> From: Melinda Skinner
> Having made some corrections on Wikipedia pages in the past,
> I would be interested in hearing what edits might be made by
> this group on Wikipedia's Fort Monroe entry.

That entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Monroe) has always been a 
mess. I've been wishing for years that I could find the time to contribute 
edits.

The two most egregious problems at the moment are a matter of fact 
(promulgation of the Big Lie that all of Fort Monroe is a national monument) 
and a matter of interpretation (countenancing of the standard, dehumanizing, 
inadvertently white supremacist but nevertheless widespread version of the 
Fort Monroe Freedom Story of 1861).

The entry opens by suggesting a falsehood. The first words are, "Fort Monroe 
(also known as the Fort Monroe National Monument) ... ." Later it 
unambiguously asserts that falsehood: "On November 1, 2011, President Barack 
Obama signed a proclamation to designate Fort Monroe as a National 
Monument." As I have reported in this forum, to see how this is false, all 
you have to do is glance at the tan, green and red parts of the illustration 
at http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/ .

To understand how the entry is a textbook case of the Big Lie requires 
familiarity with the seven-plus years of the politics of post-Army Fort 
Monroe. But I'll compress it into one long sentence: If you can make people 
think that all of Fort Monroe is already a national monument/park, you don't 
even have to bother to try to persuade them to let you build condos on the 
sense-of-place-defining bayfront of that four-century-old historic 
landscape, which reaches back to before the first captive Africans landed 
there in 1619 en route to Jamestown.

The national monument's actual footprint on the Fort Monroe landscape is a 
simple matter of fact. But misreporting about that fact is made outright 
appalling if I'm even close to right about the Wikipedia entry's more 
complicated problem of interpretation.

My view is that Ed Ayers is right to have called Fort Monroe the site of the 
greatest moment in American history. (Source: final paragraph at 
http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-Richmond-Chief-Stirs/127879/ ) If he's 
close to right, then the following analysis is probably valid.

In a November letter in the New York Times, Eric Foner asserted, “[F|rom the 
beginning of the Civil War, by escaping to Union lines, blacks forced the 
fate of slavery onto the national political agenda.” 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/opinion/lincolns-use-of-politics-for-noble-ends.html) 
Please note who did that agenda-forcing, in Foner's judgment. It was not a 
white general. That decision, though clever and constructive, was merely 
reactive. The precipitating decisions were active, and came from Blacks.

Also last month in the Times, Kate Masur's online op-ed "In Spielberg’s 
‘Lincoln,’ Passive Black Characters" 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/opinion/in-spielbergs-lincoln-passive-black-characters.html) 
made much the same point. She charged that “it’s disappointing that in a 
movie devoted to explaining the abolition of slavery in the United States, 
African-American characters do almost nothing but passively wait for white 
men to liberate them,” even though for “some 30 years, historians have been 
demonstrating that slaves were crucial agents in their emancipation.” 
Historians call the scanted principle Black agency.

Masur never mentioned Fort Monroe, but she obviously could have. As shown in 
the Wikipedia entry, this same kind of unintentional presumption of Black 
passive fecklessness still pervades public understanding of the freedom 
movement that began there shortly after Fort Sumter and spread throughout 
the South. The presumption tends to grant the dignity of being named only to 
the white general who reacted on May 24 to actions decisively taken on May 
23 by the Black self-emancipators Frank Baker, Sheppard Mallory and James 
Townsend.

(Yes, they were not the first to try, and yes, that fact is part of why 
people glorify Gen. Butler instead. I hope this gets discussed in this 
forum.)

You can see the presumption’s pervasiveness in Virginia’s insistence on 
celebrating May 24 as that Freedom Story’s anniversary, rather than May 23, 
the day when Black people actually began the story. And you can see it in 
the Wikipedia Fort Monroe entry -- and in that entry's reference to a 
similarly deficient Encyclopedia Virginia entry 
(http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Fort_Monroe_During_the_Civil_War).

Sesquicentennial discussions are too slowly, in my view, revealing for 
public consideration the active part that Black people played in forcing 
emancipation. Too often, it seems, enslaved Americans are remembered as this 
Wikipedia entry and the Encyclopedia Virginia entry remember them: as a mass 
of nameless, passive victims, rather than as individual humans with 
individual dignity, names and contributions both to the building up of the 
country and to the very meaning of the Civil War.

It's true that President Lincoln -- enthralled by race fallacy like 
Jefferson over four score years earlier, and trapped by political and social 
grotesqueness -- spoke of “giving freedom to the slave,” not of belatedly 
ceasing evil against human multitudes. Nevertheless it was to some 
substantial extent a Black-initiated movement that made a civil war into a 
struggle to affirm self-evident truths claimed over four score years earlier 
as founding principles. So 150 years on, must we continue distorting the 
national crime’s ending as entirely a gift that the powerful deigned 
belatedly to confer on passive, feckless, nameless victims? And if we should 
do better, should we not also do better with the historic landscape at Fort 
Monroe?

The new national monument/park was bizarrely bifurcated to privilege private 
interests. Norfolk’s Virginian-Pilot warns that the split will keep that 
national treasure “degraded” unless it’s unified for public profit and civic 
memory. What happened in 1861 at this Union bastion in Confederate Virginia 
is, or anyway should be, foundational for deciding the historic landscape's 
fate.

But like many elsewhere and in journalism -- and also in the history 
profession,  by silence and nonfeasance -- Wikipedia contributes little to 
clear understanding of what happened there and then, or to understanding of 
the implications for a national treasure. As I have seen directly and at 
first hand, even two of the prominent American historians who best 
understand -- Adam Goodheart and  Ed Ayers -- passively countenance that 
precious landscape's impending American cultural disaster.

Steven T. Corneliussen
Poquoson, Virginia 

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