Historic Venue Closely Linked to Endangered Civil War Treasure: Fort Monroe
For struggling grassroots defenders of an imperiled national historic treasure, it’s exhilarating to see the President of the United States step into the picture, especially if he embodies deep connections to the endangered landscape’s past.
That’s why the prospect of Barack Obama’s commencement speech this Sunday at Hampton University tantalizes preservationist defenders of nearby Fort Monroe, the scenic, cherished Army post that closes next year and will be handed over to the state.
Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, later called Hampton Institute, now Hampton University, contributed Booker T. Washington and much else to American history. Decades ago, both the campus and the fort, their pasts interwoven since slavery, were named national historic landmarks.
Yet post-Army Fort Monroe faces danger. Despite the example of the self-sustaining national park at the comparable Presidio of San Francisco, and even though an official of the National Trust for Historic Preservation has ranked the post with Monticello and Mount Vernon, decision makers plan “redevelopment.”
At worst, that means something akin to casinos marring the Gettysburg battlefield. At best — so far, anyway — it means only a possibility for a tiny, token national park centered on the moated stone citadel in Fort Monroe’s interior.
Will the president use his speech on Sunday to steer Fort Monroe toward something more fitting? Given the fort’s and university’s interwoven pasts, it’d be a nice opportunity to promote healthy, constructive revisionism about slavery and the Civil War.
You might even call it postracial. In any case, it starts with those interwoven pasts, and centers on genuine respect for the enslaved as individual contributors to American history.
But consider that no such respect graces Virginia’s latest Fort Monroe legislation. Its historical-context-setting passage praises only “English-speaking settlers” and “Virginia Indians” for building the state and the nation, ignoring laborers in bondage who contributed for nearly a quarter of a millennium. After all, slaves were just an undifferentiated mass of faceless ciphers and nameless victims, right?
Fort Monroe overlooks the lower Chesapeake Bay and Hampton Roads harbor from a low-lying but strategically Gibraltar-like sand spit first fortified in 1609. America’s original captive Africans arrived there en route to Jamestown.
Centuries later, with the moated citadel built and James Monroe’s name adopted, Fort Monroe became the Union’s bastion in Confederate Virginia. It sheltered and employed the first victimhood-rejecting African Americans who stood up, took the big risk of escaping enslavement, found sanctuary and pushed history toward emancipation. They called Fort Monroe “Freedom’s Fortress.”
Unfortunately, the generally told version of that freedom story still denies enslaved Americans their individual dignity. It goes like this: Early in the Civil War, three slaves asked for sanctuary at Fort Monroe. Their rightful owner demanded them back, citing slaveholding law. Union Gen. Benjamin Butler refused. Under the law of war, he confiscated this human property as contraband, then granted sanctuary to thousands more such “Contraband slaves.” His famous decision pushed history toward emancipation.
That tainted, common version portrays the three self-emancipators as not even worth the dignity of being named, emancipation as resulting solely from decisions by powerful white men, and slaveholding as not just legal but “rightful.” Here’s an unstained version:
Early in the Civil War, Frank Baker, Sheppard Mallory and James Townsend took a huge risk on their own initiative. They escaped from slavery and sought liberty at the Union’s bastion in Confederate Virginia. In effect, they staked an American claim under the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. Union Gen. Benjamin Butler invoked both the law of war and perverted, grotesque slaveholding law to keep them as “Contrabands.” Thousands followed at Fort Monroe; then tens of thousands crossed Union lines throughout the South. They contributed to the Union victory as laborers and soldiers. These enterprising self-emancipators pushed history toward emancipation.
They also helped found Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. In the Obama era, their story contributes mightily to conferring on the Civil War its very meaning as a struggle for freedom and dignity.
And ultimately it’s not just an African-American story, but an American one. So declared some of the country’s most prominent Civil War historians when they met in Hampton in January 2008.
In coming decades, with black, gray and blue remembered less sharply than now, no one will need to declare it.
President Obama could start us in that direction — and in the direction of a self-sustaining Freedom’s Fortress National Park at Fort Monroe.
Corneliussen co-founded Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park. E-mail Contact@CFMNP.org.
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Steve Corneliussen has clearly indicated the significance of Fort Monroe to the history of freedom, a World Heritage issue if there ever was one. Baker, Townsend and Mallory–the three men who triggered what historian Robert Engs calls the first mass freedom incident in the Civil war–absolutely deserve the attention Mr. Corneliussen gives them in his revision of the Contraband story. But the older version of the story has elements worth remembering too. General Butler’s decision to grant these men sanctuary as contraband of war, at a time when there was no Union policy regarding escaped slaves, and Lincoln was fearful of alienating the border slave states still in the Union, provided the rationale for Congress’s Confiscation Act, the first legal step on the path to the Emancipation Act and the Thirteenth Amendment. Escaping slaves had to have somewhere to go, and a legal framework to support their new freedom once they gained it. These essentials figure importantly in the Contraband story too. But that said, what Baker, Townsend, Mallory and the thousands who came after them accomplished was to express the desire of an enslaved people for freedom and human dignity—a desire that centuries of slavery had not extinguished, as the creation of the American Spiritual, that sublime art form, suggests. One of the Spirituals collected by Northern missionaries from the “contraband” inhabitants of Fort Monroe and nearby Hampton (burned by the Confederates to keep it out of Union hands) was “Let My People Go.”
