The symposium’s organizers at the Contraband Historical Society have recognized that the time has come for emphasizing national attention to the Contraband story, which began at Fort Monroe in May 1861, weeks after Fort Sumter. They telegraph this recognition in their symposium’s name. More than in the past for historical remembrance of the Contrabands, views from beyond Virginia will be involved.

One slated participant is Tom Zoellner, professor at Chapman University and Dartmouth College and a former staff writer for The Arizona Republic and the San Francisco Chronicle. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The American Scholar, The Oxford American, Time, Foreign Policy, Slate, Scientific American, Audubon, Sierra, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Texas Observer, The American Scholar, and The Wall Street Journal. He’s an editor-at-large for the Los Angeles Review of Books. His nine nonfiction books include Island on Fire: The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best nonfiction book of 2020.

Recently Zoellner also published The Road Was Full of Thorns: Running Toward Freedom in the American Civil War. (I posted about it in December.) The book jacket provides a pithy summary:

In the opening days of the Civil War, three enslaved men approached the gates of Fort Monroe, a U.S. military installation in Virginia. In a snap decision, the fort’s commander “confiscated” them as contraband of war.

From then on, wherever the U.S. Army traveled, torrents of runaways rushed to secure their own freedom, a mass movement of 800,000 people2—a fifth of the enslaved population of the South—that set the institution of slavery on a path to destruction.

The book’s circa 1864 cover photo has appeared widely. In the National Trust for Historic Preservation essay “The Forgotten: The Contraband of America and the Road to Freedom” the photo’s caption begins, “A group of African American refugees, called contraband, who worked for the Union army as teamsters.” Contrabands figured centrally in the war’s gradual elevation from a struggle for union to a struggle for union and freedom. Zoellner’s book can inspire unforgetting of the Civil War’s multitudes of slavery escapees, whether called Contrabands—with a capital C, as the Contraband Historical Society advocates3—or self-emancipators. Princeton’s Sean Wilentz cites “hundreds of thousands” of Civil War slavery escapees “forcing the issue of freedom, which helped change a war to crush southern secession into a war to destroy slavery.”

The late Gerri Hollins, a Contraband descendant like others in the Contraband Historical Society, founded the society in Tidewater Virginia in 1994. The society’s website says she “worked tirelessly until her death in 2012 to bring this often ignored history to the public’s attention.” Often ignored, indeed. When the Pentagon announced in 2005 that the Army would retire Fort Monroe in 2011 and return it to Virginia, I already had three decades of connections to it. Yet I didn’t know of the Contrabands. In 2006, after Gerri had joined the political effort to achieve something better than overdevelopment of post-Army Fort Monroe, she and I were standing next to the Lincoln Gun at Fort Monroe when she opened my eyes to the Contraband story.

Tom Zoellner will be a panelist at the May symposium. So will:

• Filmmaker Laura Seltzer-Duny, whose work has aired on PBS, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, Discovery, and the History Channel. She’s working on “THE GATE: The Story of America’s First Contraband Community” (5-minute trailer).

• Amy Murrell Taylor, University of Kentucky scholar of self-emancipation and author of Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps and The Divided Family in Civil War America.

• Abigail Cooper of Brandeis University, who studies the Civil War’s contraband camps.

• Chandra Manning of Georgetown University, author of Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War.

• Cassandra Newby-Alexander, Endowed Professor of Virginia Black History and Culture at Norfolk State University and author of Daily Life along the Underground Railroad and Virginia Waterways and the Underground Railroad. She has appeared on NBC, BBC, C-SPAN, and in PBS’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. production The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.

Postscript

During the Civil War centennial, 1961 to 1965, I was a kid, interested in the Civil War only as a stirring pageant of battles and generals and valor, same as everybody else. By the turn of the century, now middle-aged, I knew that emancipation and abolition were important, but Lost Cause propaganda still had a subtle hold.

In those circa 2000 years my family and I often visited Fort Monroe. It was a post with high-level importance for the Army—a restful, wooded seaside place with dignified residential and campuslike architecture. Our children loved it. We attended the weekly summertime outdoor concerts on a grand lawn beside the bay. Kids and dogs played with Frisbees and tennis balls at one end. At the other, near the bandstand, grownups drank wine—discreetly—and enjoyed the music. It was something like stepping into Bedford Falls in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Then something changed. In 2005, the Pentagon announced the Army’s 2011 departure and Fort Monroe’s 2011 reversion to Virginia ownership. Given the post’s essential nature as hugely attractive waterfront, it immediately became necessary to defend the precious spirit of place from the threat of thoughtless overdevelopment. That necessity in turn necessitated learning more about the historical importance. Yet most of the people I knew, including me, still didn’t know about the world history—not just American history, but world history—that gave rise to the Contrabands.

But that was two decades ago. Now, in 2026, the Black and indigenous history of this cherished place is generating awareness. At Fort Monroe on April 20, just the other day, at a bayfront spot with a clear view down the bay to the Atlantic Ocean, a gathering of many hundreds, led by Governor Spanberger, formally dedicated the African Landing Memorial. It’s a formal stone plaza oriented to point toward the Atlantic, crossed centuries ago by multitudes torturously confined and enslaved.

Members of the Contraband Historical Society were present. The president, Phil Adderley, an old friend and Jefferson Lab colleague of mine, was especially busy making something happen—something that in 1961, and in 1981, and in 2001, even with all my familiarity with Fort Monroe, I could never have foreseen. I didn’t know the history.

But now, along with many others, I do know, and know that the Contraband Historical Society signals something hopeful about the future. The scope and vision of its May symposium are new. Something missing from the national story is being reclaimed—at the Virginia place where slavery began and, a quarter millennium later, began to crumble.

Following months of sketchy planning, as reported most recently in the Feb. 18 Self-Emancipator post “History debate uncertain,” Yale historian David Blight has posted on YouTube a 73-minute conversation with historian Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the source of Project 2025.

Historian Roberts is a prominent advocate of Trump administration policies and views on American history. His 1999 Virginia Tech master’s thesis was African-Virginian Extended Kin: The Prevalence of West African Family Forms Among Slaves in Virginia, 1740–1870. His 2003 University of Texas Ph.D. dissertation was Slaves and slavery in Louisiana: the evolution of Atlantic world identities, 1791–1831.

Blight, a prominent critic of Trump administration policies and views on American history, is Yale University’s Sterling Professor of History and Black Studies. He’s a Pulitzer-holding Frederick Douglass biographer, director of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, and former president of the Organization of American Historians.

The conversation was billed as an effort “to engage a debate into the significant issues surrounding the practice of history, the role of historians, and cultural institutions amidst the criticisms from the Heritage Foundation and the Trump White House.”

Introductory materials reported an

aim to maintain a civil and decent conversation, despite their disagreements. They cover a broad spectrum of topics, scrutinizing some of the controversial stands and ideologies from both sides. This candid dialogue strives not to bridge the ideological gap but to explore whether genuine communication and honest debate are possible across one of our nation’s great divides.

It seemed to me that the two achieved that kind of communication and debate. Here’s a report sampling their conversation, which Blight hosted as an interview. Roberts had spoken in public at Yale on the preceding evening.

Blight began by asking Roberts, “Are you still a historian? A spokesman for the American right?” Roberts said that after a long time in his present political role, he plans to return to the classroom. He sees himself as one of the “intellectual leaders of conservatism,” somewhat removed from “bare-knuckles politics.” In his work in public history, Roberts declared, “We’re neither going to do what I consider to be the unacceptable revisionist history of the left, nor are we going to do some of the whitewashing that people on the right want to do.” He added that the “charges against the Heritage Foundation for politicizing history [are] actually projection”; we all need to follow what the sources actually show, Roberts said.

Roberts said he condemns “the insertion, intentionally, of contemporary politics into historical interpretation.” Entering what may be the primary realm of contention that originally inspired the idea for debating, he declared that the Smithsonian’s African-American museum has “the worst examples of historical interpretation that I can imagine … there are some exhibits there that have completely inverted the project of historians.” At one point, Blight spoke of ideology bubbling to the surface in the history profession, and Roberts countered that sometimes it’s actually a “hurricane.”

Nevertheless, I thought they did a good job of toning down the flame-war aspect seen in recent months from both sides.

They addressed President Trump’s remarkably named executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” In a 7-minute May 1, 2025, interview on PBS’s News Hour, Blight had challenged the president and the administration to debate it:

[T]hey [have] effectively declared war on our profession, whether that’s curators at the Smithsonian, or historians in universities, or the interpreters at a historic site. So, if this is a political, cultural war upon how history is told and written and exhibited, then we have to, with our meager sources, fight back. We have to get out into the public. We have to probably get into right-wing media and make the case. We have to invite the authors of such executive orders to debate us … .

But the tone of this new conversation was polite, even decorous. The two men seemed genuinely collegial about their general disagreement.

Blight challenged Roberts, Why “plant” unqualified people to “attack” the Smithsonian? Roberts cited “unacceptable revisionist history,” but Blight countercharged that by that point in the exchange, Roberts had only cited one example.

They seemed to agree that Donald Trump has helped to reintroduce the primacy of simple truth—whatever is to be said about the president’s own relationship to truth (and yes, your correspondent has a strong bias there)—primacy that has been to some extent absent in academe and elsewhere. Blight referred often to “postmodern nonsense.” Yet he declared, plainly surprisingly, “In fact, Donald Trump has brought the word truth back.”

Blight took a short excursion into a story about “postmodern nonsense.” He described participating in an annoying academic discussion that, for a couple of hours years before, had engaged the topic of “truth.” It was all about “close reading” of this and “close reading” of that. Afterwards, he drove home and turned on the World Series, just in time to see the surreal (my word, for I remember it too) report that an earthquake had rocked San Francisco and the ballpark, and, among much else, had severely postponed the game. Blight exclaimed: “You know, there’s something more important in this world than our close readings of this nonsense.” Blight said he disdains “relative truth” in favor of “facts we can put on the wall” in a museum. Both he and Roberts grew up in working-class families.

Twice in the discussion they engaged Montpelier, the Virginia estate of James Madison. Roberts condemned what he sees as Montpelier’s scanting of Madison’s Constitution, overemphasizing instead a slavery focus.

They discussed the American “golden age” that Heritage sees beginning. They discussed the Supreme Court nominee who shrank from defining a woman—Roberts calling that a telling example of what’s wrong in academe. They discussed the Fourteenth Amendment and the question of birthright citizenship. Roberts wants rid of the birthright provision. He predicted that there will eventually be a constructive reckoning with the fact that millions of illegals are here. They discussed NATO, with Roberts disputing Blight’s view of what Trump has done and emphasizing what Roberts sees as the need to expect NATO countries to contribute at the level of the United States.

Recurring to the president’s “truth and sanity” executive order, Blight called it “a declaration of war on the practice of history.” No, said Roberts, “It’s a declaration of war on unacceptable revisionist history … a declaration of war on the politicization of history.” Roberts insisted that those calling for “additional oversight of the Smithsonian aren’t attacking anything”; they’re trying to “defend and restore.” Blight responded, “Tell that to Lonnie Bunch,” founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, who now heads the Smithsonian overall. Roberts replied, “I would be happy to if he would take a meeting with me”

Blight leveled another challenge: Why call Governor Spanberger “the Soviet governor of Virginia”? Roberts said, “I mean it when I say that.” He charged that she wouldn’t work with ICE on the brutal murder case of Stephanie Minter. The governor, Roberts charged, “has refused to work with ICE to bring this man to justice.”

At the end, Blight brought up the lost-cause concept, framing Trump not as a Confederate lost-causer, but as a lost-causer in his own way, in a different sense.

University of Richmond president emeritus Ed Ayers—former Organization of American Historians president, and founding chair of the American Civil War Museum board—enjoys noting that decades ago, when he told his mom he was going to study history, she replied, “But Edward, we already know what happened!” Problem is, sometimes we don’t. And sometimes the understanding we do have is clouded or worse. My favorite example: Major General Benjamin Butler’s shrewd, constructive May 1861 “Contraband Decision.” Thoughtless disrespect for Black self-agency corrupts national memory of it.

Mere weeks after Fort Sumter, just after after General Butler took command at Fort Monroe—the Union’s mighty, and mighty symbolic, bastion in Confederate Virginia—subordinates brought him three slavery escapees who were seeking sanctuary: Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend. In fraught general circumstances, what was Butler to do? Send them back to enslavement? Keep them in some degree of freedom, thereby incurring disapproval in a country not remotely ready for emancipation? What would President Lincoln say?

The general’s civilian past as a New England lawyer led him to a clever workaround. Legally, the three men were chattel property—mere things, objects, stuff you could own. But valuable as laborers. So he simply declared them contraband of war. The general said, in effect, that he couldn’t dream of returning them to a state that was calling itself America’s enemy.

This public-relations strategy worked. Baker, Mallory, and Townsend stayed, and volatile race sensibilities didn’t get roiled. But here’s where the corruption of memory sets in. Often even today, when the story is told, the three aren’t even accorded the simple decency of being named—not even when the story is told officially by no less than the founders of Black History Month. The three were just “slaves,” you see—as if that was their permanent natural state, ordained from on high, rather than a merely temporary identity immorally forced onto them by a depraved system.

And please, no objections that “people didn’t know any better back then” (unless someone really wants us to sidetrack down that goofball road). Four million enslaved Americans knew better. And in 1861, abolitionism had been picking up steam for nearly a century among Americans generally.

Even today when the “Contraband Decision” is invoked, with glorious trumpets almost audible, Americans regularly still remember, and name, only the lawyer in a general’s uniform who made the second, reactive decision on that May morning in 1861. Regularly left unnamed and anonymous are the three risk-taking Americans who, acting with agency and resolve, made the first, active decision—the decision to escape and to see if America really meant what it had been claiming to mean for more than four score years. By war’s end, some half-million Americans had self-emancipated.

Though General Butler was crucial for catalyzing that mass movement, historians regularly note that at the time of Fort Sumter, Black America had already seen a colossal freedom opportunity coming. To me it seems outright goofy to suppose that all across the South, the opportunity would never have evolved without a single shrewd fort commander’s political legerdemain.

