John Washington, former Fredericksburg slave, gains fame through his memoirs

Date published: 2/25/2006

By BEN SELLERS

HE WASN'T a great statesman, nor a fiery revolutionary.

In fact, he wasn't even the most famous "Washington" to come out of Fredericksburg.

Soon, however, John Washington, a slave who in 1862 rowed from Old Mill Park across the Rappahannock River to his freedom, could all but have his face on the dollar bill.

"For a short while, he will be one of best-known slaves in America," said John Hennessy, chief historian at the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park.

About 135 people--young and old, black and white--gathered at Sophia Street's Shiloh Baptist Church (Old Site) yesterday for the second installment of the park's "Voices from the Storm" series, in conjunction with Stafford County's Freedom Project.

The program of dramatic readings, music and historical slides did more than commemorate Black History Month. It was also a send-off of sorts, in anticipation of John Washington's future rise to fame.

Yale University historian David W. Blight, who has been editing Washington's handwritten memoir, plans to release it next year along with another recently unveiled slave narrative by Alabama native Wallace Turnage.

Blight estimated that there are only between 100 and 130 known post-war slave memoirs addressing emancipation. That would include a few famous ones like Booker T. Washington's "Up from Slavery," which was published in 1901.

"It's a fairly small genre of such documents and when one comes available like this it's a pretty rare event," said Blight, speaking by telephone prior to the program.

Locally, the publication of Washington's memoir may have an even greater impact, he said.

"The Civil War is not just Lee's army and Burnside's army . John Washington's narrative puts the story of emancipation at the center of the Civil War in Fredericksburg."

Yesterday's event featured Hennessy as narrator, Shiloh member Dominic Green as John Washington and three additional performers. It focused specifically on the lives of slaves in the area through their own words.

"Americans have spent a great deal of time trying to redefine slavery to suit ourselves," Hennessy told the audience.

"But slavery was what it was--and it could at times be anything: benign, brutal, cheerful, sad, familial, destructive, somber and musical."

Washington spent much of his youth within a five-block radius in Fredericksburg. Shiloh Baptist's records show his name on a register of 625 congregation members from the mid-1850s. His home was on the second floor of what is now the National Bank of Fredericksburg Building, where his owner, Catherine Taliaferro, resided.

Yet one of the things that made Washington's experience a rare one among slaves was the responsibility he was given. He was hired out four times during his time in bondage.

It's likely that this level of autonomy helped make Washington's escape possible, Blight said. It enabled him to save money and granted him a level of mobility unknown to most local slaves.

"This was a young slave who had a lot of skill and a lot of talent and some lucky breaks, not the least of which was that he was hired out so many times," said Blight.

Historians also credited the strength of Washington's ambition to be free. And that yearning is no better evidenced, perhaps, than in his writing.

"His memoir illustrates that big words and a great mind are not necessarily paired together," said Hennessy.

Though his spelling and grammar weren't perfect, Washington, who had no formal education, spoke of his experiences in vivid detail and artfully tackled abstract themes and concepts.

There is a distinctly "writerly" quality to the memoir, Blight said. Not only did Washington have a sense of drama, he used popular narrative techniques of the day, such as addressing the reader. In equating the wilderness with freedom, Washington also exhibited a poetic sense of metaphor.

As Hennessy noted yesterday, the idea of freedom "creeps into virtually every passage, every scene" of the memoir.

John Washington eventually made his way to the city of Washington, where he was among the first wave of freedmen to help establish its black community. He eventually settled in Boston.

In addition to the slave memoir preserved by his daughter, he wrote a short narrative on the courtship of his wife and an elegy on the death of his son. All were ultimately given to the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Blight said there was no evidence that either Washington or Turnage ever tried to publish their memoirs. "But they were clearly extremely important family possessions."

Copyright 2006 by The Free Lance-Star

For another article relating to John Washington's escape from slavery in Fredericksburg, click here. For more information on the history of Shiloh Baptist Church (Old Site), where John Washington was a member, click here. For information on Shiloh Baptist Church (Old Site) today, click here.