Book Alert / A Slave No More

A Slave No More -- Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation by David W. Blight, Harcourt '07, $25, 307 pages, ISBN #0151012326. Index, source notes, no bibliography, b&w images sprinkled through text.

A new work by a Yale historian brings home the rueful truth that slaveholders not only kept their charges in servitude but in ignorance as well, accounting for the fact that of the four million slaves emancipated after the Civil War, only a hundred or so wrote first-person accounts of their experiences because the vast majority didn't know how to write. In A Slave No More, David W. Blight draws from the journals of two slaves who escaped from their masters and gained their own freedom.

The journal of Wallace Turnage, who fled Alabama for New York and New Jersey, illustrates the bleak choices facing those for whom enslavement had become impossible to bear: "It was death to go back and it was death to stay there and freedom was before me; it could only be death to go forward if I waas caught and freedom if I escaped."

Both Turnage and John Washington, an urban slave from Virginia, served as cooks and camp hands during the Civil War and secured stable employment up North and then were able to send for their families. Washington worked as a house and sign painter in Washington, D.C. Historian David Levering Lewis calls Blight's discovery of the two men's diaries "two of the most significant finds in the entire genre of slave narratives and of the primary material from the Civil War."