Overview

Slave narratives, some of the most powerful records of our past, are extremely rare, with only fifty-five post-Civil War narratives surviving. 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 with the publication of A Slave No More, a major new addition to the canon of American history. Handed down through family and friends, these narratives tell gripping stories of escape: Through a combination of intelligence, daring, and sheer luck, the men reached the protection of the occupying Union troops. David W. Blight magnifies the drama and significance by prefacing the narratives with each man's life history. Using a wealth of genealogical information, Blight has reconstructed their childhoods as sons of white slaveholders, their service as cooks and camp hands during the Civil War, and their climb to black working-class stability in the north, where they reunited their families. In the stories of Turnage and Washington, we find history at its most intimate, portals that offer a rich new answer to the question of how four million people moved from slavery to freedom. In A Slave No More, the untold stories of two ordinary men take their place at the heart of the American experience.

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9780156034517

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PRAISE FOR A SLAVE NO MORE Fascinating . . . gripping stories that speak to our understanding of the slave legacy and the meaning of the Civil War and Reconstruction. --Boston Globe Two remarkable lives, previously lost, emerge with startling clarity, largely through the words of the principal actors themselves. --William Grimes, New York Times <p> [The] narratives are powerful and poignant and help to fill in the cracks of history in voices too rarely heard . . . Readers will . . . be powerfully grateful. -- Christian Science Monitor <p> By editing and elaborating upon these striking autobiographies, David Blight has done an inestimable service to historians. -- New York Review of Books <p>

PRAISE FOR A SLAVE NO MORE Fascinating . . . gripping stories that speak to our understanding of the slave legacy and the meaning of the Civil War and Reconstruction. --Boston Globe Two remarkable lives, previously lost, emerge with startling clarity, largely through the words of the principal actors themselves. --William Grimes, New York Times<p> [The] narratives are powerful and poignant and help to fill in the cracks of history in voices too rarely heard . . . Readers will . . . be powerfully grateful. -- Christian Science Monitor<p> By editing and elaborating upon these striking autobiographies, David Blight has done an inestimable service to historians. -- New York Review of Books<p>

Author Information

DAVID W. BLIGHT is the director of Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and a professor of American history. His books include Race and Reunion, which won the Frederick Douglass Prize, the Lincoln Prize, and the Bancroft Prize. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

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