Wallace Turnage

 

 

Born: 1846       Died: 1916

 

            The story of Wallace Turnage is quite an amazing one.  As a slave at the age of seventeen in Alabama, Turnage attempted escape four times before successfully managing to walk 25 miles to an estuary, where he was able to survive for three weeks before paddling a rowboat into the Gulf of Mexico where he was saved by a Union Navy gunboat.  Upon his emancipation, Wallace Turnage wrote a rare manuscript detailing his experiences and hardships.  The manuscript was found in 2003 and published in 2007 in a book entitled, “A Slave No More”.