Word by Word

Christopher Hager

“While Frederick Douglass invigorated abolitionists with his eloquent prose, many of his contemporaries, still enslaved or recently freed, scrawled barely legible letters to friends and family sold to distant masters. In this revelatory hybrid of history and textual analysis, Hager argues that the act of writing—often in defiance of states’ antiliteracy laws—was an exceedingly potent form of self-empowerment for these oppressed men and women, never mind their poor spelling and unorthodox methods (one potter carved poetry into his work, another ‘composed at the handle of the plough’ and kept the lines memorized till he learned to write). Primary documents, intensely scrutinized, reveal powerful emotions and common hardships, bear witness to racial struggles across the country, and provide unalloyed insight into thestark yet hopeful reality after the Emancipation Proclamation. Particularly fascinating is the evolution of writing as a form of power: a former slave protests, via letter, to a Union general about Union soldiers attacking his neighbor’s wife, while another journals his integration into the U.S. Navy with perfunctory but increasingly assured entries. This thoughtful examination of the artifacts of a too-long-silenced population is made all the more eloquent by accompanying facsimiles of the arduously penned missives.”—Publishers Weekly

“[An] always engaging account of how the path to freedom was paved, in part, with written words.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Hager seeks to craft an intellectual history of a people too often dismissed as illiterate and lacking a culture of letters. His focus is not on stars who are well known from fugitive slave narratives, but on a handful of more or less literate blacks whose previously unpublished letters provide pieces of a complex and rich narrative of liberation. Hager discusses the mental process of writing, exploring the inner lives, secrecy, and subversion shown in black initiatives to learn how to write and how to use writing to end enslavement and to embrace emancipation.”—Thomas J. Davis, Library Journal

“From its first pages, where a stumbling black writer in Civil War New Orleans picks up the U.S. Constitution, Word by Word focuses on the initial tremors of freedom for ordinary people amid wartime turmoil and the process of emancipation. This is original work of the highest order.”—Kathleen Diffley, editor of To Live and Die: Collected Stories of the Civil War, 1861–1876

“Hager brilliantly imagines scenes of writing among freed people in the decades immediately following emancipation, showing how former slaves turned to writing as a way of taking control of their world. Word by Word is a major and revelatory act of historical recovery done with imaginative sympathy and critical verve.”—Robert S. Levine, author of Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism

“A penetrating and revealing portrait of people in the process of defining freedom, Word by Word is a stirring, important work that reshapes our understanding of slavery and emancipation.”—Louis P. Masur, author of Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union

Related Links

• At the New York Times Civil War blog Disunion, read Christopher Hager’s piece on the reactions of American slaves—in their own words—to news of the Emancipation Proclamation
• Listen to Hager discuss the lives of literate slaves on WBUR’s Radio Boston
• In the Boston Globe, read more about Hager’s research
• View more HUP titles on abolition and the American Civil War