> Why hasn't the Civil War Trust done anything?

Short answer:

Like the National Trust for Historic Preservation, they have to pick their battles in a world where Big Money's influence matters preeminently. Unlike NTHP, however, they haven't been craven about it. From the start, the Civil War Trust had its heart in the right place, though its weak advocacy contributed to the unwise compromise--the deal that Virginia's leaders and their developer cronies are cementing this fall for the coming thousand years.

More details:

Going back almost to the 2005 beginnings of the struggle, the Civil War Trust has done, or anyway tried to do, a lot for the Fort Monroe cause. In 2006 they gave us a pretty good public statement that we used for a long time. They have operated in good faith and with good intentions.

Unfortunately, they never stood up with the enthusiasm and vigor that Fort Monroe's advocates would have liked. Two problems:
* The Civil War Trust accepted Hampton's and Richmond's--and consequently a credulous Washington's (and also, a credulous national media's)--false framing of the basic issue. This is also the logical error that caused the country's leading Civil War historians to fail. The historic landscape in question--not just the moated citadel, but almost all of Old Point Comfort--was already a national historic landmark for a half-century. It is not, but nevertheless has been treated as, a Hampton development plum that happens to have a history accent. The Civil War Trust and others could have, and should have, insisted on the framing that will be seen retrospectively, and too late, as the wiser: Fort Monroe is a national treasure with a Hampton-stakeholding special accent.
* The Civil War Trust adopted the strategy of ingratiation and gradualism that the developers have cynically exploited. The Virginian-Pilot's beau geste, eleventh hour editorial the other day called the split national monument a 2011 "compromise." That's correct. Preservationists, against my vocal objections, negotiated with Hampton back-room deciders and gambled Fort Monroe on the split national monument (see the split illustrated at FortMonroeNationalPark.org). They trusted in the hope that hobbled national stewardship could be fixed later. They did not stand up for the wiser framing, which focuses on the national treasure while only secondarily respecting Hampton's unique stake. They compromised, and in the process squandered the real political power that we had begun to amass. (Please ask me about that.) Now, however, the Virginian-Pilot and the National Parks Conservation Association, both of which also bought into the compromise two years ago, are, too late, sounding an alarm. (See those two links at FortMonroeNationalPark.org.) 

Unless a miracle occurs--unless national attention somehow focuses after all on Virginia's enormous stewardship failure--sense of place at Fort Monroe is about to be sacrificed forever for the cause of swanky condos on the sense-of-place-defining bayfront acres between the two parts of the split national monument.

The well-intentioned, but in this case feckless, Civil War Trust is partly responsible. 

Their recent statement, addressed to the prominent Virginia developer (!) who leads the Fort Monroe Authority, appears at http://fortmonroecitizens.org/fort-monroe-supporters/civil-war-trust/ . What it says about practical and financial considerations is mostly true--though only within the false framing. That stuff can be used against Fort Monroe by all who fail to understand that America remains a great nation and that America, not Hampton and Richmond, should ensure respect for this unique landscape in national civic memory. That stuff is true, but only within the false framing that could still be shifted. The statement illustrates in many ways the fecklessness that I've tried to implicate above. 
 
On 10/18/13, Karen Needles<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
 
Why hasn't the Civil War Trust done anything?
Karen
On Oct 17, 2013 7:40 PM, "Steven T. Corneliussen" <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> On October 24, a politician-appointed Virginia state panel will pass
> judgment on a Fort Monroe real estate development plan purporting to
> respect inescapable economic realities. The plan permanently deletes
> Chesapeake Bay sense of place from that national treasure of four
> centuries' standing.
>
> It's the eleventh hour, but there's something citizens can do.
>
> The alarm is being sounded by the National Parks Conservation Association,
> with its more than half-million members, and by Tidewater's leading daily,
> the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. See FortMonroeNationalPark.org for links (and
> for an instantaneous visual overview).
>
> Consistently over an eight-year process, Virginia's leaders of both
> parties have shown grim resolve to kowtow to the development industry
> concerning this billion-dollar waterfront's post-Army future. So they've
> failed in their fiduciary duty, and on Oct. 24 will almost surely cement
> the failure.
>
> Unfortunately, they've succeeded in hoodwinking the national media,
> and--until a very recent awakening--preservation organizations including
> Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park, a small committee that I
> co-founded but no longer represent. Good people trusted a deeply rigged
> process, hoping in vain that a split, hobbled national monument (national
> park) could be expanded and repaired later. (Please challenge me on "deeply
> rigged.")
>
> Most damagingly, good people at the National Trust for Historic
> Preservation withheld NTHP's national moral authority from efforts to
> protect Fort Monroe's sense-of-place-defining bayfront viewsheds. (Please
> challenge me on this charge too.) No prominent historian--not the scholar
> Ed Ayers, not the writer Adam Goodheart--has stood up for Fort Monroe's
> sense of place.
>
> Support for saving Fort Monroe is nearly unanimous in Virginia, but it is
> developers who bankroll political campaigns. So Virginia needs national
> media attention--a national spotlight on the impending Fort Monroe failure,
> with its thousand-year implications for American civic memory.
>
> A discussion of sorts is underway beneath a new posting in the New York
> Times's online Civil War "Disunion" forum. At
> http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/the-real-rebels-of-the-civil-war/,
> please click "recommend" on, and please consider responding to, my Fort
> Monroe comment and also that of another Fort Monroe defender, Scott Butler.
>
> It's a long shot. In Virginia the issue is all but decided. We lost. But
> national media attention could still, just conceivably, change things. The
> Times's online "Disunion" discussion gets widely read.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Steven T. Corneliussen
> Poquoson, Virginia
> http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/
>
> http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/news/science-and-the-media
>
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