The Harrowing Accounts of Two Runaway Slaves

Author of Biography Featuring Extremely Rare Slave Narratives to Appear April 5 at Lincoln Presidential Museum

[March 29, 2008]  SPRINGFIELD -- The author of a biography that traces the harrowing accounts of two runaway slaves will have a book discussion and signing April 5 at 7 p.m. in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum's Union Theater in downtown Springfield.

David W. Blight, author of "A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom," will discuss this compelling biography during the April 5 session. Free reservations for the evening may be made by calling 217-558-8934. Copies of his book will be available for purchase in the museum's bookstore.

Slave narratives, some of the most powerful records of our past, are extremely rare, with only 55 post-Civil War narratives surviving. A mere handful are first-person accounts by slaves who ran away and freed themselves. Two newly uncovered narratives and biographies of the men who wrote them are the basis of "A Slave No More." Filled with the two men's humor, faith and joy, the book offers a rich, new answer to the question of how 4 million people moved from slavery to freedom and tells the previously untold stories of two men who can now take their rightful place in American history.

Blight is a professor of American history and the director of Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. His books have won the Frederick Douglass Prize, the Lincoln Prize, four awards from the Organization of American Historians and the Bancroft Prize. He writes for The Washington Post and lectures around the country on slavery and the Civil War.

[Text from Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum news release received from the Illinois Office of Communication and Information]