Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War (review)

Modern conventional wisdom, in a response to an earlier historiography which suggested that white Virginians of the Revolutionary generation were collectively squeamish about their ownership of slaves, would have it that most border South planters were every bit as devoutly proslavery as their Lower South brethren. For the past several decades, scholarship on race relations in the Chesapeake has either focused on those whites who failed to manumit their bond persons or on those slaves who swung from a noose for the crime of trying to force the Founding Fathers to practice what they preached.

In this prize-winning volume, Melvin Patrick Ely challenges the more recent writings, and particularly Ira Berlin's Slaves Without Masters (1974), by calling into question the "stark portrayal" of a uniformly oppressive Southern society that so despised free blacks that whites would simply not tolerate their presence in any large number (464). Although a very large and often dense book, Israel on the Appomattox is essentially a case study, in which Ely recreates the world of Virginia's aptly named Israel Hill community of Prince Edward County. The author concedes that Berlin was after the "big picture," but he insists that what most earlier studies uncovered was an "anti–free black ideology" that did not always reflect actual behavior, and while this study focuses on Virginia, Ely hints that ultimately the difference between attitudes toward freed people in the Upper and Lower South was simply a harsher rhetoric among the latter's politicians, rather than any real distinction in black "day-to-day life" (464–65).

Ely's saga begins in 1796 with aristocratic planter Richard Randolph, scion of one of Virginia's most powerful families and a distant cousin to Thomas Jefferson. Although made infamous at a very young age after being put to trial for impregnating his sister-in-law and then allegedly murdering the infant, "Citizen" Randolph, as he styled himself, believed in the ideals of the age of revolution. Shortly after his acquittal, Randolph penned an extraordinary will, and when he died four years later at the age of twenty-six, his heirs were shocked to find that he "beg[ged his slaves'] forgiveness" for ever owning them (7). He not only freed his ninety slaves, he set them up on 400 acres of land on which to begin new lives as middle class yeomen. Over the years, the community prospered and got along reasonably well with their white neighbors. Although Israel Hill served as a haven for black culture and pride, its residents frequently mingled with whites and even attended the interracial Farmville Baptist Church.

Because legal complexities delayed the creation of Israel Hill for fourteen years, Randolph's generation disappears from Ely's pages early on, but not before the author implicitly takes Jefferson to task for failing to live up to his cousin's model of liberty. Whereas most recent scholars have held Jefferson up as sadly typical of his era, Ely depicts him as a nearly solitary voice of unreason by comparison to St. George Tucker, Robert Carter III (himself the subject of a somewhat similar new monograph), and Randolph's mentor, George Wythe. The fact remains, however, that these luminaries failed to convince most Chesapeake planters to follow their advice, and when Tucker's detailed proposal for gradual emancipation was presented to the General Assembly in 1796, it was tabled without debate. At times, one suspects that Ely, both in his introductory chapter and in his illuminating concluding pages on "Sources and Interpretation," has stacked the historiographical deck by emphasizing the studies that found the most ambiguity in Virginia race relations, rather than those that chronicled the short, unhappy lives of hanged slaves.

Israel on the Appomattox is clearly the product of a good many years' labor. Apart from a deep reading of relevant books and articles, Ely...