Learning to Write

John M.Washington and Wallace Turnage

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 law to teach a Negro to write. So I had to fall back upon my own resources.”

His resources included his Uncle George, his mother’s brother, who seems to have been at least as able to read and write as John’s mother. He also had some help from “Rev. Wm. I. Walker. . . I soon learned to write some kind of inteligible hand and am still trying to improve—But having never had a regular course of spelling taught me. I am in consequence very defficient in every branch of a common Education. So those who may be tempted to read thees pages may possiably learn for the first time the disadvantages of of slavery. With some of its attending evils.”

Wallace Turnage was born in Snow Hill, North Carolina in 1846. He was sold to a cotton plantation owner in Pickensville, Alabama in early 1860. From there he ran away four(!) times, trying to achieve freedom with the Union Army. At the beginning of his memoir, he wrote “Wallace Turnage’s apology for his book. . . I will also beg my kind reader to excuse my ungrammatical and desultory biography because my kind reader can see that I have been deprived of an education, and what knowledge I have to present the biography to you, I learnt during that time and since I escaped the clutches of those who held me in slavery.”

Turnage said almost nothing about his ability to read and write in his memoir. He must have learned the basics, at least, when he was a boy in North Carolina. In November, 1861, while on his third escape attempt, Wallace wrote, “I. . .got acquainted with a man and made an agreement to teach him for something to eat. So I teached the best I could for some time and this man would come out once or twice every day to get his lessons. But after a while some of the other colored people saw me there and made so much noise about it that my friend told me I would have to leave,. . .for he was afraid that I would be caught.” As free men, both John Washington and Wallace Turnage made a living doing manual labor. But they obviously worked on improving their literacy, and were able to share their memories, in writing, with their families. And, it turns out, those memoirs became a gift to us all.

Want to learn more about John Washington and Wallace Turnage please read the book written by David Blight, A Slave No More. This book was to the next topic of the Leaders and Legacies Series at the Mentor Library. Check back to see if the talk was recorded at a later date!