James Monroe’s Home Gets Mellon Mega-Bucks to Spew Slavery Narratives
By Claudia Henneberry
June 2026
President James Monroe’s Highland home website reeks of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s nuanced verbiage and The 1619 Project’s provocative political narratives in its “Highland and Slavery webpage.”
In 2023, the Mellon Foundation joined the Alice Walton Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and Pilot Philanthropy in a “Leadership in Art Museums” initiative, committing over “$11M in funding to museums to increase racial equity in [museum] leadership roles...”
As a part of this effort, James Monroe’s Highland got a $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation “for inclusive research, teaching, and community engagement around the legacies of slavery and racism.”
With that million, Mellon funded a postdoctoral research fellow, Mariaelena DiBenigno, Ph.D., who said 2020 marked a “long overdue … racial and social reckoning” at museums that have long been seen as “preservers of white supremacist versions of the past.”
Perhaps this invasion by Mellon Foundation grant money tainted the information on Highland’s website?
In its insistence that “slavery was ingrained in the fabric of the early United States,” the writers for President James Monroe’s Highland site want readers to think that slavery was widespread and our raison d'être. The real truth is that “the British colonies in North America were, in fact, some of the least dependent on slave labor in the New World.”
The 1619 Project asserts the same – “slavery and ‘the anti-black racism it required’ shaped "nearly everything" in American life, from its economy to its slang to "the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day."
Au contraire, says Dr. Mary Grabar, author of Debunking The 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America, who informs us that in the antebellum period, six percent of white Southerners owned slaves and about two percent of free blacks did also (10,000). This information appears to be missing in Highland’s excerpts on slavery.
The “Highland and Slavery” writers claim that “the perspectives of enslaved men and women are as crucial as those of presidents to understanding this nation.” They further claim that institution of slavery and the slaves’ knowledge of agriculture “enabled the economic development of the new nation.”
Putting the enslaved on equal footing with the Founders is preposterous. Brenda Hafera, of The Heritage Foundation, contends that our Founders’ legacies are being distorted in their own homes: “the founders’ legacies are effectively being erased or distorted…. [S]o little time is being devoted to what these great men did and what unites us as Americans. These ideas are really fundamental to our character. So learning about these things or not learning about them is incredibly important. And the folks who are sidelining the ideas of the Declaration and the importance of the Constitution, are actually undermining our unity as Americans.”
Highland and Slavery calls Monroe a hypocrite: “[James] Monroe represents an inherent contradiction, keeping dozens of individuals enslaved while calling for the abolition of slavery.” The truth is that the Founders despised the institution and designed a system of government that would eventually extinguish its existence.
For almost 20 years, both Presidents Madison and Monroe worked closely with Congress to pass laws to end the African slave trade. This fact has been omitted by the writers for the Highland site.
Eventually, under President Monroe’s staunch leadership, Congress passed an act which defined the African Slave trade as “piracy” and declared it punishable by death. Finally, America had taken a truly strong stance against the African slave trade.
The law was made permanent in 1823, and President Monroe “instructed his ministers to advocate for such classification throughout all of Europe.” For the first time, the United States had taken a strong and unequivocal moral stance against the African slave trade. Ironically, there is no mention of Monroe’s leadership in the effort to put an end to the slave trade on Highland and Slavery.
“Although Monroe personally believed slavery was wrong, he insisted that any attempt to promote emancipation could cause further problems. He saw slavery as a fixture of southern culture and worried that attempts to abolish it could result in racial warfare.”
Highland and Slavery proposes that Monroe “advocated and actively worked for the resettlement of newly freed Blacks in Africa.” In actuality, Monroe did not prioritize the resettlement movement. He was primarily focused on “growing the economy through land purchases, transportation reform, and avoidance of foreign conflicts.”
Resettlement of blacks, however, wasn’t such a far-fetched idea in 19th century America. It was supported by both abolitionists and enslavers. “Many Black abolitionists supported the idea of colonization, including Martin Delany, Henry Highland Garnet, and Frederick Douglass’s sons, Lewis and Charles Douglass.”
“Enslaved labor enabled the economic development of the new nation,” says the Highland website. The 1619 Project asserts the very same absurd claim which couldn’t be further from the truth. One of the many historians who have debunked the Project, Dr. Mary Grabar, explains in an interview at minute 59, “Slavery did not build the wealth of the country.” Slavery actually held back the South economically. It was keeping wages down for poor whites. The South did not have the transportation infrastructure so it didn’t attract industry, etc. No slave society has prospered (continuing from minute 59).
