In 2012, Fort Monroe's official May 24 history celebration arrived the way the undersized, counterproductively divided Fort Monroe National Monument had arrived: notably late and wrongly defined.
Officials were celebrating Fort Monroe events from 1861 that University of Richmond president Edward Ayers once called "the greatest moment in American history."
It's easy to argue that that moment set into motion the long-delayed completion of America's founding. And it's vital to recognize that it began not on May 24 thanks to a white Union general, but on May 23 thanks to brave, self-emancipating escapees from slavery.
That moment illustrates why the split national monument should be unified, with its sense of place cherished. It should be laid out for grand public purposes rather than hacked in two for petty private ones.
In 2011, after six years of bipartisan stalling on securing a substantial national park from Congress, Virginia's overdevelopment-obsessed leaders engineered creation of the split national monument by presidential order.
Notably late, wrongly defined.
An irony is that full national stewardship on Fort Monroe's bay side, along with revenue generation on the bridge-tunnel side, would bring not only historical, recreational and environmental enrichment, but public financial enrichment too.
Fort Monroe's value "will be degraded," the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot's editors warn, unless "roughly 100 acres of state-owned waterfront land dividing" it are "added to the park." (Please see the illustration at FortMonroeNationalPark.org.)
May 23, 1861, makes all of this especially important.
Decades earlier, victory at Yorktown had made independence real, but not the principles of the Declaration of Independence. For millions of enslaved Americans, the new nation scorned self-evident truths about equality, rights and freedom.
At Gettysburg four score and seven years after the Declaration, President Lincoln invoked those truths, proclaiming a "new birth of freedom." Risk-taking enslaved Americans had contributed mightily to that new birth when they decided to seek sanctuary at Fort Monroe.
That active decision by Frank Baker, Sheppard Mallory and James Townsend pressed the Union general to make his shrewd, constructive but merely reactive May 24 "contraband decision." Noting these humans' status as so-called "property," he confiscated them.
Though self-emancipators were still mistreated, their movement cascaded throughout the South, shifting the balance of war power and pressing history toward the Emancipation Proclamation.
Ugly political reality had forced the general to decide under slavery's filthy laws, but the self-emancipators decided under the laws of Nature and Nature's God. Yet it's generally assumed that the reactive decision matters more than the active one. That's why officials celebrated May 24.
But it was those self-emancipators who, acting decisively, affirmed the natural but long-ignored truths. As Thomas Jefferson had predicted, nothing was more certain than that enslaved people would be free.
Fort Monroe, the Union's bastion in Confederate Virginia, powerfully symbolized that certainty. It could do the same in the future, if politicians would save, not squander, its sense of place.
America was the planet's first nation founded on ideas. When self-emancipators challenged America to begin living up to those ideas, the country's founding finally began moving toward completion.
That permanently beautiful truth could animate creation of Virginia's Historic Diamond. The present Historic Triangle—Jamestown, Williamsburg, Yorktown—tells only a partial story of America's founding. Fort Monroe could anchor a Historic Diamond telling the complete story.
So on a planet where freedom never goes unchallenged, what began on May 23, 1861, makes Fort Monroe a candidate for a Freedom's Fortress National Park and for designation as a World Heritage Site.
But because that would require vision, the only remaining hope is unlikely, though not completely impossible: national shaming of Virginia's crony-kowtowing leaders.
Reporters pay attention to Virginia's 2013 elections, to Big Money in politics, to the Civil War sesquicentennial and to coastal development folly. Want to help? Contact national-level journalists.
first wrote about Fort Monroe on these pages in September 2005.