Happy Dreams of Liberty
An American Family in Slavery and Freedom
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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.
In this deeply researched, movingly narrated portrait of the extended Townsend family, award-winning historian Isabela Morales reconstructs the migration of this mixed-race family across the American West and South over the second half of the nineteenth century. Searching for communities where they could exercise their newfound freedom and wealth to the fullest, members of the family homesteaded and attended college in Ohio and Kansas; fought for the Union Army in Mississippi; mined for silver in the Colorado Rockies; and, in the case of one son, returned to Alabama to purchase part of the old plantation where he had once been held as a slave. During the turbulent period between the Civil War and the rise of Jim Crow at the turn of the twentieth century, the Townsends carved out spaces where they were able to benefit from their money and mixed-race ancestry, pass down generational wealth, and realize some of their happy dreams of liberty. |
Charles Osborne's Story
Praise for Happy Dreams of Liberty
Winner - 2023 Frederick Douglass Book Prize
Winner - 2023 Tom Watson Brown Book Award
Winner - 2023 Shapiro Book Prize
Winner - 2023 William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Book Prize
Winner - 2024 James F. Sulzby Book Prize
Finalist - 2023 Harriet Tubman Prize
"Beautifully written and utterly engrossing ... a work of prodigious research."
- Shapiro Book Prize jury, The Huntington Library
"A dazzling achievement ... Morales renders the story of the Townsend family with the deft touch of a novelist, drawing the reader into a narrative that is cinematic in its execution."
- William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize jury, American Society for Legal History
"Happy Dreams of Liberty is an extraordinary family saga ... Isabela Morales brilliantly projects an intimate story onto the vast canvas of the American experience."
- Daniel J. Sharfstein, author of The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America
"Morales's engrossing family history is the product of old-fashioned archival research, cutting-edge analysis, and brilliant writing."
- James Goodman, author of Stories of Scottsboro
"A born storyteller, Morales gifts us with a captivating and multilayered history of a formerly enslaved family seeking equality. ... Morales reclaims their voices, and their stories."
- Katherine Burns, Slavery & Abolition
- Shapiro Book Prize jury, The Huntington Library
"A dazzling achievement ... Morales renders the story of the Townsend family with the deft touch of a novelist, drawing the reader into a narrative that is cinematic in its execution."
- William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize jury, American Society for Legal History
"Happy Dreams of Liberty is an extraordinary family saga ... Isabela Morales brilliantly projects an intimate story onto the vast canvas of the American experience."
- Daniel J. Sharfstein, author of The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America
"Morales's engrossing family history is the product of old-fashioned archival research, cutting-edge analysis, and brilliant writing."
- James Goodman, author of Stories of Scottsboro
"A born storyteller, Morales gifts us with a captivating and multilayered history of a formerly enslaved family seeking equality. ... Morales reclaims their voices, and their stories."
- Katherine Burns, Slavery & Abolition