The Frederick Douglass Prize is awarded by Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center and recognizes the best book written on slavery, resistance, or abolition in the last year. From the press release:

Simon Newman's book is Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London, and is available from the University of Chicago Press. Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South, by Dr. David Silkenat of the University of Edinburgh, was also shortlisted for this year's prize, and is available from Oxford University Press.

Not surprisingly, the prize committee was particularly interested in S. D. Cabaniss, a Huntsville attorney who features prominently in the book. When the fabulously wealthy cotton planter Samuel Townsend left a will naming his enslaved children his rightful heirs, Cabaniss was the one responsible for making sure his client's wishes were carried out. After four years of litigation, he did just that, and in 1860 the Townsends went free.

Personally, I have no love for the long-dead lawyer, but I have to admit I couldn't have written this book without him. Cabaniss was a meticulous record-keeper, and he saved everything: the S. D. Cabaniss Papers at the University of Alabama special collections library contain thousands of documents related to the Townsend family, including two boxes of letters written by the formerly enslaved Townsends themselves.

In life, Cabaniss often silenced the Townsends and limited their choices. In death, the archive he left preserved their voices, allowing historians like me to share them with the world. In the end, I think the Townsends got the last word.

Because The Princeton & Slavery Project has always been a grassroots, independent faculty project rather than a formal study commissioned by Princeton's president or Board of Trustees, we don't have the power to make policy changes or recommendations to the university. We can and do, however, share our research openly so that individuals and organizations can apply it to their own activism and calls for change (like the NJ Reparations Council, where I presented some of our findings this fall). Our goal has always been to ensure that the much-needed conversations about race and reparations on campus and in our community be as informed as possible.

In honor of The Princeton & Slavery Project's anniversary, I hope you'll take a look at our website today and learn something new. Here's to another 10 years!

Alexander Jeffries was a cotton planter in antebellum Alabama, the owner of a large estate and dozens of enslaved people to work it. When he died in 1838, he left his land and property to his second wife and their two children, naming his widow -- born Elizabeth Evans Dale -- as the executrix of his estate. Elizabeth is known to history as Mrs. Gibbons Flanagan Jeffries High Brown Routt. By the age of 56, she'd been wed and widowed six times -- a love life that's made her the subject of whispers and rumors of murder since 1838, when Alexander Jeffries died and his son Richard accused his stepmother of poisoning him.

My next project is a biography of this "Black Widow of Hazel Green," whose life illustrates the ways white women gained power and influence in the antebellum South -- and just how easily they could lose it. Whether or not Elizabeth was a killer (and I do have some suspicions about husband #4...), the antebellum South was a brutal and violent place: a society built on the abuse and exploitation of enslaved people. These were Elizabeth and her fellow planters' true victims, and in my book I'll tell some of their stories as well. As for the "Black Widow" herself, for now I'll say not to trust everything you read online. At this point in my research I can prove that many of the historical details presented as "fact" in popular accounts of her life are plainly inaccurate. 

What I don't know yet is where she's buried.

Elizabeth Dale's body was not laid to rest in the Jeffries cemetery at Hazel Green, Alabama. By 1856, her reputation had been so thoroughly destroyed in her community that she left the state to live with her son William in Mississippi. William A. D. Jeffries's grave can be found in Memphis, Tennessee, along with his wife and two of their children. His mother, however, isn't among them. Columbia, Tennessee, where Elizabeth's parents were laid to rest, is another promising spot. Elizabeth's mother, Mary Dale, had her husband Adam's body exhumed and moved from Hazel Green to Columbia before she died -- unwilling, according to some accounts, to have him spend eternity in a place where his family was held in contempt. Elizabeth, too, moved her first husband's body to Columbia to be buried near her parents. (That man, Reverend Samuel Gibbons, was not a murder victim: they were married for 18 years before he died of yellow fever.) Yet Elizabeth doesn't seem to be buried there either.

​I haven't given up the search, but after visiting the Jeffries cemetery last fall, I suspect her burial site won't be easy to find. The graves of Alexander Jeffries and his family have been vandalized and abandoned, partly because of their association with the alleged murderess Elizabeth Dale. Perhaps there's a holly tree in Tennessee or Mississippi slowly sinking roots through her grave, too.

North of Huntsville, Alabama, in the tiny community of Hazel Green, a low stone wall marks the gravesite of two brothers: Samuel and Edmund Townsend. Located directly adjacent to a cornfield, the green, grassy cemetery sits on land the Townsend brothers once owned. Samuel and Edmund were wealthy white cotton planters of the antebellum era, multi-millionaires by today's standards, with thousands of acres of farmland, herds of hogs and cattle, stands of beehives for honey, and a big house shaded by fruiting pecan trees. They were the aristocrats of the pre-Civil War South, and their lifestyle was only possible because they kept hundreds of enslaved people in bondage on their vast plantations.