The left-wing cabal that engineered a hostile takeover of James Madison’s Montpelier estate is officially planning a massive “heritage area and trail” that encompasses an area 70% of the size of Rhode Island.
The person hired to plan this unprecedented project also will be tasked with an educational role, not on Madison or the Constitution, but “to plan and implement educational programs that address the legacies of slavery and racism in our state and nation.”
Someone should tell Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears to make sure none of this infringes on property rights and to ensure no Virginia state funding goes to pushing misnamed “antiracism” nostrums such as the discredited 1619 Project or critical race theory.
According to Montpelier’s job description for a memorialization project director, the project, called the Arc of Enslaved Communities, “is an 850-square-mile heritage area radiating from the spine of the Southwest Mountains into a historic region of central Virginia.”
The region, says the job listing, “encompassed one of the highest concentrations of enslaved Americans during the formative years of the United States.” That’s uncontroversial. The next sentence, though, is extremely dubious: “These enslaved communities formed the socioeconomic, cultural, and intellectual backbone of an ecosystem that produced, amongst other things,” the Constitution (Montpelier’s Madison) and the Declaration of Independence (Monticello’s Thomas Jefferson).
As I reported in the Washington Examiner magazine earlier this month, the original idea was to turn the entire region into a United Nations World Heritage site. Sometimes, UNESCO heritage sites involve “the transfer of responsibility from private ownership to local and territorial governments.” Furthermore, “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.”
And a 2011 Washington University School of Law paper noted that the program “may have created a culture of economic and political quagmires.”
It is not clear whether the UNESCO idea is still part of the current “heritage site” planning, but the very idea of a heritage area so huge is worrisome.
Meanwhile, the strange claim about enslaved communities forming the intellectual background for the Declaration and Constitution was posited in a 2021 Harvard forum by now-Montpelier Board Chairman James French, who engineered the takeover of Madison’s estate foundation. There, Montpelier archaeologist Matt Reeves explained his interesting but unproven theory, which Reeves said they brought from Africa, called “black engineering.” French launched from there into an assumption that somehow the enslaved communities provided the intellectual underpinnings for the Constitution.
French said of Madison that the slaves were “the people upon whom he relied for everything, including his ideas, his sustenance, his wealth, his power, and everything. And this is truly disputed knowledge now, and that dispute is revealed by the archaeology.”
“It’s not just labor that flows from the enslaved people to Madison, but it’s culture. It is ideas. It is intellect.” All of his, French said, comes from the “ground truthing.” Which is why, he says, he wants a behemoth heritage site to cover ground all the way from Fredericksburg to the mountains and back to Richmond.
As French himself repeatedly describes it, he is engaged in power politics, perhaps including plans for what could be a massive land grab — all in service of a leap of logic so huge that it’s nonsense.
Virginia had better beware of his plans. And the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which owns Montpelier, should reconsider whether this hyper-ambitious nonsense is something it wants to support.
