So does that make illegal aliens from Mexico Americans?
 
 
In a message dated 3/13/2009 2:55:35 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
[log in to unmask] writes:

Forgive  me, but I changed the subject line, and forgive me, but this 
simply must  be addressed candidly. Mr. Dixon, echoing an earlier 
contributor,  wrote:

> I have also wondered why historians writing about  slaves
> or free Negroes in the early American period now refer
>  to them as "African-Americans." They were not "Americans,"
> at least in  a legal or constitutional sense.

Not Americans? People who helped build  America, and who contributed the 
spirituals and much else to America's  culture, and who endured America's 
worst injustices for most of a quarter  of a millennium, and who 
naturally stood up in countless cases for  America's first principles 
during the Civil War, and who handed down  American descendants 
possessing the wisdom to bend history's arc toward  justice in gentle, 
constructive ways -- can you actually and truly  believe, Mr. Dixon, that 
in any merely decent sense whatsoever those  people were not Americans?

Of course the law and the Constitution  deemed them noncitizens and 
worse. So what? What claim does any of that  perversion and grotesqueness 
have on the actual truth, then or now, under  the Laws of Nature and of 
Nature's God? Were squalidness and obscenity  somehow justified merely by 
being temporarily codified?

As a merely  legal matter, those Americans' "owners" were "rightful" 
owners. But in  discussing history we're talking about more than mere 
legality. If we  weren't, some would also find ways to lend 
unjustifiable, preposterous  legitimacy to the notion that some women 
were witches, or to the practice  of human sacrifice. As a matter of 
legitimacy -- a permanent criterion, as  opposed to the impermanent 
despicable legality of former times -- no  "owner" of another human was 
ever rightful, in Virginia or anywhere else.  And Mr. Dixon, if you seek 
to refute that, please also refute all that Mr.  Jefferson declared about it.

In my view we have here a distillation of  the interpretation precisely 
opposite to the one that I've brought up and  inquired about from time to 
time in this forum. I think that this is all  fundamentally linked to 
Virginia's -- and Virginia's historians' --  hesitant unreadiness to look 
at what Fort Monroe actually means in the  history not only of the 
commonwealth and the country, but of liberty  itself.

If we really understood who all of the Americans were in those  past days 
-- that is, if we didn't, just a little bit in most cases, still  think 
of some past Americans as somehow partly subhuman because the  revered 
unenslaved enslaved them -- then we'd see that it is not General  Butler 
and his revered "decision" that confer on Fort Monroe its special  place 
in human history, but is instead the intuitively taken, brave  initiative 
of Frank Baker, James Townsend and Sheppard Mallory, and of the  tens of 
thousands of Americans who followed them out of slavery, all  across the 
South.

It seems to me that it all boils down to whether  or not we completely -- 
not just partially -- reject the language and  therefore also the logic, 
such as it was, of the slavery era. In my view,  we're still saddled by 
that, and this discussion shows it.

Thanks  for the chance to comment.

I remain,
An American proud of _all_  ethnicities of our fellow Americans going all 
the way back, regardless of  the conditions to which some of them were 
subjected, and regardless of  evanescent and deplorable legal 
classifications,
Steven T.  Corneliussen
Poquoson,  Virginia


>

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