Ancestors of Worthy Life: Plantation Slavery and Black Heritage at Mount Clare by Teresa S. Moyer (review)

In this well-written, well-organized, and concise volume, Teresa S. Moyer presents a case study examining the interpretation of black history at Mount Clare, a former plantation house turned museum located in southwest Baltimore, Maryland. Built as a home for Charles Carroll “the Barrister” in the early 1760s, Mount Clare was part of the Carroll family’s far-flung network of agricultural and industrial properties. The labor of dozens of enslaved workers fueled these enterprises. Repurposed as a Baltimore public park in 1890, Mount Clare opened as a house museum in 1917 under the direction of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America. The Dames maintained administrative control of Mount Clare until 2012. The interpretation of the past at the Mount Clare museum changed little between 1917 and 2012, with blacks playing hardly a supporting role in a story focused on the patriotism and fashionable taste of white elites. Although this omission of black lives and agency at Mount Clare will not surprise anyone familiar with plantation tours, the value of this book lies in Moyer’s unpacking of how the erasure of black lives happened at Mount Clare and her suggestions for how preservationists and public historians can undo this omission.

Moyer deftly explains erasure as a series of processes, some deliberate and some nondeliberate, that allowed the museum at Mount Clare to tell an almost exclusively white history despite its slave past and its location in a black-majority section of a black-majority city. A particular challenge in interpreting plantations is that only rarely do they still resemble the productive, labor-oriented spaces they were constructed to be; this is especially true of Mount Clare. By 1917, the erosion of Mount Clare’s productive capacity had eliminated its service buildings, gardens, and fields. As a plantation dwelling bereft of context, Mount Clare easily became a showcase for celebrating the Carrolls’ consumerism and government service. Moyer demonstrates that the Dames’ resistance to an updated interpretation of the home’s past stamped it as a white space, irrelevant to most of the men, women, and children using the public park that surrounded it.

While Moyer diplomatically concedes that societies like the Dames likely saw nothing wrong with focusing their attention on the tastes and talents of their colonial ancestors, she argues that “this is a myopic approach to the past that exemplifies structural racism” (p. 5). In fact, Moyer opens her book by arguing that “[h]istoric plantations offer rich laboratories in which to examine the ways that racism changes and stays the same through the circumstances that enable black history to be revealed or hidden” (p. 1). Although Moyer’s use of the words racism and racist can be heavy-handed at times, she is correct that even casual neglect of black lives at historic plantations is hardly benign. Rather than writing off Mount Clare and other plantation museums as marginal, Moyer makes a powerful argument for why these places matter today, showing that there are many historical sources that offer an account of Mount Clare that is inarguably richer and more engaging than a whitewashed glorification of colonial life. Of particular interest is her treatment of the end of slavery at Mount Clare—in the 1830s, not the 1860s—and the fanning out of the freed people from Mount Clare into the Baltimore community. This valuable book joins Kristin L. Gallas and James DeWolf Perry’s Interpreting Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites (Lanham, Md., 2014) and a growing number of other works calling for a more inclusive and just tackling of race at American historic sites.