A Slave No More, David W. Blight
A Slave No More, David W. Blight
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A Slave No More
Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation

Author: David W. Blight

Narrator: David W. Blight, Richard Allen, Dion Graham

Abridged: 9 hr 47 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/06/2007


Synopsis

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 Turnage’s and Washington’s 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.

About The Author

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. Among his books is Race and Reunion, which won the Frederick Douglass Prize, the Lincoln Prize, and the Bancroft Prize. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.


Reviews

Goodreads review by robin on February 07, 2025

Two Narratives Of Emancipation Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs are among a handful of former slaves in the Old South who wrote famous narratives of their lives in slavery and their ultimate escape to freedom. It is a rare and important event to find additional first-person narratives that docum......more

Goodreads review by Maya on October 20, 2008

I heard an interview of David Blight on Fresh Air and knew right away that I had to read this book. These two narratives are amazing. Each man was a slave who escaped to freedom during the civil war and then later wrote the story of his escape. And each story was protected, but hidden, for almost a......more