budget committee starts at 10:30 a.m. eastern on c-span. a senate panel looks at innovation in the auto industry, including self-driving cars. that's live from the senate customers, science and transportation committee at 10:00 a.m. eastern here on c-span 3. the u.s. conference of mayors holds a news conference that kicks off their annual winter meeting. we'll hear from new orleans mayor mitch landrieu, who is the current president of the bipartisan group. live coverage beginning at 12:20 p.m. eastern. follow all of these events online at c-span.org or with the free c-span radio app. next on "american history tv," representatives from thomas jefferson's monticello, james monroe's my high-lands and james madison's mont pier kerpelier, talk about slavery and the challenging questions they get from the public. this was -- it's about 90 minutes.

>> good afternoon, everybody. i want to welcome everyone to this afternoon's panel. public history and public memory, talking about slavery at presidential plantations. i'm jennifer morgan, i'm a professor of history at new york university, where i work on colonial history office enslaved people. i'm very excited to be part of this afternoon's conversation. though my role here is primarily to facilitate and to learn, the presenters here have all spent their careers working in public history and have been at the front lines of important efforts to situate the presidential plantations back into the history of slavery or to situate slavery back into the history of the presidential plantations. i'm not entirely sure -- i went back and forth on how to say that. i'm not entirely sure is the right way to say it, but what i

think is the crucial thing to say is that we are considering the processes that have erased the obvious location of the enslaved in the histories of the presidencies and everyone here on this panel, and many of you in the audience, are involved in efforts that precisely do not assume that slavery is some sort of addition or add-on to the presidential histories, but rather that the two are connected. to that end, i'm really excited to hear each of this afternoon's speakers talk about the work that they are undergoing at the presidential plantations. i'm going to introduce all of them to you now in the order in which they will speak. and we have planned the presentations to allow for significant time at the end for the panelists to both engage each other and the audience to ask questions. so, first, we're going to hear -- oh, we switched it around so many times. okay. first we're going to hear from nancy stetts, who has been education programs manager at

james monroe's highland since 2014. in this role, she hires and trains new interpreters, coordinates school and group tours and manages public programming. she created a slavery at highland program and provides training to equip staff with the ability to interpret slavery at highland through primary resources and individual biographies. prior to her work there, she served as volunteer coordinator at the imperial center for the arts and sciences and tour supervisor and interpreter at monticello. she has a bs in middle grades education and an ma from appalachian state university. brandon dillard is manager of special programs at monticello. he's been with the thomas jefferson foundation since 2010. he spent most of his time in front line interpretation. he also studies cultural anthropology at the university

of virginia, as places of memory, identity and power. i also believe he's a bartender of some renowned. has a bit of a cult following, according to my sources. christian coates is director of education and visitor engagement at james madison's montpelier, where he began in 2000 as the student education coordinator. he oversees a staff of 50 interpreters and has been at the forefront of montpelier's to build and maintain relationships -- most recently he was the project director for the mere distinguish of color exhibition, which uses descendants' voices to convey the stories of their ancestors and connects the dots between 1787 and today to shine a light on slavery that still exists in the 21st century. please join me in welcoming them and we'll start with nancy. thank you.

>> all right. well, i'm really glad to be here with you all today. it's my first a.h.a. conference. but i wanted to give you just kind of a sense of where we are at highland. i had the good fortune of starting my position four years ago when our executive director was at the beginning phases of her research, which would eventually reveal a whole different house the monroes lived in and help us reinterpret the structure we thought was their house. so i've had a front row seat for that whole process. when we first started, we were ash lawn highland. now we're highland, monroe's original name, and we know that we have a presidential era guest house and a lot more archaeology to do, which is really fun. but just to give you a sense of how do we interpret slavery at highland? it is required on the guided tour that guides mention slavery both on a national context as well as individual slaves by name. we have a slavery at highland kind of drop-in station on fridays and saturdays, where you can see an interpreter in action

there. they have a table full of primary resources and guests can come and just engage as long or as short a time as they wish. we attempted to have just a formal walking tour and found that guests didn't quite have that time budgeted, so by switching to a drop-in station, we're really able to multiply our engagement, which we were really happy about. we interpret slavery on the property through the structures that are there. behind me, you can see a reconstructed slave quarter that was done in the 1980s. here is anotheragele of that with the reconstructed quarter in the center, thanked by an ridgeal 1821 overseer house on the left and an original monroe-era smokehouse on the right. or kind of a service yard area. highland was at its height a 3,500-acre plantation right next to thomas jefferson's monticello. their property still does border even today in 2018. you see a lot of green space

