Happy Dreams of Liberty

Happy Dreams of Liberty R. Isabela Morales (bio) Editors' Note: The following essay is drawn from the acceptance speech for the Tom Watson Brown Book Award, conferred on the best book published on the Civil War era in 2022. Tad Brown, president of the Watson-Brown Foundation, awarded the prize to author and public historian R. Isabela Morales for Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom, published by Oxford University Press. Morales delivered her speech during the Southern Historical Association's annual meeting on November 10, 2023, in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Society of Civil War Historians judges and administers the book prize. In the essay, Morales discusses the subtle ways the Civil War shaped the lives of one African American family, the importance of family history to the larger field, and her challenges writing the book. Happy Dreams of Liberty is the story of the Townsends—an incredible family, in my opinion—and their equally incredible journey from slavery to freedom, from Alabama to the American West, and from the antebellum period to the rise of Jim Crow. Born into slavery, the Townsends were the children of two white cotton planter brothers, Samuel and Edmund Townsend, and seven enslaved women whom they owned on their vast Alabama plantations. By law, the children were chattel, but when Edmund and Samuel died in 1853 and 1856, each of them left wills that not only freed their children but named them their rightful heirs. These wills were a shock to their local communities and an outrage to the rules of white supremacy in their time, and Edmund's will was swiftly broken in court by jealous white relatives. Samuel's, however, survived four years of litigation, and in 1860 the Townsends were indeed freed. Their names were Wesley, Caroline, Willis, Thomas, Charles Osborne, Parthenia, Milcha, Joseph Bradford, Susanna, Elizabeth, and Virginia Townsend, and at that time they ranged in age from seven to twenty-nine years old. These eleven, along with a twelfth woman, named Elvira, were End Page 157 granted equal shares in a trust fund worth 200, 000—the equivalent of six or seven million dollars today. They weren't the only Townsends who went free, either. Samuel's will also manumitted the surviving mothers of his children as well as those women's children by enslaved partners: forty-five individuals total. That's just the start of the story. In the years and decades after their emancipation, members of the Townsend family migrated all across the country, receiving a formal education at Wilberforce University in southern Ohio; homesteading and fighting for civil rights in Kansas; mining for silver in Colorado's Rocky Mountains; and in the case of one son, even returning to Alabama to purchase a part of one of Samuel Townsend's old plantations, where he'd once been enslaved. In all of these places, the Townsends sought communities where they could build new lives as free people on a basis of equality with their neighbors—where they could pursue social and economic mobility, using their dual legacies of money and mixed-race ancestry to shape their own identities. They were pursuing the American Dream. But, as you might imagine, it wasn't easy. The title of my book, Happy Dreams of Liberty, comes from a letter by a man named David Lakin, who was hired in 1860 to take members of the Townsend family safely out of Alabama and find homes for them in the free states. Lakin was a white Southerner, and he was not sympathetic to the Townsends. Frankly, he didn't think they should have been freed at all. Writing to Samuel Townsend's lawyer, S. D. Cabaniss, the executor of the Townsend estate, Lakin said: "They have happy dreams of liberty, " but "if they could realize how much more happy they would be back on an Alabama plantation, they would certainly be sad enough. "1 In Lakin's mind and in the minds of many white people the Townsends would encounter in their lives, their hopes for a better life in freedom were contemptuous. Illusions. I wanted to follow the Townsends in their lives and travels. I wanted. . .