> And, I do think that what some may call "revisionist" history has a strong 
> place in letting today's students know that the slaves did not sing while 
> working because they were just peachy-keen happy with their lot in life. 
> One reason for the songs has to do with covert communications among 
> slaves. I hope that someday someone will write more on how the slaves 
> communicated in song. I've seen bits and pieces of it.

Thanks. I agree. And I'm glad that the revisionism theme has spread to other 
threads in this forum.

My own main comment about revisionism, by the way, is that constructive 
revisionism is -- or at any rate, should be -- at the heart of the post-Army 
Fort Monroe discussion, and that it has not only cultural implications but 
very practical implications for Fort Monroe. I apologize that some of what 
follows in this long message is probably repeated from months ago (but that 
apology is only half-hearted, as any who read on will see, because of 
evolving implications for Fort Monroe's post-Army future -- implications 
that matter right now, this fall, and that I believe are directly connected 
to constructive revisionism).

Here's what I mean, and I'm not smart or able enough to be brief about it:

As the Union bastion in Confederate Tidewater, Fort Monroe was the natural 
attractor of Americans -- African Americans -- seeking to escape from the 
grotesque perversion of slavery. The fort consequently -- as has often been 
told, though in ways that I believe need revising -- became not just _a_ 
place where slavery began to crumble, but _the_ place. After the earliest 
self-emancipators found sanctuary there not long after Fort Sumter, hundreds 
and then thousands followed. Eventually, as I understand it -- and as U. 
Richmond president Ed Ayers has written -- tens of thousands crossed Union 
lines all across the South. In many cases, as I understand it, they 
subtracted themselves from the Confederate cause and added themselves to the 
Union cause.

In my view what needs healthy revising in the telling of this Fort Monroe 
story can be seen in the contrast between the way John Quarstein, 
Tidewater's well-loved (and rightfully so) public historian, tells it and 
the way more and more historians like Robert Engs (of U. Pennsylvania) are 
telling it.

Mr. Quarstein tends to glorify General Butler, the politician-in-uniform who 
cleverly discerned that the way to handle the original self-emancipators was 
to say, well, as a matter of law, enslaved people are property, and the 
Confederates are using this property as part of their war effort, so I'll 
simply deem these people contraband, and I'll refuse to send them back to 
the Virginian claiming to be their "rightful owner."

(Butler obviously wouldn't have used those scare quotes, whereas I wouldn't 
be caught not using them. This gets back to that VaHist conversation we had 
months ago about the degree to which our residual use of left-over slave-era 
language imposes on us a burden of unwitting acceptance of leftover 
slave-era logic, if logic is what you could call it. When in human history, 
after all, has one human "rightfully" owned another, whether or not some 
perverted law authorized it?)

When Mr. Q. alludes to the story, he often calls it "the famous Contraband 
decision" -- with the focus on General Butler, the politician-in-uniform. In 
that kind of usual, traditional telling of the story, General Butler is 
framed as the hero and is granted the dignity of being named, but the first 
three original self-emancipating Contrabands -- Frank Baker, James Townsend, 
and Sheppard Mallory -- are not granted that dignity, even though it was 
they who stood up, took a big risk, and, in effect, asserted the fundamental 
equality principle that Jefferson had enunciated many decades earlier, but 
hadn't always lived up to.

The term _white supremacy_ is pretty volatile, and I don't want to toss it 
around in an accusing way. But in my view the subordination and 
marginalizing of the Contrabands themselves stems ultimately from old, 
unexamined, lurking assumptions of black inferiority. Maybe I'm not framing 
this quite right or quite fairly. I don't know. But I do know that 
something's wrong with the Butler-centric telling of the story.

(That traditional telling, by the way, is how the powers-that-be are still 
framing the Contraband story. More about that further below.)

And it also seems to me that the needed revisionism must involve as well the 
contrast between the sets of laws that were invoked on that day in 1861, not 
long after Fort Sumter.

General Butler invoked not only the laws of war, by which he could designate 
something as contraband, but the squalid, perverted, grotesque laws of the 
time that said that property could be human beings.

In contrast, Baker, Mallory, and Townsend invoked something not perverted, 
but beautiful: the laws of nature and of nature's god. Moreover, they did so 
quite naturally, as is fitting.

Had they ever heard of Thomas Jefferson or George Mason? Interesting 
question. I don't know. But here's another question: if Jefferson was right 
about natural law, does it even matter whether those three Contrabands had 
heard of him? Didn't the actions of Baker, Mallory, and Townsend validate 
the equality assertion that Jefferson had framed, whether or not they knew 
the intellectual history?

One thing that's really under discussion here is a larger question -- a 
revisionism question -- that many in this forum know far more about than I 
do: To what extent was Emancipation merely what some white politicians 
deigned belatedly to confer on helpless, feckless victims, and to what 
extent was it instead the result of stand-up, entrepreneurial, 
risk-assuming, assertive action by former victims? To what extent were the 
self-emancipators "slaves," with the inherently degraded characteristics 
imposed by slaveholders, and to what extent were they instead Americans with 
natural -- even if often formerly suppressed -- dignity?

