I'm going to leave you with this. Back in Virginia there was a young slave, twenty-two years-old. His name was John Washington. He'd grown up Fredericksburg, Virginia. Had a white father whom he never knew, a slave mother named Sarah. She taught him to read and write. He grows up an urban slave with lots of skills, highly valued, probably a brilliant young man. He got hired out five times in the late 1850s and the first year of the war. He married his sweetheart in January 1862 in the African Baptist Church in Fredericksburg. And he chose his moment of escape at the first appearance of Union forces along the Rappahannock River in Fredericksburg on the 18th of April, 1862. He left a narrative that he wrote after the war that I had the great good fortune to have lopped in my lap and have recently published a book about it. And in that narrative he tells this remarkable story of the day of his escape. He even drew a map of Fredericksburg of the day of his escape, including a glossary of sixteen sites and buildings and crossroads on that map, as though he wanted the world to see as well as hear his story. And John tells this story--he's twenty-two years-old--he tells the story of all the white people evacuating Fredericksburg and his mistress, Mrs. Tolliver, is literally packing her china and her silver, and she says one day, "Now John, you'll be with us tomorrow, you'll be with us tomorrow." She's assuming his loyalty. And he says, "Yes Misses, yes Misses, I'll be with you tomorrow." And then his next scene is he's got a hotel where he's been hired out as a steward, almost like an assistant manager, and he describes all the white people fleeing the hotel and fleeing the streets of Fredericksburg, and he says he took the twelve workers up on the roof of the hotel--and the hotel was called The Shakespeare, I kid you not. He takes all the black workers up on the roof of the hotel where they could see across the river and see what he called "the gleam of the Yankees' bayonets." And then he brought them all back down into the kitchen and he poured a round of drinks, and he held a toast, and the toast was "To the Yankees." And then he instructed his fellow workers, he said, to get out of there. "But," he said, "don't get too far from the Yankees."From Lecture 15 of Yale History Professor David Blights's excellent course The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877.
And then John Washington walked two blocks down to the river, he witnessed the formal surrender of Fredericksburg, he saw the bridges being burned by the Confederate forces, and he walked one mile up river, and he said he crossed the river at Fickland's Mill; and the old stone ruins of that mill are still there. So I know exactly where he crossed the river.
He got into a rowboat, he crossed, and that night he slept in the camp of the 30th New York Volunteers. A captain in that regiment named Ladd, l-a-d-d, formally freed him, he said, based on the law that had just been passed by Congress forty-eight hours earlier in Washington, freeing the slaves in the District of Columbia. John Washington spent the rest of that summer as a camp hand and a guide for the Union Army, all the way through Second Manassas. He dated his arrival in Washington, D.C. as part of the first great wave of freedmen into the capital, as September 1. And by the following year I found him in a City Directory record, living at his first address on 19th Street in Washington. He had his wife, his newborn child, his mother and his 68-year-old grandmother living there with him. Apart from, beneath, next to, underneath this great military and political story, thousands and thousands of John Washingtons are freeing themselves.
Maybe Lincoln wasn't quite the demigod he's been made out to have been.
Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.posted by Grimgrin at 11:19 AM on July 10, 2010 [1 favorite]
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Interpretation is in my line of work, and I've been revisiting some of the ideas about this lately. Interpreting historic sites is almost always a process of negotiating the conflicts between treasured mythology and wishful thinking with fact and scholarly perspective (which integrates the concerns and thoughts of people not usually represented in the romantic version). Unfortunately, most Americans grow up with the mythology, not the history, and people with a vested interest in the mythology as something that is a foundation of their worldly success or self-opinion are rarely open to a more comprehensive interpretation.
We need to be bolder and more confident in interpreting historical sites with contemporary, more inclusive perspective, and also in finding and preserving new sites that round out our understandings of history and get us far beyond the Rich White Guy's Birthplace or Fort Whatever No. 7 model. We have plenty of monuments to capital and war, relatively few interpreted well.
This is one of a number of great reinterpretation projects going on around the country. I'm glad they're blogging about it, and in a nice clear way that's not jargon-y or insider-y, too.
posted by Miko at 6:43 AM on July 10, 2010 [6 favorites]