> And, I do think that what some may call "revisionist" history has a strong > place in letting today's students know that the slaves did not sing while > working because they were just peachy-keen happy with their lot in life. > One reason for the songs has to do with covert communications among > slaves. I hope that someday someone will write more on how the slaves > communicated in song. I've seen bits and pieces of it. Thanks. I agree. And I'm glad that the revisionism theme has spread to other threads in this forum. My own main comment about revisionism, by the way, is that constructive revisionism is -- or at any rate, should be -- at the heart of the post-Army Fort Monroe discussion, and that it has not only cultural implications but very practical implications for Fort Monroe. I apologize that some of what follows in this long message is probably repeated from months ago (but that apology is only half-hearted, as any who read on will see, because of evolving implications for Fort Monroe's post-Army future -- implications that matter right now, this fall, and that I believe are directly connected to constructive revisionism). Here's what I mean, and I'm not smart or able enough to be brief about it: As the Union bastion in Confederate Tidewater, Fort Monroe was the natural attractor of Americans -- African Americans -- seeking to escape from the grotesque perversion of slavery. The fort consequently -- as has often been told, though in ways that I believe need revising -- became not just _a_ place where slavery began to crumble, but _the_ place. After the earliest self-emancipators found sanctuary there not long after Fort Sumter, hundreds and then thousands followed. Eventually, as I understand it -- and as U. Richmond president Ed Ayers has written -- tens of thousands crossed Union lines all across the South. In many cases, as I understand it, they subtracted themselves from the Confederate cause and added themselves to the Union cause. In my view what needs healthy revising in the telling of this Fort Monroe story can be seen in the contrast between the way John Quarstein, Tidewater's well-loved (and rightfully so) public historian, tells it and the way more and more historians like Robert Engs (of U. Pennsylvania) are telling it. Mr. Quarstein tends to glorify General Butler, the politician-in-uniform who cleverly discerned that the way to handle the original self-emancipators was to say, well, as a matter of law, enslaved people are property, and the Confederates are using this property as part of their war effort, so I'll simply deem these people contraband, and I'll refuse to send them back to the Virginian claiming to be their "rightful owner." (Butler obviously wouldn't have used those scare quotes, whereas I wouldn't be caught not using them. This gets back to that VaHist conversation we had months ago about the degree to which our residual use of left-over slave-era language imposes on us a burden of unwitting acceptance of leftover slave-era logic, if logic is what you could call it. When in human history, after all, has one human "rightfully" owned another, whether or not some perverted law authorized it?) When Mr. Q. alludes to the story, he often calls it "the famous Contraband decision" -- with the focus on General Butler, the politician-in-uniform. In that kind of usual, traditional telling of the story, General Butler is framed as the hero and is granted the dignity of being named, but the first three original self-emancipating Contrabands -- Frank Baker, James Townsend, and Sheppard Mallory -- are not granted that dignity, even though it was they who stood up, took a big risk, and, in effect, asserted the fundamental equality principle that Jefferson had enunciated many decades earlier, but hadn't always lived up to. The term _white supremacy_ is pretty volatile, and I don't want to toss it around in an accusing way. But in my view the subordination and marginalizing of the Contrabands themselves stems ultimately from old, unexamined, lurking assumptions of black inferiority. Maybe I'm not framing this quite right or quite fairly. I don't know. But I do know that something's wrong with the Butler-centric telling of the story. (That traditional telling, by the way, is how the powers-that-be are still framing the Contraband story. More about that further below.) And it also seems to me that the needed revisionism must involve as well the contrast between the sets of laws that were invoked on that day in 1861, not long after Fort Sumter. General Butler invoked not only the laws of war, by which he could designate something as contraband, but the squalid, perverted, grotesque laws of the time that said that property could be human beings. In contrast, Baker, Mallory, and Townsend invoked something not perverted, but beautiful: the laws of nature and of nature's god. Moreover, they did so quite naturally, as is fitting. Had they ever heard of Thomas Jefferson or George Mason? Interesting question. I don't know. But here's another question: if Jefferson was right about natural law, does it even matter whether those three Contrabands had heard of him? Didn't the actions of Baker, Mallory, and Townsend validate the equality assertion that Jefferson had framed, whether or not they knew the intellectual history? One thing that's really under discussion here is a larger question -- a revisionism question -- that many in this forum know far more about than I do: To what extent was Emancipation merely what some white politicians deigned belatedly to confer on helpless, feckless victims, and to what extent was it instead the result of stand-up, entrepreneurial, risk-assuming, assertive action by former victims? To what extent were the self-emancipators "slaves," with the inherently degraded characteristics imposed by slaveholders, and to what extent were they instead Americans with natural -- even if often formerly suppressed -- dignity? To me the answers to these questions are obvious, but to some they're the questions of a "revisionist" who is "politically correct." An obvious irony is this: many skeptics who think in that way about what I'm saying also fancy themselves to be conservatives. But what I'm talking about is actually profoundly conservative. I'm talking about the belief that in every human heart, one way or another, there's a yearning for freedom and dignity. And I'm also talking about a species of self-reliance that would cheer the heart of any editorialist at the Wall Street Journal. Anyway, Fort Monroe's historical importance obviously varies in direct proportion to the degree of legitimacy of my overall argument for constructive revisionism. Here's why: If the self-emancipators, and not the politician-in-uniform general, are the heroes of the story, and if what they did exemplifies founding American ideals, then maybe Fort Monroe is not just an interesting Civil War site, but is a place that confers on the Civil War a good bit of that war's very meaning. At Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park, we believe in that revisionism. That's why we're beginning to inquire about World Heritage status for Fort Monroe. In any case, though, Fort Monroe at least ranks with Monticello and Mount Vernon, if you believe Robert Nieweg of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. You can hear him say so in the moving, 27-minute masterpiece film produced by the Norfolk PBS station, which is easily available to watch online at http://wmstreaming.whro.org/whro/ftmonroe/ftmonroe.asf . If you care about Virginia history, you simply must invest that 27 minutes. Fort Monroe's historical importance, as I say, obviously varies in direct proportion to the degree of legitimacy of this argument for constructive revisionism, but there's also an inverse relationship to mention. It's this: To the degree that Fort Monroe may not be so important, it's easier to justify the narrowly envisioned condo-ization of the place that the city of Hampton has long sought. Here, by the way, is where all of that stuff stands. This is why the revisionism matters in directly practical, present ways. Though Governor Tim Kaine has remained steadfast in his unwillingness to discuss Fort Monroe with mere citizens -- and please challenge me to justify that claim if you don't buy it, for I love doing so -- he has at least seen fit to countenance a "reuse plan" that emphasizes the 70% that all parties agree about and that doesn't imply too much damage within the crucial 30% that has been in contention all along, and that remains so. Recently in a ceremony at the Chamberlin (yes, that's how it's spelled) at Fort Monroe in which the governor starred, three things stood out: * The governor still holds to the discredited notion, foisted onto Virginia by quirks in the federal Base Realignment and Closure law, that Hampton has natural "redevelopment" rights to this national, indeed international, historic treasure. ("Redevelopment" is a basic assumption in the BRAC law. Would Virginia even think of "redevelopment" if the commonwealth somehow came into possession of Monticello or Mount Vernon?) The governor's dogged -- and unappealable -- adherence to this discredited notion inherently means disrespect for the heightened historical significance that I believe constructive revisionism establishes. It's easier to condo-ize what's not all that important. * Despite the governor's fine record of deep awareness of the need to continue improving our understanding of America and race and slavery, he himself still tells the Contraband story in the old way, the way that presumes -- again, I recognize that these are volatile terms -- white supremacy and black fecklessness. I've followed the governor's Fort Monroe activities closely for three years, and have talked to him about them, in one case at great length. I strongly suspect that the problem is simply that he has not focused on what some would call "revisionism" and what I call vital revisionism. * Even though the region's leading newspaper, the Virginian-Pilot, is calling for strategic post-Army use of Fort Monroe not only for enriching Hampton and the region financially, but for enrichment in cultural and recreational and quality-of-life ways as well, and even though -- as the Pilot affirms -- the only way to do that is via some sort of revenue-generating, innnovatively structured, self-sustaining national park, the governor persists in insisting, antebellum style, that states' rights sovereignty applies to this Civil War era national treasure. We don't need any federal involvement in this Virginia matter, he says -- even though the challenge is plainly bigger than Virginia can handle. Here's something I'm sure I've said before in this Virginia history forum: No practical question in the realm of Virginia history is as important right now as the peril that the Civil War Preservation Trust says threatens Fort Monroe. If you want to know more, or if you want to help, please visit http://www.cfmnp.org/ . Thanks. Sorry for the long-windedness. (Well, not that sorry. In the admirable -- and revisionist -- quest to accord a bit of dignity retrospectively to those from whom it was stolen, it seems to me that the cause of Fort Monroe beats the daylights out of the cause of determining which Jefferson dishonorably took advantage of Sally Hemings.) Steven T. (Steve) Corneliussen Poquoson, Virginia ______________________________________ To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html