Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War

Ely's revelations about Free African Americans in Virginia living, working, interacting, and marrying with white rural Virginians is a fascinating, detailed, and insightful revelation. Not so much that it happened, but that it was kept such a secret from the public, and in fact the subject of much dishonest, negative propaganda by the press and the politicians of the era. A week or so after starting to read this fascinating book, a relative was talking about what a great guy his new Cardiologist in Richmond, Va was. And he related that the good Doctor was from Charlotte Court House, between Naruna, Va where I grew up and, the location of New Isreal in Buckingham County. And his name was Randolph...,the family name taken by many of the slaves freed by the Mr. Randolph in the 1700's. This week the legislature of Virginia passed an official statement of regret for the effects of slavery. An institution the the Randolph family escaped a hundred years before most of their peers. Hopefully it wont take another hundred years before an African American Cardiologist from small town Virginia, is not a anomaly.

A Southern experiment in black freedom from the 1790s through Civil War times? President Thomas Jefferson condemned slavery but didn't believe whites and liberated blacks could live together in harmony: His cousin Richard Randolph and ninety blacks set out to prove him wrong, and built a bastion of freedom in his heritage to bondsman Hercules White and dozens of other slaves. The lives of the newly freed people on the land Israel Hill is revealed in Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War, an in-depth survey of how free black and white folk lived together for decades. Chapters provide both a social history of slavery and a set of political insights detailing hardship, black pride, and an impossible dream come to life.