David Blight's A SLAVE NO MORE Reviewed in NYT

Freedom Just Ahead: The War Within the Civil War
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: New York Times, December 5, 2007

The chaos of Civil War meant only one thing to America’s four million slaves: hope. With armies on the march, and the old social order crumbling, men like John Washington and Wallace Turnage seized the moment and made a break for freedom, issuing their own emancipation proclamations before the fact. They were “quiet heroes of a war within the war to destroy slavery,” as David W. Blight puts it in “A Slave No More.”

A SLAVE NO MORE

Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation
By David W. Blight
Illustrated. 307 pages. Harcourt. $25.

Both Washington and Turnage, near contemporaries, wrote vivid accounts of their lives as slaves and the bold bids for freedom that took them across Confederate lines and into the waiting arms of Union soldiers. Recently discovered, both texts have been reproduced by Mr. Blight as written, with misspellings and grammatical errors intact.

Mr. Blight, a professor of American history at Yale and the author of “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,” has also provided an extended preface that provides historical context, fills in biographical gaps and extends the life stories of both men past the Civil War, when their manuscripts break off abruptly, to their deaths in the early 20th century. Two remarkable lives, previously lost, emerge with startling clarity, largely through the words of the principal actors themselves.

For the rest of the article, please click here. Blight—as well as two descendants of John Washington—was also interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday.