> From: Tarter, Brent (LVA)
> Three cheers...for hosting the very
> successful 2015 Virginia Forum...

Thanks. A question about the 2015 forum, and I apologize for not being able 
to make it short:

An announcement for the forum carried the headline "Anniversaries" and said, 
among other things, "This year’s forum invites papers on how anniversaries 
in Virginia have been created, observed, recorded, and contested in 
non-fiction, fiction, other literary and historical forms, the visual arts, 
and historic and monumental sites."

It seems to me--and I admit a bias that at least some in this online 
Virginia history forum will immediately recognize--that for civic memory and 
maybe also for scholarship, an important but contested anniversary is the 
one that Edward L. Ayers once called "the greatest moment in American 
history." He meant events that Black self-emancipators set in motion by 
taking action--by exercising agency--on May 23, 1861, at the Union bastion 
in Confederate Virginia, Fort Monroe.

In Tidewater, those events not only have been, but often still are, 
remembered not in terms of Black **action** on May 23 but in terms of a 
white general's **reaction** the next day, May 24. In the usual telling, the 
cleverly and constructively reacting general is given the dignity of his 
name, Benjamin Butler. But in the usual telling, now thankfully less 
frequently heard, the three formerly enslaved Americans who first actually 
stood up and acted--Frank Baker, Sheppard Mallory and James Townsend--are 
not granted that dignity.

It's said--for example, by U. Richmond President Ayers himself--that the 
now-concluding Civil War sesquicentennial has, unlike the centennial when I 
was a kid, recalled and considered not just battles and valor, but 
emancipation.

And it's asserted--for example, by Eric Foner--that it was self-emancipators 
whose actions first pressed transformation of the war into a struggle for 
the proclaimed but long-scanted first principles of America's founding.

To me that sounds plenty important enough to link to Virginia anniversaries. 
So I ask: Did "the greatest moment in American history" come up at the 2015 
forum? Did anyone contrast May 23 with May 24?

I do see on the program this entry: "Fort Monroe National Monument: Eola 
Dance, National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, Northeast Region." 
(Ms. Dance is a National Park Service official at Fort Monroe; I might query 
her too.)

Grateful for any information on this question. Thanks.

Steven T. Corneliussen
Poquoson, Virginia


 

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