Christopher Hager's book began in the queue at the Unicorn Café in Evanston, when a man he scarcely knew suggested he look at Ira Berlin's The Black Military Experience (1983). There his eyes fell upon “A Colored Man,” copying out the Constitution, in 1863, intermingling it with his own much less assured prose, and lambasting the treatment of black soldiers by the Union. Years of research later, Hager has produced a genuinely paradigm-shifting study of black writing, before, during and immediately after Emancipation, bringing together letters, diaries and memoirs. Historians have tended to treat slave letters as data, as “about” marriage or “about” religion, without much interest in the individual slave or the nature of authorship. Literary scholars have tended to focus only on the highly literate and on literacy as liberation. Hager's originality is to treat the act of writing a letter as a historical event in itself, analysing the process of composition, and the ways in which that process was an experience involving reflection, self-transformation and often frustration or difficulty. Meticulous close reading illuminates the mental process of writing, the changes in the writers' sense of their selves and their society, demonstrating that what is often difficult to read in these semiliterate pieces is the most significant thing about them. Thomas Ducket's 1850 letter to Jacob Bigelow, imploring his help after being sold to Louisiana, was reproduced in Stowe's Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe corrected the spelling, added missing words and regularized the punctuation. While both Stowe and Hager emphasize the ways in which Ducket's shaky handwriting, crooked lines and poor spelling testify to the miseries of enslavement, Hager's analysis of the letter also shows that Ducket had learned to write from a spelling book, and therefore had not got as far as three-syllable words. Tellingly, his only word of more than two syllables is “famaly” (26). Most slaves seem to have been less interested in writing their own passes than in communicating with their relatives. Maria Perkins, writing to her husband in 1852 to tell him that their son has been sold to a trader and that she and the remaining child are up for sale, speeds up at the end of her letter, makes more mistakes and moves from facts to private reflection, and from a confident beginning to an almost hopeless end: “I am quite heartsick” (55). Perkins (living close to the University of Virginia) used the “long s” (archaic) and a fluent hand which suggests that she learned from a much older individual tutor. Hager took six and a half minutes to transcribe her letter, but for Perkins it clearly took much longer and a lot was happening in her as she wrote. Adam Plummer's diary repeats the entry recording the sale of his wife and children in 1851, first in uneven lines, then more clearly, struggling to come to terms with it. Plummer's is an enslaved narrative – not at all akin to the slave narratives written in retrospect from freedom – as is the 1850s diary of John M. Washington, later revised by him as a slave narrative in 1873. Slave literacy was not as uncommon as is often thought. Stowe's exposure to slave letters induced her to introduce a whole host of highly literate slaves in Dred, plus a slave-owner teaching them. The effects of antiliteracy laws were variable. North and South Carolina and Georgia had laws forbidding slaves to teach other slaves; the Cherokee learned English from their black slaves. Hager underlines, however, the material difficulties of writing; Washington was a wallpaper hanger and therefore had something to write on. Others were making ink from walnut bark and saving any scrap they could find. Spotswood Rice, telling his daughter's owner Kitty that the longer she kept his child, the longer she would burn in hell, uttered his furious threats on plain paper, but wrote to his daughter on finer stationery provided by a Christian aid organization, with a quasi-official imprimatur, buttressing his own parental authority. The mistress would have seen the difference. After emancipation, black writers swiftly mastered the idioms of bureaucratic correspondence; learning how to write a letter meant assimilating something of white culture. Savagely beaten in 1863 by his owner for speaking to a Union officer, one slave opened his letter to General Nathaniel Banks conventionally – “I Gorgener Roman wright a fue lines to you to ask if you will be so kind as to send someone to my assistence as soon as posable” (149) – but closed more urgently: “for God sak pleas to sen some as soo as posable before they kill me” (149). Emancipation was a complicated challenge and not all the letters make easy reading. After a dramatic escape into the Atlantic, William B. Gould's naval diary is frankly boring, much occupied with shipping stores and the weather, though it also shows, in his use of “we,” his sense of affiliation with his black community. On the other hand, Garland White described Southern contrabands as “stupit” (201) and “Idle” (201), and not such good soldiers as those from the free states. Literacy could cause intraracial division, and take people in many different directions: White became a Democrat.