David Blight's A SLAVE NO MORE in Charlotte Observer

NONFICTION
A new birth of freedom
Author presents lives of 2 escaped slaves as symbols of `glorious' liberation
JOHN DAVID SMITH
Charlotte Observer, December 15, 2007

A SLAVE NO MORE: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation
By David W. Blight. Harcourt. 320 pages. $25.

In his award-winning "Race and Reunion," Yale historian David W. Blight identified three essential ways that post-Civil War era Americans remembered the bloody internecine conflict.

Reconciliationists focused on healing the deeply divided Union. White supremacists remembered the war in markedly Southern, pro-slavery terms. Emancipationists recalled that slavery had caused the war, that freeing the slaves was its foremost result, and that blacks participated fully in their own liberation.

Blight's remarkable new "A Slave No More" unveils the lives and post-emancipation narratives of two escaped slaves, John M. Washington (1838-1918) and Wallace Turnage (1846-1916). Blight's book underscores as never before the emancipationist historical memory of slavery and the Civil War.

By publishing Washington and Turnage's previously unknown and unedited emancipation narratives, researching the authors' lives as slaves and citizens, and in deconstructing and contextualizing their texts, Blight documents what he terms "the anguished and glorious liberation of four million American slaves from generations of bondage."

Readers will find "A Slave No More" a fast-paced, intriguing and original work, an historical detective work par excellence.

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