A Special Angle: The Northern Black Middle Class in Late-Nineteenth-Century America

“Human misery,” Amos Webber recorded in 1883, “is only fully appreciated when it can [be] measured” (p. 264). This brief sentence is a succinct summary of Webber’s perspective on life. He diligently recorded daily temperatures in his “memory book” (he called it his “Thermometer Book”) for half a century (1855–1860–1870–1903) and, in a separate section, jotted down notes about local and national news and happenings, often framed in moral tones. Webber realized that human misery—like the suffering of the poor in winter—was largely ignored by society until the facts of measurement—like temperatures during a frigid week—were recognized. Where living is a comparative experience, data used as facts determine the conclusion; coerced into subordination, blacks viewed the facts of living in different ways from whites.

Amos Webber, born free and fatherless in Bucks County, Pennsylvania in 1826, moved to Philadelphia sometime in the early 1840s. The transition to an urban environment could only have been a shock to the young man, but there is no direct evidence, since Webber’s boyhood and early manhood years are undocumented. What Nick Salvatore has done, and done very well, is to construct the milieu in which Webber lived. In Bucks County, black churches, a black school, and the underground railroad armored blacks against the deprecations, denials, and deportations that whites and white slave catchers forced on them.

Black life in nineteenth-century Philadelphia has been fairly well reported, beginning with W. E. B. DuBois’ The Philadelphia Negro (1899). Even so, Webber’s first years there are a blank until he secured a menial job in the household of a wealthy white family in the late 1840s. The strict moral code observed by its patriarch, Charles Wurts, strengthened Webber’s own moral instincts. For both men, Salvatore writes, “the imperative to accept personal responsibility for one’s innate sinfulness, and to act accordingly, formed the bedrock of their moral vision.” Yet, Salvatore continues, later on “Webber would apply these values to America’s social and political problems in a manner sharply different from, yet not inconsistent with, his employer” (p. 29).

Webber’s marriage, the birth of a son (who died at the age of five), and a job in a wallpaper factory and store defined his life in the 1850s. He began his “Thermometer Book” in the middle of the decade, using the narrative entries, Salvatore says, “to record, order, and understand the world he inhabited” (p. 33). His references to himself or his family were rare and terse; his interest was in what was happening around him. He apparently had access to newspapers and magazines, to which he added information gleaned from observation and conversation. His proximity to the company’s partners, members of the white elite, undoubtedly broadened his outlook on the world outside.

For reasons never stated, the Webbers left Philadelphia and moved to Worcester, Massachusetts in 1860, where they lived out their lives. Webber was employed by a wire mill firm for almost four decades, with a twenty-two month interruption for service in the U.S. Fifth Cavalry (Colored) during the Civil War. His regiment, trained as cavalry but used as infantry, received mixed reviews after the battle for Petersburg. Ordered to prison guard duty because of one general’s negative evaluation, the Fifth had a later moment of triumph marching into conquered Richmond before being sent to Texas to serve out the war. All in all, it was an unhappy experience. Yet black veterans, like their northern white counterparts, were buoyed by their military experience and the war’s potential consequences, and acclaimed their service for their life span. Just as a battle-scarred officer like Rutherford B. Hayes proudly carried his brevet rank of “General,” so did Amos Webber proudly respond to “Sergeant.”

This book is more than a tribute to Amos Webber and his not inconsiderable achievements. What Salvatore has...