001[Music] Hello, welcome to the state library. My name is Jessica Shry and I'm a reference librarian here. We're thrilled to have you for our April author talk and would like to take this opportunity to thank the Bureau of the State House and the House Broadcast Services for their help setting up this event. Today we're honored to be joined by author and historian Jacqueline Jones. Jacqueline Jones is a LNC Temple professor of women's history at the University of Texas at Austin and she previously taught at Welsley College in Brandeise University. She's the author of 10 books, two of which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in history. Dr. Jones has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Bank Braftoft Prize in American History, a MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2021, she served as president of the
002American Historical Association. Today, she's here to talk about her book, No Right to an Honest Living, which sheds new light on the 19th century Boston and the area's anti-slavery movement. Boston was known for being a leader in the abolitionist rhetoric. But Jones exposes the city was far from achieving equality and justice within the workplace. Despite the inequality, Jones highlights black entrepreneurs who created their own jobs and forged their own career paths, highlighting the everyday struggles of ordinary black workers. This book shows how injustice in the workplace prevented Boston and the United States from securing true equality for all. Before Dr. Jones begins. I want to let you all know that this talk is being recorded and this will be uploaded to our YouTube channel. She'll speak for 30 to 45 minutes and then there'll be
003time for questions. And when we get to the Q&A portion, um we're going to have a staff member walk around with a microphone. Uh just because this is recorded, you'll have to speak into the microphone. Without further ado, I'm happy to present Dr. Jacqueline Jones. [Applause] Thank you so much Jessica for that introduction and thanks to Dava too for making uh all the arrangements for my talk today. I'm really so happy to be here in this beautiful space and uh it's an honor to talk to you today. So I should begin with the title of the book which is a quotation from Dr. John S. Rock who spoke in Boston in March of 1860. uh Rock was trained uh he's was originally uh from New Jersey. He was trained as a dentist and then as
004a physician and he was a very well-known public speaker uh on various literary topics and he ended his career as an attorney and not many people know that he was the first black man to be um admitted to the Supreme Court of the United States bar. In any case, um you can see that Rock um says that uh colored men have no right to earn an honest living in Boston in 1860. And I just want to say that over the last few years, there's been a tremendous amount of really wonderful work done on uh civil rights in New England, including Massachusetts and Boston in the antibbellum period. Uh that work deals with um suffrage, intermarriage, school integration, jewelry service, running for office, the integration of the entertainment and um transportation venues, uh political engagement of
005all kinds. So that recent literature is really rich and significant and absolutely essential for our understanding of black history in the north uh before the civil war. However, I have found that there has been little or nothing written about black people's struggle to make a living in especially in Boston or Massachusetts. Even though work was a central everyday lived experience uh and a focus a major focus of black political struggle. Even though work uh is an issue with profound implications for family life and wealth accumulation and even though work was a preoccupation of 19th century white reformers from abolitionists in the antibbellum period to labor activists and a uh academics in the latter part of the 19th century. So there are three themes I want to um introduce today and uh I hope in the
006process um tell you a little bit about some famous and not so famous uh black Bostononians. The first point is that black workers were largely confined to menial labor despite three major 19th century upheavalss. the New England Industrial Revolution, the Civil War, and the emergence of the retail and commercial sector in the late 19th century. Secondly, over their lifetimes, most black laborers contended with irregular, low-paying jobs because a whole host of potential white allies refused to press for just working conditions and opportunities in private homes, in businesses, on city public works projects, and in the US military. And thirdly, black men and women showed a great deal of resilience, creativity, and resourcefulness in making a living and sustaining their families, at times in ways that were not documented in the census or other formal or
