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

Illustrated, notes, appendix, index, hardcover, 320 pp., 2007. Harcourt, 15 E. 26th St., New York, NY, 10010, $25 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Jonathan A. Noyalas
Jonathan A. Noyalas is a history professor at Lord Fairfax Community College in Middletown, Va., and the author or editor of four books on Civil War era history.

Review:
While the Emancipation Proclamation was unquestionably one of our nation’s great charters of freedom, individual liberty was not granted to slaves solely by the stroke of a president’s pen. An untold number of slaves during our nation’s Iliad assumed the burden of realizing emancipation’s promise by fleeing their masters at the peril of their lives.

On occasion slaves succeeded, but many times their attempts to flee bondage failed. This quest for freedom during the Civil War is the central focus of David W. Blights’s splendid microcosmic study A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation.

Blight, professor of history at Yale University, stumbled onto a remarkable cache of sources in the field of slave history — two authentic slave narratives. He learned of the first, John Washington’s, through a literary agent. The second, written by Wallace Turnage, was brought to his attention by an historical society in Connecticut.

With the two narratives as the foundation of this book, coupled with additional primary and secondary materials Blight presents a cogently crafted study of the struggles of these two slaves to secure their freedom.

Born in Fredericksburg, Va., in 1838, Washington lived as a slave until he escaped his master in April 1862 as Union forces converged on Fredericksburg. After seizing his freedom Washington worked as a mess servant on the staff of Maj. Gen. Rufus King. Following the war Washington and his family ended up settling in Massachusetts where he passed away in 1918.

The other central figure of this book, Wallace Turnage, was born in North Carolina in 1846, and then sold to an Alabama cotton plantation owner. Turnage attempted to flee five times during the war. Finally, on the fifth attempt in August 1864, while Union forces secured Mobile Bay, he succeeded.

After his escape Turnage served as a cook for a Union officer, Lt. Junius Thomas Turner. Following the war he moved to New York City, where he spent much of his life as a waiter at the Metropolitan Restaurant. He died in 1916.

Both men’s stories of escape, recounted in the book’s first two chapters, are indeed gripping. Although Washington and Turnage are only two experiences, Blight places them in proper historical context to illustrate the myriad struggles thousands of slaves confronted during the war to attain freedom.

After following the path to freedom Blight then examines the men’s postwar lives in the book’s third chapter. While Blight confronts paucity of source material to construct their postwar lives, the author relies on evidence such as census records and newspapers to portray the triumphs and obstacles these former slaves and their families confronted.

In Blight’s final chapter the author again turns to contextualization to asses the process of how slaves learned of the Emancipation Proclamation. He examines how the process of capturing one’s freedom became a complex process that required not only executive authority but also individual responsibility on the part of slaves. 

After learning details of the men’s lives, Blight then lets Washington’s and Turnage’s voices resound across the ages as the book concludes with full transcriptions of both narratives. Their words, as the author justly notes, transport the reader to 1862 and 1864 and offer insights into the quest for emancipation that no other work can provide.

An exciting read, this book is not only suitable for academic circles, but for popular history ones as well. Well conceived and presented in proper historical context A Slave No More should stand for many years as a classic of the emancipation experience.