James Madison’s foundation, destroyed from within

For more than two decades, the Montpelier Foundation has restored the estate of founding father James Madison and won widespread praise for honoring his legacy without shying away from the role of slavery in the plantation’s history. It has been seen as a model landmark of American historical pride and education.

And all that could be lost if the radical activists who have pulled off a coup on the foundation board, and who aim to topple America’s other founding museums and memorials, succeed. For them, the nation’s founding is a more sinister event, and they seek to co-opt the father of the Constitution to tell their warped tale of American evil.

For now, self-proclaimed “termites,” aided by a sympathetic media and discredited organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, have riven the foundation, put its financial health at great risk, and even flirted with a United Nations-aided land grab of the region around James Madison’s Montpelier by designating it one large UNESCO heritage site.

The plan is to establish Montpelier as a beachhead for radical reinterpretations of history. To a
somewhat lesser extent, leftists have succeeded in doing the same at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

Dozens of documents obtained by the Washington Examiner and interviews with many involved with the foundation’s inner workings paint a clear picture of exactly how this was carried out.

Madison himself has a conflicted record on slavery. He agonized for his whole adult life about how, in practical terms, to end slavery, and he avidly pursued several sincere but doomed schemes for widespread manumission, but he never freed his own slaves.

The foundation, for its part, was formed in 1998 to restore Madison’s famous estate and use it to promote public understanding of the Constitution that Madison did so much to shape. It also has been at the vanguard of studying and honoring the lives and contributions of enslaved communities.

“One of the first things we did was to try to find the descendants [of Montpelier’s slaves] so we could incorporate their stories into the story of the estate,” said Margaret Rhoads, herself a direct descendant not of a slave but of Madison’s sister Sarah. Even before the Montpelier Foundation was formed, Rhoads served on a six-person “Property Council” that was a forerunner of the foundation. Then she served on the foundation’s board for 12 years.

The board hired the talented Matthew Reeves, who oversaw rigorous archeology pertaining to slaves’ lives and work. In 2001, shortly after Madison’s 250th birthday celebration, Montpelier organized
a three-day Slave Commemoration Gathering, and over the next 15 years, it received numerous national awards for permanent and prominent exhibits on slavery’s role there.

Instead of making the foundation immune from attack, these efforts made it a target for left-wing organizations.

In 2017, the ascendant liberal leadership of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which owns Montpelier but by charter is  not supposed to “have authority over either management or board governance,” created an African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, dedicated not just to the preservation of sites related to “significant African American history” but also to a “social justice … movement that uses preservation as a force for enacting positive social change … to realize equity-driven outcomes.”

In other words, politics, not just history.

Funded by a who’s who of left-wing donors and organizations led by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and by billionaire Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife MacKenzie Scott, this National Trust subgroup saw an opportunity at Montpelier. In 2018, they and liberal Montpelier staff members convened a self-proclaimed National Summit on Teaching Slavery. It produced a document usually referred to as the “Rubric.”

The document insists that “racial violence is a hallmark of American history,” that “addressing American history in a spirit of restorative justice” is crucial, and that institutions such as Montpelier must employ “a methodology for openly addressing the central role slavery played in the development of the United States. … It is imperative that these institutions also unpack and interrogate white privilege and supremacy and systemic racism.”

In June 2019, James French, a financial services entrepreneur descended from slaves of a neighboring estate, convened a Juneteenth celebration for Montpelier-related descendants. There, he announced the formation of something called the Montpelier Descendants Committee and quickly was voted chairman. That fall, he served as host, with Montpelier staff, of a curious “Memorialization Workshop” full of left-wing presenters.

One of the attendees was Mary Alexander, a direct and verifiable descendant of Madison’s manservant Paul Jennings. She was appalled by the workshop.

She sent the Montpelier Foundation’s board a letter saying the MDC at the workshop evinced “its agenda which I immediately recognized as highly politicized.” The letter said workshop presenters argued for reparations and also to “have the whole area from Montpelier to Monticello declared a UNESCO World Heritage site.” (Monticello itself already is such a site.)

UNESCO is a U.N. organization that “administers” various “protected sites,” sometimes with pressure for regulatory authority that may inhibit private property rights — or cause “the transfer of responsibility from private ownership to local and territorial governments.”

It is one thing for a single, self-contained property such as Monticello to be a UNESCO site, but critics long have worried that larger-scale, multisite UNESCO declarations could cause mischief. As the World Heritage Convention of 1994 put it, “identification and delineation of properties can involve a range of legal and financial implications, as well as technical complexities, and can potentially raise a number of cultural, social, political, economic, human rights, and religious issues in certain cases.” A 2011
Washington University School of Law paper noted that the program “may have created a culture of economic and political quagmires.”

The program from Montpelier’s Memorialization Workshop confirms that one entire presentation was dedicated to “creating a UNESCO … Heritage site at Montpelier.”

