Slave narratives are extremely rare; very few are first-personaccounts by slaves who freed themselves.Now twonewly uncovered narratives, and the biographies of the menwho wrote them, join that exclusive group.Wallace Turnagewas a teenage field hand on an Alabama plantation, JohnWashington an urban slave in Virginia.They never met. Butboth saw opportunity in the chaos of the CivilWar, bothescaped north, and both left remarkable accounts of theirflights to freedom.This book is more than their narratives: working frompainstakingly acquired records and sources for the lives ofheretofore unknown former slaves, the historian DavidW.Blight has discovered and reconstructed their livesa??fromslave childhood to black working-class stability in the North.These are the untold biographies of two ordinary men, butthey are also new answers to how four million people movedfrom slavery to freedom. A Slave No More is a major additionto the canon of American history.