A further comment on the Carter's Grove sale:  note that the Colonial
Williamsburg Foundation justifies the sale as follows:

'"Our decision was guided by a thorough evaluation of Carter's Grove's
relevance to Colonial Williamsburg's interpretive focus.  Our mission
is to tell the story of citizenship and becoming America in the 18th
century," said Campbell [the Foundation's president and chairman].
"This is best accomplished in the Historic Area, where we present and
interpret Revolutionary War-era Williamsburg.  Carter's Grove, with its
multiple stories to tell, does not support this strategic focus."'

I find that statement unbelievable.  How is it possible "to tell the
story of citizenship and becoming America in the 18th century," above
all in Virginia, without incorporating the realities of the plantation
world, including of course its basis in slavery and the still
significantly Africanized world of the vast majority of Virginia's
African Americans, the agricultural workers who never came near what is
now the Historic Area?

Campbell's words imply that four decades of transformative scholarship
on Virginia, Virginians, the Revolution, and the evolution of American
citizenship and American identity are being fundamentally disregarded
in favor of a disembodied, sanitized "story" that flattens the truths
and complexities of Virginia's and America's history.

Even if the Foundation's purpose is to celebrate the nation we have
become today--a defensible goal, in my view--how is it possible to do
that without thoroughly integrating our knowledge of the most important
facts about the nation's historical foundations in eighteenth-century
Virginia?

If anyone has been to Colonial Williamsburg recently and can reassure
me on these points, I'd love to hear it.  Last week's article in the NY
Times that Suzanne Levy noted  (thanks, Suzanne) doesn't really do
that: for example, how would the writer have learned that
eighteenth-century Virginia was "not just a society that owned slaves,
but a society organized around slavery" if she hadn't happened to visit
the soon-to-be inaccessible reconstructed slave quarters at, yes,
Carter's Grove?  I'm not a Williamsburg-basher--on the contrary, a
childhood visit to Colonial Williamsburg (and Carter's Grove) was the
spark that led me to the study of history--but this sale and the
justification offered for it strike me as a tragically misguided
indication that Colonial Williamsburg may truly have lost its way.

--Jurretta J. Heckscher

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