More Frictions at James Madison’s Montpelier

Late last month I passed on news that the Montpelier Foundation had changed its bylaws to reverse an earlier decision assigning the Montpelier Descendants Committee authority to name three members to the foundation board.

The Descendants Committee, made up of people who claim descent from the workers enslaved at Montpelier in the late 1700s and early 1800s, protested that decision. Most of the Montpelier staff joined them.

Yesterday the Washington Post reported that the foundation had fired four top staffers for publicly objecting to the bylaw change. Among the people removed were:

• executive vice president and chief curator Elizabeth Chew
• director of archaeology Matt Reeves, who has worked at the site for twenty-two years
• director of communications Christy Moriarty
• events manager Alex Walsh

Two other employees involved in the archeology program have been suspended.

The Montpelier Descendants Committee added that foundation president Roy Young fired those employees “After making repeated public statements that the Foundation would not retaliate against staff for opposing the Board’s abandonment of its commitment” to work with the committee.

The Montpelier Foundation manages the property, once owned by President James Madison and then his widow Dolley Madison, for its actual owner, the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The trust already criticized the bylaws change. In response to the firings, it issued a statement:

The National Trust strongly condemns these actions against highly regarded and nationally recognized professionals, which will impede the effective stewardship of Montpelier and diminish important public programming at this highly significant historic site. . . . these and other recent actions by the Foundation lead us to question whether a resolution is possible under the current leadership of the Foundation.

Those current leaders of the Montpelier Foundation continue to state that they are proceeding with the plan announced last year to have half the board of directors be descendants of enslaved workers. The Descendants Committee doesn’t stand in the way of that plan, which it helped to develop; it supports that goal and proposed many possible board members.

Indeed, the board can have up to twenty-five members, or nine more than currently. The present board could appoint nine new members from among the descendants, with or without the support of the three board members originally nominated by the Descendants Committee, and immediately achieve the stated goal of parity.

Instead, at this point the site’s management appears to be decimating its respected staff, alienating the historical community, and turning off a fair proportion of potential visitors.

Frictions at James Madison’s Montpelier

Back in June 2021, I noted a news story that the Montpelier Foundation was changing its bylaws to ensure that descendants of people enslaved at the plantation would be on its board.

Under that change, the sixteen-member board has included five descendants of enslaved people, two chosen by the Foundation and three by the Montpelier Descendants Committee, formed by people whose ancestors were enslaved at the site. At the time, that was widely hailed as a progressive step by the site and its supporters, ahead of any other former slave-labor plantation linked to a famous Founder.

Last week the Washington Post reported that the Montpelier Foundation was preparing to unilaterally alter that arrangement after frictions between the Foundation’s current leadership and the Descendants Committee.

Under the new arrangement, the Montpelier Descendants Committee would no longer choose any new board members. The Foundation board says it will still consider the committee’s nominations and still work toward a goal of half of board members being descendants of enslaved people—but only descendants of the board’s choosing.

According to the Post article, the Montpelier Descendants Committee’s lawyer submitted the names of forty prospective board members whom that group would support, but the Foundation still wants to cut the committee out of the process.

The Post added, “Outside mediators brought in last year eventually quit, criticizing the foundation for taking actions ‘entirely inconsistent’ with a commitment to seek board parity.”

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which actually owns Montpelier, urged the Foundation not to proceed with this change. Most of the site’s full-time employees signed a petition against the change, made public at a new website.

On Sunday, the Montpelier Foundation announced that it had gone ahead with the vote, which it termed a “broadening” of the pool of descendants of Montpelier’s enslaved eligible to be on the board. Of course, everyone had been eligible before—the only change is that the Descendants Committee can’t choose board members.

The Foundation’s press release quoted one anonymous member of the site’s staff in support of the change and led with a supportive statement from “the Jennings family of Montpelier,” no individual identified. Presumably these people are descended from Paul Jennings, who published a memoir about being enslaved to James and Dolley Madison in 1865.

Governance at James Madison’s Montpelier

James Madison’s estate Montpelier was a slave-labor plantation. 

In fact, Madison appears to have been comfortable with that. He didn’t wrestle with the morality of slaveholding like his friend Thomas Jefferson. He didn’t even acknowledge the contradictions as frankly as Patrick Henry (“I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living without them. I will not—I cannot justify it, however culpable my conduct.”).

