Two recently discovered slave narratives document the experiences of two runaway slaves--Wallace Turnage and John Washington--who managed to reach the protection offered by occupying Union forces are accompanied by thought-provoking biographies of both men that reconstruct their childhoods, escape, Civil War service, and successful later lives. Read by David Blight, Richard Allen, & Dion Graham. Simultaneous.
Two slave narratives that document the experiences of runaway slaves who managed to reach the protection of Union forces are accompanied by biographies of both men that reconstruct their childhoods, escape, Civil War service, and successful later lives.
Slave narratives are extremely rare. Of the one hundred or so of these testimonies that survive, a mere handful are first-person accounts by slaves who ran away and 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 men saw opportunity in the chaos of the Civil War, both escaped North, and both left us remarkable accounts of their flights to freedom. Handed down through family and friends these narratives tell gripping stories of escape.
Working from an unusual abundance of genealogical material, historian David W. Blight has reconstructed Turnages and Washingtons childhoods as sons of white slaveholders and their climb to black working-class stability in the North, where they reunited their families. In A Slave No More, the untold stories of two ordinary men take their place at the heart of the American experience.