What an incredible story. One I knew nothing about. Obviously, Monroe holds much more history than the fact that I was born at Fort Monroe in 1943 and lived there for the first six years of my life.
The site not only holds a wonderful opportunity for the telling of our national heritage, but for preserving the environmental integrity of the area. Stormwater runoff has been identified as the #1 culprit in the pollution of the Chesapeake Bay. Keeping this natural barrier in place not only will provide protection for the mainland, but be a magnificent place for a reserve for wildlife and plant species.
Joe Biden used this quote about Barack Obama’s historic nomination for President of the United States: “History forbids us to hope this side of the grave. But once in a lifetime, the longed-for tide of justice can arise and hope and history rhyme.” — Seamus Heaney.
May this be that time for my beloved Fort Monroe.
Here are (1) my reply to commenter Scott Butler and, closely related, (2) my report on what President Obama actually said and didn’t say concerning Fort Monroe in his Hampton University speech:
1. Dr. Scott Butler — an old friend and a colleague in the effort to save post-Army Fort Monroe from mediocritization or worse — is no relation to General Butler. I agree with Scott that Gen. Butler’s clever, constructive decision was crucial. My point, however, is that we habitually under-recognize the first cause in this story. Traditional history — the usual telling of the story — highlights Gen. Butler’s decision as if it were the first cause of what happened. But it wasn’t. The first cause was the natural yearning in human hearts for freedom and dignity. Moreover, what yearners Baker, Mallory, and Townsend did was not just an expression, as Scott rightly says, of that desire for freedom and dignity. It was also an action — an action that required initiative and involved risk. Those people, and thousands more, and then tens of thousands all across the South, stood up and acted like what they were, even though we don’t yet fully recognize it: they were Americans. Scott Butler himself doesn’t exclude such yearners from his own telling of this Freedom Story, but many others do. The story as generally told — with those Americans and that fundamentally American first cause simply omitted — displays aging residue from the kind of thinking that predominated in 1860. In my view, that’s not good enough for a decent general understanding of American history in 2010 — not in a world where the yearning for freedom and dignity matters as much as ever.
2. The president in his Hampton speech mentioned Fort Monroe without using its actual name. He called it “a Union garrison” and “the fort” when he said, “We meet here today, as graduating classes have met for generations, not far from where it all began, near that old oak tree off Emancipation Drive. I know my University 101. There, beneath its branches, by what was then a Union garrison, about twenty students gathered on September 17, 1861. Taught by a free citizen, in defiance of Virginia law, the students were escaped slaves from nearby plantations, who had fled to the fort seeking asylum.”
At least that passage contains some degree of recognition of enslaved and formerly enslaved Americans’ contributions to the complex political movement toward emancipation, and also to the Civil War’s outcome. But in the peroration, the speech’s dramatic ending, the president failed to respect the implications.
Citing the late Dorothy Height, and connecting her civil-rights-era story to timeless, fundamental American energies, the president said, “[W]hat makes us American is something that can’t be taught — a stubborn insistence on pursuing a dream. The same insistence that led a band of patriots to overthrow an empire. That fired the passions of union troops to free the slaves and union veterans to found schools like Hampton.”
Union troops only? In fact, tens of thousands of self-emancipators eventually contributed to the Union cause, as laborers and soldiers, all across the South. Those contributions began when three self-liberators gained sanctuary at Fort Monroe — and started Fort Monroe toward its historic interconnectedness with what is now Hampton University.
Concerning the “stubborn insistence,” the president continued by declaring that it “led foot-soldiers the same age as you to brave fire-hoses on the streets of Birmingham and billy clubs on a bridge in Selma” — and that it “led generation after generation of Americans to toil away, quietly, without complaint, in the hopes of a better life for their children and grandchildren.” Then he declared as well, “That is what makes us who we are.”
Indeed that is what makes _us_ who we are. And in the time of slavery — even if we failed to recognize it then, and even if we still fail now — that “us” included enslaved Americans, many of whom acted on that “stubborn insistence on pursuing a dream.”
Fort Monroe is the place where that dimension of American history, and of the history of liberty itself — and of the history of Hampton University — began to unfold.
The president missed this chance to steer a national treasure toward what it ought to be, sometime in a future that will eventually become postracial.
Steve,
I think you should send your article to President Obama. What you have to say rings so true.
I totally concur.