Tom (Excalibur131) asked: > Would list members please list the top ten > things for which they believe Fort Monroe > should be remembered? I would like to > see the list opinions in order of relative > importance with 1. being the most > important. If ten items are too many, > how about five or six. Oh, there are way more than ten. Still, everybody already knows approximately how I'll answer -- and it won't be with a top-10 list. What they might not know is why. So, as it happens, I was just composing the following reply to William Buser's closely related comment, and I'll just submit that for the consideration of those who answer Tom's question. (And I, for one, will be very interested in the answers to Tom's question, and will share them with people outside the list, if I may.) Meanwhile, William Buser wrote: > It was also the home of the US ARMY Coast Artillery in the > 20's and 30's....and was the key point for the defense of > Norfolk during WWII..one would hope that the total history > of the fort would be displayed not just the part about slavery Mr. Buser, my experience is that pretty much everybody agrees with you. I know I do. And the president of Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park, Dr. H. O. Malone, agrees with you too. He's the retired chief historian of the Army-wide Training and Doctrine Command, and he's adamant about, for example, the shore batteries. But please also consider this proposition. Obviously it's impossible to quantify historical significance, [[Tom, no kidding, I wrote that assertion _before_ your message came asking for quantification!]] but for the sake of discussion, please imagine that you could do so for everything at Fort Monroe. On the one hand, add up the historical value of the Jefferson Davis imprisonment, President Lincoln's wartime activity, the coast artillery story, the historic architecture and engineering, the evolution of the modern U. S. Army itself, the visits of E. A. Poe and Black Hawk and a president or two, the tourist hotels (with many hundreds of rooms available ca. 1900), the fortress construction contributions of Lt. Robert E. Lee, and so on. There's more, of course, going back to well before 1619, when that ship carrying captive Africans first arrived -- to become Americans. Add it all up, and you get a really high score -- plenty high to make Fort Monroe a national treasure without any reference at all to the enslavement of Americans who went on to help build the country anyway. Now add up the historical significance of America's faltering, imperfect, delayed, but ultimately grand contributions to realizing the principles of the Enlightenment. You'll have cynics, of course, who'll sneer that there's no such thing as progress. But whether or not they're right about that, they can't deny that America is a nation based on ideas, not ethnicity. And it seems to me -- and more importantly, it seems increasingly to many others -- that if you add all of that up for America as a whole, you get something incalculably high for a score. Now calculate the importance, within that incalculable liberty and human dignity score for America as a whole, of what happened at Fort Monroe. At Fort Monroe, slavery began to crumble because people who had been enslaved began to self-emancipate. Bob Engs, a U. Pennsylvania historian, says it was the beginning of the beginning of the actual realization of America's founding ideals. What score can you put on that? Does Abraham Lincoln standing on a rampart even come close? Jefferson Davis in a cell? The coastal artillery story? Those things don't symbolize the meaning of America. The Contraband story does. Thanks. Steve Corneliussen > > ______________________________________ To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html