The envisioned February history debate between Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts and Yale’s David Blight is postponed—and apparently in some danger of not happening. When I find out more, I’ll report.

Three months ago I circulated a post headlined “Debate: No history kings” about plans at The New Republic (TNR) to sponsor such a debate. Maybe the excerpts below from that post show why such a debate would be important, following still more weeks of Trumpist attacks on national memory.

- - - - - - - - - - -

The lead debaters:

• Historian Kevin Roberts, prominent advocate of Trump administration policies and views on American history and president of the Heritage Foundation, the source of Project 2025. His 1999 Virginia Tech master’s thesis was African-Virginian Extended Kin: The Prevalence of West African Family Forms Among Slaves in Virginia, 1740–1870. His 2003 University of Texas Ph.D. dissertation was Slaves and slavery in Louisiana: the evolution of Atlantic world identities, 1791–1831.

• Historian David Blight, prominent critic of Trump administration policies and views on American history and Yale University’s Sterling Professor of History and Black Studies. He’s a Pulitzer-holding Frederick Douglass biographer, director of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, and former president of the Organization of American Historians.

Why debate?

To Professor Blight, the need for a debate has been obvious for months. The May 18 Self-Emancipator post “Trump’s history war: David Blight urges direct debate” began this way:

David Blight has brought something new to the boisterous national discussion of President Trump’s remarkably named executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” In a 7-minute May 1 interview on PBS’s News Hour, he challenged the president and the administration to debate it:

[T]hey [have] effectively declared war on our profession, whether that’s curators at the Smithsonian, or historians in universities, or the interpreters at a historic site. So, if this is a political, cultural war upon how history is told and written and exhibited, then we have to, with our meager sources, fight back. We have to get out into the public. We have to probably get into right-wing media and make the case. We have to invite the authors of such executive orders to debate us … .

On September 8 and November 3—with no debating yet—The New Republic convened panel discussions online, with Blight moderating. Now a September YouTube has been joined by a YouTube of the November event: “Trump vs. History II: How Trump is trying to change our sense of who we are.” For 82 minutes, four nationally prominent historians engaged “the fight to preserve our history AND democracy.”

Further such online events are planned, and eleven commentaries have appeared accordingly at TNR, contributed at Blight’s invitation. His own contribution is “What if History Died by Sanctioned Ignorance? We must mobilize now to defend our profession, not only with research and teaching but in the realm of politics and public persuasion.” That commentary begins this way:

The primary aim of the political right, said the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, in early 2024, should be “institutionalizing Trumpism.” He and his organization meant this especially for the writing, teaching, and dissemination of American history.

On March 27, President Donald Trump, echoing the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, issued an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The White House now believes it should pronounce on the nature of history and the purpose and substance of the nation’s treasures at the Smithsonian Institution. The order is nothing less than a declaration of political war on the historians’ profession, our training and integrity, as well as on the freedom and curiosity of anyone who reads or visits museums. In other words, Trump’s team has declared war on free minds and free education in order to erase more than a half-century of scholarship and replace it with official triumphal narratives rooted in a brand of pickled patriotism designed to force the past to serve the present.

A further excerpt from the Blight TNR piece:

Today, our foes like to wear red hats and rely on moral platitudes rather than research, ad hominem accusations rather than analysis, executive orders drafted at a think tank, funding restrictions, and a hatred of what they deem “liberalism” as their weapons in a war on traditional history. Trained historians and teachers are now the “traditionalists,” defenders of an honored practice, believing in evidence and research, against a barbaric effort to dissolve the institutional and moral foundations of those two important values. We have steadily opened the gates of historical knowledge to myriad new subjects and methods that have educated a largely curious and willing world. Now we have to mobilize to defend our profession not only with research and teaching but in the realm of politics and public persuasion. And we cannot surrender!

And this:

These assaults on history have moved at a startling pace, if a bit under the radar of public attention. The Trump White House, with the assistance of Project 2025, has attacked the institutions that historians most cherish. They include the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution and its 21 museums, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright fellowship program, and the National Park Service. This is only a partial list and should also include universities themselves and public schools, which many Republicans are determined to erode or destroy. All of these measures were in the name of eliminating historical content deemed by the White House to be “woke,” or in the service of “DEI,” both vacuous labels that have come to mean almost anything about race, gender, LGBTQ life, and history. … The Heritage Foundation has been an incubator of much of Trumpism in style and content. Indeed, if Trumpism is a grandiose media show, Heritage and Kevin Roberts are Trump’s history department, ready and eager to tell you what to think about the nation’s past. On the eve of America’s 250th anniversary, Roberts leads an organization with hundreds of employees, $100 million on hand in 2023, and support from several extraordinarily wealthy conservative foundations.

Dr. Roberts

In the Project 2025 Playbook, Kevin Roberts wrote the foreword, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.” There he charges, “Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms.” He explains, “This book, this agenda, the entire Project 2025 is a plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors.” He declares, “The Conservative Promise represents the best effort of the conservative movement in 2023—and the next conservative president’s last opportunity to save our republic.”

The Juneteenth 2025 Self-Emancipator post “Don’t let Kevin Roberts ruin Juneteenth: Decently engage all of slavery’s legacies” relied on the 2024 Los Angeles Review of Books article “The Inconvenient Scholarship of Kevin Roberts: Samuel G. Freedman traces the long and contradictory intellectual journey of the man behind Project 2025.” There Columbia University journalism professor Freedman described Roberts not only as a star in his earlier career in academe, but as a star on the subject of slavery, his specialty, who got along quite well with colleagues.

Professor Freedman wrote, “In the nearly 20 years since Roberts left behind his career as a scholar of enslavement, he has periodically returned in speech and in writing to issues of race. His tone could hardly be more of a departure from the intricate, nuanced work on enslaved Black people that he had done as a graduate student.” Freedman concluded:

Long gone is the scholar who reckoned honorably with the United States’ original sin of enslavement. When Roberts speaks of wars these days, he refers not to the Civil War, with its prospect of emancipating the shackled and bestowing a “new birth of freedom” upon the United States. Instead, like radicals from the Tea Party movement to the January 6 insurrection, Roberts invokes the Revolutionary War, with both a promise and a threat. As he put it on Steve Bannon’s podcast: “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be.”

Roberts’s Heritage biography page calls the foundation “the nation’s premier conservative think tank” and “the most broadly supported … in the world, drawing support from more than 500,000 members.” The page calls his leadership “critical in pushing back on the radical, socialist agenda being advanced by the Left at all levels of government.”

Controversy occasionally recurs over a Confederacy monument in North Carolina’s coastal lowlands, a courthouse statue that promotes the “loyal slave” Lost Cause propaganda canard. That propaganda denies the reality of enslaved Americans who risked escaping, sometimes by trading slavery’s horrors for the dangers and hardships of living in lowland swamps—hidden and free.

ABOVE: The upper backside of the 124-year-old Confederacy monument that stands beside the Tyrrell County courthouse in the North Carolina coastal lowlands town Columbia. The New York Times engaged the inscription “IN APPRECIATION OF OUR FAITHFUL SLAVES” in the August 17, 2025 article “An Acknowledgment of ‘Faithful Slaves’ Divides a North Carolina Town.” BELOW: The full statue as seen from the front. (Both photos by STC.)

In 1863, as quoted by Kevin M. Levin at Civil War Memory, visiting British war observer Lt. Col. Arthur J. L. Fremantle of the Coldstream Guards wrote:

From what I have seen of the Southern negroes, I am of opinion that the Confederates could, if they chose, convert a great number into soldiers; and from the affection which undoubtedly exists as a general rule between the slaves and their masters, I think that they would prove more efficient than black troops under any other circumstances.

“Affection” that “undoubtedly” existed? That calls to mind something Tom Zoellner emphasizes in The Road Was Full of Thorns: Running Toward Freedom in the American Civil War. That fall 2025 book takes long strides toward fulfilling a prediction often made in this Substack: that Americans will come to esteem the Black self-agency, sophisticated awareness, courage, and gumption to which Lt. Col. Fremantle was blind. Zoellner wrote (p. 184): “By the middle of 1863, more than seven-tenths of the male enslaved population of Charles City County, Virginia, had run away to join federal troops. ‘There is not one negro in all the South, who will remain faithful . . . not one,’ lamented a Tidewater planter.”

In 2017, Levin published the Smithsonian magazine article “The Pernicious Myth of the ‘Loyal Slave’ Lives on in Confederate Memorials: Statues don’t need to venerate military leaders of the Civil War to promulgate false narratives.” He wrote that such “monuments promulgate the idea that the Confederate cause united both races against invading Yankee hordes,” but noted that in doing so, “they reinforce a myth that ignored the many ways that enslaved people undermined the Confederate war effort, most notably by running off to the Union army and fighting against their former oppressors.” Some historians call those slavery escapees self-emancipators.

Levin emphasized the perniciousness that his article’s title invoked:

The sons and daughters of the Confederacy understood that the key to re-imposing and justifying white supremacy following Reconstruction involved controlling history. Arguments against removing Confederate monuments often raise the dangers of erasing history.

What is often missed, however, is that the depiction of African-Americans as loyal and submissive itself constituted an erasure of history in favor of a fictional narrative that ultimately justified segregation and disfranchisement. The push to remove these monuments is recognition of the damage they have done and continue to do in communities across this country.

Coastal swamps mire a Lost Cause lie

Much of coastal North Carolina is swampland, starting with the Great Dismal Swamp straddling the border with Virginia about 72 miles north of the Tyrrell County statue. Under the headline “Exposing the Lie of a Confederate Monument’s ‘Faithful Slave’ Message,” Levin last year wrote that Tyrrell County’s “coastal marsh and swamp lands proved to be a magnet” for slavery escapees. The NC History Center on the Civil War, Emancipation & Reconstruction reports that even before the Civil War, small groups of slavery escapees called maroons “made a life in the remote vastness of the pine woods, the river canebrakes, the black water swamps.” The center says that some small communities in the Great Dismal Swamp and on the Pasquotank, the Albemarle, and the Chowan Rivers endured for generations, “invisible to white society” in places no one else seemed to want. “From the rice and turpentine plantations, runaways follow[ed] the Cape Fear to Wilmington. From tobacco and cotton plantations in the Piedmont they journey[ed] down the Neuse to New Bern. The Tar River [took] them to [the small North Carolina town of] Washington, the Roanoke to Plymouth.” Each port city was “a doorway to a new world, but a dangerous one.”

A family of self-emancipators depicted hiding in the Great Dismal Swamp in Thomas Moran’s oil painting Slave Hunt, from about 1864. (Virginia Museum of History and Culture)

Encyclopedia Virginia says that in antebellum times, the Great Dismal Swamp “entered popular consciousness as a place of refuge from slavery through works such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem ‘The Slave in the Dismal Swamp’ and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1856 book Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp.” It calls the swamp a “mythical place of enslaved resistance and rebellion” where “individuals or groups of enslaved people self-emancipated and sought refuge in inhospitable terrain.”

The National Park Service calls the Great Dismal “a vast mire teeming with predators” that nevertheless promised slavery escapees “both a better life and—thanks to its harsh conditions and fearsome reputation—safety from those seeking to return them to slavery.”

Smithsonian magazine quotes a historical archaeologist explaining that for the maroons in the swamp, there “were hardships and deprivations, for sure. But no overseer was going to whip them here. No one was going to work them in a cotton field from sunup to sundown, or sell their spouses and children. They were free. They had emancipated themselves.”

But Lost Cause propagandists have disrespected the enslaved as feckless souls, supposedly content—and “loyal.”

The circa 1864 cover photo on Tom Zoellner’s The Road Was Full of Thorns: Running Toward Freedom in the American Civil War has appeared widely. In the National Trust for Historic Preservation essay “The Forgotten: The Contraband of America and the Road to Freedom” its caption begins “A group of African American refugees, called contraband, who worked for the Union army as teamsters.” Zoellner’s book can inspire unforgetting of the Civil War’s multitudes of slavery escapees, whether called contrabands or self-emancipators. They figured centrally in the war’s gradual elevation from a struggle for union to a struggle for union and freedom.

From the book jacket’s front inside flap:

In the opening days of the Civil War, three enslaved men approached the gates of Fort Monroe, a U.S. military installation in Virginia. In a snap decision, the fort’s commander “confiscated” them as contraband of war.

From then on, wherever the U.S. Army traveled, torrents of runaways rushed to secure their own freedom, a mass movement of 800,0001 people—a fifth of the enslaved population of the South—that set the institution of slavery on a path to destruction.

A fall 2025 interviewer asked Zoellner what he hopes readers will walk away with after reading about those multitudes and that path. His answer: “Admiration for the courage of the enslaved people who endured terrible trials in the cause of freedom.” Self-Emancipator subscribers (it’s free; a cause, not a business) won’t be surprised to see Zoellner’s pithy wish likened to a prediction that recurs regularly here. It’s phrased to echo Thomas Jefferson’s 1821 prediction2 of slavery’s demise:

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that Americans will esteem the Civil War’s multitudes of freedom-striving, emancipation-forcing slavery escapees. Just not yet.

Zoellner’s new book could defray the just-not-yet. That’s why I’m about to ask you to pause and invest a total of three minutes in two musical YouTube clips. It’s not because readers would lack a general sense of each. It’s because when actually experienced within the moment, what the two songs can powerfully stir frames this essay’s point: This new book shows what American Historical Association then-president Thavolia Glymph meant in 2024 when she wrote that with the growth of what she called “the archives of slavery’s destruction,” she believes a time will come for general, grateful remembrance of Civil War Black Americans’ part “in the making of a new birth of freedom.”3

Zoellner’s chapter “Let my people go” ends by quoting a reporter’s observation, at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, that the let-my-people-go freedom hymn “Go down, Moses”—“a kind of national hymn turned proclamation”—was the “negro Marseillaise.” The chapter’s final lines: “Go down, Moses/ Way down in Egypt land/ Tell old Pharaoh/ Let my people GO.”

You don’t need to know the 1942 movie Casablanca—or know about World War II nazi influence in French Morocco—to be stirred by the exuberant musical defiance in the movie’s “Play La Marseillaise!” scene. Please pause and watch a two-minute video clip.

