No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era
By Jacqueline Jones
Basic Books 2023

Historian Jacqueline Jones’s impressive new book No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era errantly and persistently suggests a certain iconic Monty Python scene, its subject is an important and sometimes desperate one. Although the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court abolished chattel slavery in 1783, and, as Jones puts it, “Many households had begun to rid themselves of their enslaved workers in the years immediately before as well as during the early years of the Revolution,” the reality of racial equality fell far short of Boston’s “City on a Hill” image. Since slavery had flourished in the New World for centuries, something of this discrepancy is probably understandable, and when Jones signals right at the beginning of her book that she might consider such understanding complacent or even complicit, readers have grounds to worry. “Words matter,” she writes. “Yet the history of the United States indicates that many individuals and groups indulged in self-congratulation based on their often-stated principles of equality without taking tangible steps to extend those principles to the workplace. In that regard Boston was – and is – the nation writ small: a place where words were – and are – easy, and where the material manifestations of a just society were – and are  – stubbornly elusive.”

The history of Boston, although as patchwork as that of any other Northern city, is virtually one long interrupted string of tangible steps, almost all of them taken without a single drop of self-congratulation. Boston integrated its schools. Boston sanctioned interracial marriage. Boston extended the franchise to Black men. Boston Abolitionists, at real risk to their lives and livelihoods (words that were hardly “easy”), gave speeches and wrote tracts that rang around Western world. Boston rained scorn on the institution of slavery long before Jefferson Davis fought a war over it. Jones’s tendency to look at all of this and dismiss it as not measuring up to 21st century expectations is every bit the annoying anachronism it seems. 

The genius of her book is to dramatize all the ways Boston nevertheless failed to do enough, and in this Jones’s prodigious research (no bibliography, mind you – let’s not go crazy – but an invaluable 50 pages of End Notes) and perceptive eloquence crafts an essential volume of Boston history. Her lens of viewing Boston as the nation writ small is subtly daunting; the fact that the conditions Black workers and families faced in this time period in Boston were the best they could expect in the North is intensely sobering.

As Jones repeatedly notes, things often boiled down to racially-motivated economic competition. “The most successful and stable householders tended to be those men who could count on a white clientele,” she writes, and Black laborers and craftsmen, having reached a city that guaranteed their freedom, found that it often denied them the opportunities for much more:

After slavery, many Blacks found themselves alternating between menial labor and enforced idleness, a characteristic of post-emancipation societies in general … The free sons of enslaved skilled laborers lacked white patrons and faced stiff competition from whites; over the generations the craftwork that had identified individual Black families disappeared. Gone were the Black blacksmiths and carpenters, replaced by men scrounging for day work as bootblacks and window washers. Black women retained their positions as laundresses and domestic servants, earning starvation wages, and in some cases no wages at all, just room and board with a white family.

Jones’s book is filled with skillfully-drawn personalities, like Vermont-born clergyman Dr. Charles Parkhurst, whose 1896 article “The Race Problem in Boston” might very well be a writ-small version of Jones’s book, so thoroughly elaborating on the systemic inequalities faced by Black workers in Boston that it was paraded in Southern newspapers for the irony of Blacks being treated better in Dixie than in the East. “Boston has ever stood for all that is best in thought, in morals, and in religion in America,” Parkhurst wrote in his wind-up to bashing the city’s shortcomings and hypocrisies. He’d have envied Jones her 500 pages.

The “formidable” Anna Lowell, who ran the Howard Industrial School which acted as a kind of “waystation” for Black women migrating to Boston and looking for employment, also makes an appearance, although less charitably; Lowell, daughter of the Brahmin family and niece of the illustrious James Russell Lowell, we’re told, “lived a life that offered a stark contrast to the future she envisioned for the objects of her benevolence” – the tart tone belying the large amounts of practical good Anna Lowell did in even the very short time the Howard Industrial School was up and running. 

But the stars of the book are the members of the Selden family, who arrived in Boston in the schooner Thomas H. Thompson in 1847: matriarch Lucy Fountain, seven-year-old Thomas Selden, his parents Carter and Louisa, and the Fountain cousins. “Wending their way up State Street into the commercial and financial heart of the city, onto Court Street and past the courthouse, the group turned right on Cornhill, marveling at the imposing brick facades, the offices of printers and publishers,” Jones writes. “In the office at number 21m, for the first time in their lives [Peter] Randolph and the other passengers shook hands with white men.” 

By following the extended Selden family through the duplicity they encounter, the racism and double standards, the humiliations and temporary triumphs, Jones puts human faces on an often-overlooked aspect of emancipation. It’s an uncannily effective illustration of a fact all readers of history are well-advised to remember: the final destination of the Underground Railroad was never a paradise nor ever promised to be one. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.