there. there are that line of buildings you saw earlier. i think this is also symbolic of everything we still have left to discover at highland. we're very much in the infancy of archeological efforts there. we know from monroe's letters and advertisement, there were a lot more buildings, a blacksmith shop, a grist mill, a saw quarters. slave quarters. so my boss is quick to say that's an opportunity rather than a challenge for us to find. stay tuned. we hope to be making those discoveries. in terms of the slaves who are at highland, we know from the 1810 census, they capture the s.n.a. s.n.a. s.n.a. snapshot, they're usually coming to both monticello and montpelier. a lot of times we're trying to size up and compare what were the similarities and differences? highland was on the smaller side

but monroe is funny in terms of numbers. when you look at his writing, one thing that really stood out to me is when he writes about how many slaves he has, you see a lot of approximate numbers. about 30. between 30 and 40, a sufficient number, he says. about 60 or 7 o0. soin so i think some of this is because he is an absentee owner at highland. he was living abroad or in different states in the united states, so he's relying on his overseers for that more day-to-day information. another way i think highland is kind of different or unique is that these are not inherited slaves that are living here. we see when monroe's 16, in his father's will he inherits his first slave, a negro boy raffle and my colt and saddle. for the rest of his life, he is actively buying and selling slaves, which would add very much of an uncertainty to being a slave at highland.

and one of our colleagues in the field charted among monroe's different properties how many people were there. not only does he own highland, he owns land the university of virginia and eventually built on as well as a property in loudoun county named oak hill. you see the lines there, they're back and forth between properties all the time. and so we try to give the takeaway of being a slave at highland as uncertainty. you've got the fact monroe's gone, the fact there are multiple properties and that he's always buying and selling. now, one thing we did become a lot more certain of with our 2016 announcement that we had found the foundations of the monroes original house is that the tree ring dating informed us that this white structure with the porch in front of you was actually an 1818 guest house built 19 years after monroe's original house. not the original house thought to be. and what's even better and

informed our understanding about slavery in terms of this discovery is when you look at the written record, you can see monroe mentioning when he's updating his son-in-law in 1818 that the house is almost built, he says, this is done by a carpenter i bought of judge brooks last winter for $450 and george. so now we know who built that, and it was two enslaved men. that's become a new part of our interpretation, a guest house built by peter and george. if you look at the paper records, you can identify who that carpenter was monroe mentioned, which turns out to be peter. here he is in an oakville inventory. peter mallory carpenter and then we see a george later on down in the inventory. so we can kind of piece together that monroe has brought these two men from loudoun county down to build this guest house structure for him. so one way we would really like

to and are excited about interpreting slavery at highland is through augmented reality, which will be coming soon. and we wanted to really people visually the landscape through this tour. to give you a sense, it's kind of split. part of it is centered in the year 1819, which is during monroe's presidency. since that guest house -- 1818 guest house is part of the scenery, we wanted to make sure it was a year after it was built so it made sense on the landscape. but we wanted to make sure that it was revealed how that guest house was built through the enslaved, since we knew it was through enslaved carpenters. several of the scenes set in 1819 do involve conversations between the slaves on the property. so that became a really interesting process through our team of working to create this of who do you select to be slaves and what should they be talking about? so when we look at the historic record, we wanted to choose people that would have been in that historic core, would have probably seen the guest house being built and been aware of

it, so we found that monroe had a cook named hannah, and so 1796, she's a young mother with three small boys. fast forward a little over 20 years, she's approaching 1819 at the age of 50 when the tour is set. we also selected for her to be speaking to a blacksmith named nelson because he potentially could have had a role in that guest house of blacksmithing accessories for the shutters or something. you see his name highlighted, nelson, a blacksmith. he's a young man at that point. i also wanted to point out with hannah, we recently found a document where it's an inventory of items monroe is hoping madison will buy from him and mentioning a soup spoon currently in albemarle of hannah. that to me suggests she would be a person of importance around

the property. before you press play, i'm going to give you two sneak peek previews from our augmented reality tour of two conversations between the enslaved. the first is going to be a conversation between nelson and hannah, where they'll be talking about how they remember peter and george being down here and kind of wondering what was going on with them. >> i wonder how peter and george are doing back at oak hill. when mr. monroe brought them down from loudoun county last summer to build this house, all they talked about was missing their wives. it was so hard for them to be apart and never know when and for how long they can stay in the same place. i know they're glad to be back together. >> so i wanted to really just underscore the fact that separating families would have been something that was no doubt not missed by the enslaved community, of noticing that was happening. then there is a second one i'll show you.