And you don’t need to have witnessed Civil War contrabands singing the let-my-people-go hymn to be moved by Paul Robeson’s twentieth-century interpretation. Please pause and listen to the first 50 seconds of a three-minute recording.

1861 sheet music cover page for the freedom hymn that the enslaved could only sing clandestinely—but that contrabands, having long been held back from coming into their own as Americans, sang openly, with passion. (Library Company of Philadelphia)

A map in the front matter of The Road Was Full of Thorns shows contraband camps dotting the Confederate and border states, with a few in Union states. The epilogue opens by regretting that the camps “faded from the collective memory of America,” but then explains that their stories did endure “well into the twentieth century, bearing witness to a part of history often overlooked yet deeply transformative. Most of the individual stories of struggle and victories were not preserved in documents and have been irrecoverably lost. But a few are known.”

Yes, a few. And Zoellner makes sure to convey some of what’s stirring about some representative cases.

He focuses mostly on the Tidewater Virginia origins—the Fort Monroe origins—of the contraband phenomenon.4 He records the observation of the Boston minister Arthur Fuller, a Harvard graduate, hearing the contrabands congregated near Fort Monroe: “To-day these are not slaves, they are men.” Fuller heard “the singing at the evening prayer meetings [as] a genuine spiritual outpouring … with frequent references to the Exodus story.” He reports the view of the missionary Lewis Lockwood—named on the sheet music cover in the illustration above—that the refugees had “a deep impression they were the second children of Israel.”5

He tells about George Scott, a pre-war slavery escapee who overcame and disarmed his former “owner” and, using his local knowledge, became a valued scout and spy for the Union. He tells about Samuel Bolton, who became a Union army cook, but went back into Confederate territory to rescue his wife Rebecca. Bolton “would think of it for years as the proudest moment of his life.” Later, Bolton was among the first Black soldiers to enter Richmond. Zoellner tells of Peter Bruner, who got to freedom on his fourth attempt by trying the U.S. Army, and became a recruiter. He tells of Henry Jarvis, an “example of raw courage,” who escaped by water to Fort Monroe, and told the commanding general that the conflict “had got to be a black man’s war for sure.” There was also, among others, the self-emancipator Jerry Sutton, “the eventual stepfather to the great-great-grandmother” of Michelle Obama.

He also tells of Robert Langley Brooks, who self-emancipated from Mathews County and traveled in a stolen boat down the Chesapeake Bay and across the wide mouth of the York River to Fort Monroe. The book ends by reporting on Brooks’s great-granddaughter Edith Taylor, born in 1924 in segregated Hampton. The final sentence: “She never let her children forget they were the descendants of Robert Langley Brooks, who paddled away from his cruel master toward the American flag and did not look back.” Contrabands unforgotten.

The “Let My People Go” chapter declares that “no force seemed able to stem the enthusiasm among Black men to take up arms against the Confederates.” That calls to mind Chinese human-rights activist Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize speech assertion that “no force...can put an end to the human quest for freedom.” Merely coincidental parallelism links the two statements syntactically, but their fundamental parallelism links them within the realm of human rights, the realm that America’s self-emancipating contrabands illuminated. To what extent will they be remembered in the celebrations of 2026?

Dissident Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Prize speech, read in Oslo by Liv Ullman because Chinese tyrants forbade his travel, declared “No force...can put an end to the human quest for freedom.” He was in prison in China for “inciting the subversion of state power.” It was his fourth such prison spell.

The Self-Emancipator argues that what this country needs is robust retrospective esteem for the multitudes of enterprising Civil War slavery escapees—contrabands. They showed what the human-rights activist Liu Xiaobo would mean many decades later by asserting in his Nobel Peace Prize speech that “no force ... can put an end to the human quest for freedom.” But the present Self-Emancipator post argues that what this country also needs—and, in February, will get—is a good public debate between:

• Historian Kevin Roberts, prominent advocate of Trump administration policies and views on American history and president of the Heritage Foundation, the source of Project 2025. His 1999 Virginia Tech master’s thesis was African-Virginian Extended Kin: The Prevalence of West African Family Forms Among Slaves in Virginia, 1740–1870. His 2003 University of Texas Ph.D. dissertation was Slaves and slavery in Louisiana: the evolution of Atlantic world identities, 1791–1831.

• Historian David Blight, prominent critic of Trump administration policies and views on American history and Yale University’s Sterling Professor of History and Black Studies. He’s a Pulitzer-holding Frederick Douglass biographer, director of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, and former president of the Organization of American Historians.

Why debate?

To Professor Blight, the need for a debate has been obvious for months. The May 18 Self-Emancipator post “Trump’s history war: David Blight urges direct debate” began this way:

David Blight has brought something new to the boisterous national discussion of President Trump’s remarkably named executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” In a 7-minute May 1 interview on PBS’s News Hour, he challenged the president and the administration to debate it:

[T]hey [have] effectively declared war on our profession, whether that’s curators at the Smithsonian, or historians in universities, or the interpreters at a historic site. So, if this is a political, cultural war upon how history is told and written and exhibited, then we have to, with our meager sources, fight back. We have to get out into the public. We have to probably get into right-wing media and make the case. We have to invite the authors of such executive orders to debate us … .

On September 8 and November 3—with no debating yet—The New Republic (TNR) convened panel discussions online, with Blight moderating. Now a September YouTube has been joined by a YouTube of the November event: “Trump vs. History II: How Trump is trying to change our sense of who we are.” For 82 minutes, four nationally prominent historians engaged “the fight to preserve our history AND democracy.”

Further such online events are planned, and eleven commentaries have appeared accordingly at TNR, contributed at Blight’s invitation. His own contribution is “What if History Died by Sanctioned Ignorance? We must mobilize now to defend our profession, not only with research and teaching but in the realm of politics and public persuasion.” That commentary begins this way:

The primary aim of the political right, said the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, in early 2024, should be “institutionalizing Trumpism.” He and his organization meant this especially for the writing, teaching, and dissemination of American history.

On March 27, President Donald Trump, echoing the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, issued an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The White House now believes it should pronounce on the nature of history and the purpose and substance of the nation’s treasures at the Smithsonian Institution. The order is nothing less than a declaration of political war on the historians’ profession, our training and integrity, as well as on the freedom and curiosity of anyone who reads or visits museums. In other words, Trump’s team has declared war on free minds and free education in order to erase more than a half-century of scholarship and replace it with official triumphal narratives rooted in a brand of pickled patriotism designed to force the past to serve the present.

A further excerpt from the Blight TNR piece:

Today, our foes like to wear red hats and rely on moral platitudes rather than research, ad hominem accusations rather than analysis, executive orders drafted at a think tank, funding restrictions, and a hatred of what they deem “liberalism” as their weapons in a war on traditional history. Trained historians and teachers are now the “traditionalists,” defenders of an honored practice, believing in evidence and research, against a barbaric effort to dissolve the institutional and moral foundations of those two important values. We have steadily opened the gates of historical knowledge to myriad new subjects and methods that have educated a largely curious and willing world. Now we have to mobilize to defend our profession not only with research and teaching but in the realm of politics and public persuasion. And we cannot surrender!

And this:

These assaults on history have moved at a startling pace, if a bit under the radar of public attention. The Trump White House, with the assistance of Project 2025, has attacked the institutions that historians most cherish. They include the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution and its 21 museums, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright fellowship program, and the National Park Service. This is only a partial list and should also include universities themselves and public schools, which many Republicans are determined to erode or destroy. All of these measures were in the name of eliminating historical content deemed by the White House to be “woke,” or in the service of “DEI,” both vacuous labels that have come to mean almost anything about race, gender, LGBTQ life, and history. … The Heritage Foundation has been an incubator of much of Trumpism in style and content. Indeed, if Trumpism is a grandiose media show, Heritage and Kevin Roberts are Trump’s history department, ready and eager to tell you what to think about the nation’s past. On the eve of America’s 250th anniversary, Roberts leads an organization with hundreds of employees, $100 million on hand in 2023, and support from several extraordinarily wealthy conservative foundations.

The three other panelists in the November 3 YouTube—from among those eleven Blight-recruited contributors of essays to TNR overall—were:

• Edward Ayers, Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities and former University of Richmond president, former Organization of American Historians president, and founding chair of the board of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond. To TNR he contributed “Trump’s Reckless Assault on Remembrance: The attempts by his administration to control the ways Americans engage with our nation’s history threaten to weaken patriotism, not strengthen it.” Self-Emancipator readers might remember that he’s quoted here occasionally for having called the Fort Monroe, Virginia, start of slavery’s crumbling in May 1861 “the greatest moment in American history.”

• Geraldo Cadava, Wender-Lewis Teaching and Research Professor of History, Northwestern University; contributing writer, The New Yorker. Author of the TNR article “The Diversity Bell That Trump Can’t Un-ring: The biggest problem with the history Trump wants to impose on us is that it never, in fact, existed.”

• Molly Worthen, journalist, professor of history, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Author of the TNR article “What Besieged Universities Can Learn From the Christian Resurgence: Educators can fight back against Trump’s attacks by re-embracing ‘old-fashioned’ disciplines and ideas.”

Dr. Roberts

In the Project 2025 Playbook, Kevin Roberts wrote the foreword, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.” There he charges, “Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms.” He explains, “This book, this agenda, the entire Project 2025 is a plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors.” He declares, “The Conservative Promise represents the best effort of the conservative movement in 2023—and the next conservative president’s last opportunity to save our republic.”

The Juneteenth 2025 Self-Emancipator post “Don’t let Kevin Roberts ruin Juneteenth: Decently engage all of slavery’s legacies” relied on the 2024 Los Angeles Review of Books article “The Inconvenient Scholarship of Kevin Roberts: Samuel G. Freedman traces the long and contradictory intellectual journey of the man behind Project 2025.” There Columbia University journalism professor Freedman described Roberts not only as a star in his earlier career in academe, but as a star on the subject of slavery, his specialty, who got along quite well with colleagues.

Professor Freedman wrote, “In the nearly 20 years since Roberts left behind his career as a scholar of enslavement, he has periodically returned in speech and in writing to issues of race. His tone could hardly be more of a departure from the intricate, nuanced work on enslaved Black people that he had done as a graduate student.” Freedman concluded:

Long gone is the scholar who reckoned honorably with the United States’ original sin of enslavement. When Roberts speaks of wars these days, he refers not to the Civil War, with its prospect of emancipating the shackled and bestowing a “new birth of freedom” upon the United States. Instead, like radicals from the Tea Party movement to the January 6 insurrection, Roberts invokes the Revolutionary War, with both a promise and a threat. As he put it on Steve Bannon’s podcast: “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be.”

Roberts’s Heritage biography page calls the foundation “the nation’s premier conservative think tank” and “the most broadly supported … in the world, drawing support from more than 500,000 members.” The page calls his leadership “critical in pushing back on the radical, socialist agenda being advanced by the Left at all levels of government.”

Two-on-two

Near the end of the November TNR panel discussion, Professor Blight announced that Dr. Roberts had agreed to two public debates with two-on-two format, the first to take place in February. “I don’t know if this will work,” Blight said; “it may be a bit of a debacle or spectacle; it may be useful. I have approached them simply in the interest of civil discourse; it’s a term Mr. Roberts has used many times, but they keep putting out direct critiques of our profession, and that’s putting it mildly. They have attacked the Smithsonian boldly and the practice of history boldly. They can’t keep doing that without at least some response.”

Two-on-two format? I hope Edward Ayers joins Blight. On a stage or in a broadcast, he combines good-humored amiability with what I see as astuteness expertly calibrated to a given audience. Twenty years ago at my house, having seen him on PBS, we urged our daughter—a history major at the University of Virginia, where he was then teaching—to take one of his courses. Since then I’ve seen him several times, including last month at Richmond’s American Civil War Museum. And I’ve profited from the occasional conversation with him here in Virginia. He served for a time on the board of trustees for post-Army Fort Monroe, a place centrally important in The Self-Emancipator as the country’s most important site for memory of Black agency in emancipation’s Civil War political evolution.

Google lists worthy biographical pages about Ayers. I recommend the one from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It shows why it’s no surprise that two years ago the University of Richmond announced that it had acquired History News Network, “the popular history website that explores the history behind today’s headlines,” forming a “new partnership” made possible by the university’s public history project Bunk, an “online tool that makes connections between stories in the media engaging with American history across space, time, and theme.” The announcement explained that Bunk was founded by Ayers in 2016 and that it “shares a mission with HNN to make history accessible and to help readers better understand stories in the news.”

I also wonder if Roberts could be joined by Allen C. Guelzo, three-time winner of historians’ Lincoln Prize. At Princeton University, he’s the director of the James Madison Program Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship and senior research scholar in the Council of the Humanities. Earlier, at Gettysburg College, he was director of Civil War Era Studies and Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era. He has written frequently for Claremont Review of Books at the conservative Claremont Institute, which calls him a senior fellow. In 2020, the Heritage Foundation reprinted one of his Wall Street Journal op-eds and posted the YouTube “The 1619 Project Is Revisionist History: Allen Guelzo.”

Here in The Self-Emancipator it’s important to note Guelzo’s hostility to what James M. McPherson and others have called the self-emancipation thesis—and important to wonder what Kevin Roberts would say about that. Two years ago the Self-Emancipator post “Historians on the term ‘self-emancipation’” noted that at Claremont Review of Books, Guelzo once criticized what he called a “Marxist conceit still on the upswing in popularity, the idea of slave self-emancipation.” His February 2019 Wall Street Journal op-ed “Emancipation Deniers Target Lincoln’s Reputation” condemned the self-emancipation concept without using the term and ended by calling emancipation “the most heroic deed any president has ever done.”

At the end of the Civil War sesquicentennial in 2015, the New York Times asked Blight, “Was the end of slavery not accomplished by the slaves themselves?” He answered that emancipation was “both the result of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation … and the brave volition and actions of the slaves themselves,” as seen in their “thousands of individual decisions … to strike out for their own liberation.” I’d like to see the White House’s history department, the Heritage Foundation, address this apparent contradiction: their hostility to what they insist is too much attention to slavery and the traditional Republican emphasis on the importance of self-reliance.