007official reports about the social division of labor at the time. So, the narrative thread of my book uh concerns a group of formerly enslaved people who came to Boston in September of 1847. There were 67 of uh these native Virginiaians and I'm showing their de facto leader here, the Reverend Peter Randolph. Um they were all freed by the will of their master, Carter Edllo in 1844, but they did not really gain their true freedom until three years later, and they uh elected to come to Boston at that time. The 66 composed of interlocking kin networks. There were 25 men, 15 women, and 26 children. And each person came with four $14.96 even though Edlo's will uh declared that they should each receive $50 upon gaining their freedom. And spoiler alert, um Peter Randolph, who came
008as a blacksmith and later um became an ordained Baptist minister, sued for that remainder of the $50 and won in a court case in Virginia in 1855. But the arrival of the um this group uh from Virginia, they had worked on a plantation there uh in Tidewater, Virginia. The group inspired um Samuel May Jr. who was an abolitionist and worked with William Lloyd Garrison on his newspaper the li Liberator. Um May said you know this group is not like you know the other famous formerly enslaved people we know about. Um he, you know, Frederick Douglas, um he uh forged papers and disguised himself as a sailor. Uh Harriet Jacobs hid in her grandmother's attic for seven years before fleeing north. Uh you'll learn in a few weeks about Ellen and William Craft. She uh dressed
009as a gentleman. She was very light-skinned and her husband posed as her manservant. Henry Box Brown sent himself in a box uh to the north. So, you know, those very famous fugitives had engaged in really creative uh courageous kinds of esta escapes and uh Samuel May and others said, "Well, this group from the Carter Edllo estate are more like representative formerly enslaved people and so it'll be an experiment to see if they can provide for themselves and their families to see if they can work." uh which is a bit ironic considering uh these are folks who had uh literally uh slaved for uh white people their whole lives. So just a couple reminders here about Boston during this period. It was a seapport city and it was a city of immigrants by the late 1840s
010and 1850s um Irish immigrants in particular. So when we look at the uh division of labor here in Boston in the antibbellum period, we find that most black women were limited to either uh laundry work or domestic service. We find that most men were limited to hawking things on the street corner. They were tenders and tender was a common kind of catch-all phrase. Peter Randolph worked as a tender when he came to Boston. That means kind of a messenger, custodian, errand runner, uh that sort of cleaner uh and so forth. A common uh designation for black men during this time. Porter, servant. These were some of the other categories of black men's work. And most black men in particular uh engaged in peacemeal service, peacemeal work, not longstanding or stable jobs. And they had to
011go from place to place in order to find work for a couple of hours or maybe a day or two. This is called casual labor. And I include the street scene because um it was kind of the artery for black men looking for work as they went from door to door, place to place asking if anybody had any work that day. Also, it was a site of some of labor on the part of some workers. I found a couple cases of black men and women um washing windows on main streets and then having the ladders kicked out from under them by white passers by. But I learned about this whole process of searching for labor by considering the story of Anthony Burns Burns who was a freedom seeker from Virginia. He came to Boston in
012February of 1854 and he made a connection with a worker here in Boston, a black worker named William Jones. And Jones took him from place to place, a dancing master studio, a clothing shop, uh an iron works, uh place to place uh over a couple of days just asking for any kind of work for even an hour or two. Um, and this whole story comes out in a rendition hearing that resulted in Anthony Burns being sent back to his owner in Virginia in the late spring of 1854. But it's really revealing about what was kind of the common lot of among black men workers during this time. So I mentioned these potential white allies and remember that um quote from John S. Rock who said faithful friends are hard to find. Faithful friends are hard
013to find. And I want to just name very quickly six groups of potential white allies. And these are people who I thought for had good reason if they had chosen to do so to advocate for black workers in the workplace and in the public sphere. Uh and just a reminder here the black population is very small during this period. not more than one or two% of the total black population. So abolitionists and other private employers were loathed to hire black people because they feared first of all that their that their white workers would rebel or strike or quit if they had to work with black men or women. Uh and also there was the fear that uh in a store setting white customers wouldn't patronize a store where there were black clerks. So an interesting
