How We Talk About the Past: Slavery and Memory on a Presidential Plantation
Emily Bradley Greenfield is a 6th year Ph.D. candidate in U.S. History. Her dissertation – “‘Carry Me Back to Old Virginia’: Slavery, Memory, and the Making of a National Shrine” – is supported by a 2023-24 Mellon Foundation Fellowship administered by the Stanford Humanities Center.
Congratulations on your fellowship. Please share with us your research project.
My dissertation reconstructs the public history of Monticello, the Virginia plantation of President Thomas Jefferson. Since opening as a “national shrine” in 1923, the site has welcomed millions of visitors. In fact, the Monticello pilgrimage has its roots in the early nineteenth century. For two hundred years, people have been journeying to Jefferson’s “little mountain” – invited and uninvited; by carriage, train, and station wagon; on nineteenth-century travelogue tours and twentieth-century field trips. I seek to understand the magnetism of this archetypal presidential plantation, its role in shaping a larger American history of heritage tourism, and the messages and meanings it has projected to a visiting public over time. In particular, I am interested in the ways that slavery has been remembered and forgotten at Monticello and peer sites.
Jefferson’s home belonged to a memory ecosystem, one that included surrounding presidential plantations and the re-created town of Colonial Williamsburg. In the words of a 1931 brochure: “Virginia, Mother of Presidents, Welcomes You to the Cradle of Liberty. Breathe the Spirit of the Fathers – Washington – Jefferson – Madison – Monroe – and know America!” At the height of Jim Crow, a constellation of decidedly southern memorials laid claim to a national origin story. Monticello helped pave the way.
How did you get interested in this topic?
Before coming to Stanford, I worked for the foundation that stewards Monticello, developing public-facing content on the history and legacies of slavery. My office was up on the mountain – which meant that I watched, every day, as hundreds of people explored the grounds and awaited a house tour. The silent film unfolding outside my window raised all kinds of questions, pointing me toward a literature on public memory and, eventually, toward graduate school. Why are Americans drawn to places like Monticello? What kinds of stories are generated and shared on the grounds of a plantation turned national shrine? And how have those stories evolved over time?
Could you tell us a bit more about your archival sites and sources?
Monticello has been owned and operated by the same organization – the Thomas Jefferson (Memorial) Foundation – since the 1920s. Over the past century the foundation has amassed a vast archive, including 50,000+ pieces of correspondence, thousands of internal research reports, tourism materials, architectural drawings, archaeological artifacts, photographs, and oral histories. It really is a treasure trove. The collections exist primarily for the use of internal staff, informing ongoing restoration and interpretive work across the property. For a historian of memory, they present seemingly endless avenues for exploration. Indeed, one of the challenges with this project is deciding which of many untold stories to tell.
In writing a history that focuses, to a significant extent, on silence – that is as concerned with what is not said or made visible as what is – I am also challenged by the gaps inherent in an official archive. Part of my task is to assemble what historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez has called a “rebel archive,” a set of shadow sources that complicate the narrative and prioritize different voices. Stanford faculty have provided invaluable mentoring on this score. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to my advisor, Jim Campbell, for many hikes up Windy Hill spent discussing how to locate, define, and write about historical silence.
You approach Monticello as an iconic “postslavery plantation.” What do you mean by this term?
Isn’t that a wonderfully evocative phrase? I first encountered the notion of a “postslavery plantation” in a book by historian Jessica Adams called Wounds of Returning. Adams takes her readers to a series of memory sites she interprets as the cultural descendants of slave plantations, from Graceland and Willa Cather novels to Angola Prison. I deploy the term at Monticello to make an argument about the early decades of the site’s public history. Until the 1990s, slavery was not a subject discussed on tour, included in brochures, or made visible through exhibitions.
But this does not mean that slavery was absent from the visitor experience. Whether they arrived at Monticello in the Gilded Age or in the age of Jim Crow, tourists encountered a set of ideas about American identity physically rooted in a landscape of enslavement. Naming Monticello a postslavery plantation forces us to keep that reality in view.
As Michel-Rolph Trouillot, you focus on the constitutive, powerful role of silences and silencing in historical narratives. What is one significant silence in Monticello’s memorialization?
In his pathbreaking book, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Trouillot described historical narrative as a “bundle of silences.” He was reminding us that storytelling is as much about what you leave out as what you include. Think about how you might summarize your day: perhaps you mention what you ate for lunch or the highlights of an important meeting. You probably don’t detail the steps involved in preparing the meal, or the two hours of research that informed your presentation. The study of historical memory is about both sides of the equation: what is said, and what is left unsaid.
At many points in Monticello’s history, slavery has been present in the silence. On mid-twentieth-century house tours, for example, hostess’ use of the passive tense erased enslaved people from accounts of the site’s construction and care (“that piece of furniture was assembled here”; “food was transported to the dining room on a dumbwaiter”). For decades, visitors drove their vehicles along Mulberry Row, a plantation road where enslaved people had lived and worked, to arrive at a parking lot next to the house – trampling on a historic landscape of slavery. The foundation located an early gift shop in a former slave quarter and advertised it as such, a distinct but no less problematic form of erasure. In short, slavery has always been part of the public experience at a presidential plantation – even if, to return to Trouillot’s phrase, its people and plotlines were relegated to a “bundle of silences.”
How does studying “postslavery plantations” contribute to our contemporary understandings of power, race, and inequality?
For the past several years, the U.S. has been engaged in a full-scale memory reckoning, putting up statues, pulling them down, renaming buildings – the list goes on. We are witnessing a sustained movement to reinvent a commemorative landscape that is overwhelmingly male, white, and focused on war. And as recent protests have laid bare, that landscape is dominated by Lost Cause statuary, sites of memory – erected in the wake of the Civil War – that enshrine racial inequality and misrepresent the history of slavery (for excellent, up-to-date data on U.S. monuments, see this recent audit co-produced by the Monument Lab and the Mellon Foundation).
Declaring a statue problematic is the easy part. The harder task is developing a process for how we determine what comes next – a set of criteria for when we choose context over removal, for example, or what shape a new memorial should take. Monticello and its peers are uniquely positioned, in this moment of revision, to help us understand how national memory works. In the Monticello archive, I can see not just the processes by which public memory is assembled, but also how a projected narrative is received by various publics, the kind of effort it takes to change or broaden a memorial’s meaning, and the ongoing dialogue between a site of memory and contemporary politics. As a historical case study, Monticello has particular salience in a period when the future of America’s memorial landscape is up for debate.