A 2021 profile in Princeton Alumni Weekly, “The Politics of History: A conservative scholar of Lincoln and the battle over how we teach about America’s past,” portrayed Guelzo as seeking “to reach an audience beyond the narrow confines of academia,” succeeding “to an extent unusual for a credentialed scholar.” The article reported that weeks before the 2020 election, he spoke at a panel discussion at the National Archives “billed as the White House Conference on American History, that featured closing remarks from President Donald Trump.” There he told listeners “that left-wing influences on the teaching of American history were endangering the welfare of the United States.”

I should stipulate that while I unreservedly hope to see Professor Ayers in the two-on-two debate, concerning Professor Guelzo I only know enough to just be thinking out loud. I hope readers will post comments naming possible second members of the two debate sides—and about anything else in this post.

History matters

Here’s the ending of the Jill Lepore essay quoted in the epigraph above:

Last month, as many as seven million Americans gathered for another day of No Kings protests, or what congressional Republicans took to calling “Hate America rallies.” On Truth Social, the President posted an A.I.-generated video of himself—wearing a gold crown and an Air Force jumpsuit—in a fighter jet emblazoned with “KING TRUMP” on the side, flying over a generic downtown and dumping a payload of excrement onto No Kings protesters.

I went back to that [earlier-mentioned] city in the lower-right corner of Vermont. A man wearing a green hat carried a cardboard sign that read “Maple Syrup Makers for Sanity.” Django Grace, a college sophomore in a blue oxford shirt, spoke from a wooden gazebo, calling for common ground and common sense. I hadn’t made a sign; I was there to report. But, if I had, I’d have quoted not “Common Sense” but Paine’s lesser-known 1776 pamphlet, “The American Crisis.” After the war had begun, Paine, a volunteer in the Continental Army, indicted loyalists who continued to pledge themselves to King George. “Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it,” Paine wrote, “but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man.” If it’d fit, I’d wear it on a hat, except that I have a better hat. I got it at the Minnesota History Center, in St. Paul, twenty years ago, before all hell broke loose in this country. It’s black and a little threadbare, with a fraying brim, and it says “HISTORY MATTERS.” ♦

Register at TNR’s announcement page by clicking Get tickets, which says, “You are registering to get livestream information. Link will be available 24 hours before the [free] event.” After the first event, in September, TNR within hours posted a YouTube of that panel’s discussion.

Panelists for November 3:

• David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of American History, Yale University, who led the similar online event on September 8. He’s a Pulitzer-holding Frederick Douglass biographer and director of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Author of the TNR article “What if History Died by Sanctioned Ignorance?”

• Edward Ayers, Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities and former president, University of Richmond, former president of the Organization of American historians, and founding chair of the board of the American Civil War Museum. Author of the TNR article “Trump’s Reckless Assault on Remembrance.”

• Geraldo Cadava, Wender-Lewis Teaching and Research Professor of History, Northwestern University; contributing writer, The New Yorker. Author of the TNR article “The Diversity Bell That Trump Can’t Un-ring.”

• Molly Worthen, journalist, professor of history, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Author of the TNR article “What Besieged Universities Can Learn From the Christian Resurgence.”

Context

The May 18 Self-Emancipator post “Trump’s history war: David Blight urges direct debate” began this way:

David Blight, former president of the Organization of American Historians, has brought something new to the boisterous national discussion of President Trump’s remarkably named executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” In a 7-minute May 1 interview on PBS’s News Hour, he challenged the president and the administration to debate it:

[T]hey [have] effectively declared war on our profession, whether that’s curators at the Smithsonian, or historians in universities, or the interpreters at a historic site. So, if this is a political, cultural war upon how history is told and written and exhibited, then we have to, with our meager sources, fight back. We have to get out into the public. We have to probably get into right-wing media and make the case. We have to invite the authors of such executive orders to debate us, because I think we can win those debates if they’re done in some kind of fair environment.

USA Today focused on a version of this photograph—usually called Scourged back—in the Sept. 16 article “Revisionist history? Photo of enslaved man becomes new flashpoint in Trump's review: Critics see Trump's moves as an effort to whitewash ugly portions of American history.” Multiple news sources are assessing the threats to continued presentation of the photograph at the Smithsonian and at National Park Service sites.

During the Civil War, the July 4, 1863, edition of Harper’s Weekly presented the “scourged back” photograph, which has served ever since as a visual indictment of slavery’s quarter millennium in colonial America and the early republic. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art says that within months it “had secured its place as an early example of the wide dissemination of ideologically abolitionist photographs.”

One study stipulates that despite the photograph’s “ubiquity, we know relatively little about the image and the man featured in it.” It appears to me that although it’s not unknown that the self-emancipation movement figures centrally in the photograph’s story, there’s little public awareness of what the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery reports reports about that:

Although fugitives from slavery sought and received protection in Union camps as early as May of 1861 [at Fort Monroe, Virginia, on Point Comfort, the 1619 place], the Confiscation Act of 1862 formally declared that slaves seeking refuge behind Union lines were to be deemed captives of war and granted their freedom. Many of these freed slaves, known as “contraband,” joined the Union fight.

In March 1863, a man known only as Peter escaped from slavery on a Louisiana plantation and after a harrowing journey found safety among Union soldiers encamped at Baton Rouge. Before enlisting in a black regiment, he was examined by military doctors, who discovered horrific scarring on his back—the result of a vicious whipping by his former overseer. This photograph documenting Peter’s condition created a sensation when it reached the public and quickly became one of the most powerful proofs of slavery’s brutality. As one journalist declared, “This Card Photograph should be multiplied by 100,000 and scattered over the States. It tells the story in a way that even Mrs. [Harriet Beecher] Stowe can not approach, because it tells the story to the eye.”

On Independence Day 1863, in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, Harper’s Weekly featured several articles concerning recent action in the field by black troops fighting for the Union cause, including an account of Peter’s escape from bondage and his subsequent military service. Based on photographs, the images accompanying the article documented Peter’s metamorphosis from fugitive slave to U.S. soldier, punctuated by a view of his horribly scarred back.

Sergeant Peter was reported to have fought bravely in the Union assault on Port Hudson in July 1863, as part of General Benjamin F. Butler’s Louisiana Native Guards, a regiment made up entirely of free black recruits. Nothing further is known about his life.

On Juneteenth two years ago, the first post of The Self-Emancipator carried the headline “Why ‘The Self-Emancipator’? Engaging Civil War self-emancipators’ puzzlingly scanted place in national memory.” That short essay declared that the “country doesn’t yet generally see what increasing numbers of historians see: Black agency’s centrality in emancipation’s Civil War political evolution.” It seems to me that the scourged-back photo’s ubiquity, with little recognition of its self-emancipation context, illustrates that founding assumption for this Substack newsletter.

So here’s a question: Will President Trump and his saboteurs of decent national memory really go after a photographic artifact that not only spotlights what Mr. Trump abhors—necessary attention to American slavery’s crimes against humanity—but that also spotlights the world-historical prominence of the Black self-agency that pushed a slavery republic toward becoming a freedom republic?

Maybe we’re about to find out. For months, the news has been full of reporting and commentary about the president’s anti-American attacks on national memory.1 But in particular, now that the scourged-back photograph appears targeted, I recommend the short commentary by the distinguished Pulitzer Prize-winning art and architecture critic of The Washington Post, Philip Kennicott: “Erasing this indelible image of slavery is a terrifying idea: The Trump administration’s reported effort to censor one of the iconic images of American history is a five-alarm fire.” Here’s the gift link.

The September 3 Self-Emancipator post “Trump vs. history: On defeating his attack, Sept. 8, 4 pm EDT” reported that The New Republic would livestream a discussion among Yale’s David Blight and other historians on the topic “Trump Versus History: How Trump is trying to change our sense of who we are.” Now TNR has posted that 78-minute discussion on YouTube.

The magazine has also posted opinion pieces on that general topic from participants and other historians. They’re introduced this way: “Trump Against History: How is Trump changing our sense of who we are? We asked eminent Yale historian David W. Blight to round up some colleagues to consider the question. Here’s what they had to say.”

I’ll borrow a last line from Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who seems to me to have the right idea not in merely rebutting President Trump, but in outright destroying the president’s dishonest, squalid framing for his attacks on history and national memory. This is the last line from the short Substack post “Be Loud — For America”:

Unlike Donald Trump, most Americans believe in the ideals our nation was founded upon. Now is the time to stand up for those noble ideals.

From the announcement: “We have opened the gates of historical knowledge to myriad new subjects and methods that have educated a largely curious and willing world. Now we have to mobilize to defend our profession not only with research and teaching but in the realm of politics and public persuasion. David Blight talks with some fellow academics on how we fight to preserve our history AND democracy.”

You don’t have to be a history nerd to use this September 8 opportunity to show up against fascism.1

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The president’s decree attacking national history and memory.

Earlier this year, Yale historian David Blight, former president of the Organization of American Historians, brought something new to the boisterous, rancorous national discussion of President Trump’s ludicrously and ominously named executive decree “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” In a 7-minute May 1 interview on PBS’s News Hour, he challenged the president and the administration to debate their attack2 on national history and memory:

[T]hey [have] effectively declared war on our profession, whether that's curators at the Smithsonian, or historians in universities, or the interpreters at a historic site. So, if this is a political, cultural war upon how history is told and written and exhibited, then we have to, with our meager sources, fight back. We have to get out into the public. We have to probably get into right-wing media and make the case. We have to invite the authors of such executive orders to debate us, because I think we can win those debates if they're done in some kind of fair environment.

And yes, Professor Blight knows that establishing “some kind of fair environment” is hard because the Trump side is unprincipled. In the January 2024 Los Angeles Times essay “Trump’s ‘lost cause,’ a kind of gangster cult, won’t go away,” Blight charged that Trump’s “lost cause”

peddles a model of politics and society according to which facts and evidence are irrelevant. At Trump rallies, constitutionalism is for losers, history is little more than a useful weapon, and American civics is deployed as entertainment to indulge hatred of liberalism, representative democracy and — in many cases — nonwhite America. The Trump “lost cause” is thus a platform, one that the Republican Party has adopted to convert these stories and lies into votes. Win or lose, it will not die.

But that doesn’t mean the attack can’t be opposed and defeated, as emphasized in the subtitle of Blight’s recent “No surrender” commentary in The New Republic, “What if History Died by Sanctioned Ignorance? We must mobilize now to defend our profession, not only with research and teaching but in the realm of politics and public persuasion.” Here’s how the essay opens:

The primary aim of the political right, said the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, in early 2024, should be “institutionalizing Trumpism.” He and his organization meant this especially for the writing, teaching, and dissemination of American history.3

On March 27, President Donald Trump, echoing the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, issued an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The White House now believes it should pronounce on the nature of history and the purpose and substance of the nation’s treasures at the Smithsonian Institution. The order is nothing less than a declaration of political war on the historians’ profession, our training and integrity, as well as on the freedom and curiosity of anyone who reads or visits museums. In other words, Trump’s team has declared war on free minds and free education in order to erase more than a half-century of scholarship and replace it with official triumphal narratives rooted in a brand of pickled patriotism designed to force the past to serve the present.

Public and political resistance to historians is nothing new; book bans, fights over textbooks and curricula, and battles over what a proper national narrative should be have long besieged our craft. Today, our foes like to wear red hats and rely on moral platitudes rather than research, ad hominem accusations rather than analysis, executive orders drafted at a think tank, funding restrictions, and a hatred of what they deem “liberalism” as their weapons in a war on traditional history. Trained historians and teachers are now the “traditionalists,” defenders of an honored practice, believing in evidence and research, against a barbaric effort to dissolve the institutional and moral foundations of those two important values. We have steadily opened the gates of historical knowledge to myriad new subjects and methods that have educated a largely curious and willing world. Now we have to mobilize to defend our profession not only with research and teaching but in the realm of politics and public persuasion. And we cannot surrender!

Last year, American Historical Association then-president Thavolia Glymph said she believes a time will come for recognizing Civil War Black Americans’ part “in the making of a new birth of freedom, an idea that a review in the Georgia Historical Quarterly in 1939 termed ‘an absurd bit of propaganda, based on a perversion of historical facts.’”

This year, Georgia Southern University historian Bennett Parten’s book Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation—which was previewed in the Georgia Historical Quarterly—could hasten the time Glymph foresees.

Parten says he’s telling a new, “largely untold” version of the story of Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1864 march of 60,000 Union soldiers from Atlanta to Savannah. By focusing on the 20,000 slavery refugees who chose to march along “somewhere toward freedom,” he shows how “emancipation evolved” not only by the army’s “pull” but by the slavery-escaping refugees’ “push.”

Concerning that push, the book avoids the term self-emancipation. It’s a term that Parten’s Yale dissertation director, Frederick Douglass biographer David W. Blight, once characterized in The New York Times as substantively valid but tonally “too operatic.” Somewhere Toward Freedom contains the term only once, in the caption for a photo placed between two chapters: “Freed refugees from Virginia in the summer of 1862, typical of the self-emancipated people who fled to Sherman’s army in Georgia.” That photo is quite similar to the image on the book cover, shown above.

For foregrounding risk-taking, enterprising Black Americans’ self-agency in emancipation’s evolution, the book has been acclaimed in The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

No less a Civil War historian than James M. McPherson observed in 2008 that a “self-emancipation thesis” explaining that evolution had come to dominate scholarly understanding. The Self-Emancipator, named to recall the antebellum abolitionist publication The Emancipator, surveys the rising prospects for corresponding elevation of public understanding. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that Americans will esteem the Civil War’s multitudes of freedom-striving, emancipation-forcing slavery escapees.

Just not yet. But Somewhere Toward Freedom could speed things. That’s why this essay isn’t a book review. It’s a trumpeting of a worthy boost to national public memory of the self-emancipation movement.

McPherson quoted from There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America by historian Vincent Harding, first director of Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Center. Harding emphasized “the relentless movement of self-liberated fugitives into the Union lines”—“self-freed men and women” who “took their freedom into their own hands.” That phrasing could fit nicely in Somewhere Toward Freedom.

