So does that make illegal aliens from Mexico Americans? In a message dated 3/13/2009 2:55:35 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, [log in to unmask] writes: Forgive me, but I changed the subject line, and forgive me, but this simply must be addressed candidly. Mr. Dixon, echoing an earlier contributor, wrote: > I have also wondered why historians writing about slaves > or free Negroes in the early American period now refer > to them as "African-Americans." They were not "Americans," > at least in a legal or constitutional sense. Not Americans? People who helped build America, and who contributed the spirituals and much else to America's culture, and who endured America's worst injustices for most of a quarter of a millennium, and who naturally stood up in countless cases for America's first principles during the Civil War, and who handed down American descendants possessing the wisdom to bend history's arc toward justice in gentle, constructive ways -- can you actually and truly believe, Mr. Dixon, that in any merely decent sense whatsoever those people were not Americans? Of course the law and the Constitution deemed them noncitizens and worse. So what? What claim does any of that perversion and grotesqueness have on the actual truth, then or now, under the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God? Were squalidness and obscenity somehow justified merely by being temporarily codified? As a merely legal matter, those Americans' "owners" were "rightful" owners. But in discussing history we're talking about more than mere legality. If we weren't, some would also find ways to lend unjustifiable, preposterous legitimacy to the notion that some women were witches, or to the practice of human sacrifice. As a matter of legitimacy -- a permanent criterion, as opposed to the impermanent despicable legality of former times -- no "owner" of another human was ever rightful, in Virginia or anywhere else. And Mr. Dixon, if you seek to refute that, please also refute all that Mr. Jefferson declared about it. In my view we have here a distillation of the interpretation precisely opposite to the one that I've brought up and inquired about from time to time in this forum. I think that this is all fundamentally linked to Virginia's -- and Virginia's historians' -- hesitant unreadiness to look at what Fort Monroe actually means in the history not only of the commonwealth and the country, but of liberty itself. If we really understood who all of the Americans were in those past days -- that is, if we didn't, just a little bit in most cases, still think of some past Americans as somehow partly subhuman because the revered unenslaved enslaved them -- then we'd see that it is not General Butler and his revered "decision" that confer on Fort Monroe its special place in human history, but is instead the intuitively taken, brave initiative of Frank Baker, James Townsend and Sheppard Mallory, and of the tens of thousands of Americans who followed them out of slavery, all across the South. It seems to me that it all boils down to whether or not we completely -- not just partially -- reject the language and therefore also the logic, such as it was, of the slavery era. In my view, we're still saddled by that, and this discussion shows it. Thanks for the chance to comment. I remain, An American proud of _all_ ethnicities of our fellow Americans going all the way back, regardless of the conditions to which some of them were subjected, and regardless of evanescent and deplorable legal classifications, Steven T. Corneliussen Poquoson, Virginia > ______________________________________ To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html **************A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1220439616x1201372437/aol?redir=http:%2F%2Fwww.freecreditreport.com%2Fpm%2Fdefault.aspx%3Fsc%3D668072%26hmpgID %3D62%26bcd%3DfebemailfooterNO62) ______________________________________ To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html