No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era by Jacqueline Jones (review)

Reviewed by: No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era by Jacqueline Jones Matthew E. Stanley (bio) No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era. By Jacqueline Jones. (New York: Basic Books, 2023. Pp. 544. Cloth, 35. 00. ) The abolitionist movement sanctified the concept of interracial citizenship and political democracy, and emancipation proved the most revolutionary event in U. S. history. But, as Jacqueline Jones's No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era demonstrates, most white abolitionists were not interested in questions of work and wages in their own communities, and the Civil War did tragically little to improve the conditions of Black workers in the urban North. "In the heart of the nation's militant antislavery movement, " writes Jones (2), Black workers faced an economic cruelty that contrasted sharply with "the soaring rhetoric of egalitarian-minded white men and women" (8). As Jones illustrates, the residue of slavery was omnipresent in antebellum Boston, where African Americans labored under the constant threat of deportation. In an exasperating feedback loop, lack of access to industrial jobs and traditional "skilled" employment—a type of "enforced idleness" (18) —drove Black workers toward the vice economy of sex work, End Page 274 liquor sales, gambling, and petty crime, reinforcing white belief in the "natural" inferiority of Black people. Those who did find "respectable" employment faced discriminatory hiring practices, low pay, wage theft, segregated workplaces, refusal of apprenticeships, chronic material insecurity, the ever-present possibility of displacement (mainly by Irish immigrants), and random violent physical attacks. Black women's work—often unwaged—was in higher demand than that of their menfolk, but it paid less and was even more subservient. By 1860, Blacks composed only 1. 5 percent of Boston's population, but they made up a disproportionate share of its domestic workers, waiters, menial laborers, and extreme poor. "The war was about work, " Jones argues (197), and it reorientated workplace relations in the city. Wartime recession hit Black workers hardest, and the economic, political, and emotional strains of the war fueled cross-class anti-Black sentiment. Assistance flowed primarily toward the families of white soldiers; public works projects increasingly employed Irish American laborers. The absence of jobs engendered low birthrates, high mortality, and out-migration among African Americans. Some enlisted in the Union army. But military sites were workhouses, too, with familiar patterns of white authority. In some sense, Black soldiering—as transformational as it was—constituted "just another form of backbreaking labor" (245). The great lost opportunity of the Civil War era was that anti-Black racism prevented the fight against slavery and race oppression from uniting with the fight against class oppression. Jones highlights this through how white workers on the home front, whose precarity was exacerbated by proletarianization and the loss of craft status, expressed backlash against emancipation. Meanwhile, hostile employers often met worker action with threats to import Blacks as strikebreakers, thus fusing material and racial fears. African American workers, too, worried that any influx of freedpeople would "cheapen" all labor in the city. In fact, Jones contends that popular fears of Black migration northward—as well as merchant, banker, and factory-owner interest in rejuvenating the cotton economy—contributed to Boston's reformers, missionaries, and relief workers going to the Deep South to both establish a modicum of Black rights in the South and prove the viability of "free" Black field labor. This paternal focus on productive labor—and the demand that freed-people embrace exploitative wage work—was part of an "uplift ideology" predicated on the notion that "gainful employment was a matter of personal responsibility on the part of the job-seeker" (82). Such emphasis on employment was partly strategic. Abolitionists, white and Black, feared that former bondspeople on the public dole would undermine their cause. End Page 275 Yet, as Jones acknowledges, affluent and middle-class antislavery strategists were also driven by financial incentives. Their fixation on "equality before the law" animated many transactional-minded Black leaders who—in promoting interracial elite accommodation and industrial. . .