Book Review: No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggle of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era

No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggle of Boston ’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era.By Jacqueline Jones. New York: Basic Books, 2023. Hardcover, 534 pp., $35.00

Reviewed by Gordon Berg

The schooner Thomas H. Thompson gracefully slipped between the islands that dotted Boston harbor on the mild morning of September 15, 1847. Her cargo included sixty-six African Americans from a plantation in Virginia. But these men, women, and children were not enslaved or indentured. They were free, manumitted by Carter H. Edloe upon his death at age forty-six. They hailed from “Mount Pleasant,” in rural Prince George County and ranged in age from one to eighty. They arrived in Boston, a city of 135,000 whites and about 2,000 free Blacks, knowing no one and with no promise of making a living. “Over the next half century,” writes Jacqueline Jones in her extensively researched and carefully written narrative, “the collective biography of the Edloe Sixty-Six (as they came to be known) would reveal the everyday struggles of Boston’s Black workers — struggles that encompassed family life and military service no less than the pinched opportunities that hobbled job-seekers.” (5)

To the uninitiated, Boston might seem like the promised land for emigrating Blacks. It was home to the descendants of the American Revolution and Crispus Attucks, a man of African descent and one of the first casualties in the war for American independence. Antebellum Boston embraced a myriad of progressive causes, not the least of which was abolitionism. But as Jones’s deep dive into Boston’s social and political structures clearly reveals, “The fight against slavery and the fight for rights on behalf of the laboring classes converged in the struggles of northern Black workers, yet this convergence were unnoticed among many white reformers.” (51). Jones maintains that many white reformers had more interest in the correcting the wrongs of slavery in the South than they did in fighting for the rights of Black workers living in their midst.

Jones has made extensive use of census data, city directories, and personal diaries, letters, and newspaper articles to explore the lives of Black Bostonians. She maintains that even though “The city offered only an imperfect refuge, the newcomers transformed life there in dramatic ways, material and political.” (55). Jones brings these citizens to life by presenting them by name and occupation, not just statistics. We meet self-taught Peter Randolph, twenty-two, who arrived in Boston from Virginia in the 1850s. He became a self-taught itinerant preacher visiting towns in New England in Upstate New York. He wrote a graphic account of his life in slavery, Sketches in Slave Life, in 1855. He summed up his first three years in Boston, saying “My chief difficulty was not in getting much work — but in getting much pay.” (47).

After passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, many African Americans arriving in Boston were forced to seek employment in what Jones calls “The Fugitive Economy.” Their lifestyle consisted of “subterranean rooms and narrow alleys” necessary to “thwart kidnappers and Federal authorities.” (55). This uncertain existence “was an unstable one, made even more so by the high mortality rates suffered by Black Bostonians living in cramped quarters.” (57). Some fugitives, like the reformer Harriet Jacobs, were more fortunate. She found employment as a seamstress, became reunited with her family, and lived “beyond the reach of the bloodhounds.” (57). Thomas Selden was seven when he came to Boston as part of the Edloe group. He worked as a waiter and a porter and his life might have gone unnoticed, except at the age of twenty-three, “he joined the army and became part of the first US regiments of Black soldiers.” (51).

The passage of the Emancipation Proclamation set off three days of celebration in Boston and spurred the formation of two of the Civil War’s most celebrated regiments, the 54th and 55th Massachusetts. Jones recounts the exploits of the men of these regiments as they were reported in the local newspapers and magazines. Jones explains that by early 1863, “a visitor to Boston might have mistaken the city as besieged by enemy combatants.” (228). The city and the harbor teemed with activity; war materials going south, casualties coming north, all impacting the lives of Boston’s working classes — Black and white. The war’s growing economic impact on the home front leads Jones to perceptively note that “inflation heightened the anxieties of white workers, who feared they might someday soon lose their livelihoods to Black southerners seeking jobs and safety in the North.” (229). The growing political strength of Irish working men foretold potential conflict between them and newly emancipated freed people for jobs and city services.

Jones wisely carries her story beyond the war years to include the dynamic years of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. She concludes that, “By the late nineteenth century, most white Bostonians accepted Black men at the ballot box; but by then, antebellum employment patterns had hardened into an ossified system of discrimination, limiting many Black workers to casual, ill-paid, dead-end, jobs. A cascade of incremental decisions on the part of individual city officials, factory owners and merchants, shop floor bosses, and labor leaders shut Black people out of a wide variety of employment possibilities.” (440). The employment patterns set before, during, and after the Civil War would haunt Boston and other cities well into the twentieth century.

Gordon Berg has published dozens of articles and reviews in popular Civil War periodicals. He writes from Gaithersburg, Maryland.