A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation
320
A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation
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Overview
Slave narratives, among the most powerful records of our past, are extremely rare, with only fifty-five surviving post-Civil War. This book is a major new addition to this imperative part of American history—the firsthand accounts of two slaves, John Washington and Wallace Turnage, who through a combination of intelligence, daring, and sheer luck, reached the protection of the occupying Union troops and found emancipation.
In A Slave No More, David W. Blight enriches the authentic narrative texts of these two young men using a wealth of genealogical information, handed down through family and friends. Blight has reconstructed their childhoods as sons of white slaveholders, their service as cooks and camp hands during the Civil War, and their struggle to stable lives among the black working class in the north, where they reunited their families.
In the previously unpublished manuscripts of Turnage and Washington, we find history at its most intimate, portals that offer a startling new answer to the question of how four million people moved from slavery to liberty. Here are the untold stories of two extraordinary men whose stories, once thought lost, now take their place at the heart of the American experience—as Blight rightfully calls them, “heroes of a war within the war.”
“These powerful memoirs reveal poignant, heroic, painful and inspiring lives.”—Publishers Weekly
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780156035484 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2017 |
| Series: | . |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 891,438 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Rappahannock River
Day after day the slaves came into camps and everywhere the "Stars and Stripes" waved they seemed to know freedom had dawned to the slave.
— John Washington, 1873, remembering August 1862
John M. Washington was born a slave on May 20, 1838, in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Washington begins his narrative with the wry comment that he "never had the pleasure of knowing" his mother's owner, Thomas R. Ware, Sr., who died before John was born. And he supposes "It might have been a doubtful pleasure." So far as can be determined, Washington also never knew his father, though we can assume he was white. As an autobiographer reconstructing his own youthful identity, Washington says revealingly: "I see myself a small light haired boy (very often passing easily for a white boy)."
With these words Washington recollects the complicated story of so many American slaves — mixed racial heritage. The offspring of sexual unions between black women and their white male owners or pursuers suffered a legacy of confusion, shame, and abuse, but they also occasionally benefited from economic and social advantages, especially in towns and cities. Washington was one of more than 400,000 out of four million American slaves by 1860 who were officially categorized as "mulatto" or other terminology to distinguish a person of some white parentage. From 1830 to the Civil War, the state of Virginia especially had gone to great effort, although unsuccessfully in practical terms, to legally establish a color line marking who was white and who was not. White friends, and perhaps relatives, aided John's education and opportunities early in his life. But in Fredericksburg and elsewhere, due to his mother's status and color, he was considered a chattel slave until the war came.
Exactly who Washington's father was, and how John got his middle initial and last name, have been impossible to trace. A John M. Washington, a distant cousin of President George Washington, lived in Fredericksburg, went to West Point in the 1810s, became an artillery officer, and died in a shipwreck in 1853. But no evidence exists for his patrimony of John. Ware had four sons by 1838, ages twenty-six, twenty-four, twenty, and eighteen. Any of them could have been Washington's father, although only the two younger ones, John and William, seem to have been residents of Fredericksburg at the time.
Washington's story is much clearer on his mother's side. Women determined, protected, and supported John's life chances. His maternal grandmother was a slave named Molly who was born in the late 1790s and owned by Thomas Ware. Molly, called "my Negro woman," is acknowledged for her "faithful service" in Ware's 1820 will, in which he bequeathed her and her children (valued at $600) to his wife, Catherine (who would eventually be John's owner). By 1825 Ware's estate inventory lists Molly and four children; John's mother, Sarah, was the oldest at age eight. Molly would have another four children by the 1830s. In June of 1829 this strong-willed mother misbehaved (perhaps running away) in such a manner that Catherine Ware arranged with a punishment house to execute a "warrant against Molly and for whipping her by contract $1.34." Perhaps Molly's defiance was sparked because her sister, Alice, had just been sold away for $350.
We can only imagine the sorrow and scars in Molly's psyche, a woman whose life was spent nursing white children as well as her own and serving the extended Ware family. But she would live to join her grandson on their flight to freedom in 1862. She died a free woman near her daughter, grandson, and great grandchildren. Whether she departed as a sad or a joyful matriarch, John Washington does not tell us. His silence about Molly may reflect that he was telling only his own heroic story, which did not allow for his grandmother's saga, but it could also represent a part of his family history he was not prepared to expose.
Sarah Tucker, John's mother, was likely born in January 1817. Who the men fathering all these children were remains a researcher's mystery. Sarah probably also had a white father; she is described in various documents as being "bright mulatto" and short in height. Ware did not own any men who could have been either Sarah's or John's father. When Sarah gave birth to John in 1838, she was a twenty-one-year-old who had somehow learned to read and write, a less unusual accomplishment for urban slaves in small households than for plantation slaves.
