The multiple award-winning family saga and winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize

Happy Dreams of Liberty
​An American Family in Slavery and Freedom


​Also available from:​

Oxford University Press
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When Samuel Townsend died at his home in Madison County, Alabama, in November 1856, the fifty-two-year-old white planter left behind hundreds of enslaved people, thousands of acres of rich cotton land, and a net worth of approximately $200,000. In life, Samuel had done little to distinguish himself from other members of the South's elite slaveholding class. But he made a name for himself in death by leaving almost the entirety of his fortune to his five sons, four daughters, and two nieces: all of them his slaves.

About the Author

​R. Isabela Morales is an award-winning author and historian. Her first book, Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom, was awarded the 2023 Frederick Douglass Book Prize from Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center, the 2023 Tom Watson Brown Book Award from the Society of Civil War Historians, the 2023 Shapiro Book Prize from the Huntington Library, the 2023 William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Book Prize from the American Society for Legal History, and the 2024 James F. Sulzby Book Award from the Alabama Historical Association. She is the Education and Exhibit Manager at the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum, Central New Jersey's first dedicated Black history museum, and the founding editor of Princeton University's expansive public history initiative, The Princeton & Slavery Project. 

Dr. Morales received her Ph.D. in history from Princeton University in 2019. She completed an M.A. in history from Princeton in 2014 and a B.A. in history and American Studies from The University of Alabama in 2012, where she first began the research that would become Happy Dreams of Liberty. She is currently working on her second book.
Curriculum Vitae