hannah then will go into a room and have a conversation with an enslaved spinner. we purposely chose not to give her a name just to really represent the many unnamed by their masters, slaves in american history, and the kind of irony and paradox is that monroe is one of those classic examples of a plantation in virginia where grain is the primary export. just can't keep up with the cotton revolution that is coming. in the earlier scene, you can see monroe talking with an overseer about how highland is not making the profit it should. we see hannah and the spinner about their fear that maybe monroe will sell highland. he absolutely does do this. and ironically they independent up being sold to a cotton plantation in florida. we see that fear actually does become real in what actually happened nine years later. >> you have to move to the next slide. >> okay. >> all i know is wool.

washing, carding, spinning, weaving, here the women and the men have terrible conditions in those cotton fields down south, and it's a lot rougher than here. lord, i hope mr. monroe does not sell us south. it's worry enough never knowing when he's going to wrench you out or send you to work to oak hill on one of his projects. >> hush. i hear someone coming. >> and just in case it's not obvious, when you do take the tour, you'll see the scenes on an actual background, it won't be black like that, but we chose intentionally to do illustrations instead of live actors. we thought that really allowed for more scope for the imagines, whereas when you see an actor you know you're looking at an actor, where we thought you could let your mind explore more with the illustrations. but we very much hope that you will come see us at highland this year and i'm eager to take your questions following all the

presentations. [ applause ] >> something that i omitted from my bio notes is that i also have a degree in philosophy, which i got 12 years ago. which is why i was a bartender for 20 years. i don't know how jennifer heard that i was a bartender. >> i have sources. >> i thought that joke would go around. y'all know what i'm talking about, the philosophy firm is never hiring. i found myself at monticello eight years ago now and i really have spent many of those years interpreting, talking about slavery. i was ban tending in the evenings and working as a tour guide during the day. i've talked to thousands of people about the institution of slavery and what that means, thomas jefferson, monticello, and the vast majority of those

people are museum-goers, which in america fits a very specific demographic. it's not a diverse group of people. it's middle aged affluent white people. their ideas about what slavery is and why they're visiting the historic site they're visiting is very different. i know everyone in this room has a clear understanding of what academic history means and what the difference between academic history and history is and memory and history are, and they're not the same thing. the average visitor to monticello is not thinking about that difference. it says nothing about their intelect. if you're trained in engineering, the last time you might have taken a social sois class might have been in high school. i'm sure most of y'all were good at that class, but that probably isn't the case for mathematically-minded people, right? just another class to go through. monticello is a beautiful place. by have been operating and providing tours for the public since 1923, which is a long time. the century since we have been

offering tours, the message has change changed a lot and the tour has changed. and i think that something that jen said early in the introduction here in terms of the processes that erased slavery, you know, when people do visit a presidential home, they're there for a very specific reason, often. which is about this idea of heritage. it's this idea of memory and what that means as our identity as americans. and i like to show this picture as a way to talk about thomas jefferson, because i think it really underscores the point. right? we talk about not putting historical figures up on a pedestal at our historic sites. instead of celebrating memory, we really want to talk about history as a nuanced idea. but that's the biggest pedestal i've ever seen, right? and we can get into a conversation about how we've blasted four dead white guys on the most sacred site for several american indian nations in the west, which is also something we should probably recognize, but when you're having a conversation at monticello about how great thomas jefferson was

as the guy who invented america, it's pretty hard to then move into a conversation about slavery. this is a memorial in tanzania because there isn't a national memorial to slavery in the united states of america. there are many memorials, but in terms of actually recognizing that institution as a people, we're pretty far off from that. so having conversations with folks day in and day out at monticello, it leads to a lot of very interesting conversations that are illuminating in a lot of ways. some people really understand the institution, they really want to get into the depth of the jefferson's involvement, they want to talk about the individuals who were enslaved there and what their lives were like. some people come to monticello and don't know whether they're at thomas jefferson's house or thomas edison's house. and i'm serious. they want to talk about how they wrote the constitution. sorry, christian. they haven't studied it in a long time. that's fine. most of all, people come and see this beautiful botanical garden on this beautiful landscape and it's hard to imagine that as a

living, breathing plantation where people were held in bondage by jefferson and ran off families. we have been working to talk about slavery more. we started offering slavery at monticello tours in 1993. this is the 25th commemorative year of offering those tours. we started archeological explorations specifically starting in the 1950s. it's been an ongoing process for a very long time. in the 1980s, slavery became part of the exhibitions and in the '90s, part of the interpretation. that interpretation has changed a lot. several people in this room have talked about how that interpretation has come to the for and helping us understand thomas jefferson better as a person means we have to understand the institution of slavery and the lives of people he held in bondage with who he was so entangled. the last picture i showed you was an image of mulberry row, it's the main street of the plantation.

