As Montpelier Goes Woke, Will Virginians Rescue James Madison From Cancellation?
Montpelier is diminishing James Madison’s legacy and seeking to influence how America is recognized on the world stage.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the organization that owns Montpelier, has considerable resources, but Montpelier is not using its funds to preserve the legacy of James Madison.
Though the trust owns Montpelier, Madison’s home is operated by the Montpelier Foundation. The mission of the Montpelier Foundation is to engage “the public with the enduring legacy of Madison’s most powerful idea: government by the people … to communicate Madison’s role in creating our modern, democratic government.” Incredibly, there are no exhibits at Montpelier dedicated to our nation’s fourth president, the man often called “the Father of the Constitution.”
In 2020, Virginia’s Department of Historic Resources gave $1,000,000 to the County of Orange for programming at Montpelier. Montpelier’s website states that the funding was for a memorialization project, which would include a memorial to enslaved people and the development of anti-racist curricula for use in Virginia public schools. No such memorial has yet been built.
Declaring a portion of Virginia a historic site on the basis of slavery is a complicated and politically fraught objective. It is certainly true that slavery existed in Virginia, and slavery is part of American history. Yet those who seek this designation diminish James Madison and Virginia as the intellectual birthplace of the Constitution. James French, current chairman of the Montpelier board, has noted that people come to Montpelier to “worship” a president and a document, and that Montpelier should “leverage the meaning that [Montpelier] holds for the nation and for the world,” “reinterpret an iconic institution,” and “challenge its history.”
Following a board takeover led by French, it seems Montpelier will continue to try to diminish, rather than recognize, the many accomplishments and status of Madison. For example, they recently changed the banner on their email blasts, relegating Madison’s name from the logo title to a subheading alongside “enslaved community” and “constitution.”
Others at Montpelier want to remake American history. Shockingly, Montpelier’s longstanding director of archeology Matthew Reeves reportedly stated that he has no interest in “honoring a ‘dead white president and a dead white president’s Constitution,’” and that “he needed to act ‘less like a bulldozer and more like a termite that undermined a building’s foundation, destroying it from within before tearing it down.’”
Montpelier and the National Trust are seeking to use the influence of powerful individuals and institutions, including international bodies, to transform American history. Their leverage point of choice is the Father of the Constitution’s own home.
It is up to the American people to push back against these elite forces and restore a faithful and balanced telling of American history, reflective of the national gratitude we owe generations past. Once again, in the spirit of their forebears, Virginians can assume their particular responsibility and defend the home and reputation of James Madison.