| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Douglas B. Chambers. Murder at Montpelier: Igbo Africans in Virginia. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 2005. Pp. x, 325. $45.00.

On August 24, 1732, after a month-long illness, Ambrose Madison died at Mount Pleasant, his plantation seat in Virginia's piedmont backcountry. Within a week three African slaves were accused of poisoning him. Two of them, a woman named Dido and a man named Turk, belonged to Madison; the third, a man named Pompey, belonged to a fellow planter nearby. On September 6, a jury of Madison's peers heard the evidence, found the defendants guilty, and sentenced Pompey to execution and Turk and Dido to twenty-nine lashes each. In Douglas B. Chambers's transatlantic analysis, these Africans were part of the "charter generation" of what came to be called Montpelier, home of Ambrose's grandson, President James Madison, and the murder was its "charter event." The book's title suggests a sensationalism—and a narrative—that Chambers cannot deliver, due to the exceedingly fragmentary sources about the event and about that first generation of Madison slaves.

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