What about makingVirginia's Historic Triangleinto the Historic Quadrangle?Especially if supplemented by the Mariners' Museum's new Monitor Center in Newport News, a Fort Monroe National Park, highlighting the Contraband story, could become the fourth anchor point in a Historic Quadrangle, expanding the Historic Triangle of Jamestown, Yorktown and Williamsburg. Fort Monroe as a Civil War heritage-tourism attraction would become all the more compelling if the Museum of the Confederacy establishes a major branch museum there. Promising discussions have begun on that idea.Below appears a Historic Quadrangle op-ed as it was originally submitted to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, where it appeared on June 19, 2007 -- "Juneteenth." The editors removed material near the end reporting and explaining APVA Preservation Virginia's and the Civil War Preservation Trust's formal announcements that Fort Monroe is in danger of inappropriate development. We've boldfaced the four paragraphs that the editors removed from among the final nine.
Juneteenth in Virginia
Historic Triangle could become Historic Quadrangle
Richmond Times-Dispatch
June 19, 2007 ("Juneteenth")
Steven T. Corneliussen"Virginia had almost nothing to do with the end of slavery," asserted Del. A. Donald McEachin, D-Henrico, last winter. He promoted Virginia's resolution of profound regret for slavery.
Virginia is "where slavery began to die" -- and thus, even if only haltingly, "where freedom for all Americans truly began" -- says University of Pennsylvania historian Robert F. Engs. He wrote "Freedom's First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861-1890."
Both men are African-American. For historical understanding, but also for a stark economic reason, their views merit comparing on this Juneteenth, the June 19 celebration of slavery's end. The economic reason is tourism, Virginia's fifth largest source of private-sector employment.
If politician McEachin is right, the commonwealth's heritage-tourism potential remains the same. If historian Engs is right, the commonwealth's heritage-tourism potential increases, maybe enormously.
The politician's view makes sense if you see emancipation only as what whites finally deigned to proclaim for helpless victims forced to wait passively to be freed.
But the historian's view makes sense if you look deeper than the convoluted politics of the Emancipation Proclamation. It makes sense if you see the end of slavery as owing in large measure to enslaved Americans who stood up, threw off unnatural bondage, and seized freedom.
THREE COURAGEOUS VIRGINIANS
Just after the Civil War began, three Virginians -- Frank Baker, Sheppard Mallory and James Townsend -- stood up, left enslavement and sought sanctuary with the Union Army at Fort Monroe on Old Point Comfort, where Hampton Roads meets the Chesapeake Bay.
The men got sanctuary by being deemed enemy "property" and thus war contraband. What followed, says Engs, was the war's first mass freedom incident, transforming the struggle into a war for freedom.
Tens of thousands followed. "Everywhere in Virginia and the South slaves risked everything to escape," wrote the University of Richmond's new president, historian Edward L. Ayers.
Engs says these Americans' initiative led to slavery's disintegration and, because many became laborers and soldiers for the Union, crucially affected the war's outcome.
That's the heritage-tourism story that Fort Monroe can tell. Unlike slavery-era stories at Monticello, Mount Vernon or Williamsburg, it's not about victims. It's about courageous, risk-taking Americans.
And it shows the Civil War as a war of ideas that still matter.
Consider the contrasting laws invoked when Baker, Mallory and Townsend seized freedom.
A Union general deemed the men contraband by invoking the sickeningly perverted law of the land, which called certain humans property. But Baker, Mallory and Townsend, in effect, invoked something beautiful: the laws of Nature and of Nature's God.
Today, given the complex horrors in Iraq's civil war, many question whether Thomas Jefferson was right about those laws. Does every human heart really yearn, in some way, for freedom? In my view, Virginia's Fort Monroe end-of-slavery story has something to say about that.
With the Army leaving Fort Monroe in 2011, and with ownership mostly reverting to Virginia, we should make Fort Monroe into some sort of grand public place. Many believe that's best accomplished by establishing an innovatively self-sustaining national park. A new state law requests a federal study of that option.
Unfortunately, however, what we might get instead is thousands of upscale houses defacing the historic setting and disinheriting Fort Monroe's actual owners: all of us.
ENDANGERED NATIONAL TREASURE
Fort Monroe -- including its historic moated, stone fortress -- occupies all of Old Point Comfort, nearly 600 water-surrounded acres just east of the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel. It offers spectacular views across the harbor, over the bay, and into America's past.
It also offers beaches, live oaks, fishing, biking, a deep-water marina, a windsurfing cove, fine old residences, dignified campus buildings, a Tiffany-windowed chapel, an 1802 lighthouse and a two-mile promenade from which you can almost reach out and touch a passing aircraft carrier.
With the new USS Monitor display in Newport News, Fort Monroe could add a major Civil War dimension to our tourism. The Historic Triangle of nearby Yorktown, Williamsburg and Jamestown could become the Historic Quadrangle.
Old Point Comfort with Fort Monroe bookends American slavery's history. It's where the ship carrying the first Africans first landed, and where, a quarter of a millennium later, slavery began to die.
It has been publicly owned for 400 years. With wise management of its present and prospective assets, it could pay its own way for 400 more.
But developers are salivating. And thanks to mindless federal base-closing processes, the city of Hampton has been able to seize substantial, and disproportionate, control of the planning. Hampton seeks narrowly envisioned windfall profit from what would amount to a gated neighborhood without the gate.
So APVA Preservation Virginia has included Fort Monroe among eleven "Most Endangered Historic Sites in Virginia for 2007." And the Civil War Preservation Trust, the nation's largest organization devoted to preserving Civil War sites, has declared it "at risk."
Thanks to that new state law, however, Gov. Tim Kaine has the power to ensure that this national treasure's new planning panel not only looks far into the future, but wisely into the past. How will he use it?
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Steven T. Corneliussen, of Poquoson, is a vice president of Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park (CFMNP.org).(Home)