Wallace turnage biography

Wallace Turnage was an enslaved African American who recounted his story of repeatedly trying to escape brutal slaveowners before escaping to Union Army lines.
Born in Green County near Snow Hill, North Carolina, Turnage, the son of a 15-year-old slave woman named Courtney and an 18-year-old white man, Sylvester Brown.
Wallace Turnage was born in Snow Hill, North Carolina in 1846.

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June 14, 2004

Journals of 2 Ex-Slaves Draw Vivid Portraits

Courtesy of the Alice J. Stuart Family Trust and the Massachusetts Historical Society

John Washington

Courtesy of The Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich

Wallace Turnage

A page from the Washington manuscript.

The scene sounds like one conjured up by a screenwriter for a Civil War epic. As the Union Army converges on Richmond in 1862 and white residents frantically pack their silver, a group of slaves gathers in a hotel tavern after closing time. The slave in charge of the tavern, John Washington, pours the others drinks, and they all cheerfully toast to "the Yankees' health."

The scene is not from a movie. It is from an account that Mr. Washington wrote in 1873 and whose existence few people even knew of until the last few months. But through a series of coincidences, his handwritten autobiography and another powerful unpublished narrative much like it, by a former Alabama slave named Wallace Turnage, have surfaced and come to the

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Wallace Turnage

Wallace Turnage (c. 1846 – 1916)^[1] was an enslaved African American who recounted his story of repeatedly trying to escape brutal slaveowners before escaping to Union Army lines. He moved to New York City with his family and lived in economic poverty. He wrote a narrative about his life.^[1] It was published for the first time in 2007.

He was born in North Carolina, and was the son of a fifteen-year-old female slave and a white man.^[2] He was sold multiple times and made repeated attempts to run away, and succeeded. He lived in New York and New Jersey, working as a waiter, janitor, glass blower, and finally as a watchman.^[3]

His manuscript was passed on to his daughter, Lydia Turnage Connolly (1885 – 1984). After her death, it was another 20 years before it was published. In 2007, Civil War historian David W. Blight published A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation, the two men being Turnage and John M. Washington.

A historic marker in Mobile, Alabama, reads

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Learning to Write

Slave narratives are extremely rare, especially first person accounts. In 2007 Civil War historian David Blight published two recently discovered memoirs of men who escaped to freedom during the war. While the two accounts were written many years after the Civil War ended, they could be written because both John Washington and Wallace Turnage somehow learned to read and write in the antebellum South.

John M. Washington was born a slave in Fredericksburg, Virginia in 1838. In his memoir he wrote, “At about 4 years of age Mother learned me the alphabet from the “New York Primer,” I was kept at my lessons an hour or two each night by my mother.” He does not explain how his mother had learned enough to start him on the road to literacy. When John was 12, his mother and siblings were hired out by their owner to a farm in Staunton, Virginia. John remained in Fredericksburg. “About this time,” he says, “I began seriously to feel the need of learning to write for myself. I took advantage of every opportunity to improve in spelling.” “. . It [was] positively forbidden by