014um quote here from Frederick Douglas who like John S. Rock had the stature really to criticize white abolitionists. And I must say that we must give uh all abolitionists their due. These were courageous men and women uh harassed, often physically attacked. They were in a distinct minority in Boston. Uh and they showed uh tremendous fortitude in advocating for enslaved people in the south. But the point of rock and Douglas here is that these white abolitionists care more about the suffering enslaved worker in the south than they do about their black neighbors in Boston. uh white Republicans who presented themselves as relatively egalitarian and they were relatively certainly here in the uh 19th century, but they uh did not consider uh black men a a real constituency. They were just not numerous enough. And I will
015say that a lot of black men did vote because they paid their $150 pole tax, not because they owned their own homes, but because they owned a little bit of furniture that was personal pro property that uh was taxed. Lewis Hayden himself, a fugitive from slavery, born a slave in Kentucky, uh came to Boston with his wife Harriet and their son. He uh was the exception that proved the rule because in 1858 when his clothing business failed, he was uh appointed secretary uh messenger to the Massachusetts Secretary of State, a position he held for the rest of his life. But in general, uh white Republicans were not keen on giving uh even loyal black Republicans those kinds of political jobs. So, uh, white workers and their leaders, labor reformers of the 19th century, and I'll
016get to Jenny Collins in a minute, but I will say that Boston was really a center of uh, labor activism. Uh, Iris Stewart during the Civil War, was a champion for the eight hour day. Uh Frank Keys Foster was a Massachusetts native and a leader of the Knights of Labor and together with Samuel Gumpers, the cigar maker, helped form the American Federation of Labor later in the 19th century or actually in 1886. Um, Jenny Collins was a labor reformer who uh wrote and spoke on behalf of white women. And her major consideration, her major concern was white women textile workers who worked long, long hours. But in 1871, she wrote a book called Nature's Aristocracy, a play for the oppressed, where she really lit into white women who employed domestic servants. And she she said,
017"These women are mean-spirited. They're overly demanding. They're penny pinching. They're really awful employers. They're horrible to work for. It's a degrading job to be a domestic servant." That whole thread was taken up a couple of years later by Louisa May Alcott of Little Women fame who wrote a book called Work: A Story of Experience where she too said, you know, any self-respecting woman wants to get herself out of domestic service as soon as possible. Well, it's around this time that hundreds of uh black refugees from Virginia are migrating to Boston. And they're doing that under the supervision, the sponsorship of the US Freeman's Bureau, which wanted to really um diminish the population of the Virginia Peninsula there, get some of those refugees out. If you can see here, um, Eliza Meeks, uh, has come with
018her eight children. Again, uh, often, uh, women coming with their children. And it was assumed when they arrived in Boston that the women and the older children, the girls especially, would work as domestic servants. So, people during the period are talking about white women are fleeing this kind of job, but they'll be replaced by black women. That's what's going to happen. But in any case, labor reformers of all kinds are not really that concerned with the plight of black workers during this period. Neither are city officials. And this is a scene uh from the time when Back Bay was filled in. Um and if you can see in the background, way in the background, you can hardly tell, but there's a train coming in. And it's a train coming in from Needam full of gravel
019and sand that will be dumped here to help fill in this area on the Charles River. And here are some pictures. Some very poor people are going through that um that sand and gravel to see if there are any cast off uh pieces of clothing or furniture, housewares, that kind of thing. But um the people who unload the trains and who empty the carts of gravel were paid by the city and they were exclusively white men. And this was a theme um that followed the city through the late 19th or into the early 20th century that even though some black men were taxpayers, they derived no benefit from public works projects. Also, um, we would have thought that perhaps, uh, Union soldiers, white Union soldiers would have appreciated the bravery, the courage of their black
020compatriots during the Civil War. Dr. John V. Degrasse was a Boston surgeon who served uh, in the army during the war. Keep in mind that black soldiers, the from the 54th, the 55th Massachusetts, and also the fifth Massachusetts cavalry got lesser pay. They got $7 a month compared to their white counterparts who got $13 a month. This inequity lasted until uh late in the Civil War. What we should do here is look at uh military service as a kind of job uh and look at the compensation, the working conditions and so forth. After the war, when white men, white veterans uh came together in organizations, veterans organizations, they segregated those and uh that remained the case uh for quite a while. So, no advocacy there on the part of uh white uh military um veterans.
