Concerning this interesting discussion of the denotations and connotations 
of the words "plantation" and "farm" in old Virginia, here are a tangent and 
then a tangent to the tangent:

THE TANGENT: Today's New York Times offers an article 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/us/30rename.html) headlined "Rhode Island 
Weighs Using Shorter Official Name." It begins, "It does not appear on the 
state flag or license plate. You won't see it on road maps or welcome signs. 
But Rhode Island has a lightning rod of a formal name -- Rhode Island and 
Providence Plantations -- that harks back to its prominent role in the slave 
trade and makes some of its residents cringe." The article reports that 
after "years of defending the state's name, the State Senate and House of 
Representatives voted overwhelmingly last week to allow a referendum asking 
voters whether to shorten it by seven syllables, to Rhode Island." The 
article also reports that one of three House members who opposed the measure 
charged that striking "and Providence Plantations" from the state's name 
would be "like tearing down our history. They're trying to be revisionist, 
and revisionism doesn't work." (Whether or not this particular bit of 
revisionism proposed in Rhode Island would be unwise -- and I offer no 
opinion on that -- I remain baffled at the belief that a given understanding 
of the past, once received, is perfect in every way, and unchangeable, and 
undiscussable.)

THE TANGENT TO THE TANGENT: It seems to me that this story shows yet again 
that in America, and I don't mean just the South, we're nowhere near 
finished developing our understanding of our slavery-era past. Too bad that 
many of the Virginia authorities in charge of deciding Fort Monroe's 
post-Army fate agree that the past is already quite well understood. That's 
what they've continued to demonstrate by continuing to produce official 
documents treating the Contraband freedom story not as the story of 
enslavement-escaping Americans standing up for the natural law on which the 
country was founded, but merely as the story of a white politician in a 
general's uniform making the best of a squalid legal and military situation 
grounded in the obscenity of federal slavery law ca. 1861. I should add, 
however, that historians have re-entered the discussion in a formal way. 
Maybe there'll soon be good things to report about the constructive 
revisionism that's obviously needed concerning the story of the Union's 
bastion in Confederate, slaveholding Virginia. 

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