The historic site of James Madison’s Montpelier had been owned since 1983 by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In 1998 the Montpelier Foundation was formed “with the goal of transforming James Madison's historic estate into a dynamic cultural institution.” Which of course means raising money.

More recently the Montpelier Descendants Committee formed as a “nonprofit organization devoted to restoring the narratives of enslaved Americans at plantation sites in Central Virginia, including but not limited to James Madison’s Montpelier.”

This month the Montpelier site announced a significant step in its governance, making the Descendants Committee and the Foundation co-equals in governing the historic site.

This is the latest step in a long process that included a National Summit on Teaching Slavery convened at Montpelier in 2018. One product of that gathering was the report “Engaging Descendant Communities in the Interpretation of Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites” (P.D.F. download).

Every historic site is in a different situation, but it will be interesting to see how other sites associated with slave-owning Founders approach the questions Montpelier has been talking through.

The Myth of Dolley Madison and the Easter Egg Roll

Many authors have written about Dolley Madison instituting the tradition of rolling eggs on the White House grounds on or around Easter.

The story goes way back. A magazine called The Industrial Enterprise quoted the 11 Apr 1909 Detroit Free Press as stating:

The custom of having the children of Washington come to the White House on the Monday following Easter and roll eggs originated so far in the distant past that its beginning is uncertain. It is the current belief, however, that Dolly [sic] Madison first gathered them in and herself prepared the eggs which they rolled, coloring them a scarlet by boiling them wrapped about with red flannel which faded upon them.

And it’s still current. In 2017 the Politico website stated: “The roots of the Easter Egg Roll are often traced to President James Madison and first lady, Dolly Madison, but these early public celebrations were held on Capitol Hill.”

Even the White House Historical Association passes on that factoid, though fobbing it off on others: “Some historians note that First Lady Dolley Madison originally suggested the idea of a public egg roll…”

In fact, that’s all a myth. As the Dolley Madison Papers explain, there’s absolutely no evidence behind it.

During the Founding Era,…religious observances such as Easter and Christmas were simply not part of the national calendar. Indeed, when James Madison was President of the United States, Easter was not yet a publicly celebrated holiday; it was observed neither at the president’s mansion—not yet officially known as the White House—nor by Congress. And a search of Dolley’s letters fails to produce a single mention of Easter or Easter eggs. That leaves two questions: when and where did the tradition begin, and what does Dolley Madison have to do with it?

The tradition in Washington, D.C., can be definitely dated to the years after the Civil War. Late in the Ulysses Grant administration, Congress barred children from playing on the Capitol grounds, but President Rutherford B. Hayes welcomed them at the White House. The press coverage of the event really took off in the 1880s and 1890s, turning it into a national institution.

That same period coincided with America’s Centennial and Colonial Revival, when Dolley Madison became the nation’s paragon of a political hostess. Her papers site says:

She was the symbol of American hospitality, warmth, and graciousness. By the late 19th century manufacturers were using her image to promote their products. Between 1876, which marked the end of Reconstruction, and World War II, all kinds of manufacturers used her image as part of their advertising campaigns to send a message of grace and charm and cordiality. If not unique, Dolley Madison was one of the very few American icons with an equal appeal to both the North and the South.

Thus, if there was any sort of venerable public event in Washington, it made sense to say Dolley Madison was the earliest hostess.

The Imprint of Madison’s Hand

A couple of years ago, I attended a seminar at the Massachusetts Historical Society on a paper by Prof. Mary Sarah Bilder of Boston College Law School. She had been studying James Madison’s record of the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787.

That in itself wasn’t unusual; Madison’s notes, first published in 1840, have become the standard source on what happened in those discussions. For folks who take an “originalist” stance to legal interpretations, they’re crucial to what the Founders supposedly meant.

Bilder had focused not on Madison’s record but on how that record had changed since 1787, as revealed by surviving notes and versions copied out by other people in the meantime. The result is the new book Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention.

