BookOpinion

Charles Rappleye has won the George Washington Book Prize, which awards $50,000 for the most important new book about the era during the founding of America. His book, Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution, is about John and Moses Brown. They were brothers and partners in business, politics, and the founding of Brown University, yet they passionately opposed one another on one of the most divisive issues of the day—the slave trade.

“I wanted to do justice to a wonderful story and refresh our understanding of the dilemma posed by slavery in the early days of the Republic,” Rappleye said. “It’s very gratifying to think that, on the strength of this award, that story might reach a wider audience.”

In their report on the winning entry, the jurors wrote that “Rappleye, a journalist, spotted the ideological polarity represented by Moses and John Brown and turned the greatest contradiction in the Revolutionary period into the history of two men: one a Baptist-turned-Quaker opponent of slavery and the other a passionate revolutionary who was a major actor in the slave trade. Rappleye’s book shows how this contradiction was not a conflict between North and South but a battle waged in the North, within a state thought to be one of the most independent and liberal of any in the Union, and in fact within one family.”

Created in 2005, the George Washington Book Prize was awarded in its inaugural year to Ron Chernow for Alexander Hamilton and last year to Stacy Schiff for A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America.

The Washington Post wrote about the award for Sons of Providence:

…The book, which sheds light on how controversial slavery was in this country long before the Civil War, covers 100 years, from the birth in 1736 of John Brown, a robber baron who ran slave ships from Providence, R.I., to the 1836 death of Moses, the younger brother, who with slave blood on his hands became an abolitionist.

“The book opens with the family’s first venture in the trade, staged by patriarch James Brown the year John was born,” the introduction to the book says. “Thirty years later, the brothers establish a personal stake in the trade when they stage their own voyage to Africa. It results in a human and financial disaster: after a journey attended by disease and shipboard rebellion, more than half the slaves perish, an ordeal illuminated by detailed notes from the captain’s log.”

It’s after this experience that the brothers take their separate paths on the issue.

“It’s a fascinating story,” Rappleye said in an interview from the grounds of Mount Vernon, where he was awarded the prize at a black-tie dinner yesterday.”You have two brothers who share the same background and end up on the opposite sides of the slavery issue during the American Revolution. I was interested in what drove them apart and what kept them together despite the dispute on slavery.”…

…Rappleye, 51, who lives in Los Angeles, said he began working on the book about three years ago after he lost his job as a journalist at the LA Weekly, where he was an editor and a staff writer. “I was fired by the LA Weekly when a new regime at the paper came in,” he said. “They cleaned house and I went out the door.” He had wanted to write about the Brown brothers for some time and the firing gave him time…

…The other finalists for the prize were Catherine Allgor for “A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation” and Francois Furstenberg for “In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation.”

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