That UNESCO discussion at the workshop was preceded by one of several presentations by French, the MDC founder. As if to confirm Alexander’s fears, French, who has no known ancestors who lived at Montpelier, similarly said at a November 2021 Harvard University forum that one big MDC goal is “
to design a [physical] trail
” from Montpelier to Monticello and perhaps all the way from Richmond to Fredericksburg “that will allow people to navigate across still existing property boundaries today.”

At the Harvard forum, French said the “whole landscape” in that region of Virginia was “the most densely populated area of the early United States of enslaved people. That’s where the wealth came from. That’s where the power came from. So once that public history is changed, that orthodoxy is changed. That creates a new demand. … So that’s kind of what we’re trying to do. … It will feed back into shifting power arrangements.”

Again and again, French has described the MDC’s goal in terms of who gets to exercise power. His main means of doing so came from the Rubric’s demand for “structural parity,” meaning at least half the board would be chosen by the MDC.

Beyond that, the activists have painted modern America as not far removed from the era of slavery. Inveighing at Harvard against “all-white boards,” French had said that museums such as Montpelier are dominated “by people who look like Madison. The boards who make all the decisions — these are actual decision-making questions, and that relates to power structures. And these power structures, to this day, reflect hierarchical power arrangements that were very much very similar to what existed back in Madison’s day.”

With the National Trust’s backing, French, in the name of slave descendants, secured a Montpelier Foundation board seat and immediately began agitating for the MDC to attain “structural parity” on the foundation board. Yet despite its name, French’s MDC is composed not only of descendants of people enslaved at Montpelier but of anyone enslaved in the general region — plus, pulling this idea straight from the Rubric, “those who feel connected to the work the institution is doing, whether or not they know of a genealogical connection.”

By August 2020, 26 members of verified Jennings descendants had had enough. They wrote a letter to Montpelier’s board chairman thanking the institution for its long record of “uncovering the largely invisible slave inhabitants of Montpelier” but said they were “concerned about the legitimacy and tenability of the representations made by the MDC.”

Furthermore: “The MDC appears to be a very small group of self-appointed individuals, who have put little to no known effort into community outreach, and thus cannot possibly well-represent the descendants of Montpelier’s enslaved. … We know of no mandate or election from the enslaved descendant community that the MDC purports to represent. … [We] emphatically state that we do not acknowledge the MDC to be our representatives in any form or fashion.”

Nonetheless, National Trust President Paul Edmondson continued to insist that the MDC, which French later turned into a 501(c)(3) organization, be considered the sole representative of descendants, without regard to opposition from 26 verified descendants. Edmondson and the National Trust publicly and privately pressured the Montpelier Foundation board into succumbing to French’s demands.

Despite the ideological centrality of the Rubric to the MDC’s plans, current and former Montpelier Foundation board members said the board never actually voted to adopt the Rubric or even was asked to approve it.

“The first time I heard about the Rubric was at a presentation by staff as part of our semi-annual board meeting materials,” one former board member told the Washington Examiner. “So whether everyone even went through and read it, I find doubtful. People that deal with museum issues and the finance issues probably focused on that issue. Not everyone is going to read every piece of all the material that is disseminated.”

Yet board members found themselves pressured to act as if the Rubric’s prescriptions were ethically binding on the foundation that had never even discussed it in detail.

After sending a bombastic letter threatening “public embarrassment and a negative impact on the Montpelier budget,” left-wing scholar Michael Blakey used an October 2020 board meeting to browbeat the board, according to numerous accounts. If it didn’t accede to the MDC’s demands, critics would “rain ruin” on the board, multiple members recalled. Blakey also referred to the Jennings descendant on the board as a “token.”

From that point forward, said a former member, there was “clearly a concern of being perceived as a racist if you were to disagree with anything that James [French] was trying to push.”

Indeed, as the takeover effort reached a crescendo in 2022, French told the New York Times that the board’s refusal to meet his demands was “by definition racist.” Likewise, MDC attorney Greg Werkheiser told NPR that “usually racists these days are more competent.” And Reeves, the staff archaeologist, repeatedly promoted stories in which his own employers, board members, were described as racists.

This same supposedly racist board had spent 20 years paying for research into slaves’ lives, had proactively engaged with hundreds of Montpelier slave descendants, and had sponsored the award-winning exhibit on slave contributions called “The Mere Distinction of Colour.”

In June 2021, after months of French’s agitation and pressure from the National Trust, a significant “progressive” contingent on the Montpelier staff threatened mass resignations if the board didn’t grant structural parity to the MDC. The staff threats were led by the archaeologist Reeves and by then-Executive Vice President Elizabeth Chew.

Reeves, oddly enough for a 20-year employee of Montpelier, seems to be no fan of Madison. According to documents shared with dozens of board members whose authenticity was confirmed by multiple sources, Reeves had had an alarming 2020 conversation with the chairman of the board’s Museum Committee. He apparently said something to the effect that staff members had no interest in honoring a “dead white president and a dead white president’s Constitution,” to which the board members advised that such language would be inapposite in public. That’s when Reeves said, according to multiple documents and emails, 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.”

