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In spring 2001, former governor Douglas Wilder announced that he might locate the United States National Slavery Museum in Fredericksburg Virginia. Despite some recent changes, Fredericksburg's heritage tourism landscape, as it is built and performed, reproduces a white American nationalism extolling the virtues of individualism, valor, and free enterprise. The mere potential of adding the Museum to Fredericksburg's landscape engendered intense debates about the ways the City's cherished Colonial and Civil War pasts are remembered. In this article, I use recent literature on landscape, memory, and race to explore changes in how African-American histories are represented in and through the landscape. Then, I examine one venue for these debates-the letters-to-the-editor, op-ed pieces, and online reader responses published by Fredericksburg's newspaper of record, The Free Lance Star. In these texts, Museum opponents and supporters selectively deploy constructions of race, versions of Fredericksburg's past, and visions for the City's future to support their arguments. I conclude by noting how debates over the Slavery Museum continue to inform more recent proposals to change Fredericksburg's landscape.
KEY WORDS: collective memory, slavery, landscape, Fredericksburg, Virginia, museum, heritage tourism
On the evening of November 17, 2007, I attended a program at the antebellum Fredericksburg Baptist Church entitled, "To Freedom: The World and Words of John Washington." John Washington was a rare individual, but also representative of the larger slave population during the Civil War. A literate slave, he was one of the first to escape bondage in spring 1862 when the Union Army reached the bank of the Rappahannock River opposite Fredericksburg. Some estimate that 10,000 slaves escaped through Fredericksburg in the months that followed (Hennessy 2006). In 1873 Washington detailed his life as a slave and his escape to Union lines in his memoir, Memorys of the Past.1 The 270 people attending the "To Freedom" program witnessed dramatic readings of Washington's and other residents' written memories of slavery and emancipation in this southern city. It was a performance of local memory- an attempt to remind us of African-American sacrifice, bravery, and struggles for freedom.
One month later, sixty Confederate reenactors marched by my house on their way to "skirmish" with Union forces in Fredericksburg's streets. As has happened every December for almost twenty years, the City government closed...