To Live an Antislavery Life

Ball drives a stake into the heart of the tired argument that much of the aspiring black middle class in the antebellum North turned its collective back on the plight of its enslaved southern brethren in an inward-looking quest for uplift, respectability, and local political rights. Ball draws upon many of the same sources often cited in support of that argument—prescriptive conduct literature, domestic discourse, newspapers, convention debates, and cultural productions such as the Anglo-African Magazine. However, by placing these sources in conversation with slave narratives and interpreting them in fresh ways, she is able to demonstrate persuasively that, for free blacks, self-advancement could be a revolutionary, even subversive, act and the strong family unit could serve as the essential site for building race consciousness and fighting slavery.

* author of Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 *

Ball's well-written book makes a good case for the impact of individual lives 'lived well' on the elimination of slavery and racism. It should have broad appeal among audiences interested in nineteenth-century African American history and cultural studies.

* author of The Clamorgans: One Family's History of Race in America *

[Historian] Erica L. Ball, associate professor of American studies, aims to do nothing less than prompt a rethinking of the relationship between the personal and the political among the northern black middle class in the years before the Civil War.

This thoughtful, eloquent [To Live an Antislavery Life] shows how ‘elite and aspiring’ African Americans vested their everyday conduct and values with radical potential. . . . its compactness and clarity make it an attractive option for classroom use, and Ball displays an impressive analytical range within five concise chapters. . . . Most significantly, scholars of nineteenth-century class formation and African American history will profit from Ball’s incisive work at the intersection of those two rich fields.

* New England Quarterly *

Emphasizing the fusion of the political with the personal, Ball usefully and persuasively shifts our perspectives on the character and purposes of antebellum African American writing… In sum, this attractively produced [To Live an Antislavery Life] makes a valuable contribution to the study of antebellum American history.

* American Historical Review *

[Ball] delivers an insightful explication of what motivated the antebellum black middle class… Erica Ball has produced a strong, innovative, and valuable contribution to the historiography of black activism and the black middle class.

* Journal of the Early Republic