Without Masters

"To his credit, however, Ely unfashionably resists many of the temptations to which historians of the subaltern fall prey: to translate all black self-activity into activism; to elevate the understandable pursuit of familial security, economic advancement, and personal dignity into full-fledged political agency; and to locate overt or covert anti-slavery or anti-racist politics in his subjects' quest for independence and autonomy. Reluctant to impress the black Israelites into political service as recognizable front-line soldiers in the long black struggle for freedom, he instead appreciates them on their own terms."

In The New Republic, Eric Arnesen reviews Melvin Patrick Ely's Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom From the 1790s Through the Civil War.