021And finally, um I look at um academics and settlement workers in Boston around 1900. I'm sorry, this is kind of blurry, but it's the front of a book by John Daniels. Um the book is In Freedom's Birthplace, a study of the Boston Negroes. It was published in 1914 and it looks at um Boston black community in 1900 and it really does kind of put the impromator on scientific racism during this period. Um Daniels notes that no black men or women have been hired in factories. Uh they don't uh work as uh uh department store clerks or bookkeepers. and he he veers toward attributing this to some failure on the part of black workers themselves rather than recognizing that employers refuse for various reasons to hire people of color in these jobs. So, um how does
022a study of work in particular kind of change the way we look at some very familiar themes? And I just want to run through kind of a kaleidoscopic set of issues that come to the four uh by looking at this theme work. One is what I call the fugitive economy and that's um the economy that surrounds these freedom seekers who come from the south find their way to excuse me uh Boston mainly by sea. That's the Underground Railroad. It's a watery route uh from Virginia and uh and also parts of c uh North Carolina here. Elizabeth Blakeley um endured this um long journey. Money had to change hands. Uh she probably had to pay a broker at the point of embarcation. She had to grease the palms of the sailors on board the ship. Probably
023give something to the captain as well. So money has to take um change hands in in the course of these escapes by sea. Uh I also found that the Boston Vigilance Committee uh provided certain services for these fugitives and were paid accordingly. So this uh list from the vigilance committee includes the names of some very well-known people. Lewis Hayden, Samuel May Jr., William Cell worked on the Liberator with Garrison and they're being paid to board uh or nurse or provide uh o other professional services for particular fugitives, in this case um Alice C. Green. These um vigilance committee members got paid for posting descriptions of slave catchers so people in Boston could look out for them. They got paid for providing room and board for fugitives for um providing clothing and medical care for paying
024for tickets to Canada. So again there was this economy uh related to uh fugitives in Boston during this period. I also wanted to um offer a reminder that a lot of work surrounding uh the fugitive economy and taking care of these people was unpaid labor. Unpaid labor. Harriet Hayden, the wife of Lewis Hayden, whom I showed earlier. She and her husband at one point had 13 um fugitives in their house in what is now Philip Street was South Street. and we can be sure that it was she who did all the laundry and the cooking and the cleaning uh for these uh 13 men and women. So um a significant part of work uh here is not uh paid. I also um have alluded to the priorities of abolitionists and Republicans. And I bring this
025slide uh about Frederick Douglas up again just as a reminder that Douglas broke with William Lloyd Garrison over this issue of work. I mean we we normally think of uh Douglas arguing with Garrison over the meaning of the constitution or the value of political engagement. But this issue of work was uh central to their conflict as well. And also um we should consider not only uh Frederick Douglas's uh activism but that of lesserk known activists Charles Lennox Reand and his sister Sarah Parker Reand and how they made a living as full-time activists, Charles in particular. So I when I started this I thought that they got um sort of a cut you know when they went out and spoke to a group that they would get part of the collection for that evening but in
026fact they were salaried. They were given a very small amount uh in compensation and they were given some money to cover their travel expenses. But what that meant was hardship for their families at home because this was a very lowpaying and kind of uh tenuous kind of job. I do a whole chapter called the world of the streets where I look at what is really kind of a carnivalesque aspect of Boston streets during this period. Here we see the corner of winter Washington and summer streets. Um, there's an organ grinder with a monkey. The ladies are out in their finery. There's a carriage driver who's driving too fast. Um, the streets were a place where white supremacy was performed. And it it um has a special place I think in the history of work uh
027altogether. I also consider um a place I call the underground commons. The underground commons. And this is a place, these are places in the north end, uh, usually where Alyssa's services are bought and sold. Um, gambling, drinking, prostitution, that sort of thing. This is, um, a rat pit where men would bet to see how many rats the dog could kill in a certain amount of time. Uh, and I found an account of um a black man who accumulated the rats. He uh went to stables and other places. Uh one night he um his name was Jum. Uh he was accosted on the street by uh a police officer who said, "What do you have in that burlap bag?" And Jun put it down and there were the policeman could see there were all these squirreling
