The full Montpelier: Madison’s mansion gets its day in the sun

Making the invisible visible 

In the 1970s, Rebecca Gilmore Coleman’s father took her for a drive down Route 20, headed south through Orange County towards Montpelier.

“After arriving near the main gate of Montpelier, he pointed to the right and said, ‘That’s where I was born,’” recalled Coleman.

Coleman’s great-grandfather was George Gilmore, a slave of the Madisons born at Montpelier in 1810. Shortly after the Civil War, he was freed and bought 16 acres for $560 from the great-nephew of James Madison. There, across Route 20 from the plantation, he built a cabin. It was abandoned sometime in the 1960s, however, and so decades later in 2001, at the behest of Coleman, Reeves and several JMU students spent four years restoring the two-story cabin.

“Here’s a person who was President Madison’s slave. He then went from being a slave to being free and a property owner, because of the Constitution and the amendments which were created by the guy who lived over there,” said Cotz. “Because of the way Madison designed the Constitution, and because he allowed it to be a malleable, changing document, George was able to go from being a piece of property to being a property owner.”

About 300 African Americans were enslaved over the course of Montpelier’s history, living in three separate locations throughout the sprawling property, where a slave cemetery has also been restored. The Gilmore cabin was just the first of many former slave homes that have recently gone up on Montpelier. This past February, more than two dozen people built a log cabin with hand-hewn lumber in Montpelier’s south yard which, along with several “ghosted” buildings—open-air timber structures —give visitors an initial impression of how close some of the slave quarters were to the mansion.

In 2007, Montpelier held an unprecedented three-day gathering of descendants of slaves at Montpelier, which Coleman played a large role in facilitating. Imhoff said the gathering was monumental in shaping the future direction that Montpelier would take towards addressing slavery.

“The first thing the slave descendants said was, ‘That’s great you did the mansion, but where are we? We want to be more than an outline on the ground’,” recalled Imhoff. “So we ghosted these structures and focused in on how we can tell the other stories and make the invisible visible.”

Another gathering of descendants was held earlier this year thanks to a $50,000 grant from Dominion Power—which will also go towards further restoring of slave life at Montpelier—and the overwhelming consensus was that the “ghosted” structures should be completely restored with authentic plank floors, siding and glass windows. Imhoff says those restorations are a top priority for Montpelier.

“I would love to get the money to actually finish some of these. That’s the hope,” said Imhoff, adding that after they are complete, she wants to erect similar structures representing the field slave quarters.

Coleman said she’s excited to see Montpelier take such a large interest in resurrecting slave life on the former plantation in a way that feels authentic.

“I think the more the enslaved story is being told there, you’re going to find more visitors interested in coming there,” she said.

It’s vitally important for Imhoff that Montpelier does not shy away from the difficult subject of slavery as they attempt to tell the story of Madison, who, unlike Jefferson, did not free any of the 108 slaves he inherited from his father.

“Madison knew that slavery was wrong but he couldn’t figure out how to deal with it,” said Imhoff.

Lynn Uzzell is a scholar-in-residence at the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution—Montpelier’s education and research branch. Uzzell said she encounters visitors to the Center and the estate who wonder why anyone would want to preserve such a horrible period of history.

“I think it’s worth looking at,” Uzzell explained. “Up until now, we’ve had this tendency of wanting our heroes to be pure as driven snow. But what we really know is that all of us are more complex. And Madison ends his life, I believe, being deeply conflicted. He knows that slavery is not a good institution. And yet cannot see his path forward and keep the Union whole. So he leaves it to the future to solve that problem.”

Many miniature Madisons

It is through understanding the past that a more promising future can be born, and to that end, Uzzell helps design and implement the Center for the Constitution’s growing number of classes that are held both online and at Montpelier, where participants can stay in cottages onsite. The latest program that Uzzell is developing will go into depth about the role that slavery played in the writing of the U.S. Constitution and the separation of federal and state powers.

In my time talking with staff at Montpelier, I was not expecting to repeatedly hear mentions of the “Arab Spring”—the revolution that began spreading across Northern Africa and the Middle East in 2010. But for fans of Madison, it was a thrilling moment because it was that founding father who pored over hundreds of books in a half-dozen languages while cloistered in his library. And it was Madison who took those ideas and compiled them into the fundamental building blocks that he would share with his peers at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. And it was Madison whose subtle and deft hand formed the backbone of America’s freedoms, the Bill of Rights. Now, across the ocean and languages apart, Montpelier’s staff watched as history was born anew.

“When the Arab Spring happened, I was like, ‘Holy crap, they’re taking my guy’s ideas and they’re building a new country, they’re having a revolution using Madison’s ideas,’” said Cotz. “That was pretty powerful.”

C. Douglas Smith, the vice president of the Center for the Constitution, agrees, but cautions that while overthrowing unpopular systems of government is the first step, the most important ingredient is solidifying a new form of government, as Madison helped do with the Constitution.

“The problem is that anyone can start a revolution with a hashtag,” said Smith. “It’s much more difficult to create a stable government, and that’s where we can educate people.”

The Center itself is housed in an old barn erected by the duPont family a stone’s throw away from the mansion. Smith and I meet on its first floor next to a classroom that can hold 70 people and has seen the likes of former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, nine members of the Burmese parliament, and Charlottesville Police Chief Tim Longo. The room also doubles as a meeting room and space for fundraising events with donors.

At the opposite end of the first floor is the dining area with a small kitchen, which used to be where cockfights were held in the duPont era. “We serve a lot of chicken,” jokes Smith.

Both Imhoff and Smith want the Center for the Constitution to break out of the stodgy academic world, where theories are recorded in journals and textbooks and die a slow death. They want the Center to be vibrant. They want Madison to come to life.

But it’s not until I later meet with Imhoff in an office on the second floor that I fully realize what they mean. The office belongs to Sean O’Brien, the Montpelier Foundation’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, but he won’t be interrupting us because he’s in Egypt as an observer of the country’s presidential election currently underway.

“Last election there was a lot of voter fraud. But how do you prove voter suppression?” said Imhoff, describing why it was important for O’Brien to make the trek overseas, and connecting it to Madison’s lasting legacy. “We have a really important story here to tell about constitution building because we still have ours.”