No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era

Jacqueline Jones recovers the working lives of Boston's free Black residents in the years before, during and after the Civil War, setting that recovery directly against the city's reputation as the cradle of American abolitionism. Jones follows individual workers, laborers, mariners and domestic servants, through the city's employment records, court files and city directories, tracing how they searched for decent jobs in a city that prided itself on opposing slavery while denying many of the same Black residents steady wages, skilled trades and fair treatment from white employers and unions alike.

Jones builds the book around recurring figures whose lives she follows across years and sometimes decades, letting readers watch individual Bostonians navigate an economy that offered them, in the book's own phrase, no right to an honest living even as the city celebrated its antislavery credentials. She shows how that gap between reputation and reality widened rather than closed once the Civil War ended and Reconstruction's national promises reached a Northern city that had never fully applied its own principles at home, a story that complicates the standard account of a North largely untouched by the racial injustice usually located in the postwar South, and that ties Boston's own labor market directly into the national reckoning over what freedom actually delivered.

Jones writes graceful narrative history built from painstaking archival reconstruction of ordinary lives the record rarely preserves in detail, and reading the book means following that reconstruction through real individuals rather than statistics alone. It suits a reader who wants Boston's abolitionist reputation tested against the economic reality its Black residents actually lived.