In this History News Network article, Bilder laid out the basis of her book:

To a remarkable degree, Madison’s revised Notes created the narrative we inherit of the Convention. Hundreds of books and articles have been written about the Convention. They rely on one manuscript: Madison’s Notes. In 1840, after Madison’s death, Dolley Madison published his Notes. They remain the authority for scholars, historians, journalists, lawyers, and judges.

Madison’s Notes are the only source that covers every day of the Convention from May 14 to September 17, 1787. No other source depicts the Convention as Madison’s Notes do: as a political drama, with compelling characters, lengthy discourses on political theories, crushing disappointments, and seemingly miraculous successes. The Notes are, as the Library of Congress catalogs them, properly considered a “Top Treasure” of the American people.

But the Notes do not date in their entirety to the summer of 1787. They are covered in revisions. This fact is known–but the number is a shock. When I saw the manuscript in the conservation lab at the Library of Congress—in the aptly named Madison Building—the additions appear in various ink shades, with handwriting, some youthful, some with the shake of Madison’s later years. Madison even added slips of paper with longer revisions. . . .

Madison’s Notes were revised as he changed his understanding about the Convention, the Constitution, and his own role. Madison’s Notes were originally taken as a legislative diary for himself and likely Thomas Jefferson. They tracked his political ideas, his strategies, and the positions of allies and opponents. The original Notes reflected what Madison cared about.

I love talking about the Notes with students because they know that one cannot take notes of oneself speaking. When they are called on, they either leave their notes blank or they compose that section later, reflecting what they realized afterwards was the right answer. Madison’s own speeches are thus the most troubling in terms of reliability. In fact, in the years immediately after the Convention, he likely replaced several of the sheets containing his speeches in order to distance himself from statements that became controversial. . . .

Beginning in 1789, Madison began to revise the Notes to convert his diary into a record of debates. Along the way, he converted himself into a different Madison. In the original Notes, Madison was annoyed and frustrated. Slowly by altering a word here, a phrase there, he became a moderate, dispassionate observer and intellectual founder of the Constitution.

One particular area of evolution was Madison’s idea of how much control the federal government had over the states. He went into the convention with the idea that the national government should have a veto over state laws, but that idea was unpopular enough that his notes preserve no record of such a suggestion. Of course, Madison continued to change his thinking about the balance of power between state and nation from the late 1780s to the mid-1810s, depending on his circumstances.

Another issue, inextricably related to that one, was how the Constitution treated slavery. Bilder addressed that in a recent essay at We’re History:

Madison’s role in promoting slavery is often overlooked because historians have relied on Madison’s revised version of his record of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, known to historians as Madison’s Notes. They are the most important source for what happened at the Constitutional Convention. In two comments Madison recorded in his Notes, he spoke against slavery at the Convention. They are the only two times in the Notes he claims to have spoken against slavery. Both occasions occur on August 25. No other delegates’ notes from the Convention contain a single word indicating that Madison was opposed to slavery.

New evidence suggests that Madison composed his anti-slavery comments two years after it appeared he had written them. Madison did not finish the Notes until after the Convention, and he wrote the Notes from August 22 to September 17 after the fall of 1789. Curiously, one of the sentences Madison attributes to himself bears a strange resemblance to a statement that he had originally recorded another delegate, Maryland’s Luther Martin, making on August 21.

Madison was the delegate who suggested enumerating enslaved people not as property but as three-fifths of people, the basis of what became known as the “slave power” in ante-bellum America.

Paul Jennings: “required a ladder to get it down”

In sorting out the various stories of how George Washington’s portrait was removed from the White House before the arrival of British troops in 1814, lately scholars have been paying special attention to the 1865 memoir of Paul Jennings, enslaved in the White House at the time.

Jennings (shown here, courtesy of the Library of America blog) was born in 1799, so he was still in his mid-teens as the foreign enemy approached. Over fifty years later he stated:

It has often been stated in print, that when Mrs. Madison escaped from the White House she cut out from the frame the large portrait of Washington (now in one of the parlors there), and carried it off. This is totally false. She had no time for doing it. It would have required a ladder to get it down. All she carried off was the silver in her reticule, as the British were thought to be but a few squares off, and were expected every moment. John Susé (a Frenchman, then door-keeper, and still living) and Magraw, the President’s gardener, took it down and sent it off on a wagon, with some large silver urns and such other valuables as could be hastily got hold of.

