An Easing of Frictions at James Madison’s Montpelier

I’ve been passing on monthly news from Montpelier, the Virginia mansion that was once the center of James Madison’s slave-labor plantation.

The property is owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. However, it’s managed as a tourism and education site by an organization called the Montpelier Foundation, founded in 1998.

Last June the Foundation announced a pioneering agreement with the Montpelier Descendants Committee to make it co-equal in governing the site. That committee is “devoted to restoring the narratives of enslaved Americans at plantation sites in Central Virginia, including but not limited to James Madison’s Montpelier.”

The first step was adding more descendants of enslaved Americans were on the governing board. Under that agreement, the Descendants Committee named three new members and the Foundation board chose two more.

But this March, the Foundation board voted to end that arrangement, citing frictions with Descendants Committee leaders over issuing statements about recent events. The Foundation chair and its president insisted that they still wanted to reach the goal of having half the board be descended from enslaved people, but they wanted the board to choose those people unilaterally.

Most members of the Montpelier staff, the National Trust, and many in the history professions criticized the board’s vote as betraying its commitment. In April the Foundation fired four top staff members because of their public position on the controversy. Naturally, that only increased the criticism.

On 16 May, the Montpelier Foundation named eleven new members of the board, all drawn from a list drawn up by the Montpelier Descendants Committee. (The committee had proffered a long list of candidates months ago.) That group includes many people of national standing in their fields, including history. This achieves the goal of parity at the board level.

The Foundation chair seen as behind this spring’s reversal is stepping down after four years. The Montpelier Foundation president, who arrived in 2020, appears to remain. The head of the Montpelier Descendants Committee also remains on the board, as does a former head of the National Trust. I see no news about the fired staffers.