--Yesterday's conversation at Norfolk State University was all about momentous national issues of slavery and freedom, about what gets remembered from the Civil War and what doesn't.

But time and again, events and people linked to the Fredericksburg area popped to the forefront of the historians' discussions.

They aren't household names, but deserve to be: William and Ellen Craft. Henry Brown. John M. Washington.

All were slaves who escaped to freedom through Stafford County, long before the secession crisis loomed, and--in the case of Washington and 10,000 more who followed in his footsteps during the first Union occupation of the county.

A new website, trailtofree dom.com, follows their progress.

Washington later wrote an autobiography, one of the nation's most vivid and personal slave narratives. His account, told by Yale professor David Blight, riveted attendees at yesterday's conference.

The wartime exodus of slaves from Central Virginia helped to transform President Lincoln's war aims, said John Hennessy, chief historian of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park.

"If you want a vivid, physical manifestation of the overarching theme of [the Norfolk] conference, there is no better place to see or experience that than [in Fredericksburg]," Hennessy said. "The story that unfolded here in the spring and summer of 1862 is unexceeded in its magnitude and profundity."