The board itself still opposed the idea of race-based structural parity in foundation governance and in the first ballot voted it down. But French and the National Trust’s attorney, who had told the board in 2020 that the National Trust was “joined at the hip” with the MDC, continued to press the issue by playing the race angle and warning how awful it would be if leading staff members carried out their resignation threats. On a narrow revote at that same meeting, they prevailed by getting the board to change the bylaws.

The remaining issue was whether the board could choose descendants who weren’t aligned with French. After nine more months of what numerous observers repeatedly described as “bullying” by French, the frustrated board voted 10-3 to re-amend the bylaws in March 2022 to clarify that slave descendants other than those nominated by the MDC could be considered for board membership. Draft minutes saved by several board members noted that “French started hurling insults and raised his voice.” (It isn’t clear if the board approved that wording.)

French did not reply to two emails and one phone message from the Washington Examiner requesting an interview. His attorney responded to those requests by objecting to previous coverage of the controversy.

French, Reeves, Chew, and the National Trust’s Edmondson then engaged in a high-profile media campaign, with articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and many others, all portraying the board as “reactionary” or racist.

In response, Montpelier’s CEO fired Reeves and Chew in April, alleging multiple instances of “insubordination” and other direct policy violations. He also noted Reeves’s widely discussed alleged comment about being a “termite” and an alleged comment by Chew that “when the board voted a white male as the new president, I was shocked and furious.”

Reeves and Chew both declined to be interviewed for this story.

In April, William Lewis, the first board president and 19-year member of the board who this year
published a book on Montpelier’s successes, wrote a lengthy letter to Edmondson. He recalled Montpelier’s long history of constructive inclusion of slavery exhibits and objected to the “discrimination” by French’s MDC against the Montpelier descendants, among other things. He also complained about “the successful national campaign to smear [the foundation’s] reputation” and said French was engaging in a “coup.”

In response, Edmondson demanded that Lewis withdraw the letter and said that if Lewis didn’t, he should “lawyer up,” according to numerous sources. Lewis withdrew the letter. Through a spokesperson, Edmondson declined to comment.

By late May 2022, the national press campaign, the threats to ruin board members’ reputations, and the perceived threat of legal action all had their effect. The board again changed its bylaws, giving in completely to the MDC. Several board members and the CEO resigned, and French took over as board chairman. He immediately rehired Chew and Reeves, with Chew promoted to interim CEO.

Since then, the board roster has taken a hard left. Its members include Bettye Kearse, a pediatrician who claims to be descended from Madison himself despite long-accepted assumptions that Madison was infertile, and Vice Chairman Hasan Jeffries, an Ohio State professor who hosts a podcast for the Southern Poverty Law Center, as well as a trio of left-wing professors, former NAACP President Cornell Brooks, and liberal pundit Soledad O’Brien.

The fallout from the takeover continues. In July, three top employees resigned. They were the education director for Montpelier’s Center for the Constitution, the chief advancement officer, and the director of philanthropy.

In August, Chew dismissed the chief financial officer without warning and also announced that the job of chief of the Center for the Constitution would be downgraded from “director” to a mere “manager” answering to the “director of civic engagement.” In turn, the civic engagement job includes directions to “develop expansive histories that go beyond the dominant narrative of the Madison family and the U.S. Constitution to include historically excluded communities [and] organize appropriate trainings for all Montpelier staff, including diversity, equity, and inclusion training.”

Meanwhile, Chew floated a redesign of Montpelier’s logo to take Madison’s name from the title and relegate it to a subheading co-equal with the “enslaved community.” (Contrarily, the original $10 million bequest for the property’s establishment as a public historic site specified “that the role of James Madison be emphasized.”)

The changes are controversial. Alexander, the Jennings descendant and now board member opposed by the MDC, was quoted in April saying that the de-emphasis on Montpelier’s actual owner is “a disservice to Madison. There were hundreds of thousands of slaveowners but not hundreds of thousands who wrote the Constitution.”

The turmoil, meanwhile, has been costly. In June, the then-chief financial officer circulated a memo showing Montpelier $576,000 below anticipated income for the year, saying two major donor events had been canceled or postponed during the turmoil and describing an “operating cash crisis.” One of those events was the annual Dolley Madison Legacy Luncheon in May that in 15 years has raised more than $900,000 while attracting major guest speakers such as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Looking like yet another attempt to de-emphasize the Madisons at their own home, Chew’s team on Aug. 19 told the ladies who organize the event that their committee is now disbanded, saying, “We plan to completely rebrand [the event] with a new name, logo, and purpose.”

Rhoads, the longtime board member descended from Madison’s sister, explained part of Montpelier’s crisis: “Within the last several months, I know of four expected major gifts that will be canceled if the central focus does not revert to Madison’s work on the creation of our government.”

Quin Hillyer is a senior commentary writer and editor for the Washington Examiner.