Israel on the Appomattox: a Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1700s through the Civil War.

* Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom From the 1700s Through the Civil War by Melvin Patrick Ely Alfred A. Knopf, November 2004 $35, ISBN 0-679-44738-5

These Israelites were a hundred or so freed men and women who lived on several acres of land in Prince Edward County, Virginia, off the Appomattox River. When Richard Randolph (a cousin of Thomas Jefferson) died in 1796, his will stipulated that 400 acres of land be set aside for some of his slaves to develop their own community. The former slaves called it Israel Hill.

In a book that is more than 600 pages--a third of them given over to documents, sources and interpretation, notes and remarks--Melvin Patrick Ely is a diligent and resourceful guide as he captures a remarkable piece of arcane African American history. Ely brings to life the black personages who demonstrated that self-determination was possible in the South prior to the Civil War. His precise detailing of the day-to-day existence of these Afro-Virginians raises a number of questions about the nature of slavery and what lessons can be drawn from a situation that by all intents and purposes appears untypical.

"I contend ... that to accept the thesis of tree black achievement that I and others put forward is also to accept a meaningful distinction between white racial ideology and actual behavior in the Old South," Ely wrote in the book's Postscript.

By the 1920s, the Hill was all but a memory, but this is a rare slice of history recounted by an uncommonly fastidious historian who is as passionate about the Hill as he is about the Israelites who dwelled there.

Herb Boyd is a frequent contributor to BIBR. An excerpt from his latest book, Pound for Pound: Biography of Sugar Ray Robinson, appeared in the March-April 2005 issue.