The term self-emancipation appears in the subtitle of a 2014 Cambridge University Press book by another another Georgia historian, David Williams of Valdosta State University: I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era. Parten’s book avoids the term, but declares that the “collective movement” of so many refugees “dismantled slavery from within” in “America’s most revolutionary moment.”

Public historian Kevin M. Levin, introducing an online interview with Parten, said the book “complicates our understanding of how emancipation evolved.” The two agreed on “military emancipation” as the crucial self-emancipation “catalyst.” But that contrasts with the view of Brent Leggs, African American heritage director at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Leggs says three of the war’s earliest self-emancipators in Virginia inspired “500,000 freedom seekers” across the land “to follow in their footsteps. And this moment of self-determination is this unknown story that was just a catalyst for emancipation.”

That May 1861 Virginia self-emancipation moment of Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend further complicates retrospective understanding. Edward L. Ayers, former president of the Organization of American Historians, has called it “the greatest moment in American history.” But the three slavery escapees sought and gained sanctuary at Fort Monroe, the Union army’s mighty, and mighty symbolic, stronghold in Confederate Virginia. Does that make it “military emancipation,” as with refugees crossing the moving lines of Union forces? What’s the ratio of individual self-emancipation to group military emancipation in Georgia slavery refugees who, according to Parten, agonized over the risks of leaving plantations to join Sherman’s march? Doesn’t all of it involve admirable, risk-taking self-agency? Weren’t those refugees affirming American principles with their feet?

That 1939 Georgia Historical Quarterly dismissal of Black agency in Emancipation called it “an absurd bit of propaganda, based on a perversion of historical facts.” Compare that to the opening line of President Trump’s recent propagandistically named executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”: “Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”

Over the past decade? Williams tells a little story about white-saviorist dismissiveness for Civil War Black self-agency in the section “A Story too Long in the Shadows” in the introduction to I Freed Myself. In a “1928 biography of Ulysses S. Grant,” Williams wrote, “W. E. Woodward expressed white America’s prevailing view that ‘negroes are the only people in the history of the world ... that ever became free without any effort of their own. … They twanged banjos around the railroad stations, sang melodious spirituals, and believed that some Yankee would soon come along and give each of them forty acres of land and a mule.’” “Sadly,” Williams added, “the public’s general view of Blacks during the Civil War has changed little despite decades of scholarly attention.”

But in the decade since Williams’s self-emancipation book’s publication, there’s been further scholarly attention to the self-emancipation movement—and with it, advances in public awareness. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s review called Somewhere Toward Freedom “highly accessible and engaging.” I think that’s right—and that for contributing to public appreciation of Black agency’s centrality in Emancipation’s evolution, the highly accessible and engaging Bennett Parten arrived at a good time.

The retired Army post Fort Monroe on Point Comfort, Virginia, contains the majestic, moated stone citadel that Civil War self-emancipators called Freedom’s Fortress.

In June 2025, the Self-Emancipator post “Watch out, Fort Monroe: Two threats against national memory at Point Comfort” began this way:

During Trump 2.0, Fort Monroe at Point Comfort, Virginia—the preeminent landscape for public memory of both U.S. slavery’s start in early colonial days and the Civil War’s self-emancipating multitudes—faces two threats: possible closure of Fort Monroe National Monument and the consequent return of Virginia politicians’ parochial zeal for spirit-of-place-hobbling overdevelopment.

What follows below is a version of a short, closely related opinion piece that appeared in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and the Newport News Daily Press. Readers of this Substack newsletter are already familiar with much of what it says, but in the present threatening circumstances for decent remembrance of American history, all of it bears repeating.

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World landmark

By Steven T. Corneliussen, who began writing about Fort Monroe in 2005.1 Email selfemancipator@gmail.com.

Even more than Monticello, Fort Monroe on Point Comfort (look right when nearing Hampton on the bridge tunnel) inherently commemorates the world's first freedom nation's founding. Thankfully, overdevelopment can't threaten Monticello. But it has regularly threatened Fort Monroe since the 2005 announcement of the Army's 2011 departure.

Like Monticello, Point Comfort with Fort Monroe could become a World Heritage Site. It's already becoming a world landmark. But because it's prime waterfront, Virginia officials plan only a “regional landmark.” That means squandering economic potential stemming from world importance within what emancipation historian David Brion Davis meant by calling slavery's eradication “probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history.”

In The Second Founding, historian Eric Foner proposes that creating the world's first nation founded on freedom—not geography, religion or ethnicity—took from 1776 to the Civil War. Wall Street Journal conservative Jason L. Riley says “What makes America unique is not slavery. It’s emancipation.” Martin Luther King Jr. said “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” From 1619 at Point Comfort to the Civil War at Fort Monroe, that arc bent toward emancipation.

In 1619, British North American slavery began when captive Africans arrived at Point Comfort. In a moment weeks after the Civil War began, slavery began to crumble at Fort Monroe, the Union's mighty stronghold in Confederate Virginia. Enterprising slavery escapees sought freedom there. A movement involving a half million self-emancipators resulted. It cascaded across the South, figuring centrally in the war's evolution into a struggle for both Union and freedom.

Former American Historical Association president James M. McPherson, writing in the Virginian-Pilot, once called that Black-initiated Fort Monroe moment “the story of the end of slavery.” Henry Louis Gates Jr. says the same. University of Richmond president emeritus Edward L. Ayers, former president of the Organization of American Historians, calls it “the greatest moment in American history.”

Brent Leggs, African American heritage director at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, cautions that self-emancipation remains an “unknown story.” In 2008, though, McPherson observed that a “self-emancipation thesis” had begun dominating historians' understanding. To help spread that, I publish a nonpaywalled Substack newsletter, The Self-Emancipator.

David W. Blight directs the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Calling freedom “humanity’s most universal aspiration,” he declares that how “America reimagines its memorial landscape may matter to the whole world.” Yet Virginia's “Reimagine Fort Monroe” web page still proclaims the 2005 vision: “to redevelop this historic property into a vibrant, mixed-use community.” It never even mentions the severely limited, bizarrely split, token Fort Monroe National Monument that politicians contrived on Point Comfort's shoreline in 2011, marginalizing calls for the substantial shoreline national park that's still possible.

McPherson calls Fort Monroe a “world-class destination.” In the New York Times, Adam Goodheart ranked it alongside the Liberty Bell, Plymouth Rock and Gettysburg. Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition says “world historical actions” of the enslaved “forever changed” the dynamics of slavery versus freedom. More than 100 monuments worldwide commemorate Black resistance to slavery. In 2021, UNESCO honored Fort Monroe as a United Nations Site of Memory. As Africa.com, USA Today and the New York Times have reported, Wanda Tucker of Hampton, whose family traces to those Africans of 1619, has inspired transatlantic connections between Point Comfort and Angola, with participation by both countries' presidents. Four Tidewater mayors emphasized Fort Monroe's “special place in world history” when urging national monument expansion. They called for elevating Virginia's Historic Triangle—Jamestown, Williamsburg, Yorktown—to its Historic Diamond by including Fort Monroe.2

On a Norfolk State University history panel, former National Park Service chief historian Dwight T. Pitcaithley once asked, “Where’s the national monument to emancipation?” My History News Network essay argues that we already have it: a world landmark, Point Comfort with Fort Monroe.

Slavery historian and Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts (from his Heritage page).

Last year for Juneteenth, Ph.D. slavery historian and Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts published the brief essay “Don’t Let the Left Ruin Juneteenth’s True Meaning.” It comes across much like this year’s remarkably named Trump 2.0 executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Roberts’s foundation created Project 2025, the guidelines for President Trump’s radical—and in my view, nihilistic—campaign to transform the federal government and the country.

Don’t let Kevin Roberts ruin Juneteenth. Like that executive order, his essay distorts the country’s struggle to engage all of slavery’s legacies decently.

And don’t mistake who Dr. Roberts is. Last September, the Los Angeles Review of Books published the article “The Inconvenient Scholarship of Kevin Roberts: Samuel G. Freedman traces the long and contradictory intellectual journey of the man behind Project 2025.” Columbia University journalism professor Freedman describes Roberts not only as a star in his earlier career in academe, but as a star on the subject of slavery, who got along quite well with colleagues—which bears noting, given Roberts’s hostility to universities now.

Professor Freedman writes, “In the nearly 20 years since Roberts left behind his career as a scholar of enslavement, he has periodically returned in speech and in writing to issues of race. His tone could hardly be more of a departure from the intricate, nuanced work on enslaved Black people that he had done as a graduate student.” Roberts’s 1999 Virginia Tech master’s thesis was African-Virginian Extended Kin: The Prevalence of West African Family Forms Among Slaves in Virginia, 1740–1870. His 2003 University of Texas Ph.D. dissertation was Slaves and slavery in Louisiana: the evolution of Atlantic world identities, 1791-1831. He landed a tenure-track position when almost nobody else could. But Professor Freedman concludes:

Long gone is the scholar who reckoned honorably with the United States’ original sin of enslavement. When Roberts speaks of wars these days, he refers not to the Civil War, with its prospect of emancipating the shackled and bestowing a “new birth of freedom” upon the United States. Instead, like radicals from the Tea Party movement to the January 6 insurrection, Roberts invokes the Revolutionary War, with both a promise and a threat. As he put it on Steve Bannon’s podcast: “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be.”

Roberts’s Heritage biography page calls the foundation “the nation’s premier conservative think tank” and “the most broadly supported … in the world, drawing support from more than 500,000 members.” The page declares his leadership “critical in pushing back on the radical, socialist agenda being advanced by the Left at all levels of government.”

His 2024 essay “Don’t Let the Left Ruin Juneteenth’s True Meaning” opens with three “key takeaways”:

1. Until the last four years, Juneteenth was an uncontroversial celebration of American freedom and the end of slavery in Texas.

2. The left has worked hard to co-opt the holiday and use it as a tool to divide their countrymen and to replace the real Independence Day.

3. We have an opportunity to reject racial divisions and the revisionist history of the ivory tower. It’s long past time conservatives start reclaiming our institutions.

The essay charges that “Democratic leaders … named the national holiday ‘Juneteenth National Independence Day,’ setting it up in opposition to July 4.” No doubt Democrats did choose the name. But by a vote of 415 to 14, the House of Representatives passed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act.

The essay presses the accusation of unpatriotically counterproductive opposition to the Fourth of July, presenting as its evidence the Guardian opinion piece Juneteenth—not the Fourth of July—was the real Independence Day by William and Mary Ph.D. candidate Kelsey Smoot. Yet with the approach of Juneteenth 2025, newspapers and the web are full of cheerful news about the impending holiday. Are Juneteenth-vs-Independence-Day scowlers lurking?

Smoot writes, “as I moved into adulthood, learned the expansive and ongoing history of American imperialism, experienced blatant racism, homophobia, and transphobia, and internalized that my ancestors were held in bondage and considered chattel far beyond the date and year that I was supposed to consider the demarcation of American ‘freedom,’ the idea of celebrating the holiday became untenable.”

Those aren’t rare, outlying views. Would Juneteenth really be a better national observance if President Trump succeeded in what his executive order calls restoration of his versions of “truth and sanity” in American history? Does Kevin Roberts’s condemnation of the turmoil following George Floyd’s police torture-murder mean that Americans who have been passionate about it—and who bring it up on Juneteenth—should just stifle?

The Roberts essay invokes two other opinion pieces in complaining that “activists have called for Juneteenth to be used to explore ‘racial trauma’ and enact reparations.”

For racial trauma, it cites the USA Today essay “Juneteenth holiday is America's chance to explore racial slavery and its lasting impact: Juneteenth can be our path to a new national consensus forged not by lies or half-truths, but by coming to terms with our history of racial trauma.” It’s by Peniel Joseph, the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values and founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at Roberts’s own University of Texas. That’s the caliber of at least one of the supposed antipatriots accused of seeking to “ruin Juneteenth’s true meaning.” Professor Joseph writes, “Juneteenth offers the rare chance to foster a new national consensus, one forged not through lies, evasions or half-truths, but through the crucible of coming to terms with the full depth and breadth of American histories of racial trauma that continue to haunt our country despite efforts by some to deny their very existence.”

For reparations, it’s the Brookings Institution post “Why Juneteenth is a rallying cry for reparations” by Rashawn Ray, Brookings senior fellow and University of Maryland sociology professor. He writes:

As we celebrate Juneteenth, we have a lot of work to do as a nation to make-up for Black plight since 1619. Black people’s Americanness has never been fully acknowledged. We have fought in every war and died to defend a utopian way of life that we never truly benefited from. We love America, but America has never truly loved us back. Reparations is the only path toward true racial equity in the United States of America.

The link in that last sentence is to a longer Brookings piece by Professor Ray and a Brookings coauthor, Andre M. Perry: “Why we need reparations for Black Americans.” Myself, I’ve long been unpersuaded by reparations advocacy, but I’m fully persuaded that that’s no reason to complain—I think counterproductively—that some Americans are exercising their right to frame the concept together with Juneteenth.

Roberts asserts, “Americans are souring on Juneteenth. What they hear from the media and elected leaders on Juneteenth is a self-righteous, anti-American drumbeat of criticism and division. Most Americans are excluded from the celebration, as is anyone who believes in America’s founding or doesn’t buy the narrative that America is ‘systemically racist’ today.”

But blessedly, he ascends from that tone to write that Juneteenth “celebrates what Lincoln called ‘a new birth of freedom’ for America. It celebrates the completion of the work of July 4, 1776—the extension of liberty to all Americans. It also commemorates the untold numbers of young men who died in the war fighting for that freedom.”