Dr. James Oakes, distinguished Professor of American Studies (expert on Emancipation), states, “Slavery made the slaveholders rich. But it made the South poor. And it didn’t make the North rich. The wealth of the North was based on the emerging, capitalist internal market that allowed the North to win the Civil War…. [T]he legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth. The slave societies of the New World were comparatively impoverished. To say things like, the entire wealth of ‘the white world’ is based on slavery seems to me to ignore the enormous levels of poverty among whites as well as blacks.”
One of the more egregious statements on Highland and Slavery is “The legacy of slavery is continually present in our communities today in systemic inequalities.” This disputed assertion is likewise one of the foremost declarations forced on readers by The 1619 Project, which Dr. Gordon Wood, expert on the American Revolution and early American history, contradicts. The Project ignores how the Revolution “unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world" and made the Declaration of Independence's principle of equality "the most powerful statement ever made in our history"—not a myth or hollow cover for white supremacy.
It is clear that the Highland site, like The 1619 Project, ignored the abolition movements. And on the subject of ‘systemic inequalities’, Dr. Allen Guelzo, foremost Civil War historian, concludes, “It is the bitterest of ironies that the 1619 Project dispenses this malediction from the chair of ultimate cultural privilege in America, because in no human society has an enslaved people suddenly found itself vaulted into positions of such privilege, and with the consent—even the approbation—of those who were once the enslavers.”
Another similarity between Highland and Slavery and its benefactor, the Mellon Foundation, is the contrived concept of “multivocality”. Mellon is all about “multivocality,“ and that same language can be found on Highland and Slavery: “At Highland we strive to represent a multivocal history, one in which many voices combine to tell one set of stories.” (emphasis in the original)
Evidence of both the Mellon Foundation’s and The 1619 Project’s influence is obvious at President James Monroe’s Highland, forcing the emphasis to be on disparaging President Monroe and the United States, not on James Monroe’s efforts to stop the African Slave Trade, expand our nation’s horizons and keep government limited.
By Claudia Henneberry
June 2026
President James Monroe’s Highland home website reeks of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s nuanced verbiage and The 1619 Project’s provocative political narratives in its “Highland and Slavery webpage.”
In 2023, the Mellon Foundation joined the Alice Walton Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and Pilot Philanthropy in a “Leadership in Art Museums” initiative, committing over “$11M in funding to museums to increase racial equity in [museum] leadership roles...”
As a part of this effort, James Monroe’s Highland got a $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation “for inclusive research, teaching, and community engagement around the legacies of slavery and racism.”
With that million, Mellon funded a postdoctoral research fellow, Mariaelena DiBenigno, Ph.D., who said 2020 marked a “long overdue … racial and social reckoning” at museums that have long been seen as “preservers of white supremacist versions of the past.”
Perhaps this invasion by Mellon Foundation grant money tainted the information on Highland’s website?
In its insistence that “slavery was ingrained in the fabric of the early United States,” the writers for President James Monroe’s Highland site want readers to think that slavery was widespread and our raison d'être. The real truth is that “the British colonies in North America were, in fact, some of the least dependent on slave labor in the New World.”
The 1619 Project asserts the same – “slavery and ‘the anti-black racism it required’ shaped "nearly everything" in American life, from its economy to its slang to "the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day."
Au contraire, says Dr. Mary Grabar, author of Debunking The 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America, who informs us that in the antebellum period, six percent of white Southerners owned slaves and about two percent of free blacks did also (10,000). This information appears to be missing in Highland’s excerpts on slavery.
The “Highland and Slavery” writers claim that “the perspectives of enslaved men and women are as crucial as those of presidents to understanding this nation.” They further claim that institution of slavery and the slaves’ knowledge of agriculture “enabled the economic development of the new nation.”
Putting the enslaved on equal footing with the Founders is preposterous. Brenda Hafera, of The Heritage Foundation, contends that our Founders’ legacies are being distorted in their own homes: “the founders’ legacies are effectively being erased or distorted…. [S]o little time is being devoted to what these great men did and what unites us as Americans. These ideas are really fundamental to our character. So learning about these things or not learning about them is incredibly important. And the folks who are sidelining the ideas of the Declaration and the importance of the Constitution, are actually undermining our unity as Americans.”