this image was taken maybe five years ago. and you can see the beauty of the mulberry trees, but this was a vibrant street. there were many buildings up and down it. it was dynamic in jefferson's life. a lot of it changed throughout those years, but he held 607 people in bondage through the course of his life, over 400 of them at monticello. at any given time, 30 people were enslaved at a time on that plantation. the buildings primarily serve as industrial centers, a blacksmith's shop, a nailery. and one of the first restorations tack place in 2014. this is a store house for iron. just beyond it, there would have been a nail-making shop, but it was only there for a couple of years. there have been lots of conversations about what to build and how, as it changed so much over time. you can't build every building. so which buildings are going to be most representative of what life was like? we've learned a little bit about that as we go. this is the inside of a building that is a little farther up and this is interpreted as a home

for john and priscilla hemmings, two people enslaved at monticello. i'm sure the hemmings family name is something that many people in this room recognize. i'll talk more about the hemmings' as we go on. john hemmings was the master carpenter ter and his wife priscilla was the head nursemaid. they lived in a small house. not unlike what anyone living in a cabin in the early beginning, white or black, that's what it would like. lots and lots of people had an interesting reaction after building this. we could hear this with our guests and come out and say, it's not so bad. tours, guests would say my great grandfather lived in something way worse than that. and the implication there is the obvious one, which is thomas jefferson took care of his slaves, which is sometimes stated directly to you. so we had conversations about this, you know, we can't get every single visitor on tour to engage with us in a dialogue about this and there is a sign

on the wall that says in big red letters, not so bad, question mark, and it talks how how the reality of slavery has very little to do with material conditions. when your children can be stolen from you, it doesn't matter what house you live in. engaging people in that conversation is something we've worked on for years. i wear a lot of hats, but the primary role that i engage is in to help our guide work on ways to talk with visitors about these ideas about slavery and what it means for people who are really processing through the stuff, sometimes for the first time. but they'll be on the same tour with somebody who knows more about it than i will ever read and people, again, who think they're at thomas edison's house. so you have a really interesting conversation. the best ones are when everybody talks to each other and the guide gets to stand there and say, that's interesting. so the big thing that we're about to engage in, and we've been on this multiyear project of restoring the landscape of slavery to monticello, and we're

coming into the final big push. this is the south terrace wick, one of the wings off the main size of the house at monticello. it's an old picture, but it shows the way it has been discussed for many years. these are small rooms. there is a kitchen, a smokehouse, two rooms that were servants' quart, that's what jefferson called them, right? when the thomas foundation opened in 1923, when virginia was still a segregated state, it should surprise no one in this room that conversations about race were not paramount. a decision was made to build public restrooms in two of those spaces. we want to remove that, but that takes a lot of time and money. you can see some of the restoration of the site here's and this is, again, the 1940s when there is original structure there. actually that building that you see standing is the oldest standing structure on the

monticello mountain, the small building where thomas jefferson moved in 1772 with his young wife after they got married. just below it was the original slave quarter, the original kitchen, and that was the men's room for years and years. but now it's not. it's an empty space. and we are hoping to open it in june of this year. fully restored. with more of a conversation about slavery. one of the things that we found that was most surprising, that is the base of a stew stove. so when jefferson had this area remodelled, he had to backfilled, which means there was about this much dirt from the 1770s piled up on top of a base that we didn't know excited. that stove would have been used by james hemmings, who jefferson took to paris where he learned the art of french cuisine and returned to the united states as a french chef. that was a big find. we can talk about james hemmings. he had a fascinating life. he could read and white in

french and english. invited to be the chef aft the white house but declined because thomas jefferson would not ask him himself. a man who took his own life. we don't know why. but whose life really shows us what it was like for people who were enslaved to try to operate in the worlds of white and black. jefferson's original diagram for that wing. you can see here our plan for what it's going to look like when it's open. the two rooms i want to talk about the two in the center there. you see getting word is a space. in 1993, we also began an oral history project. that has interviewed over 200 descendants of people enslaved at monticello. those interviews are collected and many of them are available online. just google getting word monticello and you can hear the oral histories from the descendants of those enslaved at monticello. it's ongoing and the director is in this room. it helps us engage with a very