028uh kind of squirming animals. Uh and Jum had made $5 that night, which was a very good hall indeed. But um this is you know these are the workers who make their living off this kind of underground uh economy. And I spend quite a bit of time actually on Joseph Clash who was a barber, a dance hall operator, a musician, a pimp, a con man. Uh he owned a very popular um dance hall in the north end called the American Hall and he would give various events there. He would give prizes for costumes. Uh and it was a really it was a gathering place for black and white men and women of all classes. And one of the best descriptions I found was in the newspaper when a reporter attended one of the uh you
029know a Friday night um get together, Friday night dance in um in company with a local police officer and they just had a great time. The food was terrific and the d the music was great um and it was very entertaining. It was very entertaining night and in fact Joseph Clash himself was actually as he probably needed to be a pretty violent man. He figures in several murder trials, assault trials uh during this period, but he was always acquitted by uh a jury of white men because his dance hall was so popular among so many different kinds of people. But I should include here the pickpockets. And I had never seen this term pickpocketress uh used by one Boston police chief. Um it's around this area of Boston that we find sex workers, card sharps,
030scam artists. uh and I think we should file these workers under work and not just crime because again uh if we evaluate their working conditions, how much they were compensated kind of the also the dangers the uh hazards occupational hazards they faced you know we can see kind of compare this kind of work to uh work in the legitimate economy. I found some really creative kinds of work here. And this is the fugitive impostor. There were many. Um, this is CC Burley. And people are writing in to the liberator to warn people that this man has pretended to be a fugitive from slavery when in fact he is not. And that was a special kind of work uh that was available only to black men and women, right? Uh they had to have a good
031story. They had to present themselves as uh brave freedom seekers who had left behind their families and they needed money to get those families out of slavery and up north. It was a very um parapotetic kind of life because they could only scam for so long before they were found out and then they had to move on to the next town. But really interesting category of labor I think and that is the fugitive impostor. some um very well-known and wellto-do black workers, Joshua Bowen Smith, a caterer, and Robert Morris, an attorney. And I want to say that both of these men were successful because they had white clients. Uh Joshua Bone Smith uh catered uh all sorts of parties for the Boston City Council, for Harvard faculty. Robert Morris had black and white clients. He
032had a lot of Irish clients, too. And that was a key to uh uh economic stability and well-being having white clients. I want to also mention a couple others. Louise de Morty who had b been born free in Virginia. She was an elocutionist. She had memorized large chunks of poetry and literary passages. and also um Christristiana uh Cartto Banister who called herself a hair doctress and um had quite a a thriving business in Boston. These are the exceptions again that prove the rule. I mean these are uh high-profile well relatively wellto-do workers during this period. But I want to come back to the uh burdens placed on women especially when their activist husbands were away for long stretches. Anna Douglas took care of um her and Frederick's children, the household when he was gone for
033long stretch stretches, months, maybe even uh years at a time. And uh that equation of the um public activist's career is not always recognized. I mentioned that military service can be seen as a kind of work. This is James M. Troder originally uh from Ohio. He is the father of William Monroe Troder here in Boston. Um again look at these soldiers. look at their pay, their working conditions, whether they had an opportunity for promotion, what the workplace culture was was a like. And you can see that there are echoes of the civilian workplace in army encampments and also aboard ships where black seammen are working. And some of the most eloquent literature of the time concerns these black soldiers who are getting paid less than their white um counterparts. And what is missing from a
034lot of those um those treatments is the other side uh and that is what's happening in Boston to the uh wives and children of these men who are suffering greatly because uh they're not getting um pay during this time. And these these men by the way do stand on principle and do not accept pay until they're paid equally in July of 1864. So um and a lot of uh black soldiers were fatigue workers. They were put to work building trenches, putting up tents, digging latrines, cutting down trees, uh sometimes in service of white regiments during this period. And also um I wanted to consider what I call the Boston diaspora and that was those uh black Bostononians who went south during or after the civil war to provide release services for the refugees or provide
