Vol. 13 No. 2 Summer 2009
  

Montpelier’s Other Half

By Tony Reichhardt

Like many of the Founding Fathers, especially those born and raised in the South, James Madison was a walking contradiction when it came to the vexing subject of slavery. The Father of the Constitution, the man who gets chief credit for the radical document on which American rights and freedoms depend, owned other human beings as property. At the time he became President in 1809, Madison counted more than 100 slaves among his possessions.

Eight years later, having finished two terms in the White House, Madison and his wife Dolley retired to Montpelier, their family estate in Orange County, Virginia.
With panoramic views of the Blue Ridge Mountains to the west, Montpelier was, and is, one of the most beautiful properties in Virginia. And it was there that the ex-President spent the rest of his life, with a small community of enslaved African-Americans to support him.
          

Matt Reeves, Montpelier’s director of archaeology, takes seriously his obligation to interpret the lives of Montpelier’s less famous residents. “Without their labor, folks like Madison wouldn’t have been able to be politicians. Without plantation slavery, the U.S. through its early years wouldn’t have survived,” he says, explaining that slavery was a crucial component of the South’s agricultural economy, the exports from which benefited the entire country.

Relive The Past On A Drive Down Natchez Trace Parkway

By Michael Sims

We were headed south out of Nashville by the time the sun crept over the horizon. Because we were driving the Natchez Trace Parkway from south-central Tennessee to southern Mississippi, we had a carload of binoculars and maps, notebooks and cameras. Our route would later cross paths with the fabled Blues Highway—the environs of U. S. 61—so we were playing Otis Spann’s version of “The Blues Don’t Love Nobody.” I traveled with Denny Adcock, a Nashville-based photographer and former curator at the Country Music Hall of Fame, who provided background information about the Trace, as well as how the blues grew out of the troubled history of this region.

You can comfortably tour archaeological sites along the Trace in three or four days. The road roughly parallels the original Natchez Trace, which began as the ancient path of large game and the various native groups who hunted them. Bison and deer originally wore the path by following a natural ridgeline southward, establishing a route between the lush grazing of the Mississippi Delta and the salt licks of the Tennessee central basin. Humans then established trade routes along the game trails.

When the Russians Were Coming

By Paula Neely

Blue onion domes rising above Russian Orthodox churches in villages along the coast of Alaska are among the few visible reminders of Russian colonization along the Pacific Coast of North America. Russian American has largely been forgotten. “People are very aware of Russian American history in Alaska,” said Aron Crowell, Alaska Director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Arctic Studies Center, “but elsewhere, it’s a little known chapter of America’s colonial past.” During the past few decades, however, archaeologists have excavated dozens of sites in Alaska, California, Hawaii, and Russia, revealing new insights into this important period.

Russian America began in the mid-18th century, after Russian fur hunters and traders, known as the promyshlenniki, depleted the supply of ermine and sable in Siberia and went east to find more furs. When Vitus Bering, commissioned by Peter the Great, succeeded in crossing the North Pacific in 1741, he officially claimed what is now Alaska as Russian territory. The first Russian to discover the Aleutian Islands, he also found an abundance of sea otters and fur seals. The promyshlenniki wasted no time island hopping across the Aleutians to the southern coast of Alaska in the rush for pelts. Supported by wealthy moguls, these well-armed entrepreneurs established trading posts and settlements along the way, exploiting, dominating, and at times slaughtering the native people. 

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