A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation Book

Slave narratives are extremely rare; very few are first-person accounts by slaves who freed themselves.Now two newly uncovered narratives, and the biographies of the men who wrote them, join that exclusive group.Wallace Turnage was a teenage field hand on an Alabama plantation, John Washington an urban slave in Virginia.They never met. But both saw opportunity in the chaos of the CivilWar, both escaped north, and both left remarkable accounts of their flights to freedom.This book is more than their narratives: working from painstakingly acquired records and sources for the lives of heretofore unknown former slaves, the historian DavidW.Blight has discovered and reconstructed their lives—from slave childhood to black working-class stability in the North.These are the untold biographies of two ordinary men, but they are also new answers to how four million people moved from slavery to freedom. A Slave No More is a major addition to the canon of American history.Read More