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  • To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum Black Middle Class by Erica L. Ball
  • Stephanie J. Shaw (bio)
To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum Black Middle Class. By Erica L. Ball. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. Pp. 175. Cloth, $69.95; paper, $22.95.)

In To Live an Antislavery Life, Erica L. Ball utilizes nineteenth-century black writing to construct a narrative about the ways that black [End Page 118] middle-class and aspiring northerners transformed the antislavery war into a personalized political consciousness and way of life. Using period newspapers, novels, speeches, the proceedings of political conventions, narratives, and memoirs, Ball pays particular attention to "conduct discourse" or prescriptive writing and maintains that rather than view this type of writing in defensive or patronizing terms (as "racial uplift" rhetoric), we should rather see it as a manifestation of the personalized politics that undergirded this particular antislavery war.

Ball begins by focusing on black "advice literature" that encouraged and provided instructions on self-improvement and, thus, on "self-fashioning" (10). Through "education, temperance, industry, and morality" (11), free black husbands and wives, sons and daughters could not only realize and reflect middle-class ideals but also become "living refutations of proslavery doctrine" (13). Exclusion of blacks from public spaces proved the existence of the proslavery doctrine in the North and, therefore, that the antislavery war could not be limited to the South. But it is important to note that the demonstration of middle-class social and cultural values was also required in private black spaces, suggesting personal, not imitated, values. Connecting all of these efforts to Christian doctrine, advocates insisted that "God helps those who help themselves" (32). Ball describes this total view as "a distinct brand of antislavery consciousness" and as central to the "emerging black middle-class culture" (13).

Subsequent chapters help to illustrate additional manifestations of this personalized antislavery consciousness. In the second chapter, Ball focuses on memoirs and the narratives of former slaves. This literature emphasizes independence as evidence of manliness and a necessary criterion for participating in the body politic. Young men had to practice temperance or self-discipline in all areas of life because the forms of entertainment that were so prevalent in the city consumed time and money and threatened a man's (and his family's) independence as much as his morality. In the many settings (literary societies, improvement associations, etc.) where people met to read and hear about individual accomplishments, participants could also gain an education, which was often formally denied to them in the broader public sphere. For Ball, these narratives and memoirs "helped to create the archetype of the black self-made man," provided role models, and illustrated the potential outcomes of the ideals (60).

Slaves were the obvious example of dependence. And the peculiar institution was particularly devastating for slave families. Antislavery advocates, black and white, pointed to the particular cruelty that made it impossible for husbands and fathers to protect their wives, sons, and daughters. The [End Page 119] broader antislavery movement made all its members responsible for the plight of slaves in one of its most well known slogans: "Am I not a man and a brother?" But black northerners' credentials were different: their relationship to the slaves in the South was not metaphorical but literal and, of course, personal.

Black family members in the North, however, were part of antislavery households, and their manifesting conditions that were denied to slaves was very important. Young men and women had to marry and to choose their life partners carefully. Family members had to live frugally in order to maintain the family's independence. Young men and women, fathers and mothers were urged to work in particular (independence-producing) occupations. While recognizing some women's need to work for others, domesticity for black women included a focus on their own families and on their obligation to spread virtue. Parents had to educate their children and rear them carefully; children, in turn, had to represent their families well. In addition to expressing their commitment to antislavery lives, living up to these ideals would make them all "living refutations of...

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