To me the answers to these questions are obvious, but to some they're the 
questions of a "revisionist" who is "politically correct." An obvious irony 
is this: many skeptics who think in that way about what I'm saying also 
fancy themselves to be conservatives. But what I'm talking about is actually 
profoundly conservative. I'm talking about the belief that in every human 
heart, one way or another, there's a yearning for freedom and dignity. And 
I'm also talking about a species of self-reliance that would cheer the heart 
of any editorialist at the Wall Street Journal.

Anyway, Fort Monroe's historical importance obviously varies in direct 
proportion to the degree of legitimacy of my overall argument for 
constructive revisionism. Here's why: If the self-emancipators, and not the 
politician-in-uniform general, are the heroes of the story, and if what they 
did exemplifies founding American ideals, then maybe Fort Monroe is not just 
an interesting Civil War site, but is a place that confers on the Civil War 
a good bit of that war's very meaning.

At Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park, we believe in that revisionism. 
That's why we're beginning to inquire about World Heritage status for Fort 
Monroe. In any case, though, Fort Monroe at least ranks with Monticello and 
Mount Vernon, if you believe Robert Nieweg of the National Trust for 
Historic Preservation. You can hear him say so in the moving, 27-minute 
masterpiece film produced by the Norfolk PBS station, which is easily 
available to watch online at 
http://wmstreaming.whro.org/whro/ftmonroe/ftmonroe.asf . If you care about 
Virginia history, you simply must invest that 27 minutes.

Fort Monroe's historical importance, as I say, obviously varies in direct 
proportion to the degree of legitimacy of this argument for constructive 
revisionism, but there's also an inverse relationship to mention. It's this: 
To the degree that Fort Monroe may not be so important, it's easier to 
justify the narrowly envisioned condo-ization of the place that the city of 
Hampton has long sought.

Here, by the way, is where all of that stuff stands. This is why the 
revisionism matters in directly practical, present ways.

Though Governor Tim Kaine has remained steadfast in his unwillingness to 
discuss Fort Monroe with mere citizens -- and please challenge me to justify 
that claim if you don't buy it, for I love doing so -- he has at least seen 
fit to countenance a "reuse plan" that emphasizes the 70% that all parties 
agree about and that doesn't imply too much damage within the crucial 30% 
that has been in contention all along, and that remains so.

Recently in a ceremony at the Chamberlin (yes, that's how it's spelled) at 
Fort Monroe in which the governor starred, three things stood out:
* The governor still holds to the discredited notion, foisted onto Virginia 
by quirks in the federal Base Realignment and Closure law, that Hampton has 
natural "redevelopment" rights to this national, indeed international, 
historic treasure. ("Redevelopment" is a basic assumption in the BRAC law. 
Would Virginia even think of "redevelopment" if the commonwealth somehow 
came into possession of Monticello or Mount Vernon?) The governor's 
dogged -- and unappealable -- adherence to this discredited notion 
inherently means disrespect for the heightened historical significance that 
I believe constructive revisionism establishes. It's easier to condo-ize 
what's not all that important.
* Despite the governor's fine record of deep awareness of the need to 
continue improving our understanding of America and race and slavery, he 
himself still tells the Contraband story in the old way, the way that 
presumes -- again, I recognize that these are volatile terms -- white 
supremacy and black fecklessness. I've followed the governor's Fort Monroe 
activities closely for three years, and have talked to him about them, in 
one case at great length. I strongly suspect that the problem is simply that 
he has not focused on what some would call "revisionism" and what I call 
vital revisionism.
* Even though the region's leading newspaper, the Virginian-Pilot, is 
calling for strategic post-Army use of Fort Monroe not only for enriching 
Hampton and the region financially, but for enrichment in cultural and 
recreational and quality-of-life ways as well, and even though -- as the 
Pilot affirms -- the only way to do that is via some sort of 
revenue-generating, innnovatively structured, self-sustaining national park, 
the governor persists in insisting, antebellum style, that states' rights 
sovereignty applies to this Civil War era national treasure. We don't need 
any federal involvement in this Virginia matter, he says -- even though the 
challenge is plainly bigger than Virginia can handle.

Here's something I'm sure I've said before in this Virginia history forum: 
No practical question in the realm of Virginia history is as important right 
now as the peril that the Civil War Preservation Trust says threatens Fort 
Monroe. If you want to know more, or if you want to help, please visit 
http://www.cfmnp.org/ .

Thanks. Sorry for the long-windedness.

(Well, not that sorry. In the admirable -- and revisionist -- quest to 
accord a bit of dignity retrospectively to those from whom it was stolen, it 
seems to me that the cause of Fort Monroe beats the daylights out of the 
cause of determining which Jefferson dishonorably took advantage of Sally 
Hemings.)

Steven T. (Steve) Corneliussen
Poquoson, Virginia

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