Murder at Montpelier : Igbo Africans in Virginia / Douglas B. Chambers.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Chambers, Douglas B. (Douglas Brent)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Madison, James, 1751-1836.

Madison, Ambrose, approximately 1696-1732.

Enslaved persons--Virginia--Orange County--History--18th century.

Enslaved persons.

Igbo (African people)--Cultural assimilation--Virginia--Orange County--History--18th century.

Igbo (African people).

Plantation life--Virginia--Orange County--History--18th century.

Plantation life.

Culture conflict--Virginia--History--18th century.

Culture conflict.

Families.

Murder.

History.

Race relations.

Igbo (African people)--Cultural assimilation.

Virginia--Race relations.

Virginia.

Montpelier (Va. : Estate)--History.

Montpelier (Va. : Estate).

Madison, Ambrose, approximately 1696-1732--Death and burial.

Madison, Ambrose.

Murder--Virginia--Orange County--History--18th century.

Madison, James, 1751-1836--Family.

Madison, James.

Orange County (Va.)--Biography.

Orange County (Va.).

Virginia--Orange County.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

x, 325 pages : maps ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2005]

Summary:

In 1732 Ambrose Madison, grandfather of the future president, languished for weeks in a sickbed then died. The death, soon after his arrival on the plantation, bore hallmarks of what planters assumed to be traditional African medicine. African slaves were suspected of poisoning their master.

For Montpelier, his estate, and for Virginia, this was a watershed moment. Murder at Montpelier: Igbo Africans in Virginia explores the consequences of Madison's death and the ways in which this event shaped both white slaveholding society and the surrounding slave culture.

At Montpelier, now owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and open to the public, Igbo slaves under the directions of white overseers had been felling trees, clearing land, and planting tobacco and other crops for five years before Madison arrived. This deadly initial encounter between American colonial master and African slave community irrevocably changed both whites and blacks.

This book explores the many broader meanings of this suspected murder and its aftermath. It weaves together a series of transformations that followed, such as the negotiation of master-slave relations, the transformation of Igbo culture in the New World, and the social memory of a particular slave community. For the first time, the book presents the larger history of the slave community at James Madison's Montpelier-over the five generations from the 1720s through the 1850s and beyond. Murder at Montpelier revises many assumptions about how Africans survived enslavement, the middle passage, and grueling labor as chattel in North America. The importance of Igbo among the colonial slave population makes this work a controversial reappraisal of how Africans made themselves "African Americans" in Virginia.

Contents:

Part 1 Igbo Africans

Chapter 1 Atlantic Africans and the Charter Event of Montpelier 3

Chapter 2 Out of Calabar: The Igbo Hinterland 22

Chapter 3 Village-Level Society in "Eboan Africa" 38

Chapter 4 The Significance of Poison 67

Part 2 In Virginia

Chapter 5 The Seating of Mt. Pleasant and the Development of a Regional Community 75

Chapter 6 The Madison's Slave Community: The Charter Generation 96

Chapter 7 A Montpelier Community of Slaves: The Creolizing Generation 112

Chapter 8 The Creole Generations: Peak and Decline 128

Chapter 9 A Long Memory 143

Chapter 10 Historical Creolization in Virginia 159

Conclusion: A Thread of Evidence 188

A New Virginia Slave Trade Statistics, 1676-1775 193

B Madison Family Slave Population, 1720-1850 198

C Census of Madison Family Slaves, 1732-1868 209

D Selected Orange County Tithables, 1738-1782 232

E Dispersal of Madison Family Slaves, 1770s-1850s 240

F Account of Montpelier Plantation, ca. 1795 245.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 295-317) and index.

ISBN:

1578067065

OCLC:

58392553