In 1832, when Sarah was a teenager, Catherine Ware married Francis Whitaker Taliaferro, a plantation and slave owner with four grown children. The Taliaferros had their own slaves and hired others when they needed extra hands, as was the common practice; in 1836 Mr. Taliaferro advertised for "ten able-bodied men for the remainder of the year," offering twelve dollars per month to their owners. The Taliaferros also hired out their own slaves on occasion, including Sarah. With John in tow, Sarah was hired out in 1840 to a farm thirty-seven miles west of Fredericksburg, owned by Richard L. Brown of Orange County. Washington yearningly describes his eight years in the countryside in the idyllic opening section of his narrative. His mother must have worked as a house slave because he played "mostly with white children." He spent summers "wading the brooks" and climbing ridges from which he could see the "Blue Ridge Mountains" and a "moss covered wheel ... throwing the water off in beautiful showers" at a mill on the Rapidan River. Among these pleasant memories is his going to a circus at Orange Court House, where he got lost from his family, and his attending services with his mother at the "Mount Pisgah" Baptist church, a large structure "with gallerys around for colored people to sit in." John loved the "tall pines" that surrounded the church and remembers the "cakes, candy and fruits" sold under the great trees on Sundays. He relished his recollections of "corn shuckings," a "hog killing," and a joyous Christmas celebration. He also remembered his mother teaching him the child's bedtime prayer, "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep," and the "Lord's Prayer." And perhaps most important, by the time he was eight, Sarah had taught him the alphabet. Equipped with literacy, if not with good spelling or grammar, Washington brilliantly uses all of these images of nature as backdrop for his descent into the hell of slavery. He employs natural beauty as a metaphor for freedom and a reminder of the terror of bondage, knowing that the glories of nature can both inspire the soul and mock human sadness. He worries at one point that his "minute events" would not "interest" his reader, and then he quickly moves his story forward.
These early years were both easy and painful for Washington to remember. He likely had no memory, though, of his mother's attempt to run away when he was only three. On February 19, 1841, Thomas R. Ware, Jr., advertised in a Fredericksburg newspaper for a "NEGRO WOMAN SARAH." She is described as "about 20 years of age, a bright Mulatto, and rather under the common size." Clearly she had fled some distance and for some length of time, because the notice offered a twenty-dollar reward if Sarah was captured "more than 20 miles from this place." No evidence survives to indicate how and when Sarah was captured or why she fled. Perhaps she simply took flight from the pressures of daily life for a while. Perhaps she was a young, disgruntled woman "lying out," as the saying went, absconding to the woods or another farm to be with her lover. But she was surely a woman of unusual intelligence and resourcefulness if she managed to escape and remain on her own for a period of time.
A recent study of runaway slaves in the antebellum South found that slaveholders' advertisements often described a slave as "proud, artful, cunning ... shrewd" or "very smart." Historians Loren Schweninger and John Hope Franklin conclude that the typical runaway exhibited "self-confidence, self-assurance, self-possession ... self-reliance." It was rare for women to run away, especially those with small children. In the database produced by Schweninger and Franklin, based on extant runaway advertisements in five Southern states, 81 percent of all runaways were male. Of the 195 Virginia runaways from 1838 to 1860, of which Sarah would be one, only seventeen (9 percent) were female.
Sarah likely never told her son the story of her flight, although he eventually might have learned of it from others. That Washington had a mother who herself had been a runaway provided a deep layer of silent inheritance, embedded in his spirit if not in his memory. No doubt, both John's mother and grandmother kept parts of their own physical, emotional, and sexual stories to themselves. Perhaps their experience with white men and with rearing children in the desperately insecure world of slavery left them much like Harriet Jacobs, the author of one of the most important slave narratives. "The secrets of slavery are concealed," wrote Jacobs, "like those of the Inquisition. My master was, to my knowledge, the father of eleven slaves. But did the mothers dare tell who was the father of their children? Did other slaves dare to allude to it, except in whispers among themselves? No indeed!"
By 1848 Sarah had four more children — Louisa, Laura, Georgianna, and Willie, all presumably born on the Brown farm. Sarah, like Molly before her, now had a growing flock of young to worry over and feed. She would have intuitively understood Jacobs's assertion that "the mother of slaves is very watchful. She knows there is no security for her children. After they have entered their teens she lives in daily expectation of trouble." Sarah would eventually achieve freedom with her son, but her more than two decades as a slave and mother made her undoubtedly one of the women whom Jacobs spoke for in her eloquent and terrible questions: "Why does the slave ever love? Why allow the tendrils of the heart to twine around objects which may at any moment be wrenched away by the hands of violence?"
As the Mexican War wound to a conclusion in 1848, a crisis over the expansion of slavery exploded in American politics be cause of massive land acquisitions in the Southwest. Revolutions against monarchies broke out all over Europe. And the Brown farm was sold. Ten-year-old John Washington moved back to Fredericksburg with his mother and four younger siblings. John lived as the house servant of Mrs. Taliaferro, now a widow, while Sarah lived with the four younger children in a house on George Street near the Rappahannock River. John describes his mother as "sent to live to herself ... without any help from our owners (except) doctors bills." Mrs. Taliaferro's son, William Ware, was a teller at the Farmer's Bank, where she may have boarded for a time. Washington writes that he "was dressed every morning ... in a neat white jacket and pants and sent up to the Bank to see what Mistress might want me to do." As her servant boy, John was sometimes forced to "sit on a footstool, in her room for hours ... when other children of my age would be out at play." He relates such childhood stories in a chapter starkly entitled "Slavery," as though a veil had descended over the innocence of his youth.