“John Susé” was obviously Jean Pierre Sioussat, whom Dolley Madison called “French John.” “Magraw, the President’s gardener,” was called an “Irish gardener, Thomas M’Gaw,” in Charles J. Ingersoll’s 1849 history of the war.

Some later authors said that Jennings held the ladder for Sioussat as he lifted the portrait off the wall, but Jennings made no such statement. In fact, he claimed no personal role in saving the portrait. I suspect that those later authors read that slaves had been involved, knew that Jennings was a slave in the White House, and made the leap to rendering him one of those slaves. But there were several other slaves on the scene as well, and he took no credit for saving the picture.

Furthermore, while Jennings refuted authors who stated that Dolley Madison cut the painting from its frame, he didn’t contradict Madison herself because she made no such claim. In her letters she wrote that she “insisted” on and “ordered” and “directed” the work. First Ladies with servants don’t lift heavy objects or break wooden furniture themselves. After all, that’s what servants are for.

All the accounts—from Madison, Jacob Barker, Sioussat, and Jennings—are easy to reconcile when we consider the:

• confusion and distress of the evacuation of Washington.
• large number of servants and other helpers who were probably rushing around, trying to save valuables, necessities, and lives.
• decades between the event and when people set down their recollections.

Madison gave the orders. Sioussat probably took charge of carrying them out. Sioussat, McGraw, and some anonymous black servants, free or enslaved, did much of the actual heavy lifting. (Jennings was privy to that work but not greatly involved; as a young footman who belonged to the Madisons, he might have been busy with their personal effects.) Barker, Robert DePeyster, and their anonymous slaves drove the painting away to safety.

The steps of the process appear to have been:

• deciding that the portrait must be saved.
• getting it down off the wall.
• breaking it out of its big decorative frame (leaving the canvas uncut and still stretched on its inner frame).
• loading the canvas into a wagon to be moved.

In 1849 Sioussat told Ingersoll that Dolley Madison was gone before all these steps were complete, and Jennings hints the same. However, she must have stayed long enough to ask Barker and DePeyster to drive it away, and by that time it was down from the wall. Again, she made the arrangements, though the servants did the work.

Jean Pierre Sioussat: “laboring with a hatchet”

Busy in the background of the accounts of saving George Washington’s portrait from the advancing British army in 1814 are the servants—the people who probably did most of the heavy work. Dolley Madison wrote, “I directed my servants in what manner to remove it from the walls.” Jacob Barker recalled being “assisted by two colored boys” as he drove away with the canvas.

Some of those servants were still living in the capital when this episode launched a minor historical controversy in 1848. One was Jean Pierre Sioussat (1781-1864), White House doorman during the James Madison administration (shown here). Dolley Madison referred to him as “French John (a faithful domestic)” in the letter she dated 1814 and provided to a biographer more than twenty years later.

Charles J. Ingersoll relied on Sioussat’s memory in his Historical Sketch of the Second War between the United States of America and Great Britain (1849):

Mrs. Madison, with the carving-knife in her hand, stood by while French John and others strove to detach the picture uninjured from its heavy external gilt frame, and preserve it whole on the inner wooden work, by which it was kept distended and screwed to the wall.

Charles Carroll, of Bellevue, a gentleman intimate in the President’s family, entered from the affair of Bladensburg [i.e., the British rout of American forces], while the French porter, John Siousa, and Irish gardener, Thomas M’Gaw, were laboring with a hatchet to take down the picture, and remonstrated against Mrs. Madison risking capture for such an object, which, Mr. Carroll urged, ought not to delay her departure.

Her letter to her sister, Mrs. Washington, states that the picture was secured before she left the house. Mr. Siousa, who is highly worthy of credit, thinks she was gone before it was done, as her letter expresses the accomplishment. The Irish gardener, to whose aid, in the midst of the work, Mr. Jacob Barker came in, according to Siousa’s recollection, while he was gone to bring an axe, got the picture down from the wall, and placed it in the hands of Mr. Barker; with whom, according to Siousa’s statement, there was no other person except a black man, whom he took for Mr. Barker’s servant.

There might be other descriptions based on Sioussat’s stories, but I haven’t found any directly from him or claiming to be based entirely on his words.