Exactly. And as an accomplished historian of slavery who understands all of that—and who, according to Professor Freedman, once valued the Black self-agency of slavery days—historian Roberts could add something like this: “And Juneteenth celebrants should begin expressly commemorating the multitudes of enterprising, risk-taking Civil War slavery escapees, the self-emancipators, who figured centrally in the war’s transition from a struggle for union to a struggle for both union and freedom—people who were among the most American of all Americans.”1

Advocacy handout, ca. 2017, for Fort Monroe at Point Comfort, Virginia—a flat Gibraltar that looks across the lower Chesapeake Bay, over Hampton Roads harbor, and back four centuries. Fort Monroe includes a majestic, moated stone citadel, mightiest in American history. Self-emancipating Civil War slavery escapees called it Freedom’s Fortress. When the Pentagon retired the full Army post in 2011, Virginia politically engineered a bizarrely split, severely limited Fort Monroe National Monument on Point Comfort’s Chesapeake Bay shoreline, sidelining calls for the more substantial national park that’s still possible. The handout shows how the split national monument could be unified and expanded for preserving spirit of place. The mayors of Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, and Virginia Beach endorsed unification and added a call for elevating Virginia’s Historic Triangle—Jamestown, Williamsburg, Yorktown—into the Historic Diamond by adding Fort Monroe. As of mid-2025 in Fort Monroe’s case, to return small National Park Service sites to states, as is threatened, would mean reawakening Virginia and Hampton politicians’ zeal for overdevelopment.

Threat 1: Presidential assault on national parks

Consider an excerpt—with italicized boldfacing added in two places—from the New York Times essay “Will America’s National Parks Survive Trump?”

[In 2023], the most recent [year] for which figures are available, the 325 million visitors to national parks, monuments and historic sites spent an estimated $26.4 billion in surrounding communities. Visits to the parks swelled last year to a record of nearly 332 million.

These figures should come as no surprise. Americans love their national parks and visit them avidly. Last year, the National Park Service received the highest rating of all federal agencies in a survey by the independent Pew Research Center, with 76 percent of respondents viewing the agency favorably.

Clearly, America’s national parks have been a golden goose. The question now is whether President Trump will gut them in his effort to slash federal spending. Even before he took office, the Park Service was running lean, on a slim operating budget of about $3 billion. But since January, an estimated 13 percent of its staff has departed through pressured buyouts, early retirements and deferred resignations.

And the outlook for the national parks next year is especially grim. Mr. Trump has proposed hacking the Park Service’s operating budget by roughly 30 percent, which would be catastrophic, and transferring less visited national parks and other Park Service locations to states and tribal governments. Theresa Pierno, the president of the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group, has warned that the system “would be completely decimated” should such cuts be imposed.

The group estimated that reducing the operating budget by $900 million, as the Trump administration wants to do, would require closing 350 of the 433 parks, monuments, historic sites and other locations overseen by the Park Service.

Should anything even remotely like that come to pass, we would be witnessing the dismantling of a century-old system that has protected majestic scenery and places of ecological or historical importance from development. It has been a model of stewardship of landscapes that belong to all Americans, and it has been emulated around the world.

The possible transferring of “less visited national parks and other Park Service locations to states” and the possible closing of 350 of 433 national parks, monuments, and historic sites calls to mind the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s report1 of what Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum told Congress. He said that “the federal government could shift responsibility for hundreds of historic sites and battlefields to states, foundations and private entities” and “suggested that many historic sites and battlefields ‘are just cost centers’ that the government could shift to states to run.”

There’s also this: The Times essay noted that “more than 100 parks in the 433-unit system are currently without permanent superintendents.” Will Fort Monroe National Monument become one of them, possibly en route to closure? Three days before the Times essay appeared, The Guardian ran the article “Turmoil, resignations and ‘psychological warfare’: How Trump is crippling US national parks.” It overlaps a lot with the Times piece. But consider as well The Guardian’s discussion of “facade management,” as introduced in this excerpt:

When the former national parks director Jonathan Jarvis2 surveys the current landscape, he is reminded of a trip to China he took more than two decades ago.

At the time, China was developing its first ever national park system and looked to the US as a shining example. Jarvis—who was then the superintendent of Alaska’s Wrangell-St Elias national park—found himself deep inside a cave that Chinese representatives wanted to show off. “I brought a flashlight,” he recalls, “so I could see what they weren’t showing me.”

While the environment of the main cavern had been restored to what appeared to be a healthy cave ecosystem, Jarvis’s flashlight beam revealed side caverns that were full of garbage. “They were taking all the human litter left by the visitors above ground and stuffing it below,” he says. “Their idea of a park was pure facade management.” . . . “We are headed toward facade management,” Jarvis says of the Doge-induced changes. . . . “There are ideologues who want to dismantle the federal government,” he says. “And the last thing they need is a highly popular federal agency that undermines their argument about how the government is dysfunctional.”

“So their approach is to make the agency fail,” he adds. “This is their chance to kill the golden goose.”

Maybe they know about what was quoted above from the Times: “Last year, the National Park Service received the highest rating of all federal agencies in a survey by the independent Pew Research Center, with 76 percent of respondents viewing the agency favorably.”

Threat 2: Return of Virginia’s parochial short-sightedness

Virginia's Fort Monroe Authority manages Fort Monroe with the city of Hampton and—to a token extent, as I see it—with the National Park Service. An official Virginia web page proclaims the vision that Virginia’s and Hampton’s leaders have consistently intended since the Army’s 2005 retirement announcement: “to redevelop this historic property into a vibrant, mixed-use community.” The page never even mentions the national monument or the National Park Service.

A sentence from Wikipedia further indicts Virginia’s longstanding parochial outlook on this national treasure, even though the statement is at least partly obsolete: “Several re-use plans for Fort Monroe are under development in the Hampton community.” During and beyond the half-decade of Fort Monroe politics that followed the 2005 announcement of the Army’s 2011 departure, Fort Monroe’s civic defenders would have condemned that statement as displaying the Hampton-owns-it presumption.

That presumption was all the more potent because Point Comfort is prime urban waterfront. And in 2006, Fort Monroe’s civic defenders found out what we were up against when Hampton purported to invite open public discussion and suggestions about post-Army Fort Monroe in citizen sessions in the city’s huge convention center.

At the public pre-meeting assembly the night before, I stood, asked for, and got confirmation that there’d be none of the rumored prohibition of national-park discussion. But in the morning, with participants ready at a multitude of tables, an official rose to the podium and bluntly rescinded the confirmation. Correspondingly, each table had an enforcer, though their success in forbidding national-park discussion was limited. Still, it all called to mind the warning I had heard from a neighbor: “Steve, you ain’t never gonna stop ’em developers.”

The Self-Emancipator post “Profiling the 1619 place: Point Comfort and Emancipation’s long arc” contains a section headed “Limited, split national monument” that summarizes the early politics of post-Army Fort Monroe. Don’t get me wrong, though. Hampton has a legitimate, unique, important stake. But Fort Monroe isn’t just another retired Fort Drab beside a cornfield, to be turned over to the nearest town for exploitation.

By rights it belongs to America, and for that matter to the world. My 2022 History News Network essay shows why Point Comfort should become the nation’s memorial landscape for Emancipation. Both Tidewater daily papers last Sunday ran my essay—here’s the gift link—responding to Virginia’s leaders’ chronic undervaluation of that landscape under a headline contradicting those leaders: “Fort Monroe is a world landmark, not merely a ‘regional’ one.” Hampton didn’t expand to include Point Comfort until 1952, after well more than three centuries of Point Comfort and Fort Monroe history that make this landscape an obvious candidate for World Heritage Site status.

So, what to do?

And that’s the answer I’d give if anyone said, OK, what should be done if the national monument does get canceled? We should go on offense. We should take the initiative to press

• for World Heritage Site status,

• for a substantial, presumably post-Trump, Freedom’s Fortress National Park, and

• for designating Point Comfort with Fort Monroe as the national emancipation memorial.

Ken Burns’s documentary series on national parks as America’s best idea emphasized that various interests tend to oppose creation of national parks until those interests lose—and then find out how economically wrong they have been. Please see the first paragraph of the long New York Times excerpt quoted above.

Twenty years ago, in a Newport News Daily Press op-ed, I published what was, as far as I know, the first public challenge to Virginia’s and Hampton’s early plans to squander post-Army Fort Monroe. That outlook—calling to mind the spectacle of a subdivision on a Monticello hillside—could threaten again.

The term systemic racism doesn’t appear in either the Trump 2.0 assault on national memory—titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History—or its Trump 1.0 predecessor, Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping. But both condemn the insistence that, as the Trump 1.0 order puts it, racism “is interwoven into every fabric of America.” Whatever is to be said about that, something like systemic racism explains the memory-holing of today’s date, May 23.

In the realm of contingent history, there’s a strong argument that without that memory-holing, what we now celebrate as Juneteenth could come around instead on May 23. Juneteenth recalls a Union general’s emancipation announcement to enslaved Americans in Texas. May 23 recalls the multitudes of enterprising self-emancipators across the South, who Eric Foner says “forced the fate of slavery onto the national political agenda.”

As a summertime festival of civic joy, Juneteenth thankfully isn’t headed for anything but wider cherishing, even if there are further presidential assaults on national memory. But that’s no reason not to excavate May 23 from the memory hole. Over the years, I’ve avoided racial-politics language in writing about the Civil War self-emancipation movement. Yet some of the excavating requires attention to this: the memory-holing of May 23 stems from mostly inadvertent systemic racism—not overt, deliberately hateful racism, but thoughtless, impersonal discrimination built insidiously, and close to invisibly, into the structure of national civic memory.

May 23

In 2011, at the start of the four-year-long Civil War sesquicentennial, Adam Goodheart’s New York Times Magazine article “How Slavery Really Ended in America” (gift link) began this way:

On May 23, 1861, little more than a month into the Civil War, three young black men rowed across the James River in Virginia and claimed asylum in a Union-held citadel. Fort Monroe, Va., a fishhook-shaped spit of land near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, had been a military post since the time of the first Jamestown settlers. This spot where the slaves took refuge was also, by remarkable coincidence, the spot where slavery first took root, one summer day in 1619, when a Dutch ship landed with some 20 African captives for the fledgling Virginia Colony.

Two and half centuries later, in the first spring of the Civil War, Fort Monroe was a lonely Union redoubt in the heart of newly Confederate territory. Its defenders stood on constant guard. Frigates and armed steamers crowded the nearby waters known as Hampton Roads, one of the world’s great natural harbors. Perspiring squads of soldiers hauled giant columbiad cannons from the fort’s wharf up to its stone parapets. Yet history would come to Fort Monroe not amid the thunder of guns and the clash of fleets, but stealthily, under cover of darkness, in a stolen boat.

Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend were field hands who—like hundreds of other local slaves—had been pressed into service by the Confederates, compelled to build an artillery emplacement amid the dunes across the harbor. They labored beneath the banner of the 115th Virginia Militia, a blue flag bearing a motto in golden letters: “Give me liberty or give me death.”

It was not just American history that came to Fort Monroe on May 23. If there’s merit in historian David Brion Davis’s calling slavery’s eradication “probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history,” it was world history.

In 2015, when the sesquicentennial ended, the New York Times asked Goodheart, “Notwithstanding the much-celebrated Emancipation Proclamation, was the end of slavery not accomplished by the slaves themselves, by refusing to remain slaves whenever the presence of Union forces made this possible?” Goodheart replied:

In early 1861, Lincoln and nearly all other white Northern leaders—and most of the general public—wanted to avoid the slavery issue as much as possible. It seemed much safer to frame the struggle in terms of Southern treason and the Union’s survival. It was enslaved African-Americans themselves who forced ending slavery onto the Union’s wartime agenda.1

The most dramatic single event occurred on the night of May 23, 1861, when three Virginia slaves—Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend—escaped across the James River and sought asylum with U.S. forces. By declaring them “contraband of war” and offering his protection, Gen. Benjamin F. Butler placed the federal government in the role of liberator. This was a revolutionary change, since throughout its previous existence U.S. authority had protected slaveholding as a constitutional right. Soon, thousands more escapees were pouring into the Union lines and becoming the Yankees’ only reliable allies in the otherwise hostile South. This eventually made Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation appear not just politically acceptable to millions of Northern whites, but even historically inevitable.

In 2014, Henry Louis Gates Jr. too wrote that emancipation began when Baker, Mallory, and Townsend escaped to Fort Monroe on May 23. The three were forerunners of 500,000 self-emancipators across the South who recognized the colossal freedom opportunity in radically new circumstances. Self-emancipators acted with historic self-agency—not as “the passive bystanders of conventional wisdom,” as Ken Burns has put it, but as active agents in an “intensely personal drama of self-liberation.”

Former American Historical Association president James M. McPherson wrote in 2008 that among scholars during the 1980s, a “self-emancipation thesis became dominant” for explaining emancipation’s wartime 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. More than a century after the Civil War, Professor McPherson was talking about an important excavation of the memory hole.

Unknown story

But scholars’ views aren’t necessarily the same as national public memory. Brent Leggs, African American heritage director at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, sees in that May 23 Fort Monroe moment the “unknown story” of a “catalyst for emancipation” and an example of “uplift” that positions Black Americans “not just as spectators in history,” but as actors in it.

Unknown story, yes—as discussed in the Self-Emancipator post “Question for Ibram X. Kendi & Keisha N. Blain: What about Black centrality in forcing emancipation?” Their New York Times best-selling anthology Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, has 90 Black authors—including coeditor Kendi, antiracism’s founder. It doesn’t address the self-emancipating multitudes. Memory hole.

Consider as well David Williams’s telling of “A Story too Long in the Shadows” in the introduction to I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era, from Cambridge University Press. Williams observes that in a “1928 biography of Ulysses S. Grant, W. E. Woodward expressed white America’s prevailing view that ‘negroes are the only people in the history of the world ... that ever became free without any effort of their own. … They twanged banjos around the railroad stations, sang melodious spirituals, and believed that some Yankee would soon come along and give each of them forty acres of land and a mule.’”

“Sadly,” adds Williams, “the public's general view of Blacks during the Civil War has changed little despite decades of scholarly attention.” Scholars’ views aren’t necessarily the same as national public memory.

The world’s first country to profess to found itself on human rights struggled, after further decades, to found itself that way actually. A civil war finally yielded a still imperfect second founding. That country’s story of a half-million of the most American of Americans still languishes, mostly trapped in a memory hole. The excavation isn’t mainly historians’ job. I think it’s everyone’s.

Historian David Blight: “We have to invite the authors of such executive orders to debate us, because I think we can win those debates if they're done in some kind of fair environment.”

