Amos Webber (1826-1904) perhaps never intended there would be a biography written of him. After all, his life as a black man born free in the North, as a Civil War soldier, as a servant and janitor was the not an experience that captured headlines. His was a life that could be overlooked easily by historians and others who document America's past.

But Webber did intend for someone to read about his life, for he wrote more than 2,000 pages worth of his thoughts and views on 19th-century American life.

Nick Salvatore just happened to be that someone. Salvatore, an award-winning biographer and professor of history in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, stumbled across Webber's diary 10 years ago in a Harvard University library while researching an article on 19th-century American labor.

Penciled in between two lines of type on a list of research materials was the notation "Amos Webber Thermometer Record and Diary." Salvatore believed the note referred to the furnaces in a steel mill and that the listing would be a work log of a mill foreman or supervisor. It was not. Instead Salvatore uncovered a nine-volume diary belonging to Webber. That discovery took Salvatore on a 10-year search for information to piece together Webber's life story, which he tells in his new book, We All Got History: The Memory Books of Amos Webber (Times Books, 1996).

"Through reading Webber's words, it is clear that black Americans in the 19th century understood that, essential to their well-being, they would have to create a rich, complex life for themselves despite the hostility and exclusion they faced," Salvatore said.

The "Amos Webber Thermometer Record and Diary" actually refers to a ledger Webber kept of daily weather conditions. Along with the meteorological information, Webber penned comments on community events and his opinions on slavery, civil rights and politics. Journal entries run from 1854 to 1860 and again from 1870 until his death.

The diary, however, contains very little of Webber's personal life. The death of his only son receives scant attention, and his wife, to whom he was married for more than half a century, is mentioned only "five or six times," according to Salvatore.

Webber, who was born in 1826 outside Philadelphia and died in Worcester, Mass., at age 78, made a living working for white people, as a servant, a messenger and as a janitor in a steel factory. When not in the steel mill or crisscrossing town on message runs, Webber embarked on missions that expressed his pride in being black and an American. Webber fought in the Civil War with the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry and helped slaves escape to freedom on the Underground Railroad. While Webber writes of some of his Underground Railroad experience, he never divulges any information in his chronicle that could implicate others in this illicit mission. For example, Salvatore surmises that an 11-day gap in journal entries, beginning with the notation "A.W. = started for Canada" and ending with "A.W. = arrived in Canada Last night" is evidence of Webber's work in bringing slaves to freedom.

"This certainly is not an episode that Amos Webber would have wanted to publicize in the diary for fear of somebody reading it and using the information against him," Salvatore said.

In his journal, Webber tells of his and other black war veterans cautious acceptance into the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), an organization for Civil War veterans. But Webber soon becomes perturbed over the organization's failure to fully welcome black veterans.

"The GAR held campfires where war veterans would tell war stories as a way of healing the pain of the conflict and carrying on their history," Salvatore said. "However, none of the black veterans was ever invited to take part in these campfires; their stories went untold."

When the GAR finally agreed to allow black veterans to participate in the campfires, Webber and others invited members of their families, clergy and congregations to hear their stories.

"This is one example of how Webber and others found strength in the black community; these stories were not just the veterans' stories, they were stories of the black community," Salvatore said.

Webber's writing also demonstrates that he and his friends had a strong sense of the history of black Americans, which Salvatore said is reflected in the establishment of a fraternal organization dedicated to the well-being of black Americans.

In 1868 when Webber establishes the Grange United Order of Oddfellows, a national black organization in Worcester, the membership consciously chooses Aug. 1 as its founding date and names its chapter the North Star Lodge. "These references to the date black Americans celebrated the British emancipation and to the star that guided the slaves to freedom are not coincidental," Salvatore claims. "They represent the deep understanding Webber and others had of their history."

Webber's desire to support his fellow veterans led to the creation, in 1880, of the Massachusetts Colored Veterans Association.

"At one regional convention, these veterans, organized by Webber, marched through Worcester in their federal blue," Salvatore said. "They were intent on claiming for themselves and all black people a central place in the nation's memory of the Civil War."

By writing the journal, Webber also may have affirmed aspects of his life, Salvatore suggests.

"In many ways, this journal served as vehicle for personal development and growth," he said. "Black people back then had very little public role, and his journal entries served as a way for him to offer his views on the day without suffering unwanted consequences.

"What Amos Webber helps us understand is a way in which a group of people who were not nationally known or subjects of major headlines not only built their daily lives but lived their lives around a principled sense of commitment to and engagement with each other and the world around them" Salvatore said.

In the book's epilogue, Salvatore suggests that Webber's world of civic pride and strong community relationships fostered by his service to fraternal organizations is a world that for a long time remained hidden from white people.

"Too many whites thought that blacks as a people lacked a collective history or a social structure, and they, therefore, assumed that a man like Amos Webber was just a janitor," Salvatore writes. "He knew better, and his act of faith in projecting that knowledge continued to bear fruit even eighty years after his death."

Salvatore's book has been praised in The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post. Writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Charles L. Blockson of Temple University, says, "Nick Salvatore's reconstruction of Amos Webber's life, using Webber's own writings, warms the heart and soothes the soul of people thirsting for a broader sense of identity." Salvatore, a fellow of the Society of American Historians, won the Bancroft Prize (1983) and the John H. Dunning Prize in United States History (1984) for Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist, a biography of the former labor leader.