Tom (Excalibur131) asked:
> Would list members please list the top ten
> things for which they believe Fort Monroe
> should be remembered? I would like to
> see the list opinions in order of relative
> importance with 1. being the most
> important. If ten items are too many,
> how about five or six.
Oh, there are way more than ten. Still, everybody already knows
approximately how I'll answer -- and it won't be with a top-10 list.
What they might not know is why. So, as it happens, I was just composing
the following reply to William Buser's closely related comment, and I'll
just submit that for the consideration of those who answer Tom's
question. (And I, for one, will be very interested in the answers to
Tom's question, and will share them with people outside the list, if I
may.)
Meanwhile, William Buser wrote:
> It was also the home of the US ARMY Coast Artillery in the
> 20's and 30's....and was the key point for the defense of
> Norfolk during WWII..one would hope that the total history
> of the fort would be displayed not just the part about slavery
Mr. Buser, my experience is that pretty much everybody agrees with you.
I know I do. And the president of Citizens for a Fort Monroe National
Park, Dr. H. O. Malone, agrees with you too. He's the retired chief
historian of the Army-wide Training and Doctrine Command, and he's
adamant about, for example, the shore batteries.
But please also consider this proposition. Obviously it's impossible to
quantify historical significance, [[Tom, no kidding, I wrote that
assertion _before_ your message came asking for quantification!]] but
for the sake of discussion, please imagine that you could do so for
everything at Fort Monroe.
On the one hand, add up the historical value of the Jefferson Davis
imprisonment, President Lincoln's wartime activity, the coast artillery
story, the historic architecture and engineering, the evolution of the
modern U. S. Army itself, the visits of E. A. Poe and Black Hawk and a
president or two, the tourist hotels (with many hundreds of rooms
available ca. 1900), the fortress construction contributions of Lt.
Robert E. Lee, and so on. There's more, of course, going back to well
before 1619, when that ship carrying captive Africans first arrived --
to become Americans. Add it all up, and you get a really high score --
plenty high to make Fort Monroe a national treasure without any
reference at all to the enslavement of Americans who went on to help
build the country anyway.
Now add up the historical significance of America's faltering,
imperfect, delayed, but ultimately grand contributions to realizing the
principles of the Enlightenment. You'll have cynics, of course, who'll
sneer that there's no such thing as progress. But whether or not they're
right about that, they can't deny that America is a nation based on
ideas, not ethnicity. And it seems to me -- and more importantly, it
seems increasingly to many others -- that if you add all of that up for
America as a whole, you get something incalculably high for a score.
Now calculate the importance, within that incalculable liberty and human
dignity score for America as a whole, of what happened at Fort Monroe.
At Fort Monroe, slavery began to crumble because people who had been
enslaved began to self-emancipate. Bob Engs, a U. Pennsylvania
historian, says it was the beginning of the beginning of the actual
realization of America's founding ideals.
What score can you put on that? Does Abraham Lincoln standing on a
rampart even come close? Jefferson Davis in a cell? The coastal
artillery story?
Those things don't symbolize the meaning of America. The Contraband
story does.
Thanks.
Steve Corneliussen
>
>
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