important and invested community about how we talk about slavery, and we are in constant communication with the descendants of the enslaved to talk about how best to work on these things. that will be an exhibit pace. with panels on the walls and probably some digital stuff so you can go in and learn. the room next door is going to be sally hemmings' room. the most sentinel change in the history of monticello was in the year 2000 when the thomas jefferson foundation said that we believe thomas jefferson was the father of sally hemmings' children. there are a lot of reasons that is the case. a whole lot of research. as the research got deeper and deeper, eventually it came to a point where it's fairly difficult to deny that thomas jefferson was the father of sally hemmings' children. note, i don't say impossible, because people still do, but most academic historians do not. and i think that one of the lines i use most often to talk about this is at this point, there is more evidence that thomas jefferson was the father of sally hemmings' children than

there is evidence that he was the father of his wife's children, which is true, okay? so we're going to have a conversation about that. we're going to have a conversation about her living in this small quarter with her children with thomas jefferson. and, of course, people now, they don't really want to argue so much about whether or not the relationship happened, they want to know what it was like. did they love each other? was it rape? did they love each other and was it rape? and so we're hoping to allow for that conversation and to provide a space where people can really think about those things and talk with each other and with us about them. we're probably not going to provide answers. we can't do that. and saying specifically that we know that it was one way or the bucket that denies sally hemmings the exact same agency she was denied in life. we don't know how she felt. so the entire plantation is a big place. and it was 5,000 acres, almost 8 square miles. today we own about half of that. and a lot of it is opened up to

the public for various reasons, but this big effort is to restore the idea of what monticello was as a plantation so that people don't come in and have this reenforcement of an idea that slavery is this idyllic past oral, bucolic thing that you see whenever hollywood portrays slavery. there is this cotton slavery of the deep south. which existed but very, very different than what early public virginia slavery looked like. in both cases, the people were not seg grated and separated from each other in the ways we've dnched in our minds through public memory. no matter what tour you take, our goal is you're going to have a conversation about slavery, what the lives were like to the people who lived there and how they were intwined with each other. we focused on agency and telling the individual stories. one of the things that nancy said was monroe's numbers were approximate. with thomas jefferson, we have the opposite, right? we have, like, thomas jefferson

counting the shuffle fulls of dirt it took to bury his best friend's body. come on, y'all. that's creepy, right? that's real specific, right? thomas jefferson is a man who was really focused on precision. so we know a lot about the people who were enslaved there and not only from his records but their own oral histories, their own regards, documents, archaeology and ongoing history that teaches us more and more about it. we want to focus on those stories. we want to tell about the lives of the people who suffered most here at monticello, but whose lives really impacted american history and helped us understand who we are as a people. i'm going to close with one last thing. everybody know what that is? this has been a very strange year to live in charlottesville, virginia. and i will say that, yes, our focus is on individual agency and, gentlemyes, we are committ telling the stories to recognize the agency of those who were denied it, but we're also

committed to understanding the legacies of slavery and helping our guests understand that as well. one of the things i hear most often from people, we didn't invent slavery in america. that's true. we didn't. slavery didn't end with the emancipation proclamation. that's also true. but slavery in america was different from slavery everywhere else in the world because of the way it was intertwined with the concept of race. that was created at the same time. you want to talk about having a difficult nuanced conversation in 36 minutes? where you have to talk about the declaration of independent, the beauty of the architecture and help your guests understand that race is a soes logical construct that has no biological basis whatsoever and our institutions today or or systemically re-enforcing hierarchies. i just did it in 30 seconds, y'all. it can be done. it can be done. but these guys don't hear it. they don't hear it and they have no idea. and, frankly, for some of them, it's not really their fault.

i would ask us this in closing, what can we do? as sites, as historians, what can we do to help challenge that? and i think that what we're doing is important. and i think that telling these stories and remembering slavery as something that is so integral to american history and understanding how that re-enforces systemic racism today, that's our channel. -- that's our challenge. hopefully we can make things like that become part of history as well. thanks. [ applause ] i've still got the video. all right. let's see. thank you.

