A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation

Slave narratives are extremely rare; very few are first-person accounts by slaves who 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. In the chaos of the Civil War, both escaped north, and both left remarkable accounts of their flights to freedom. Here, in addition to their own stories, is an account of their lives as discovered and reconstructed by the historian David Blight - one that ultimately gives new answers to how four million people moved from slavery to freedom.