David Blight, former president of the Organization of American Historians, has brought something new to the boisterous national discussion of President Trump’s remarkably named executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” In a 7-minute May 1 interview on PBS’s News Hour, he challenged the president and the administration to debate it:

[T]hey [have] effectively declared war on our profession, whether that's curators at the Smithsonian, or historians in universities, or the interpreters at a historic site. So, if this is a political, cultural war upon how history is told and written and exhibited, then we have to, with our meager sources, fight back. We have to get out into the public. We have to probably get into right-wing media and make the case. We have to invite the authors of such executive orders to debate us, because I think we can win those debates if they're done in some kind of fair environment.

Not that Professor Blight—Pulitzer-holding Frederick Douglass biographer, Yale University Sterling Professor of American History, and director of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition—doesn’t know the present debate environment.

Consider: Oklahoma state school superintendent Ryan Walters has mandated high school history standards promoting misinformation about the 2020 presidential election. Among those advising him is Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which published Project 2025. Walters declares that because the “left has been pushing left-wing indoctrination in the classroom,” Oklahoma is “moving it back to actually understanding history.” Compare that to Mr. Trump’s executive order’s truth-and-sanity title—and to the order’s opening paragraph:

Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed. Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.

Fair debate environment? You can bet that Walters and supporters of the president’s executive order would charge the Associated Press with the logical fallacy of begging the question in the very headline of its article “New standards for Oklahoma high school students promote misinformation about the 2020 election.” I don’t mean beg the question as raise the question. I mean the phrase’s longstanding meaning of presuming as true what has not been proven. In this case, wouldn’t ardent Trump defenders simply insist, yet again, and falsely again, that no one has proven their 2020 rigged-election arguments to be misinformation?

Would it matter in Trumpworld that nothing within the realm of fact could overlook the repeated, unambiguous disproofs of those arguments? No. That’s why Professor Blight inserted the if clause here: “I think we can win those debates if they're done in some kind of fair environment.”

Just as the Rosetta Stone led scholars to unlock Egyptian hieroglyphics, the question implicit in Walters’s Oklahoma question-begging stunt unlocks this political era: Who won the 2020 election? Any answer or evasion is revealing. Try it on any election denier.

Nevertheless reasonable voices can differ on a general public-history issue that came up in the News Hour’s parallel but opposite May 2 interview, “Conservative offers perspective on Trump’s effort to exert authority over history and art.” Christopher Scalia, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, defended the right to choose “what elements of the past to focus on.” On that principle, and while avoiding the president’s inflammatory language, he said “I think that the president has a point. The point isn't that historians can't revise how we understand America's past, but really the point is to push back against this movement in museums and elsewhere that focuses on the shortcomings, flaws and mistakes of America and its past.”

“Certainly, there are some” such shortcomings, flaws and mistakes, he stipulated, “But I think the president is trying to get museums and educators to focus—not ignore those, but to focus on the virtues and greatness of the United States.” Note that he avoided characterizing the shortcomings, flaws and mistakes of a quarter millennium of British North American, and later U.S., slavery as what they were: crimes against humanity.

Mr. Scalia also called it “a good idea to really put the emphasis on celebrating America's history, including new discoveries historians have made through new methods.” It was only a short TV interview, so maybe it’s not fair to note that that bypasses another foundation of healthy revisionism: evolving moral awareness. I suspect that he would approve this Substack newsletter’s constantly repeated outlook statement: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that Americans will esteem the Civil War’s multitudes of freedom-striving, emancipation-forcing slavery escapees. Just not yet.”

But elsewhere in Trumpworld, wouldn’t that stir objections, given that it’s predicated on what amounts to systemic racism, a concept that’s thoughtcrime there? That is, it’s predicated on the view that even in 2025, there still remains white-saviorist disregard for the Black self-agency that historians increasingly credit as central to emancipation’s wartime political evolution—as central to the war’s evolution into a struggle for both Union and freedom.

If Professor Blight should somehow happen to get a debate conducted “in some kind of fair environment,” I’d like to hear about that from all sides.

A family of self-emancipators depicted hiding in the Great Dismal Swamp in Thomas Moran’s oil painting Slave Hunt, from about 1864. (Virginia Museum of History and Culture)

While southeastern Virginia remains mostly unaffected by Donald Trump’s anti-American attempts to sabotage national memory, Tidewater’s twin local daily newspapers have spotlighted The Self-Emancipator’s historical cause: esteem for the under-recognized multitudes of enterprising slavery escapees who forced slavery’s fate onto the Civil War political agenda.

An April 11 editorial in both the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and Newport News Daily Press supported the effort to designate the Great Dismal Swamp, now part of a national wildlife refuge, as a National Heritage Area. The editorial made a point of linking that prospect to national memory of self-emancipation—and to Fort Monroe at Point Comfort:

A similarly promising idea is underway to designate Fort Monroe in Hampton and several sites in Maryland as the Chesapeake National Recreation Area, drawing more public attention and congressional funding to efforts to protect the Chesapeake Bay and tell its rich history.

The designation would help raise the profile of Fort Monroe, whose historic roles as the first arrival point of enslaved Africans and as the site of a pivotal moment of self-emancipation at the start of the Civil War deserve broader appreciation and understanding.

The editorial ends by declaring the importance of protecting these assets not only for the country, but for the world.

The Great Dismal Swamp straddles the line between Virginia and North Carolina. (Just below and slightly to the right of the letter s in Newport News is Point Comfort, containing Fort Monroe with Freedom’s Fortress—and overlooking Hampton Roads harbor, the lower Chesapeake Bay, and four centuries of national memory that Donald Trump seeks to sabotage.)

Encyclopedia Virginia says that in antebellum times, the swamp “entered popular consciousness as a place of refuge from slavery through works such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem ‘The Slave in the Dismal Swamp’ and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1856 book Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp.” It calls the swamp a “mythical place of enslaved resistance and rebellion” where “individuals or groups of enslaved people self-emancipated and sought refuge in inhospitable terrain.”

The National Park Service calls it “a vast mire teeming with predators” that nevertheless promised slavery escapees “both a better life and—thanks to its harsh conditions and fearsome reputation—safety from those seeking to return them to slavery.”

Slavery escapees who lived free in such circumstances were called maroons. Smithsonian Magazine says that from antebellum days through the Civil War, the Great Dismal Swamp contained the country’s largest maroon community. The article quotes a historical archaeologist explaining that for those Americans, there “were hardships and deprivations, for sure. But no overseer was going to whip them here. No one was going to work them in a cotton field from sunup to sundown, or sell their spouses and children. They were free. They had emancipated themselves.”

But don’t tell Donald Trump.

Among his attacks on national memory, consider his executive order with the ludicrous name “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” It begins by condemning what the order itself seeks to perpetrate: “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”

The order levels accusations of “corrosive ideology,” “improper ideology,” “improper partisan ideology,” and one that’s especially ironical concerning slavery’s quarter millennium, 1619 to the Civil War: “divisive, race-centered ideology.”

Race-centered? Here’s a passage that the president’s culture goons removed from a National Park Service web page, but restored under public pressure from Americans who esteem the self-emancipation movement:

The Underground Railroad—the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight, through the end of the Civil War—refers to the efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage. Wherever slavery existed, there were efforts to escape, at first to maroon communities in remote or rugged terrain on the edge of settled areas and eventually across state and international borders. These acts of self-emancipation labeled slaves as “fugitives,” “escapees,” or “runaways,” but in retrospect “freedom seeker” is a more accurate description. Many freedom seekers began their journey unaided and many completed their self-emancipation without assistance, but each subsequent decade in which slavery was legal in the United States, there was an increase in active efforts to assist escape.

The “urge to police the past,” writes David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker since 1998, “is hardly unique to the Trump Administration. It is the reflexive obsession of autocrats everywhere. … Trump’s executive order on history does not repeat precisely the tactics of Putin or Xi. But it rhymes.”

With President Trump imagining his self-glorification prospects for 2026—the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence—he will likely target Virginia too with his America-betraying tactics. But I like what the Frederick Douglass biographer David Blight wrote in the the New York Times: “the administration has started a war it cannot win.”

Civil War slavery escapees “forced the fate of slavery onto the national political agenda,” says Columbia’s Eric Foner. Brent Leggs, the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American heritage director, numbers them at a half million across the land by war’s end. He sees in those multitudes the “unknown story” of a “catalyst for emancipation” and an example of “uplift” that positions Black Americans “not just as spectators in history,” but as actors in it. It all started in May 1861, weeks after Fort Sumter, with numbers of these “contrabands” that quickly grew into the hundreds, then more, at the Union stronghold Fort Monroe on Point Comfort, now part of Hampton, Virginia. Filmmakers are preparing a PBS documentary about it: “THE GATE: The Untold Story of America’s First Contraband Community.”

In 1861, to call self-emancipating slavery escapees contrabands—confiscated property—meant avoiding the hypervolatile legal issue of emancipation. On a web page that offers a five-minute promotional trailer, the filmmakers say of Hampton contraband descendants that they “recount their ancestors’ dangerous escapes, wartime struggles, and post-war accomplishments. We’ll film them as they meet previously unknown white, mixed-race, and black relatives, tend to neglected burial sites, and broaden the meaning of family.” The documentarians hope to “ensure this little-known story becomes a lasting part of American history.”

Me too. Their ambition is a call to predict yet again, in the founding spirit of this Substack newsletter, that nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that Americans will eventually esteem the Civil War’s multitudes of freedom-striving, emancipation-forcing slavery escapees.

This film project also fortifies my hope that eventually I can stop appending “Just not yet” to that prediction. Consider a comically discouraging example of enduring national dimness about self-emancipators’ little-known story. A 2020 article in no less than The New Yorker—with its immense fact-checking pride—reported ludicrously that at Fort Monroe during the Civil War, “five hundred thousand slaves emancipated themselves.” In fact Civil War self-emancipations took place all across the South. To imagine them all at one place amounts to outright historical—and geographical—goofiness. A correction request to The New Yorker drew no response.1

I hope this PBS film can bring light to the persistent dimness. Liza Rodman, who speaks for Hampton’s Contraband Historical Society, told me that “self-emancipation and returning agency to the history of the formerly enslaved is the overriding theme.”

Freedom’s first generation

The documentarians likely know all about the broad overlap of their historical material with that of the late University of Pennsylvania scholar Robert F. Engs’s Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861-1890. Bob Engs came from Tidewater and is remembered with esteem at William and Mary, where he led in the founding and advancement of the Lemon Project—a “multifaceted and dynamic attempt to rectify wrongs perpetrated against African Americans by William & Mary through action or inaction.” Others and I too cherished Engs for his contributions to the civic effort to limit parochial politicians’ overdevelopment of post-Army Fort Monroe. For me, a highlight of Fort Monroe activism was the gentle summer afternoon he and I spent out on my dock, drinking iced tea and talking about history. I learned a lot.

Freedom’s First Generation observes early on that Hampton constituted a unique dimension in the slavery-to-freedom transition. Fort Monroe saw the first mass escape of the enslaved; the Army there began learning how to deal with the eventual hundreds of thousands of escapees across the land; the first northern missionaries came there and began efforts to aid the formerly enslaved. Reconstruction started early in Hampton—1861, not 1865—and lasted years longer than elsewhere. Engs calls the Hampton contrabands “freedom’s first opportunists,” who over decades “would test freedom’s meaning with a determination and sophistication that at once surprised and dismayed many whites, including erstwhile allies.”

A passage from Engs’s epilogue typifies the overlap between the book’s and the filmmakers’ material:

Northern involvement in Hampton made black success possible, but it was the blacks’ own efforts that made success a reality. The antebellum experiences of both the original contraband and the black refugees to Hampton had provided a foundation on which they could build. They were the black men, women, and children who had learned enough about freedom to know that their masters would go to war rather than grant it to them, and who had fled when the war began in order to gain it. Once these blacks had achieved freedom they sought to put it to good use. They pursued the same rights and privileges enjoyed by other free Americans. In Hampton blacks learned that not even their Northern allies had intended full black equality in the emancipation of slaves. Nevertheless, they remained determined that something at least approximating equality would be their goal.

There’s broad overlap, but there’s also this challenging comment from Freedom’s First Generation’s bibliographic essay: “Sources about Civil War Hampton within the black community are few and difficult to locate. Oral history proved largely futile for this period because few stories of that period have been passed down among the identifiable descendants of the original freedmen. Those that exist are difficult to corroborate through other sources.” Still, historians and other researchers have sharpened their methods since the book appeared in 1979.

Presence of the past

A March 5 Saturday Evening Post history article declares that Hampton serves as a “living testament to the indomitable spirit” of its Black community. The article opens by invoking the Emancipation Oak (pictured below) as a symbol of the city’s pervasive presence of the past:

I’m standing under the magnificent canopy of branches from the Emancipation Oak, a historic southern live oak tree believed to be more than 200 years old in Hampton, Virginia. I’m in the midst of a two-day Black history tour of Hampton, a coastal city with historical roots that are part of the genesis of America, from the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in 1619 at Old Point Comfort to the self-emancipation of men and women who sought and found refuge at Fort Monroe during the Civil War. As I work to absorb the many stories of perseverance and triumph, I picture teacher Mary Peake sitting beneath the massive, outstretched branches of this hardwood to educate those formerly enslaved people, laying the foundations of Hampton University,2 a historically Black university.

Hampton University, within easy walking distance of Fort Monroe on Point Comfort, evolved from Hampton Institute, which itself had evolved since the days of Mary Peake. A web page for a 2013 PBS miniseries elaborates:

[Series host Henry Louis Gates Jr.] visits the campus of Hampton University [where] many “contraband” slaves made attempts to educate themselves and become literate. The school’s origins lay with schoolteacher Mary Peake, an educated woman of color who had taught slaves in secret for years, but became capable of doing so publicly under the auspices of the Union. The contraband slaves were determined to learn, just as dedicated to “liberating the mind” as freeing themselves from bondage. Peake’s class grows quickly to over 900 students.

Outside Fort Monroe during the Civil War, the Grand Contraband Camp—a makeshift refuge for contrabands—grew quickly too. It came to contain thousands of self-emancipating refugees. In 2024, Preservation Virginia listed it among Virginia’s most endangered historic places. Attention to it is growing, including from the PBS filmmakers.

