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

Abstract

Human misery, Amos Webber recorded in 1883, 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.