| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Murder at Montpelier: Igbo Africans in Virginia. By Douglas B. Chambers. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. x, 325 pp. $45.00, ISBN 1-57806-706-5.)
Murder at Montpelier is not the book one expects from its provocative title. Instead of a thriller about killing and mayhem on the fourth president's estate, Douglas B. Chambers's book is an insightful study about Igbo-African slaves and their descendants who toiled on this Piedmont plantation from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Chambers thoughtfully explores how generations of slaves developed communities and remembered their past.	1
First, the murder: in summer 1732, Ambrose Madison (the future president's grandfather) died following a short illness. Three slaves were charged with poisoning the planter, two of whom Madison possessed—a man and woman named Turk and Dido. The third bondsman, owned by someone else, was named Pompey. After a trial before county magistrates, Pompey was hanged, while Turk and Dido received whippings. Although cryptic court records are the only surviving evidence, Chambers argues that this crime constituted "the charter event at Montpelier" (p. 5). He assumes the slaves purposely killed Madison, yet he believes that "a more interesting question is what this event meant in the longue durée" (p. 6). Thus he explores how the poisoning came about and how it was later remembered. While I am not convinced that Ambrose Madison's death formed the community's central memory, the book is a fascinating generational history.	. . .

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