TOMORROW: A fifteen-year-old witness, and trying to pull it all together.

Jacob Barker: “the portrait was taken by Mr. Depeyster and myself”

When Charles Carroll of Bellevue’s son claimed that his father had saved the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington in the White House in 1814, Dolley Madison wasn’t the only person who responded.

In 1847 Jacob Barker (1779-1871), a businessman in New Orleans, wrote a letter confirming that he and Robert DePeyster had carried the painting away from the presidential mansion at the First Lady’s behest. Barker also wrote: “Several persons assisted in taking down the portrait, and the most active was the venerable Mr. Carroll.”

That wasn’t good enough for the younger Carroll, who wrote a newspaper article niggling at Barker’s mistaken details. Barker then replied with a much longer account of the event, dated 8 Feb 1848. This extract picks up as Barker rushes back to the White House after the American defenses have broken:

As soon as our troops broke and retreated, the President sent his servant express to warn his good lady of her danger, with directions to leave immediately. . . . The messenger preceded me five or ten minutes, having passed me on the Pennsylvania avenue, and given the information, with a request that I would repair to the house and assist in their departure. . . .

Whether I found your father there, or whether he came in subsequently, I do not know; but I do know that he assisted in taking down the portrait of Washington and left the house with the President, leaving the portrait on the floor of the room in which it had been suspended to take care of itself, where it remained until the remnant of our army, reduced to about 4,000, passed by, taking the direction of Georgetown, when the portrait was taken by Mr. Depeyster and myself, assisted by two colored boys, from the said room; and with it we fell into the trail of the army and continued with it some miles. Overtaken by night, and greatly fatigued, we sought shelter in a farm house.

No other persons assisted in removing or preserving the picture. I acted at the special request of Mrs. Madison, and Mr. Depeyster co-operated with me in carrying her wishes into effect. I always supposed the praiseworthy solicitude originated with her; it would require very positive and clear proof to induce me to change that opinion. It certainly did not originate with me or with Mr. Depeyster; nor have I ever intimated that any other than Mrs. Madison was entitled to the least credit therefor.

The younger Carroll responded with more angry accusations, so in Barker’s next public letter, later in 1848, he cited Dolley Madison’s authority to assert that Charles Carroll deserved no credit at all, not even for helping to get the painting down from the wall. So there.

COMING UP: The servants speak.

(The photograph about shows Charles Carroll’s 1801 Bellevue mansion in Washington, D.C., now known as Dumbarton House and the headquarters of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America.)

Dolley Madison: “I have ordered the frame to be broken”

Among the most famous legends of Dolley Madison is that she saved Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington from the White House as the British army approached the capital in 1814. Thomas Fleming’s Smithsonian article “How Dolley Madison Saved the Day” does a good job of retelling this story.

A major source for that episode is Madison’s own letter to her sister dated 23 Aug 1814, which says in part:

Our kind friend, Mr. [Charles] Carroll, has come to hasten my departure, and is in a very bad humor with me because I insist on waiting until the large picture of Gen. Washington is secured, and it requires to be unscrewed from the wall. This process was found too tedious for these perilous moments; I have ordered the frame to be broken, and the canvass taken out it is done, and the precious portrait placed in the hands of two gentlemen of New York, for safe keeping.

However, that letter exists only as a manuscript Madison created in the 1830s for a biographer. In a 1998 article “Dolley Madison Has the Last Word” (readable here), David Mattern notes that this text has a different tone from a letter she definitely wrote after fleeing Washington, more brave and less self-pitying. As a result, historians think that Madison might have composed that account from memory or reshaped an authentic contemporaneous letter to tell the story as she wished it made public.

In the mid-1840s Charles Carroll of Bellevue’s son began to assert publicly that his father had been responsible for saving the Washington painting. In 1848 Dolley Madison wrote that Carroll didn’t deserve such credit. She reiterated that saving the painting was her idea: “I directed my servants in what manner to remove it from the walls, remaining with them until it was done.” She also identified the two New York gentlemen who received the painting as Jacob Barker and Robert DePeyster—the latter being the father of the newspaper publisher to whom she wrote.

COMING UP: Other eyewitness statements.