Virginia’s Historic Quadrangle

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Given Hampton Roads’ evolving Civil War tourism assets, why not expand the Historic Triangle to become the Historic Quadrangle?

Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown present America’s origins as a nation built on ideas, not ethnicity. But that triangle excludes the war that proved America truly means those ideas. A Historic Quadrangle would tell the founding’s complete story -- and would enrich the region in multiple ways, starting with financially.

Physical assets for including the Civil War are evolving nicely. In 2011, the Army leaves Fort Monroe, a national treasure with unique Civil War importance as "Freedom’s Fortress." A leading preservationist ranked it alongside Monticello in WHRO’s moving, 27-minute Fort Monroe documentary "Kingdom by the Sea," accessible online. With the Monitor Center nearby, Fort Monroe would anchor the quadrangle’s fourth corner.

Moreover, Richmond’s Museum of the Confederacy plans a substantial Fort Monroe presence. Some even say Fort Monroe could import Fredericksburg’s envisioned slavery museum. That possibility calls to mind a crucial non-physical asset that’s also evolving nicely: awareness that the "Contraband" freedom story makes Fort Monroe the place where slavery began to die.

Traces of leftover slave-era thinking still skew that story. Here’s the typical version: Early in the Civil War, three slaves sought sanctuary at Fort Monroe. Their rightful owner demanded them back, citing slaveholding law. Gen. Benjamin Butler refused. Under the law of war, he confiscated the human property as contraband, then accepted thousands more "Contraband slaves." His famous decision pushed history toward emancipation.

Unintended traces of ugly old presumptions stain that version. It portrays the three self-emancipators as not even worth the dignity of being named, emancipation as resulting solely from decisions by the powerful, 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 a claim under the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. Gen. Benjamin Butler invoked both the law of war and perverted, grotesque slaveholding law to keep them as "Contrabands." Thousands followed, then tens of thousands all across the South. They contributed to the Union victory as laborers and soldiers. These self-emancipators pushed history toward emancipation.

Critics will charge political correctness, revisionism and presentism. Three questions for such scoffers:
* When enterprising self-emancipators made the Civil War into a war for liberty, were they acting as slaves, or as Americans?
* Nobody believes that women burned at the stake were really witches. Does accuracy really demand that we not just remember slavery’s squalid reality, but retrospectively accept it too?
* How will all of this be seen a century from now, with blue-vs.-gray passions at long last dead in America, but Contraband-like longings for human rights abiding in hearts worldwide?

Whether or not America itself is exceptional, its founding ideas are. At most historic sites, slavery means victimhood, but the Historic Quadrangle also means Americans escaping from victimhood, seeking to live out the true meaning of America’s creed.

That’s why the Contraband freedom story’s significance involves not only slavery in America's past, but liberty in the planet's future. Fort Monroe is a national treasure with international significance. Its implications encompass Tiananmen Square, brave women thwarting sex slavery in chaotic lands, and Iraqi voters’ purple-fingered majesty.

Yet the Civil War Preservation Trust regularly affirms that post-Army Fort Monroe remains at risk of mediocrity or worse. One example: a planning official recently tantalized developers with possibilities for "mixed-use beachfront development" on that national historic landmark that reaches back 400 years. Hampton city councilman George Wallace echoed this threat of development for development's sake, as opposed to development for making Fort Monroe self-sustaining.