Public history advocate Steven T. Corneliussen argues that the United States needs a National Emancipation Monument and that it should be placed at Fortress Monroe in Virginia. Here are excerpts of an essay he recently wrote for the History News Network:
For a national emancipation memorial, I propose Point Comfort, Virginia, the Chesapeake Bay sand spit later called Fort Monroe, a national historic landmark since 1960. It saw both slavery’s 1619 start and the 1861 start of emancipation’s Civil War political evolution. What it tells can appeal to all sides in the history wars: the story of the long arc of the moral universe that bent—or if you prefer, arguably bent—toward emancipation.
When New York Times Magazine deployed the 1619 Project to the history wars, the cover photo’s blurb began, “In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists.”
In that same place in May 1861, mere weeks into the Civil War, enterprising slavery escapees Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend asked for asylum at the Union army’s Fort Monroe, provoking momentous events that McPherson once called “the story of the end of slavery in America.” On a 2015 sesquicentennial panel with Blight and Ken Burns, Adam Goodheart described the momentous answer the three self-emancipators got. The fort’s commander designated them contraband of war, making the federal government their liberator—a “revolutionary change,” Goodheart declared, since always before, “U.S. authority had protected slaveholding as a constitutional right.”
Baker, Mallory, and Townsend, forerunners of 500,000 self-emancipators across the South, recognized the freedom opportunity inherent in radically new circumstances. Self-emancipators acted with historic agency—not as “the passive bystanders of conventional wisdom,” as Burns has put it, but as active agents in an “intensely personal drama of self-liberation.” McPherson says they “forced the issue of emancipation.”
…In 2011, the army retired the citadel and surrounding post, two parts of which now constitute Fort Monroe National Monument, a form of national park. But as a candidate to serve as, or host, a national emancipation memorial, this historic landscape hides in plain sight. The country doesn’t yet generally see what increasing numbers of historians see: Black agency’s centrality in emancipation’s evolution.
McPherson wrote in 2008 that among scholars during the 1980s, a “self-emancipation thesis became dominant” for explaining that evolution—and that it “won the imprimatur of the foremost scholarly enterprise on the history of emancipation,” Ira Berlin’s Freedmen and Southern Society Project. …
In 2014, Henry Louis Gates Jr. declared that the three Fort Monroe freedom strivers forced “the beginning of the end of slavery” in what National Humanities Medal holder Edward L. Ayers has called “the greatest moment in American history.” Not just “a great,” but “the greatest.”
The National Park Service is looking at how to interpret Firtress Monroe. What do you think? Should it be the location for the National Emancipation Monument?
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Hey all-
I’m hoping someone can please help me with something?
I am not disputing/advocating/in any manner that Lincoln largely adopted the arguments of Butler as Union policy. That’s not contested.
But what were the grounds/reasons why Butler then did proceed to return fugitive slaves to their masters during the war, (up to about early 1862).
I’m not sure; was it because his statements that the Fugitive Slave Act not applying to a foreign country was de facto a recognition of the Confederacy as a foreign country?
If anyone has anything, very appreciated.
As has been noted by Eric Foner: “Like all great historical transformations, emancipation was a process, not a single event. It arose from many causes and was the work of many individuals.”
I don’t think Ft Monroe has to be the only site of a National Emancipation monument. I think there should be several, placed throughout the country in general and the South in particular.
But, yes: there should be a National Emancipation monument at that location. Its significance to the Emancipation process is unquestioned, and the Hampton Roads commemorative landscape has a paucity of monuments that speak to this subject.
I note that Richmond now has an Emancipation monument, but that is not a Federal installation.