Thanks for those three links to remembrances.  I was privileged to know and 
learn from Bob Engs, mostly but not only concerning matters related to the 
struggle to save Fort Monroe from culturally and financially 
counterproductive overdevelopment. Once he even visited my house for lunch, 
after which he and I for a long time discussed Fort Monroe while sittin' on 
my dock of a bay--the same Chesapeake Bay that further south gives Fort 
Monroe its intrinsic, and now almost certainly doomed, sense of place.

After the Army's Fort Monroe departure decision in 2005, it quickly became 
clear that Virginia intended to do the wrong thing with that place. Pretty 
soon it also became clear that public understanding--for that matter, my own 
understanding--involved little general awareness of that place's deep 
historical importance in the history of liberty.

That is, people knew about, for example, the construction contributions of 
Lt. Robert E. Lee, the brief presence of Edgar Allan Poe, and the 
incarceration of Jefferson Davis. Yet in 2006, the first iteration of the 
evolving official planning for post-Army Fort Monroe contained only a few 
lines about history. In my view today, there were two fundamental problems. 
One was simply that Fort Monroe had for so long been an Army post that 
people mainly just thought of it that way. The other, though, was the 
problem that I believe and hope the Lemon Project engages. It's the problem 
that Annette Gordon-Reed often cites, and that the Smithsonian exhibition on 
Monticello's inhabitants combated: the problem of general unawareness that 
far from being a mass of nameless victims, the enslaved were individual 
Americans with individual agency--with individual lives, stories, and 
exertions, not to speak of contributions to the country's growing wealth and 
culture.

So in 2006 it became imperative for Fort Monroe's defenders themselves to 
get better educated. This we tried to do. We turned to Bob Engs. We became 
Engs disciples. Next to me on my desk as I write is my much-written-in and 
heavily sticky-noted copy of "Freedom's First Generation."  We promoted an 
Engs-wisdom-based broadening of general understanding of the stakes at Fort 
Monroe.

By 2007, the authorities were forced to look up, or at least act like they 
were looking up, from their overdevelopment obsession. They felt forced to 
convene a panel of national and local historians, though of course they 
intended only PR cover and plausible deniability. Here's a paragraph from 
something I submitted in this forum after that symposium of January 2, 2008:
QUOTE
Inspired initially by Professor Engs, we have been talking like this for two 
years. In early January, we saw these lines of constructive revisionism 
validated and affirmed at a Fort Monroe symposium that included not only 
Professor Engs but William Alexander, Ed Ayers, Ira Berlin, Tommy L. Bogger, 
Jack Davis, Ervin L. Jordan, Cassandra Newby-Alexander, John Quarstein, 
Joseph Reidy, Carol Sheriff, and Lauranett Lee.
UNQUOTE

Unconscionably but unsurprisingly, the symposium moderator--a public 
official, not a scholar--literally and publicly forbade discussion of that 
constructive revisionism's implications for recalibrating the importance of 
the historic landscape, and for fully understanding the sense of place. 
Though almost all of that landscape--that is, not just the moated stone 
citadel--had been designated a national historic landmark a half-century 
earlier, Hampton's and Virginia's leaders grimly intended, then as now, to 
overdevelop much of it. So their agent, the symposium moderator, unethically 
headed off any potential for the panelists' stature to be lent to land on 
which her bosses, the politicians, wanted condos. The dishonesty reminded me 
of the Challenger disaster commission's leaders' efforts to suppress what 
the physicist Richard Feynman, armed with a glass of ice water and a shred 
of material, revealed about what happens to the shuttle's O-rings if you 
chill them.

But Bob Engs chaired that Fort Monroe symposium panel, and Bob Engs wrote 
that report. And Bob Engs undermined the moderator's Potemkin imposition. He 
inserted prominently a line making plain that the panel knew that Fort 
Monroe's post-Army stakes involve the whole landscape, not just the stone 
fortress within it--and that in their judgment, the overall landscape 
mattered.

The report was buried, of course. The symposium's PR value had already been 
extracted and exploited. And who needed anything implying big importance in 
a landscape that merely saw both the beginning of the start and the start of 
the end of American slavery? Today if you search "Engs" or "symposium" on 
the Fort Monroe Authority's Web site, you get no hits.

But I don't need a computer search to remember what I learned from Bob Engs, 
or what a friend and encourager Bob Engs was, or what Bob Engs stood for, or 
what, both before and after that symposium, Bob Engs did for Fort Monroe.

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