num_pages: 656
description: WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE New York Times Book Review and Atlantic Monthly Editors' ChoiceThomas Jefferson denied that whites and freed blacks could live together in harmony. His cousin, Richard Randolph, not only disagreed, but made it possible for ninety African Americans to prove Jefferson wrong. Israel on the Appomattox tells the story of these liberated blacks and the community they formed, called Israel Hill, in Prince Edward County, Virginia. There, ex-slaves established farms, navigated the Appomattox River, and became entrepreneurs. Free blacks and whites did business with one another, sued each other, worked side by side for equal wages, joined forces to found a Baptist congregation, moved west together, and occasionally settled down as man and wife. Slavery cast its grim shadow, even over the lives of the free, yet on Israel Hill we discover a moving story of hardship and hope that defies our expectations of the Old South.
language: English
title: Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War
titlecomplete: Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War
genres: Historical, History, African American, American History, Race, Civil War, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 114
awards: awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: Bancroft Prize, awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: Mark Lynton History Prize, awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: Albert J. Beveridge Award, awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: Frederick Douglass Book Prize, awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: Wesley-Logan Prize
publisher: Vintage