Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North

"Jim and Lois Horton’s Black Bostonians is one of the foundational texts of the new social history of the 1970s. They publish a couple of years after the famous quartet of community studies that traces the social demographic fabric of New England towns like Andover, Dedham, Winthrop (which I mentioned a few minutes ago) and others. The Hortons go after a different quarry, and with it, a different story. They want to know about the non-white community—the community of African and African-descended people—in a city on a hill. The thing that I admire so much about the book is how much blood they’re able to squeeze from really stony documents. They give us a sense of the sounds, sights and textures of daily life for some of the poorest people in the city, from records that, if you looked at them, would seem to tell you nothing. From city directories that give us occupations, from tax assessments that tell us who’s living on a block. From these really humble materials, they tell the story of the vitality and resistance of a relatively small black community, the infighting between Afro-Bostonians and the wave of Irish immigration that came in the 1820s and really picked up in the 1840s—this competition for scarce resources at the bottom of the economic ladder. Some of the under-history of Boston’s abolitionist thought, with the daily lives of free people and their own community, and a wonderful social geography of the city, too. I’ve had the experience this week of reading Horton side by side with Common Ground , which I had never done before, and thinking this is really the pre-history of the busing crisis of the 1970s, just as it’s also the pre-history or the history of the Massachusetts 54th Civil War regiment that’s so famous. There’s a lot of humble, everyday glory in the stories that the Hortons are able to dredge up. It’s just a quite miraculous piece of research, especially for its time. Relative to the rest of the Anglophone world, women are extraordinarily well-educated in New England. That is a post-Puritan legacy. For families to read the Bible in its vernacular editions and instruct their children in piety is an important article in civic faith. Women in Boston and Massachusetts and New England more broadly are much more literate than they would have been in almost any other place in the English-speaking world—by orders of magnitude over London, say. There are educated women here from the very beginning. Some of the first writing that advocates for women in civic life by people like Judith Sargent Murray in published writings and by Abigail Adams in private writings, like Susanna Rowson in one of the first American novels. It’s not an accident that so much of that energy comes out of Boston. Anglo-women do continue to play an important role in the cultural life of the city up through Isabella Stewart Gardner’s time. And not just Anglo-women. It’s quite logical that Phyllis Wheatley, one of our first published non-white women poets, is published in Boston, where the faith commitments of the people who owned and eventually would free her favoured women being educated to a degree. A patronage network of evangelicals saw her book into print. So yes, it is a place of relative female achievement. The Common School movement that begins in the early nineteenth-century educates boys and girls alike, although not identically. Sure. The Exchange Artist tackles the rise and fall of a financial and architectural scheme in the first and second decades of the nineteenth century. A man named Andrew Dexter, one of the commercial booster types that innovate disastrously across the early republic, engages in a dodgy paper money scheme in order to build a seven-storey skyscraper. It’s a temple to Mammon in the heart of Puritan Boston; built beside the city’s first church, it cast the old State House in shadow. It’s a comeuppance story in a lot of ways. Building a seven-storey building in a town of five-storey fire hoses and ladders turns out to be a mistake; it burns a mere ten years after completion, providing nineteenth-century commentators about speculation and excess with a large metaphor that they play with for about a hundred years."