But that innocence had begun to vanish while on the Brown farm. From those otherwise bucolic years, Washington recollects his "first great sorrow": He watched a coffle of slaves, "formed into line, with little bundles strapped to their backs ... marched off to be Sold South away from all that was near and dear to them." In the 1840s, slave coffles were a common sight, as slaves were traded from the upper South to the deep South, where the demand for their labor had exploded. The fear of such a sale always loomed over Washington and his kin. In the coffle, John watched families disintegrating before his eyes. "I shall never forget the weeping that morning," he remarks, "among those that were left behind each one expecting to go next." He could take solace, however, from his beloved mother's instruction in reading. John gratefully acknowledges Sarah's keeping him "at my lessons an hour or two each night." At the age of ten he was as equipped as his struggling mother could make him in the insecure world of slavery. Washington could read; he had learned to wear pants; he was honing his negotiating skills with his mistress and other white people. And he now lived in a city — where the boundaries of slavery were permeable.
"A city slave is almost a freeman," wrote Frederick Douglass in his Narrative, "compared with a slave on a plantation." Washington's story confirms Douglass's ironic claim. In Southern cities, the lines between slavery and freedom did, indeed, become blurred. White Southerners complained endlessly of their dilemmas with urban slavery, where the master-bondsman relationship lost so much of its rural plantation routine and certainty. "The problem," writes the historian of urban slavery Richard Wade, "was not what happened in the factory or shop but what happened in the back street, the church, the grocery store, the rented room, and the out-of-the-way house." Cities "corrupted" slaves, wrote a Louisiana planter, attracting them to the "worst habits." But a group of free blacks in Richmond saw it differently; in their view, they had merely "acquired town habits." The Southern journalist J. D. DeBow saw the issue clearly. "The negroes are the most social of all human beings," he said, "and after having hired in town, refuse to live again in the country." A white Northern traveler, John'S. C. Abbott, described most insightfully why cities did not bode well for slave obedience: "The atmosphere of the city is too life-giving, and creates thought," he remarked.
This was precisely the experience, both fortunate and anguished, of John Washington. From his early teens on, Washing ton became very social, and he developed lasting "town habits." Eventually his freedom would be the product, in part, of his own brand of virtuous corruption learned in the interstices of urban slavery.
Some of "what happened" in the back streets and groceries started with the growth of complex connections between slaves and free blacks, a phenomenon observed in every city. The free black population significantly outnumbered the slave population in every antebellum Southern city despite restrictive residency laws. As precarious and marginal as their lives were without political rights and with curbs on their property ownership, free blacks were nevertheless crucial to urban economies, and they developed a good deal of autonomy despite discrimination. Above all they were a social and moral threat to the slave system. Free blacks were a "plague and pest in the community," declared a New Orleans newspaper, "elements of mischief to the slave population." In cities of all sizes in the South, slaves and free blacks shared housing, jobs, churches, social gatherings, friendship, marriage, and blood kinship. That John Washington — like Frederick Douglass and others before him who had escaped from cities — would marry a free black woman and grow up in her social circle was not at all unusual in the world of urban slavery.
The bloodlines and folkways of black and white people were also interwoven in the slave society of Fredericksburg. John's personality, his heredity, perhaps his very worldview were a remarkable example of the interdependence of black and white cultures that Ralph Ellison famously described a century later. "Southern whites cannot walk, talk, sing, conceive of laws or justice," wrote Ellison in 1963, or "think of sex, love, the family, or freedom without responding to the presence of Negroes." With an unknown white father, and both black and white relatives around him, John came of age as a slave, but with his eyes on a way out. In the shops, workplaces, churches, taverns, homes, and streets of a Southern city, John was on the surface both black and white, both slave and free. In time he probably possessed a higher degree of freedom of movement about town than he admits in the narrative; he entered stores, did financial transactions for his mistress, and talked among friends — black and white. With his responsibilities as a servant and laborer came everyday reminders of the possibilities of life beyond slavery. Washington was cornered. Legally he was someone's property, a creature of others' pride, profit, and will. But he was a young person of talent, an extremely valuable and agile spider in slavery's tangled web; and he spun his share of that web as it was in turn spun around him. He knew that his owner's dependence on him provided his best hope for independence. He learned to work, wait, and, above all, to deceive his mistress.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Slave No More"
by .
Copyright © 2007 David W. Blight.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
ContentsPrologue 1
Chapter 1
The Rappahannock River 17
Chapter 2
Mobile Bay 55
Chapter 3
Unusual Evidence 90
Chapter 4
The Logic and the Trump of Jubilee 128
Author’s Note 163
John M. Washington, “Memorys of the Past” 165
Wallace Turnage, “Journal of Wallace Turnage” 213
Appendix: John Washington,
“The Death of Our Little Johnnie” 259
Acknowledgments 261
Notes 265
Index 301
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