>> quell, good afternoon, i'm anyway is christian coates, i'm the director of education at james madison's montpelier. i've been there for 17 years. the father of the constitution, architect of the bill of rights, co-author of the federalist papers. it was also home to his parents, his siblings, his grants, his beautiful bride dolly, but more importantly, for our conversation today, it was home to over six generations of enslaved african-americans that lived at montpelier during the tenure of the madison ownership, which lasted about 120 years. mo montpelier is unique today because we have the opportunity to interpret three generations

of african-american slavery. we have the reconstructed or the restored home of george gilmore, a montpelier slave who built this cabin in the lower left during the reconstruction era. we have the restored montpelier chain depot, built in 1910. an exhibit about segregation, we've restored it with the white and colored waiting rooms. we have an acting descendant community that works and advises us on our interpretation today. and throughout those centuries, it's really been the african-american community that has been the constant presence at montpelier, much more so than the madison family, right? the madison family, dolly sells the place in the 1840s, they have no kids and the madison family has never really come back in a meaningful way to montpelier. where the african-american community that lived there first in enslavement and later in semi

forms of freedom, right, are still around and still active at montpelier today. so i want to tell you a little bit about what we've done over the last 20 years. and which gets us to the big project we just opened in june. the pointer here is that what we did -- the exhibit that we opened in june would not have been possible without the 20 years that proceeded it, okay? this is really important for historians to think about. you can't just get a chunk of money and then, you know, have this big, meaningful exhibit. you have to have the -- you have to have put in your time with the community. so, in 2000, or in 1999, rebecca gilmore coleman approached us about the falling down cabin across the street from our main gate. in the 1980s when the national trust acquired montpelier, there

were over 160 structures on the property, right, and the only ones we knew much about were the montpelier main house, which, of course, had a25,000 square feet added to it by the dupont family and the temple which sits right next to it, which was also madison construction. everything else was late 19th sentry or 20th century buildings. we didn't much care about them or have the funds to take care of them. this was just one more of those 158 buildings that was falling down on the property. rebecca says, that was my great grandfather's home. he was a montpelier slave and built that during reconstruction and i think you should restore it. and we said, we agree with you, that's really cool. we did the research and figured it out. that restoration took five years. that little cabin took five years because we had no money to do it. it was start and stop and start and stop. right after this opened, we started the reconstruction of the main house of montpelier. that took five years, but we had

$25 million to do it, right? and that really started this engagement with the descendant community. her family came out and participated in the archaeology under the cabin and she opened doors for us into the orange county community. so we were meeting all of these descendants who were coming to us with their stories and who wanted to be involved at montpelier. and we had descendant reunions in 2001 and 2007. i don't have pictures of those because nobody had digital cameras back then. but in 2009, we had met the family of paul jennings. paul was madison's enslaved man servant. and paul was the guy who saved that picture of george washington when the british came with the torch -- [ inaudible ] to the white house. they met obama and got their photograph taken in front of the painting, which is really pretty cool. i did not get invited on that trip, unfortunately.

we also started public archaeology programs and we had those going for awhile, but we really started making a concerted effort to bring the descendant community into those programs. you have them digging on the sites where their ancestors lived. pulling objects out of the ground. the last people who touched those objects were their ancestors, right? that's really cool, meaningful stuff. in 2014, the picture of everybody on the porch was an advisory meeting i put together to ask the descendant community what else we should be doing in the current interpretation of montpelier. what else would they like to see? we were kind of at a turning point where we had completed a few projects and didn't know where we were going next and wanted their opinions on it. the big thing that came out of that meeting was you have to restore the south yard, the buildings that we're going to see off the side of the mansion where the slaves who worked in the mansion for the madisons lived, kitchen, smokehouses and

daily quarters and we had done archaeology in those spaces between 2008 and 2011, these sort of exploratory excavations because we didn't have the money to do complete excavations, and our director of archaeology, matt reeves, said let's frame out the structures. let's put these ghosted timber frame structures and i said, matt, that's a dumb idea. these are going to look like jungle gyms and the kids are going to climb all over them. that's okay. that's exactly what happened. he said some district attornono see these and why didn't you finish these? we need the money to do the archaeology and build the cabins the way they should be. i said it's never going to happen. lo and behold, david rubenstein came through with a $10 million gift to do just that. i got to stand on the terrace of the mansion looking down at the south yard explaining matt's idea to him. i left out the part about giving

us money to do it, but it must have -- it must have been a good idea. so we took down all of those six structures that we had built and we started doing the archaeology. as we did the archaeology, it sort of moved slowly, right, so as we did archaeology and restored buildings, while these buildings were being restored, archaeology is being done on the smaller buildings in the middle and then on and on. right now, four buildings have been restored and two left to go but the archaeology was done. his gift was to finish the archaeology, restore the six structures and then refurnish all the spaces in the mansion that had yet to be refurnished, okay? that included about a third of the rooms above stairs and the entire cellar level of the mansion. and then the six new buildings in the south yard. and my job was to furnish those cellar spaces and the new six buildings in the south yard. and what we decided pretty

immediately was that we could do a better job of telling more meaningful stories by not refurnishing those spaces in the traditional way, right? we knew we didn't want to have that exhibit about slavery that you see at so many plantations, that revolves around hard labor and poor living conditions, right? we wanted to tell more meaningful stories that pushed things into the present tense. and so we came up with this idea, the exhibit title is "the mere distinction of colour." madison does not talk in sound bites like other people. but he -- at the constitutional convention, he said, we have seen the mere distinction of colour made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man. okay? and if you take the constitutional convention away

and the date away and james madison's name away, you could really stop and ask yourself, when was that quotation spoken, right? we have seen the mere distinction of colour made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man. through our work with the descendant community, sorry, we knew that we needed to treat the stories of the enslaved with humanity and dignity. we wanted to attack it from a point of empathy, right? we wanted -- we wanted our visitors to think about shared universal experiences rather than hard work, right? none of us will ever know what it feels like to plow a 40-acre field, right? none of you are going to stand behind a mule and do that.

unless you're really strange. but you know what it's like to be a mother. or a father or a child or a grandchild. you can imagine what it would be like to have those people taken away from you, right? and those are more -- those are concepts and characterizations and experiences that people can relate to. okay? and so we took photographs from the library of congress and we sort of ghosted them on these glass panels and we used projections of shadows on the walls that faded in and out that lent some idea of these universal experiences that we wanted people to think about. there are little text blurbs with them that don't try to share somebody's biography, right? these aren't historical individuals that we're talking about. in particular, right? but, rather, again, those universal concepts that people could relate to. so the woman in the middle who

is nursing a child in the photo, i don't know if you can see it, it says i was a wife, i was separated, i was raped, i was afraid, i was hopeful, i was a survivor, i was property, righter and and all seven of these glass panels end with that phrase, "i was property." you'll also notice that there is no punctuation, which was a really long conversation. [ laughter ] >> that's how museum people are, right? so these -- these images share these emotions, right? the shadows share the emotions. and we also have these listening stations spread out through the exhibit where you can sit down and listen to the voices of the descendants. because we had this great community, we thought why should we tell the stories in an academic or institutional voice that will feel cold and removed, right? why don't we let the descendants tell the stories of their

ancestors. so we have this beautiful black and white photography that scrolls behind the words of people talking. i'll just play you a short clip of that. >> i think with montpelier, we're trying to look at addressing the people who were here and providing as much dignity to their spirits and to their history as we can. it won't be fully restored, we know that, but this is a step in the right direction to tell their story. their story needs to be told. they weren't incredible. they were someone's great, great grandmother, great, great grandfather, it's etched in our dna. we are them and they are us. >> she does talk in sound bites. she is a gold mine. and as we recorded these people, right, these were not -- we're not were narrations. we asked people open-ended questions and they responded to them and we edited together their answers to make these

recordings, which are also pretty cool. we stencilled the 281 names of the known people enslaved at montpelier on the wall. right, this is going along with the same idea of the vietnam war memorial. why is that so moving? it's because when you start thinking about the enslaved as individuals, right, it's much more meaningful than it is when you're looking at them as a monolith, right? this happened to one person at a time, right? every person is somebody's child or somebody's parent. it makes a real difference. we also used photographs of our living descendant community in the south yard structures in the living quarters where their ancestors live so you walk into this quarter and see a full size picture of the descendants here. there are others. you see a text blurb about the historic family that may have lived there and you press the button and hear rebecca talking about the artifact in the little glass case, which in this case

is a piece of pencil and writing slate. she talks about how important literacy was to this enslaved family who lived there but also to her ancestors, right? her great grandfather was written -- was recorded in the freedom's bureau records of one of only six african-americans in orange county who were literate, okay? paul jennings' descendants hugh and mary alexander and the type of paul jennings that they have in their family. joe mcgill, founder of the slave dwelling project, is part of our community as well. next to zwroe is this mosaic made of up of fragments of excavated brick shards. that were excavated out of living quarters. there underneath is the kid is a full size brick that was excavated that has the fingerprint in it of an enslaved child who would have made that brick. part of this, we also decided to tell the national story about

