Dear colleagues:

Today's Washington Post contains at article at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/10/
AR2007061001404.html on this past weekend's Montpelier Slave
Descendants Reunion at Madison's Montpelier in Orange County.
Unfortunately, it tells little about the reunion, the people who
attended, or their ancestors, choosing to focus instead on the
intriguing claim of one family, based on oral history, to be direct
descendants of Madison himself.

At the same time Matthew Reeves, director of archeology at Montpelier,
is quoted as dismissing oral histories depicting Madison as a "good"
slaveholder because "most oral history comes back with that."  (A
questionable statement, I think.)  Instead, he castigates Madison
because "when it comes down to the end, his slaves are all sold."

Reeves knows far more than I do about Madison as a slaveholder, but it
seems to me his words considerably oversimplify the situation: it's my
understanding that Madison left his slaves to his wife, and she ended
up selling them some years later in order to cover the debts incurred
by her son, an alcoholic and gambling addict, which was an outcome
Madison did not foresee.  Madison's struggles to decide the fate of his
slaves are discussed with great sensitivity by Drew McCoy in his
remarkable study The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the
Republican Legacy.

The Post article is accompanied by a photo of, among others at the
reunion, Gladys-Marie Fry: some of you may know her work as a
folklorist/historian.

--Jurretta Heckscher