Schwartz: Fort Monroe – “Where Slavery Started?”

by Andrew Schwartz

In a letter from the Hampton Roads Virginia congressional delegation to the White House, Representatives Randy Forbes, Bobby Scott, Rob Wittman, and Scott Rigell urged President Obama to consider using “any powers afforded to the Executive Branch” to accelerate designating Fort Monroe as a “unit of the National Park System.” While I agree that Fort Monroe should be made such a unit, I believe it should be made for the right reasons. Historically, the merits of Fort Monroe stand on their own; but as a historian, I feel it necessary that the merits imputed toward the Fort be accurate.

The delegation wrote that the “historical importance of the Fort Monroe site is not in dispute…[but] what is not commonly known is the significance the site has in the history of African Americans.”

It certainly does have that significance, but what follows in their letter is a common misconception regarding the Fort’s history.

“In 1619,” explain the representatives, “the first Africans to arrive in the New World landed at Old Point Comfort, the land on which Fort Monroe stands. These first African-Americans arrived as slaves, marking the beginning of that practice in America. Nearly 250 years later, the site where slavery started in America was witness to the beginning of its end.”

(Because the “beginning of the end” of slavery in Fort Comfort is outside my area of thorough study — the Civil War — I will only address the first parts of that statement).

A quick Wikipedia search of Fort Monroe will seem to corroborate the representatives’ history of the place; however, while Wikipedia may be useful for general knowledge, one cannot take its content as scholarly truth, especially when no citations are given.

Perhaps one can forgive the congressmen for asserting that “the first Africans to arrive in the New World landed at Old Point Comfort.” They probably meant the “English” New World, as the first Africans bound in slavery shipped to the Spanish New World occurred over a century prior to the settling of Jamestown. However, even if we allow them our forgiveness, it is still simply not accurate.

They base their facts on John Rolfe’s account in August of 1619, in which he describes “a Dutch man of Warr of the burden of a 160 tunnes arriued at Point-Comfort” with “20. and odd Negroes, [which] the Governor and Cape Marchant bought.” (All original spellings are retained.) Even from this information, we cannot tell whether their fate at Jamestown was slavery or not. Dr. Warren Billings stated in 1975 that “No one [can] conclude that Slavery began in August 1619…for no clue to the fate or status of those unwilling immigrants now exists.” While we do have new evidence concerning their origins (stolen from a Portuguese ship by Dutch pirates), we still do not know that they were slaves upon their acceptance into Jamestown. What we do know is that free and indentured blacks were not uncommon in the English settlements.

But even if this August cargo were slaves, they were still not the first Africans to arrive in the (English) New World. In 1995, William Thorndale uncovered a census from 1619, which identified 15 male Negroes and 17 female Negroes, “in the service of [several] planters,” “in the begininge of March, 1619.” The origins of these Africans are still a mystery, but we cannot determine they were slaves, either; and we certainly cannot say with certainty that they arrived in 1619, or that they landed first at Point Comfort.

The events at Point Comfort, and later Fort Monroe, over the past four centuries have enough significance to warrant a designation as a National Park. And while I am not criticizing the Congressmen for their ignorance of recent scholarship — not surprisingly, the Washington Post got it wrong, too — we should not feel it necessary to promulgate historical myths in order to satisfy our constituents. I am certain the representatives’ intentions were noble, but their facts should also be accurate. And that is something that may be said for Congress-at-large.

[Citations available upon request: andrewschwartz@live.com]

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Andrew Schwartz is a United States Marine, and a graduate of Old Dominion University with a Bachelor’s Degree (Summa Cum Laude) in History, and focuses on Colonial and Early American Political and Intellectual History. He has written for various blogs and newspapers on historical and political matters for about five years

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