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

The streets of Black Boston come alive in No Right to an Honest Living , a sensitive, immersive, and exhaustive study of African American workers, their dreams, and their disappointments in the diasporic port city on the bay. A gifted practitioner of labor history and urban history, Jacqueline Jones pulls back the curtain of everyday life in this book, revealing the complexities of Black class positionality, the financial costs of abolitionist activism, the contours of the underground economy, the hidden contributions of Black womens labor inside their own homes, the dramatic effects of Irish immigration and economic recession on Black job prospects, and the fight of Black Civil War soldiers to gain fair pay for their service. In Joness careful rendering, Boston is sometimes a safe haven and always a place of marginalization for the Black migrants and laborers who changed the city even as they made it home.

Tiya Miles, National Book Awardwinning author of All That She Carried

Jones has done a superb job of capturing the complexity and hard edges of a turbulent era in US history. Her compelling book demonstrates that neither Bostons powerful current of abolitionism nor a great war that destroyed the institution of slavery could remove the race-based social and economic constraints that bedeviled the citys Black residents.

Gary W. Gallagher, author of The Enduring Civil War

In No Right to an Honest Living , Jones provides a deeply researched, provocatively rendered, and engagingly written analysis of the conflict between Bostons egalitarian rhetoric and its racially segregated and economically exploitative reality. Black Bostonians were free, fiercely political, and comparatively successful in their fight against legal segregation and the rendition of fugitive slaves by an antebellum Federal system dedicated to the peculiar institution. Yet, even as they launched a radical abolition movement alongside white antislavery allies, Black Bostonians faced employment discrimination and workplace exclusion that belied the citys self-righteous professions of racial exceptionalism. Through attentive descriptions of individual Black Bostoniansthe attorney Robert Morris; the Reverend Leonard Grimes and his wife, Octavia C. Grimes; Union Army surgeon Dr. John V. DeGrasseand the segregated economy in which they lived, Jones provides a prescient analysis of race and labor that resonates in our current political moment. A triumph of historical research, this book will be a foundational text in nineteenth century labor history.

Kerri Greenidge, author of Black Radical

Jones is one of our greatest historians of race in American society. In this elegantly crafted, deeply researched book, she reconstructs the troubled history of Black labor in nineteenth-century Boston through compelling biographical vignettes of workers and reformers alike. Her book is a profound reflection on the enduring tensions between Americas high-minded rhetoric of liberty and equality and the persistence of racial injustice.

Thomas J. Sugrue, author of Sweet Land of Liberty

Joness No Right to an Honest Living demonstrates the deadly convergence of the racial and capitalist orders in Civil Warera Boston, where there was no pathway to freedom but through workand Black people were excluded from work. A singular contribution to the history of racial capitalism in the Deep North.

Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America

An essential labor history and an incredible history of the Civil War era. By focusing on Boston as a site of abolitionist activism and racist work policies, Jones offers expansive insights into the stakes of ending the institution of slavery and ushering in a period of freedom. With graceful writing and sharp analysis, Jones brings us a fuller story of the transition from Emancipation to Reconstruction to Jim Crow.

Marcia Chatelain, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Franchise

Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical

A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obamas America

Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War

Creek Walking: Growing Up in Delaware in the 1950s

A Social History of the Laboring Classes: From Colonial Times to the Present

American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor

The Dispossessed: Americas Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present

Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present

Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 18651873

Copyright 2023 by Jacqueline Jones

Cover design by Chin-Yee Lai

Cover images The Granger Collection, New York; xpixel / Shutterstock.com; Itsmesimon / Shutterstock.com

Cover copyright 2023 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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First Edition: January 2023

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jones, Jacqueline, 1948- author.

Title: No right to an honest living : the struggles of Bostons black workers in the Civil War era / Jacqueline Jones.

Other titles: Struggles of Bostons black workers in the Civil War era

Description: First edition. | New York : Basic Books, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022031966 | ISBN 9781541619791 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541619807 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Boston (Mass.)HistoryCivil War, 1861-1865Social aspects. | African

AmericansEmploymentMassachusettsBostonHistory. | Free black peopleMassachusettsBostonSocial conditions19th century. | Fugitive slavesMassachusettsBostonSocial conditions19th century. | Working class African AmericansMassachusettsBostonSocial conditions19th century. | LaborMassachusettsBostonHistory19th century.

Classification: LCC F73.44 .J66 2023 | DDC 974.4/6100496073--dc23/eng/20220706

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022031966

ISBNs: 9781541619791 (hardcover), 9781541619807 (ebook)

E3-20221116-JV-NF-ORI

To Anna and Erica

Boston and Its Environs, ca. 1860. (Kate Blackmer, from H. McIntyre, cartographer, Map of the City of Boston and Immediate Neighborhood: From Original Surveys , 1852, 142 192 cm, Boston Public Library, Norman B. Leventhal Map Center; J. H. Colton & Co., Map of Boston and Adjacent Cities , 41 33 cm (New York: J. H. Colton & Co., 1856).