We continue our series of the honors and awards at the recent annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History with the Cromwell Book Prize, conferred by William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Book Prize with the advice of a committee of the ASLH. This year's went to R. Isabela Morales, Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2022). Here is the citation:
This book is a dazzling achievement, especially as a first book. Happy Dreams of Liberty is a family saga, a tale of a father who set free his enslaved children upon his death and then sought to endow them with his considerable fortune — an act that shocked his white relatives. 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. By reading deeply and creatively into the archival record left by an extensive battle over the execution of Samuel Townsend’s will, Morales is able to construct vivid and intimate portraits of the lives of numerous members of the family who lived both in freedom and in slavery.
R. Isabela Morales
Law is an integral part of Morales’s story, both circumscribing the possibilities for the Townsend children and allowing them to claim their freedom and some degree of financial stability. Morales is highly attentive to the local, showing how the practical consequences of freedom expanded and contracted depending on the residence of the various members of the Townsend family. At the center of Morales’s story is a lawyer, S.D. Cabaniss, who used his specialized knowledge to defend the Townsend will against legal attacks but also wielded his elevated status as a lawyer to intimidate the will’s beneficiaries. Morales demonstrates how, in ways both big and small, Cabaniss held sway over the lives of the Townsends. We found the book to be a model of legal microhistory, both well-argued and a pleasure to read.
--Dan Ernst