slavery, right? how does montpelier fit into the nation's history? how does the plantation fit into the economic world? how does slavery fund these states? how does the wealth that slavery created ascend to the presidency or translate into the presidency? how does that wealth and the people who are spouting the ideology around slavery sort of get the stage in the 18th century? how do these ideas reach the national stage and how do those ideas eventually translate into the constitution that madison created, right? our guy is the guy who created the constitution. and it protects slavery in a half dozen different ways. we needed to call that out. we needed to acknowledge that. and then we needed to acknowledge that slavery, right, even though it ends in 1865, the story doesn't end in 1865, right? it doesn't end when madison dies, it doesn't end when dolly

sells everybody, it doesn't end with abe lincoln, but this legacy of slavery continues today. and brandon was saying, you know, what are we going to do about what happened in charlottesville this summer? and i think this kind of tells you a little bit about what we're trying to do. we did this before charlottesville happened. ♪ >> i think our appropriate as americans is that we actually hate history. so we can't really connect the dots. what we love is nosalgia. we love to remember things exactly the way they didn't happen. and history itself is an indictment, often. and people, we hate to be indicted. ♪ >> don't shoot him!

don't shoot him. he has no weapon. he has no weapon. [ gunshots ] >> four black kids inside of one car pumping one hip-hop album too loud through one residential area will guarantee one unequal pull over by two racist cops. >> and when you're living constantly with the fear of going to jail because you fit the description or because you can't afford a lawyer, if i'm walking down the street going to pick up milk, i can be accosted, you know? that fills one with an intense amount of dread. >> the negro is still languished in the corners of american society and finds himself in exile in his own land. >> don't you put none of our

boys in jail and charge them with treason because you deserved to be charged with treason. because anytime you force people to live that way, you deserved to be charged with treason. you are guilty, not us. >> there are days when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it. >> amazing grace. amazing grace. my god continue to shed his grace on the united states of america. >> okay. i'd show you more but then it goes into the ray charles music and we had to pay a lot of money for that and not allowed to show it on the screen. so that video piece is about the

legacies of slavery, and i showed you the middle, right? it starts with madison and the constitution and it goes through the 19th century and how slavery was so important to the economy of the nation. after this bit, it goes into a piece with rebecca gilmore coleman who talks about being three generations removed from slavery at montpelier and what that means to her. and she gets into conversations about rape in that monologue that she has. so, anyway, we use that as the sort of centerpiece of our opening in june of 2017, where there were over 900 mostly african-american faces under the tent in the backyard, right? and i am pretty sure i can't guarantee you that that's the time there were ever that many african-american people at mo montpelier in its history. i think it speaks volumes about how billing relationships and doing, you know, your due

diligence really pays off in the end. >> thank you. [ applause ] >> close the whole thing. >> all right. well, thank you very much for these presentations. i guess i wanted to start by asking if listening to each other you have thoughts or responses or questions for each other and -- so that we can start there. we have a little more than a half an hour for conversation. so let's start there. and then i have some questions. then we'll open it up to the audience. so you all get ready. but are there things that occur to you about the ways in which the projects -- one of the things that occurred to me is that the project of interpreting must be very different based on the kind of support and the

structure of each house and each site in ways that aren't visible to me. but as i'm listening to them, i'm wondering if there are ways that you think your jobs are different because you're at montpelier or you're at another site? >> well, i'll start off. actually, i think, you know, i think we all benefit from the fact that we have really strong and courageous leadership at our sites that have not only allowed us to go to these places but pushed us to go to these places, right? and who haven't backed down when we've been, you know, edgy or pushes. >> mmm-hmm. mmm-hmm. >> i would say the same. just an ongoing effort, you know from the board to the donors to the leadership to, you know, everybody that is at monticello, it's been this constant push to try to talk more and more. and, further, the relationship we have with each other. so many of us are in this very small area in central virginia, that, you know, we know each

other pretty well. we didn't really have much of a preliminarily conversation before this panel took place. it was like, okay, let's do that, okay? >> can you pushed mikes closer? >> somehow that? better? ok ok okay. captioning performed by vitac

american history tv on c-span 3, this week in primetime, wednesday night at 8:00 p.m. historians attending the american historical association conference look at how american veterans are being honored, remembered, since world war ii. thursday night at 7:00 p.m. eastern live in the newseum in washington, d.c. friday night, 8:00 p.m. ed in a green medford on abraham lincoln's friends and enemies. coming up on american

history tv, historians and university leaders discuss free speech on college campuses. part of the conversation includes how social media has changed the nature of discourse in university settings, and the role that political protests have played.