abolition may not have been an official war aim before Sept. 1862 but slaves were being freed by May 1861 and the first confiscation act (July 1861) authorized freeing some slaves.
The Fortress Monroe argument is strong -- Ben Butler begins emancipation early on and set the stage for the EP.
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Paul Finkelman, Ph.D.
President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law
Albany Law School
80 New Scotland Avenue
Albany, NY 12208
518-445-3386 (p)
518-445-3363 (f)
[log in to unmask]
www.paulfinkelman.com
*************************************************
________________________________________
From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Steve Corneliussen [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, May 08, 2012 9:27 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] The Peculiar Institution's End Without The Intervention Of The Civil War
> From: Ron Roizen
> ... abolition didn't become a war objective for the North until
> well into the war with the Emancipation Proclamation.
But wait -- aren't historians like Adam Goodheart and Edward L. Ayers right
to say that we need a better understanding of how black people themselves
pushed the transformation of the conflict into a war for freedom?
I enter the conversation with my usual Fort-Monroe-preservation bias, of
course. I agree with President Ayers that the greatest moment in American
history took place at Fort Monroe in May 1861 -- which was shortly after
Fort Sumter and long before the Emancipation Proclamation. In that moment,
self-liberating escapees from enslavement pressed first General Butler, but
ultimately President Lincoln and history itself, toward that proclamation --
which it seems to me could also be called the Declaration of Merely Partial
Cessation of America's Quarter-Millennium National Crime. Isn't it
excessively Gone-With-the-Windish to imagine that that proclamation did
anything more than belatedly, shakily semi-affirm in mere words what
self-emancipators -- and Yankee soldiers -- had already been robustly
affirming for some time in actual fact? It's a question offered in the
spirit of the constructive reconsideration of the slavery era that the Civil
War sesquicentennial seems to call for. Thanks.
P.S.: The new national monument at Fort Monroe omits the
sense-of-place-defining bayfront hundred acres indicated by red that's been
added to a National Park Service map at
http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/ . If you agree that this omission is
as self-evidently preposterous as would be, say, planning for subdivisions
on the hillsides at Monticello, I'm sorry to report to you that things look
grimmer than ever -- in part thanks to those snookered historians, including
even Goodheart and Ayers, that I still need to answer Jurretta Heckscher
about.
Steven T. Corneliussen
Poquoson, Virginia
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