The French program in the Department of Modern Languages & Literatures welcomes Andrew M. Davenport '12, a public historian at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Join us April 21 at 4:30 p.m. in Chalmers Library 320.
Historians have pored over the written accounts of Thomas Jefferson's last days and hours for nearly two centuries. These documents reveal how Jefferson's white relatives mourned the death of their patriarch upon his death on July 4, 1826. Their grief would soon be reflected in national mourning rituals which, in the white American popular consciousness, canonized Jefferson as the apostle of freedom. But for Jefferson's nearly two hundred enslaved African Americans, his death brought untold suffering and separation. In an attempt to rescue themselves from financial ruin, Jefferson's white relatives sold away nearly all the enslaved people.
Considering how Jefferson's death affected the hundreds of African Americans he enslaved, as well as their descendants, shifts attention away from his achievements and toward a more comprehensive understanding of the profoundly unequal, entangled Monticello community and the "free" nation they lived within, and which Americans have inherited. Although the fates of the vast majority of Jefferson's enslaved community are unknown, historians and researchers continue to search for those who were sold during the aftermath of Jefferson's death in a concerted attempt to reunite long-ago fractured Black American families and reconstruct an account of what occurred on and beyond Jefferson's Monticello.
Andrew M. Davenport is the public historian at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and director of the Getting Word African American Oral History Project. He is a Ph.D. candidate at Georgetown University where he served as a research assistant with the Georgetown Slavery Archive. Davenport has published in Lapham's Quarterly, Los Angeles Review of Books and Smithsonian Magazine. His first academic article, "Ralph Ellison and New York City, 1946-1994," appeared in "Ralph Ellison in Context" (ed. Paul Devlin, Cambridge University Press, 2021), and his second article, "Mourning at Monticello," will appear in "Mourning the Presidents" (eds. Lindsay Chervinsky and Matthew Costello, University of Virginia Press, 2023). Davenport serves on the board of directors of the American Agora Foundation (Lapham's Quarterly) and is a member of the inaugural cohort of the White House Historical Association Next-Gen Leadership Ambassadors. He earned a B.A. in English from Kenyon, an M.A. in American studies from Fairfield University and an M.A. in U.S. history from Georgetown University.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, the Department of English and the Office of the Provost.
Masks are optional.