Fort Monroe is increasingly ranked alongside the likes of the Liberty Bell, Plymouth Rock, and Gettysburg. It didn’t actually fall within Hampton’s boundaries until 1952. Nevertheless Hampton’s place in world history dates to the universe’s quarter-millennium-long moral arc, 1619 to the Civil War at Point Comfort, that bent toward emancipation.

In May 1861, weeks after Fort Sumter and nearly 250 years after 1619, slavery escapees Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend started what University of Richmond president emeritus Edward L. Ayers—holder of the National Humanities Medal and former president of the Organization of American Historians—has called “the greatest moment in American history.” (Not just “a great.” “The greatest.”) They sought freedom on Point Comfort at Fort Monroe, the Union’s mighty, and mighty symbolic, bastion in Confederate Virginia. Gates declared this “the beginning of the end of slavery.” For James M. McPherson, the phrase was “the story of the end of slavery in America.”

That Chesapeake Bay landscape uniquely commemorates the struggle of the planet’s first nation to found itself on freedom. Stand on Point Comfort’s shoreline where the new African Landing Memorial is rising. It will commemorate the first captive Africans’ 1619 arrival via the Atlantic Ocean, visible on the horizon.

Then turn around and see the 1861 end of emancipation’s arc: the majestic, moated stone citadel. It attracted the freedom-striving Civil War slavery escapees who called it Freedom’s Fortress, and who started the movement historians increasingly call self-emancipation.

One prominent emancipation historian has called slavery’s eradication “probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history.” In 2020, another prominent Civil War historian urged an “epic process” of “memorialization of emancipation.”

These filmmakers intend to contribute.

The Emancipation Oak on the Hampton University campus near Fort Monroe (Erik Soderstrom, Wikimedia Commons).

The Emancipation Memorial, Washington, D.C.—also called the Freedman’s Memorial or the Emancipation Group. (National Park Service photo)

I asked a friend about the pictured Emancipation Memorial, in Lincoln Park near the U.S. Capitol. He lives a block away. “I’ve never liked that statue,” he said. “It always seems demeaning to me.”

Me too. But I also think it’s important to consider the extensive view of Yale’s David W. Blight, the Frederick Douglass biographer who directs the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He sees the objection, but has urged keeping the monument.

Under the headline “Protesters denounce Abraham Lincoln statue in D.C., urge removal of Emancipation Memorial,” the Washington Post in 2020 reported the objection this way: “Critics say the Emancipation Memorial—which shows Lincoln holding a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation as an African American man in a loincloth kneels at his feet—is demeaning in its depiction of African Americans and suggests that they were not active contributors to the cause of their own freedom.” And this way: “Critics say the image of a paternalistic Lincoln and subservient enslaved man discounts African Americans’ role in winning their freedom.”

It all calls to mind this Substack’s foundational proposition: Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that Americans will come to esteem the Civil War’s multitudes of freedom-striving, emancipation-forcing slavery escapees.

Boston removed its replica of the memorial on grounds of disregard for Black Americans’ estimable place in emancipation history. Douglass, a few days after speaking at the Washington original’s grand 1876 dedication, wrote “What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man.”

Douglass’s wish came to light when Carnegie-Mellon University’s Scott A. Sandage discovered it in a Douglass letter. Sandage and Jonathan W. White, of Christopher Newport University, cited the wish in their 2020 Smithsonian Magazine article “What Frederick Douglass Had to Say About Monuments.” The two historians observed, “As the nation continues to debate the meaning of monuments and memorials, and as local governments and protesters alike take them down, the Lincoln Park sculpture presents a dispute with multiple shades of gray.”

Shades of gray

The memorial probably doesn’t do much to foster esteem for those multitudes of freedom-striving, emancipation-forcing Civil War slavery escapees. Yet as noted frequently in this Substack, Sean Wilentz, W. E. B. Du Bois, James M. McPherson and other scholars have numbered in the hundreds of thousands those Americans whom some historians call self-emancipators. Brent Leggs, African American heritage director at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, says it was a half million. That’s one in every eight enslaved Americans.

Columbia’s Eric Foner says Civil War slavery escapees “forced the fate of slavery onto the national political agenda.” Leggs sees in that the “unknown story” of a “catalyst for emancipation” and an example of “uplift” that positions Black Americans “not just as spectators in history,” but as actors in it.

Unknown story, yes—a puzzling national memory deficit. Consider even the New York Times best-selling anthology Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019. Its 90 authors—including coeditor Ibram X. Kendi, antiracism’s founder—survey history pretty comprehensively, but don’t address the self-emancipating multitudes.

In The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States, University of Maryland slavery historian Ira Berlin wrote that by “offering their labor and their lives” and acting with “resolute determination,” those multitudes contributed importantly to the Union cause. Many in the North came to see that the Union’s security required slavery’s destruction.

That 2015 book repeats verbatim the most important sentence from Berlin’s 1992 Washington Post op-ed “How the Slaves Freed Themselves”: “No one was more responsible for smashing the shackles of slavery than the slaves.” Berlin emphasized shackle-smashing by the Union’s 180,000 Black soldiers and 20,000 Black sailors. The movie Glory portrayed some of them. More than 135,000, Berlin says, were formerly enslaved.

In 2020, National Public Radio broadcast a David Blight interview that NPR.org headlined “Why A History Professor Says ‘Racist’ Emancipation Memorial Shouldn’t Come Down.” Michel Martin asked Blight why he thought the memorial should be kept. His reply began, “Because we can’t purify our history. Yes, that’s a racist image. But there’s a much larger story about that monument, about its unveiling, about what it meant at that time.”

Blight sees that much larger postbellum story as so important that he begins Chapter 1 of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, which won a Pulitzer, with nine pages about the Emancipation Memorial’s 1876 dedication day and the Douglass speech.1 In 2013 at the Smithsonian, Blight spoke2 at length about the dedication, pointing out early on that Douglass was the 19th century’s most photographed American—more than even Lincoln or Mark Twain.

In that 2013 presentation, Blight declared that Douglass’s speech was really about the federal government’s betrayal of Reconstruction in the South. “Black freedom and the fate of the Civil War, constitutional amendments, the civic lives and personal survival of the freed people, were on the line in the South at that very moment, 1876,” Blight said, and “Grant and the government had to be called to action. That was Douglass’s subject.”

For framing, Blight elaborated on the grandness of the biracial dedication day:

Throughout the spring morning of April 14, 1876, a huge crowd, largely African American, began to assemble in the vicinity of 7th and K Streets in Washington ... 11 years to the day since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. A parade involving nearly every colored organization in the city, as the press put it, was about to step off at noon en route to the unveiling of an extraordinary monument to Lincoln. The city had witnessed many remarkable parades since the end of the war, but this one would be a first. The day was declared a public holiday in the capital. ... At the head of the procession rode a contingent of 27 mounted police, followed by three companies of colored troops headed by the Philharmonic Band of Georgetown. Numerous other cornet bands, marching drum corps, youth clubs in colorful uniforms, and fraternal orders from both Washington and Baltimore filled in the long line with pride and pomp. The Knights of Saint Augustine carried a large banner with a painting of the martyred Lincoln on it. Horse-drawn carriages carried, among others ... the order of the day, the newly arrived resident of Washington, the famed abolitionist, Frederick Douglass. ... President Ulysses S. Grant, now nearing the end of his second term, arrived before the parade reached the park and was accompanied by US senators, ... members of the president’s cabinet, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, many members of the House of Representatives, and a large contingent of other government officials, as well as some Union generals. This was an amazing audience. Near the platform, the Marine Band struck up “Hail Columbia” as the speakers walked from their carriages, and the hundreds and hundreds of marchers found their places in a vast audience.

Blight noted to his 2013 Smithsonian audience that the memorial’s sculptor had altered his original conception “from a kneeling slave represented as perfectly passive to an emancipated slave, agent of his own deliverance”—something not universally perceived by 21st century eyes. And Blight reported that Douglass, “from his own visceral experience as a slave and a fugitive slave who plotted his own escape … fully understood just how much freedom for Black Americans was both seized, but also given.”

Blight emphasized Douglass’s commandeering of the historic event. “African Americans had tenuously arrived, finally and openly, in the center of the country’s highest affairs,” Blight said, and declared, “Man, he wasn’t gonna miss this moment.” No Black speaker had ever addressed all of the country’s leadership in one place, “and no such speaker ever would again until Barack Obama was inaugurated president in January of 2009.”

Blight imagined that Douglass “must have caused some squirming” in that

he injected race … into this rhetorical tribute. It was as though he had decided to give voice to the kneeling slave on the statue, who would now say thank you as well as speak some bitter truths about a real history and not merely allow the occasion to be one of proud national self-congratulation. It was as though Douglass was saying, you gave me this unique platform today, and I will therefore teach these lessons about the complex, jagged, and tragic paths by which Black people …achieved freedom in the agony of war. “He,” said Douglass, meaning Lincoln, “was preeminently the white man’s president.” And as he continued in that baritone voice of his, he said Lincoln was “entirely devoted to the welfare of the white man. He was ready and willing … at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity and the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of the country.”

Blight called this “a stunning level of honesty and directness for such a ceremonial occasion.” And he called the Douglass speech itself “the tortured effort of a national stepchild to find the words that might still make the high and mighty of the United States hold the remaining lifeline to his people.”

A monument to teach with

Here’s more of what Blight said in that NPR interview several years after his Smithsonian presentation:

There’s a much larger story about that monument, about its unveiling, about what it meant at that time, about why it wasn’t done during Reconstruction that would truly be lost if you simply remove it and stick it in the corner of some museum, where it would become some kind of curiosity. … I’ve taken teachers and students to that monument. That monument is something to teach with. So, you know, my fear is that the circumstances, the conditions, the context when that thing was unveiled will be lost. But I think if you had it there next to a great, new, modern, beautiful emancipation memorial—what an amazing way to mix past and present and learn from it. If that was a national creation, as Douglass said, let’s create another national memorial there next to it.

Maybe that’s right. But on a distinguished panel at Norfolk State University just before the 2011-2015 Civil War Sesquicentennial, former National Park Service chief historian Dwight T. Pitcaithley asked, “Where’s the national monument to emancipation?” He specified Washington, D.C., but only in a general way. Panelist Blight reacted enthusiastically.

I’ll note, speaking only as a nonhistorian advocate for public history, that I’ve argued in a short History News Network essay that a national monument to emancipation already exists. It’s in plain sight, though paradoxically hard to see, given the deficit of civic memory concerning the self-emancipation movement.

It’s not the Lincoln Park monument near the U.S. Capitol, whether or not Blight’s supplemental monument gets added there. It’s Tidewater Virginia’s Point Comfort, the 1619 place containing Fort Monroe—Freedom’s Fortress, as self-emancipators called the Union’s majestic moated citadel in Confederate Virginia when their movement began to flourish there in 1861.

That was a quarter millennium after captive Africans’ 1619 arrival. At Point Comfort, the arc of freedom’s history was long, but it bent toward emancipation.

Historian and political commentator Heather Cox Richardson, with an enormous Substack following, wrote recently that former president Barack Obama had said that Americans had lost the sense of “a common national story.” In 2023, I had something to say about that in the Washington Post after Post reporters offered the same surmise then that the former president has offered now.

- - -

Last week on December 5 in Chicago, the former president made his lost-national-story statement in the third in his annual series of lectures for his foundation’s Democracy Forum. Professor Richardson calls those lectures “a historical and philosophical exploration of the weaknesses of twenty-first century democracy as well as a road map of directions, some new and some old, for democracy’s defense.”

Last year on July 30, a headline atop the Sunday Washington Post front page declared “Nation’s racial past drives fight for future.” The three-author article lamented that “the nation’s metastasizing culture wars . . . have broadened to strip Americans of a shared sense of history.”

It’s the same surmise. So I’ll exclaim again what I exclaimed in the August 9, 2023 Self-Emancipator post “All sides in the history wars”: “Strip Americans of a shared sense of history? I believe it, but I also know a sense of history that all sides in the history wars could share.” That post continued: “That’s why I advocated a national emancipation memorial last year in a History News Network essay. It’s why I’ve started this Substack.”

Then I quoted my letter to the editor that the Post printed on August 4 under the headline “The U.S. does have a shared national story”:

We do have a shared national story, at least potentially. It's the long arc of the moral universe that bent toward emancipation. It would appeal to any side in the history wars.

Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley — a Black man, it’s necessary to point out — wrote in Hillsdale College’s ultraconservative Imprimis, “What makes America unique is not slavery. It’s emancipation.”

In 2020, David W. Blight, who directs Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, published a New York Times op-ed headlined “There’s a Chance to Tell a New American Story. Biden Should Seize It.” In a 2020 Post op-ed, Blight urged an “epic process” of memorializing emancipation.

This national story of our second founding comes directly from slavery’s crimes against humanity and the Declaration of Independence. It shows Ukrainian, Chinese and other freedom strivers that Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was right in his Nobel Prize lecture that “no force . . . can put an end to the human quest for freedom.”

It centrally involves what Princeton’s Sean Wilentz describes as “hundreds of thousands” of Civil War slavery escapees “forcing the issue of freedom, which helped change a war to crush southern secession into a war to destroy slavery.”

Ira Berlin of the University of Maryland’s Freedmen and Southern Society Project explained in a 1992 Post op-ed “how the slaves freed themselves.” James M. McPherson, with others, calls that the “self-emancipation thesis.”

It's hiding in plain sight as a shared national story affirming founding principles, but the country has not yet adopted it. I think the country will.

When I wrote that final paragraph 16 months ago, I had not yet begun saying what I say regularly now, borrowing phrasing from Thomas Jefferson:

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that Americans will eventually esteem the Civil War’s multitudes of freedom-striving, emancipation-forcing slavery escapees. Just not yet.

By the way: The Post itself unintentionally illustrated that just-not-yetness. With the online copy of my letter, the paper included a picture of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington’s Lincoln Park—a statue depicting a shirtless Black American kneeling before Abraham Lincoln, who’s holding a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation and looking downward. It presumes Black inferiority and omits any sense of those “hundreds of thousands” of enterprising Civil War slavery escapees “forcing the issue of freedom.”

It was well intended when dedicated in 1876. In 2024, it’s a reminder of the just-not-yetness.