Exploring the lives of multiple members of a single unusual family, this book illuminates new and intriguing facets of the histories of slavery, freedom, and racism in the nineteenth-century United States. When the wealthy Samuel Townsend died in Alabama in the mid-1850s, his will named nine of his own enslaved children by at least seven different mothers, along with two enslaved children of a brother. Altogether, the will emancipated forty-five people, including the children, their mothers, and other children the women had borne with enslaved fathers. All, as required by state law, departed Alabama. Much of the book traces their journeys to Ohio, Kansas, Colorado Territory, and even back to Alabama.
This monograph’s structure and evocative writing turn the story into something of a mystery: What would be the ultimate fates of the various protagonists? (The only previous study of this family is a 1940 master’s thesis whose author concluded...