To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum Black Middle Class by Erica L. Ball (review)

Some historians have suggested that members of the African American middle class of the North paid only minimal attention to their brethren living in slavery. Rather, they were more concerned with raising their own status and pursuing the politics of respectability. Others have argued that the drive for respectability was a means of striking a blow against slavery, a cause they believed in deeply and pursued with dedication. Erica L. Ball sides with the latter and shows convincingly that an active role in the abolition movement was a central part of their lives and as important as improving their status and seeking political rights.

Ball’s monograph, To Live an Antislavery Life, takes a detailed look at how middle-class leaders, including editors, teachers, and ministers, sought to promote a racial consciousness even as they advocated the same virtues urged by white leaders: education, morality, temperance, and economy. But for African Americans, these included a full commitment to antislavery activism. In an effort to undercut white racism, which emphasized the misdeeds of a few and lampooned black efforts at respectability, black leaders taught that racial pride and activism must be a central part of the struggle for true freedom.

Ball uses a combination of the varied forms of literature as her primary sources: letters, narratives, editorials, journals, convention proceedings, sermons, and lectures. This, together with a thorough and up-to-date accounting of the relevant secondary literature, makes her research impressive. She provides an account that will be of special importance to scholars and those interested in the literature of the antebellum North, while providing insights for the more casual reader as well.

The struggling free black population of the North faced both economic and racial barriers to advancing their status. In the face of such obstacles, African American leaders took a traditional approach to improve their situation. They urged the traits of the Cult of True Womanhood: piety, purity, virtue, and submissiveness and counseled black men to work for economic independence and avoid any hint of immoral activity. As Frederick Douglass argued, a class of elevated African Americans dedicated to home and family could help undercut the racism of society as well as improve its overall status.

But emulating white middle-class virtues by itself was not enough. Blacks had to join in the attacks on slavery. They were urged to join vigilance committees and aid fugitive slaves by hiding them in their homes and assisting them in their escape from bondage. They had to be active in the drive for black suffrage and in every way possible attack the evils of discrimination and slavery. They had to assail the racism that had left them marginalized and segregated. For slavery worsened their own status, due in part to the kidnapping of free blacks like Solomon Northup. Many still cowered before whites in submissiveness. Freedom for men would restore their rightful authority over their family which slavery had denied, while for women it would end the assault on their purity and morality. Slave narratives, such as those of Henry Bibb, Samuel Ringgold Ward, and Harriet Jacobs, described heroic bondsmen working to undermine slavery, some even in revolutionary ways. Foreign and American freedom fighters, including Crispus Attucks, Toussaint Louverture, and Cinque were held up as worthy examples to be emulated. Especially important here was the first African American literary magazine, the Anglo-African Magazine, edited by Thomas Hamilton, which at times adopted a militant approach.

Ball’s account in places becomes repetitive in its occasionally tedious description of the traits to be sought. It sometimes belabors the obvious in explaining how blacks should seek an education, live moral and frugal lives, and work industriously. Nor does Ball develop fully enough the impact of the drive to involve blacks in the antislavery movement. To what degree did blacks respond to the urgings of...