National Treasure Needs Richmond Voices for Preservation

Wednesday, Nov 14, 2007

Richmond Times-Dispatch

By STEVE CORNELIUSSEN
TIMES-DISPATCH COLUMNIST

In the future, will understanding continue to deepen concerning slavery, the Civil War, and the history of liberty itself? That prospect heightens the importance of an Army public forum tomorrow in Richmond.

Army officials seek opinions about the future of Fort Monroe, 570 acres of prime waterfront offering unmatched views over the Chesapeake Bay, across Hampton Roads, and into all four centuries of America's past.

Under BRAC law -- Base Realignment and Closure -- the Army will leave the post in 2011. Under Section 106 of federal historic-preservation law, the Army must consider citizens' opinions in setting guidelines for the Virginia panel planning Fort Monroe's future.

So officials will listen from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 2801 Kensington Avenue, Richmond. They're also gathering opinions in Tidewater, in Washington, and by e-mail. (Information: the BRAC link at www.monroe.army.mil )

The forum matters because Fort Monroe isn't Camp Swampy. In a moving 27-minute documentary online at WHRO.org, Robert Nieweg of the National Trust for Historic Preservation ranks the post as a national treasure alongside Monticello and Mount Vernon.

But the forum matters even more if understanding is going to continue to deepen concerning slavery, the Civil War, and the history of liberty itself.

YOU CAN SEE such deepening in Virginia's 2007 expression of slavery regret, in Richmond's commemorations of slavery-era events, in Colonial Williamsburg's attempts to portray 18th-century African-American life, and in slave-trade remembrances in Africa and England.

You can see it in the Museum of the Confederacy's constructive resolve to do what once couldn't have been contemplated: display honored Confederate artifacts in a satellite museum at Fort Monroe, Virginia's Union Army stronghold.

You can see it at Monticello and Mount Vernon, where curators try hard to convey historical truth -- but where even in the best circumstances, African-Americans were victims degraded under squalid, perverted laws protecting so-called "owners" who, paradoxically, led in America's founding.

Contrast that with Fort Monroe. There you can remember formerly enslaved humans as what they were always, inevitably, going to prove themselves to be -- not under human laws, but under something higher: "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." If you look into the past at Fort Monroe, you see not victimized slaves but stand-up, risk-taking, self-emancipating fellow Americans.

University of Pennsylvania historian Robert F. Engs calls Fort Monroe the site of the Civil War's first mass freedom incident. He means acts of self-emancipation that eventually transformed the struggle into a war for freedom, and made Virginia the place where freedom for all Americans finally and truly, even if haltingly, began.

A CENTURY or four from now, where will this story fit in the history of liberty itself? Can we decide -- we who can't even agree what to make of Iraqi voters' purple fingers?

A half-century ago, all of Fort Monroe -- the land where the ship importing the first Africans arrived in 1619 -- became a National Historic Landmark, partly for containing the moated stone citadel that self-emancipators called Freedom's Fortress.

Yet according to the Civil War Preservation Trust and APVA Preservation Virginia, inappropriate development threatens Fort Monroe. In 2005 the BRAC law steered Fort Monroe toward control by Hampton, which envisions upscale new houses making the publicly owned post a gated community without the gate.

No politician, no journalist, no one with power asked the starkly obvious question: If Virginia somehow came to possess Monticello and Mount Vernon, would we simply donate them for narrow purposes to Charlottesville and Alexandria?

 

But there's a law higher than BRAC or Virginia's unwise Fort Monroe legislation. It's Section 106, the stimulus for the Army's Thursday forum. And sometimes -- as when self-emancipators escaped to Fort Monroe -- a higher law's moral force can matter most.

 

Tomorrow, Central Virginians will get their chance to insist that the Army instruct Gov. Kaine and the Virginia panel to respect all of Fort Monroe as what it is: a National Historic Landmark ranking with -- and maybe someday outranking -- Monticello and Mount Vernon.

 

Steve Corneliussen represents a citizens group advocating a financially self-sustaining Fort Monroe National Park (www.CFMNP.org).

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