035other services for uh freed people. Lou uh Harry Jacobs uh hid in her grandmother's attic for seven years before she made her escape to the north. her daughter and she uh started schools in Alexandria, Virginia and also in Savannah, Georgia. And there are only two examples of again what I call the Boston diaspora. So I had mentioned uh the failure of the antibbellum Republican party um to really uh reward its black supporters. George L. Ruffen was uh the first black graduate of Harvard Law School. He was uh the first black judge in uh Massachusetts. He was a very uh dist distinguished person and he did get um a couple of uh political jobs because he was such a loyal Republican. However, he didn't get the promotions within those jobs that white men got and that
036was a source of great um disgust and humiliation for him. So also uh looking at leaders of various kinds I I do uh look very closely at ministers and I have I found that their income usually was not commensurate with their prestige and to give you an example Reverend Leonard A. Grimes was the pastor of 12th Baptist Church, often known as the fugitives church. He was a an activist in his own right, a leader in the community, very well known, very well respected, and yet he and his family struggled. Here's his wife Octavia. They struggled because their the congregation was so poor. And that was um the case for Peter Randolph from the original group from the Edllo plantation. He moved from congregation to congregation in uh Boston, in Canada, in Virginia, looking for a
037congregation that could pay him a living wage. And he uh really did not find one until he moved back to Boston after the Civil War. And uh got um a position in the South End and started a church called Ebenezer. But uh it was really u hardgoing and eventually he had to give up that as well and become a traveling uh activist on uh the for temperance causes. So again income was not necessarily pegged to prestige and the preachers are a good case of that. along with the fugitive impostors other kinds of interesting workers I found uh deacon Cyrus Foster who was born in 1785 in Chelmsford was uh variously a servant of valet uh but also an entertainer, a musician and an imprario. He gave an annual concert in Boston and um this was
038a place where whites um whites attended because they made fun of him and his way of talking. Uh but uh I think he had the last laugh because he was able to make quite a good living from offering these annual con um concerts where the whites thought he was playing a fool. But I think they were probably the fools for um uh paying so much money to to hear him and see him. before each concert, the day before, he would uh march a group of black workers with their brooms and their buckets through the center of town in order to get an announcement in the paper that the concert was the next day. So very savvy there uh in terms of promoting this concert. And then I will just say too that one thing we
039have to consider um is the way that these impoverished households kept things together made it um made it through um the days and months and years. We do find that many older children remain in their parents' households to help support the parents even after those older children have married. We find households taking in borders, people from who have come from the south of fugitives and free people of color. We find people relying on their churches, on charitable groups, on fraternal orders uh to uh help with uh medical expenses, burial expenses, that kind of thing. So, I just wanted to wrap up and say um a couple of things. first of all that um again the um racial division of labor in Boston in 1900 was essentially what it had been in 1900. It was essentially
040what it had been in 1840. And John Daniels in his book provides various categories of black workers uh in 1900 and 81% of them can be classified as uh unskilled or menial. Uh missing from this group is any mention of any uh substantial numbers of men in the skilled trades, in factory work, in white collar work such as bookkeeping or in teaching or the other professions and women were mostly uh laresses and servants. So, uh, I I thought I would include this quotation because it really struck me at the time. And this is from Charles L. Woodworth, who was a congregational minister, lived in Boston during the war. He had actually been a minister in Ammerst, but and then served as a chaplain in the um, Union Army and moved to Boston to work for
041the American Missionary Association after the war. He is a white man. And in a sermon in 1867, he reminded his listeners about what white people owed enslaved people in the south. He said, you know, the prosperity of the north of Boston and its hinderland, that prosperity has rested on the shoulders of uh enslaved people growing cotton. And what do we owe to them? and especially what do we owe to them? Um the soldiers, the black soldiers and seaman who help preserve the union. Uh disguise it as we may, we have grown rich by robbing the poor and mighty by taking the energies of the weak. and it's a really eloquent explication of the larger antibbellum economy and how it rested again on the um shoulders of enslaved men, women, and children. So, uh, just in