Highland and Slavery calls Monroe a hypocrite: “[James] Monroe represents an inherent contradiction, keeping dozens of individuals enslaved while calling for the abolition of slavery.” The truth is that the Founders despised the institution and designed a system of government that would eventually extinguish its existence.
For almost 20 years, both Presidents Madison and Monroe worked closely with Congress to pass laws to end the African slave trade. This fact has been omitted by the writers for the Highland site.
Eventually, under President Monroe’s staunch leadership, Congress passed an act which defined the African Slave trade as “piracy” and declared it punishable by death. Finally, America had taken a truly strong stance against the African slave trade.
The law was made permanent in 1823, and President Monroe “instructed his ministers to advocate for such classification throughout all of Europe.” For the first time, the United States had taken a strong and unequivocal moral stance against the African slave trade. Ironically, there is no mention of Monroe’s leadership in the effort to put an end to the slave trade on Highland and Slavery.
“Although Monroe personally believed slavery was wrong, he insisted that any attempt to promote emancipation could cause further problems. He saw slavery as a fixture of southern culture and worried that attempts to abolish it could result in racial warfare.”
Highland and Slavery proposes that Monroe “advocated and actively worked for the resettlement of newly freed Blacks in Africa.” In actuality, Monroe did not prioritize the resettlement movement. He was primarily focused on “growing the economy through land purchases, transportation reform, and avoidance of foreign conflicts.”
Resettlement of blacks, however, wasn’t such a far-fetched idea in 19th century America. It was supported by both abolitionists and enslavers. “Many Black abolitionists supported the idea of colonization, including Martin Delany, Henry Highland Garnet, and Frederick Douglass’s sons, Lewis and Charles Douglass.”
“Enslaved labor enabled the economic development of the new nation,” says the Highland website. The 1619 Project asserts the very same absurd claim which couldn’t be further from the truth. One of the many historians who have debunked the Project, Dr. Mary Grabar, explains in an interview at minute 59, “Slavery did not build the wealth of the country.” Slavery actually held back the South economically. It was keeping wages down for poor whites. The South did not have the transportation infrastructure so it didn’t attract industry, etc. No slave society has prospered (continuing from minute 59).
Dr. James Oakes, distinguished Professor of American Studies (expert on Emancipation), states, “Slavery made the slaveholders rich. But it made the South poor. And it didn’t make the North rich. The wealth of the North was based on the emerging, capitalist internal market that allowed the North to win the Civil War…. [T]he legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth. The slave societies of the New World were comparatively impoverished. To say things like, the entire wealth of ‘the white world’ is based on slavery seems to me to ignore the enormous levels of poverty among whites as well as blacks.”
One of the more egregious statements on Highland and Slavery is “The legacy of slavery is continually present in our communities today in systemic inequalities.” This disputed assertion is likewise one of the foremost declarations forced on readers by The 1619 Project, which Dr. Gordon Wood, expert on the American Revolution and early American history, contradicts. The Project ignores how the Revolution “unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world" and made the Declaration of Independence's principle of equality "the most powerful statement ever made in our history"—not a myth or hollow cover for white supremacy.
It is clear that the Highland site, like The 1619 Project, ignored the abolition movements. And on the subject of ‘systemic inequalities’, Dr. Allen Guelzo, foremost Civil War historian, concludes, “It is the bitterest of ironies that the 1619 Project dispenses this malediction from the chair of ultimate cultural privilege in America, because in no human society has an enslaved people suddenly found itself vaulted into positions of such privilege, and with the consent—even the approbation—of those who were once the enslavers.”
Another similarity between Highland and Slavery and its benefactor, the Mellon Foundation, is the contrived concept of “multivocality”. Mellon is all about “multivocality,“ and that same language can be found on Highland and Slavery: “At Highland we strive to represent a multivocal history, one in which many voices combine to tell one set of stories.” (emphasis in the original)
Evidence of both the Mellon Foundation’s and The 1619 Project’s influence is obvious at President James Monroe’s Highland, forcing the emphasis to be on disparaging President Monroe and the United States, not on James Monroe’s efforts to stop the African Slave Trade, expand our nation’s horizons and keep government limited.