Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom by R. Isabela Morales

Abstract

Exploring the lives of multiple members of a single unusual family, this book illuminates new and intriguing facets of the histories of slavery, freedom, and racism in the nineteenth-century United States. When the wealthy Samuel Townsend died in Alabama in the mid-1850s, his will named nine of his own enslaved children by at least seven different mothers, along with two enslaved children of a brother. Altogether, the will emancipated forty-five people, including the children, their mothers, and other children the women had borne with enslaved fathers. All, as required by state law, departed Alabama. Much of the book traces their journeys to Ohio, Kansas, Colorado Territory, and even back to Alabama.This monograph’s structure and evocative writing turn the story into something of a mystery: What would be the ultimate fates of the various protagonists? (The only previous study of this family is a 1940 master’s thesis whose author concluded that the manumitted Townsends would have been better off remaining enslaved.)Some of the Townsends held themselves apart from other free people of African descent, even from abolitionists and fugitive slaves, sharing classism and colorism. Others became leaders of local Black communities, yet spouted racism against Chinese immigrants or Native Americans. Some joined the Union Army, some farmed, some purchased property. They worked as domestic servants, clerks, teachers, barbers, teamsters, waiters, and janitors. One drank and gambled; others imbibed ideologies of racial uplift. Some of the women married white men. One man became a lawyer and civil rights leader (white people burned down his Kansas home). One returned to Alabama to establish a school for Black children and hold local office. It took more than thirty years to settle the estate, a process tainted by the racism of the white executor, and none of the Black Townsends ever inherited the full amount stipulated in Samuel’s will.Morales shares her research methods with readers, highlighting both the centrality and the challenges of the executor’s voluminous archive. Notably, letters from the manumitted Townsends prove to be “stiff, terse, and designed to flatter the attorney’s ego,” devoid of personal reflections, and “crafted for the eyes of a powerful white southerner” (11). An in-depth “Note on Methodology” offers further and welcome detail. To give just one example: With the women’s voices particularly elusive, Morales plied a slave inventory to “reverse-engineer a timeline of Samuel Townsend’s sexual history,” using his children’s ages and birth years to determine the points at which each of their mothers became the target of his exploitation (192).The book’s endnotes, too, are a goldmine, not only for their impressive compendium of secondary sources, but also for the array of primary sources on display, including letters, depositions, deeds, inventories, and census records, of course, but also farming records, school yearbooks, local newspapers, travel accounts, city directories, maps, photographs, and the preserved voices of other enslaved people in parallel circumstances. Rather than simply imparting information, Morales brings her sources to life, describing “calculations scratched on the backs of envelopes,” a man’s height “jotted on an enlistment form,” or a Reconstruction-era pardon “with a purple ribbon and stamped in red with the Great Seal of the United States” (11, 121, 150).Morales does not surmise why Samuel Townsend wished to “provide for the children he had produced through violence” (40). But the book’s more important questions, which center the Black actors, concern the decisions and strategies of the different family members, each one ultimately wishing to live freely and equally in a post–Civil War nation of Jim Crow discrimination. These actors are, Morales writes, “important as more than vehicles for historical argumentation,” for they were “real people with hopes and fears, dreams and ambitions, and deep inner lives” (195). In this way, the story itself becomes the book’s argument.