042conclusion, I hope you'll agree with me that a study of the ways of making a living is a particularly rich topic for historical research, covering virtually every aspect of black family and community life in Boston during this period. The Civil War was a traumatic event, but it did not affect the racial division of labor in Boston. The separate low-wage division of labor was not a natural historical process, but the product of decisions among many groups of ordinary white men and women in concert with employers, clergy, and political leaders. But in spite of barriers to economic justice, black men and women showed resilience and resourcefulness in creating their own jobs and pooling their own resources. as members of extended king groups, churches, and mutual aid societies. I think we should remember and honor their struggles not
043only as freedom fighters but as workers as well. Thank you. [Applause] So, do we have any? Yes. Could you talk a bit more about the uh role of work in the split between uh Garrison and Douglas? >> Yes. Well, the the quote I uh gave you from Frederick Douglas about work was from 1853. And there there was quite a bit of consternation within the abolitionist community that Frederick Douglas would criticize William Lloyd Garrison. Again, Garrison very courageous physically. Uh he spent his lifetime advocating for enslaved people. He raised money. But he he had his limits certainly when it came to um concerned for black Bostononians. And I'll give you an example. In the early 1830s when he was just getting started with his abolitionist society and with the liberator, he seemed to favor a vocational
044school for black men and women that would help them in the job market. But that was an appeal, I think, to black subscribers of the Liberator. And once that journal took off, Garrison came to realize that first of all, the school itself, the proposed vocational school, would cost a lot of money and would probably drain precious donations from well-meaning men and women from the abolitionist cause into a school for northern black men and women. and he became more more aware of the finances here, what it took to keep the liberator going, what it took to fund the abolitionist cause in the north, and he didn't want any distractions from that. So again, after just a couple of years, the idea of the school kind of faded. But Douglas is saying here, you know, how can
045you expend all your time and energy on enslaved people without showing any concern really for your black neighbors in Boston. And this was a a bitter split. was um only John Rock and Frederick Douglas who had the stature and the um fortitude I think to stand up to Garrison because most people who embraced the anti-slavery cause black and white thought of Garrison as as a real hero and someone to be emulated not someone to be criticized. I was surprised in reading your book about the financial assistance that Bostononians, I guess it was more the businessmen, sent down to Savannah, Georgia after the war. How did the uh the the ministers and the press respond to money going south instead of keeping it in Boston? Right. Well, and in fact, that effort to provide relief for
046Savannah came not at the end of the war, but during the war. This was in January of 1865 when the war was still going on. U Savannah had been liberated in December of 1864. And what the news reports indicated was that there was a huge stockpile of cotton in the city of Savannah. And you can see these uh folks from LOL and Lawrence really perking up. You know, who's going to get all that stockpiled cotton? Well, maybe we should appeal to our, you know, misguided brethren in Savannah. So, there's a tremendous fundraising effort uh and people donate their ships to take all the food and the supplies south so forth. Uh New York actually ended up getting most of the cotton so it didn't work. But yes, I mean there was some concern um generally
047that relief efforts that went to the south would kind of drain Boston's charitable coffers and that not only in terms of this aid sent to Savannah but also setting up schools in the south for uh free people and so forth. So yes, that that was a concern. I will say the concern only lasted a couple of years because much of that money flowing south really stopped after a couple of years. And what we can find, again, I think it's really fascinating, and the large numbers of black refugees who came by ship to Boston beginning in 1867 through through 67. Well, thank you so much for coming today. Appreciate it. Thank you for inviting me. [Applause] >> So, to close out our talk today, I'd just like to say a huge thank you to Dr. Jones
048for coming and speaking with us. Um, thank you all for coming and we hope you'll join us for our next talk on April 25th. There's a schedule of events on your way out. Um, and thank you once again to Dr. Jones. [Applause] [Music]