(I'm omitting preceding text because my sense is that I'm supposed to.)

True enough, Kevin: in recent decades not only professional historians 
but many of the rest of us have become conscious of the potential for 
widening and deepening historical understanding by looking at people 
generally, not just at the powerful. Indeed that's one part of why Sally 
Hemings is so important to all of us nowadays, it seems to me.

But I assert that there's a problem with too neatly framing this 
constructive revisionism about the Fort Monroe freedom story merely as 
an extension of academics' discussion of new social history. Please let 
me give an example. It's a volatile one, so I want first to spend one 
brief paragraph introducing it.

Here's that fire-avoidance paragraph: I have to bring up Iraq. But I 
don't mean here to express any opinion about it, and certainly don't 
mean to start an Iraq discussion in this Virginia history forum. Some 
Democrats called the Iraq venture an invasion and an occupation; Sen. 
Zell Miller got angry because they didn't call it an invasion and 
liberation. Some people thought the whole thing was a terrible idea. 
Some people thought it was a potentially useful idea, but botched by an 
administration that failed to see that nation-building has many more 
dimensions than the merely military one. And many people thought, and 
think, that President Bush only retroactively pasted onto the venture 
notions of democracy promotion -- even though Tom Friedman at the New 
York Times, as well as the editors of the Washington Post, heard 
democracy promotion during the 2002 run-up, and argued publicly for it.

I offer no opinions about any of that, except this one, which I think 
fits with all perspectives: when those Iraqi voters displayed their 
purple-fingered majesty, all of us, no matter what we thought about the 
whole venture, had to ponder the degree to which the human heart yearns 
naturally for freedom and dignity. That is not a question for the 
powerful to decide. It's something for the powerful to deal with.

If you're Vice President Cheney, you probably think the connection in 
Iraq's voting was direct and simple. If you're Vice President Cheney's 
detractor, you probably think that Iraq was such a squalid failure, such 
a hideous idea in the first place, and its complexities so great, that 
little can be inferred from the display of what I call purple-fingered 
majesty -- and you probably don't like my trite and corny allusion either.

But I'll bet that even Vice President Cheney's hugest detractor believes 
that somewhere in there, somehow, in all the horror, there's some sort 
of connection, however tenuous, between those purple fingers and what 
the Fort Monroe Contrabands stood up for -- and between all of that and 
the truths about human nature that we hold to be self-evident.

Kevin, it seems to me that it's not in the power of the powerful to 
affect all of that fundamentally -- and it seems to me that all of that 
matters fundamentally _before_ you talk about white politicians deigning 
belatedly to confer what ought never to have been denied.

What's self-evident and basic about human equality and liberty and 
dignity does not fall under political control, it seems to me, even if 
politics can horribly obscure and suppress it. In China you can toss 
people in jail for being liberty-minded. In North Korea you can torture 
them to death. In Iran, you can hope that they gradually change the 
country's outlook. In Holland you can hope that they sort out the 
struggle that confronts them between freedom of speech and the 
possibility of being murdered for exercising it. In all those cases, 
people naturally know what they know about freedom and dignity.

And in Virginia -- where until very recently we seldom had the mere 
decency to accord Frank Baker, Sheppard Mallory, and James Townsend the 
simple dignity of their names -- you can hope that in a country that is 
continually re-assessing its slavery-era past anyhow, we don't 
unnecessarily over-develop the place that Robert F. Engs of Penn says is 
not just _a_ place where slavery began to die, but is _the_ place where 
slavery began to die.

If that yearning had not existed in those men's hearts, Gen. Butler's 
cleverness and exercise of power would have been unnecessary. It's that 
that the Civil War affirmed, it seems to me. You say that at "its worst, 
the new social history offers a mono-focus on the victims of power." But 
when those three Americans came to Fort Monroe, they were no longer 
victims (except that, of course, they were still mistreated even after 
they self-emancipated).

Unlike the slavery-era portrayals of African-American victims at, say, 
Monticello and Mount Vernon -- not to speak of even worse examples of 
bondage -- Fort Monroe is prospectively a place where it is not victims 
that we portray, but Americans. That's why, together with the nearby 
Monitor Center in Newport News, it ought to become the anchor for a 
Historic Quadrangle to replace Virginia's Historic Triangle -- 
completing the nation-formation story by including the Civil War.

By the way, as far as I know nobody else is advocating this story line, 
as you put it. Even my colleagues at Citizens for a Fort Monroe National 
Park are cautious about it. But in 2006 when I began it in a series of 
op-eds here and in Richmond and in Washington, nobody named the three 
men. Now they do.

But again: even if my revisionism is faulty, I'm asking a question that 
Virginia is not answering: What will we make of all of this in a hundred 
years? Will Fort Monroe be preserved to ensure that we will then have 
what we'll then need?

(One more thing: I hope skeptics about new social history are watching 
the Hampton citizens' initiative concerning Fort Monroe. Under 
provisions of the city charter, Hampton citizens are taking the Fort 
Monroe issue formally into their own hands. More about this as it 
develops -- if it seems appropriate in this academic forum.)

Thanks.

Steve Corneliussen

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