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Liberating Free Labor
Vere Foster and Assisted Irish Emigration, 1850–1865
Introduction: Assistance, Relief, Control
Assisted emigration accounted for less than 4 percent of departures from Ireland during the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the roughly 275,000 people who left the island after receiving financial aid from landlords, the British state, or private philanthropists deserve attention as cases that demonstrate how the redistribution of underemployed surplus labor was governed and imagined as a resource for white, Anglophone settlements.1 Bracketed by the Irish Famine and the beginnings of mass migration to the United States, and the Civil War, the period of 1850 to 1865 saw key developments relating to what it meant to be a free laborer and migrant if one was a young, unaccompanied Irish woman. By the end of the war, Irish servants were avidly pursuing the benefits that came with the ability to contract their labor freely, much to the dismay of Anglo-American employers. In conflict with the prescriptions that the brokers of their labor offered, which urged them to move west into the interior and marry, Irish servants crafted racial and political identities as independent, urban wage earners instead.
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Mary Harlon had strong opinions about wages, working conditions, and the respect she deserved as a domestic servant. Contrary to what might be expected of an Irish orphan whose emigration was paid for by charitable funds, Harlon was hardly a dependent. Between May 1862 and October 1865, she shared her perspectives on work and life in a series of six letters she wrote to Vere Foster, the man who sponsored her immigration. Foster was a member of the Anglo-Irish gentry. Using his personal inheritance and private donations solicited through his Pioneer Irish Emigration Fund, Foster financed the passage of approximately 1,250 Irish women between 1850 and 1857. During the early 1880s, Foster subsidized the emigration of an additional 20,000 women between the ages of eighteen and thirty, paying for half the cost of their steamship tickets.2 The Foster family had been landlords in County Louth, Ireland, since the late eighteenth century, and most of the emigrants who applied for assistance in the 1850s came from the area around Glyde Court, the family’s estate. Foster appears to have been an acquaintance of Harlon’s parish priest, who probably connected the two. In her letters, Harlon asked Foster to relay to a Father Smyth that she was attending Mass every Sunday, and that she received communion whenever her work schedule allowed.
Foster was a critic of private and state-backed initiatives that dispensed charity without calculating what returns their investment might bring.3 Influenced by the emerging social science of charity work in Britain, Foster’s solicitations for financial support included the controversial proposal calling for prohibitions on the emigration of families, which landlords could finance as an alternative to paying taxes that supported local workhouses and outdoor relief. Foster believed that the migration of whole families increased the likelihood of pauperism, and that it was prudent to identify the most capable individual wage earners when administering emigration assistance.4 Because the arrival of pauper families also aggravated nativist public opinion in the United States, their emigration endangered the trust on which more productive transfers of populations between nation-states rested. Framing migration as the trade in human subjects, Foster noted that his program was designed to minimize the possibility of “some trifling misunderstanding between the governments of the two most free and progressive countries on the globe.”5 The migrants Foster sponsored were asked to repay the assistance they received, although no data exist on how many actually did. In Harlon’s case, she would have had no difficulty reimbursing Foster’s “loan.” In May 1862, Harlon’s situation with the Carrigan family came to an abrupt end. To Foster, Harlon vented anger at having spent seventeen months working for the Carrigans only to be let go with one day’s notice. She was upset that the Carrigans had provided no explanation as to why she was dismissed, since her service—to the best of her knowledge—had been exemplary. Her disappointment notwithstanding, Harlon had managed to put away eighty dollars in savings and found new employment, with the Taylor family, almost immediately.
In defiance of the thrift that Foster preached, Harlon communicated her plans to purchase a new silk dress.6 This act of personal indulgence was perhaps intended to numb the sting of her sudden dismissal. It can also be read as an assertion of her continued autonomy. Clothing was a frequent flash point in conflicts between Irish servants and their Anglo-American employers. In the 1850s, middle-class employers were already complaining that Irish servants wasted their wages on unneeded and unbecoming consumer luxuries. When dressed in fine clothes, an Irish servant challenged the visible markers of class difference that separated capital from labor, and immigrants from the native-born. An 1863 cartoon in Harper’s Weekly gave visual form to employers’ anxieties, and the ways in which fashion and Irish servants’ liberty of contract had become conflated. In the image, “Bridget O’Flaherty” wears a dress with a large bustle and sports an ornamental umbrella while she awaits hire in an intelligence office. The office’s proprietor, Mrs. Blackstone, presents to O’Flaherty a “Mr. Jones,” who is looking for a cook and assures his prospective domestic that he has a “fair character” and is “steady.” Harper’s readers would have appreciated the irony. It is Jones getting scrutinized rather than the other way around.7
Figure 1.1. “The Present Intelligence Offices,” Harper’s Weekly, 1863.
The Catholic Church and middle-class employers were in agreement that Irish servants had no business concerning themselves with personal appearance, albeit for different reasons. Sister Mary Frances Cusack lectured in Advice to Irish Girls in America that the servant who bought “fine clothes, which are not suitable to her station in life,” put “herself in danger both in this world and the next.” Cusack was undoubtedly also worried that individual purchases would cut into the amount of remittances that Irish women were able to send back to Ireland. In this vein as well, Irish Catholic commentators sometimes dissuaded single women from marrying, since marital obligations—and the need to keep their own homes—hindered their ability to earn wages.8
There is an insular quality to Harlon’s correspondence that gestures to ways in which immediate material concerns dominated the perspective of the immigrant wage worker. Written during the Civil War, her letters contain only passing mentions of the conflict. The New York City Draft Riots, which led some Anglo-American employers to allege that their Irish servants were plotting to loot their workplaces, merit no attention at all. The only biographical details Harlon provides in her letters are references to two brothers still in Ireland, and a one-line lament about the “loss” of her parents.9 Harlon frequently prayed for Foster in order to express her “gratitude” for his “kindness,” and concluded her letters with the valediction “your friend and servant.” Deference coexists with an intimate and open tone in which Harlon appears almost indifferent to the chasm of social class between the two. Foster responded to the correspondence he received from Harlon—although the copies of his letters are unavailable—and she mentions in one of her letters that he called on her in person when he visited New York in 1864.10
Much more is known about Foster, unsurprisingly. Born in 1819 in Copenhagen, Vere spent his youth in Turin, before enrolling at Eton and then Oxford. His father, Augustus John Foster, was a career diplomat who served as minister plenipotentiary (the equivalent of ambassador) to the United States before vacating his position at the start of the War of 1812. Vere, if he set foot on Irish soil at all before 1847, left no record of having visited. Both he and his eldest brother, Frederick, pursued careers in diplomacy following their father, while the middle of the three brothers, Cavendish, became an Anglican minister. When Augustus committed suicide in 1848, Frederick took charge of Glyde Court. After touring famine-ravished southern and western Ireland in the autumn of 1849, Vere enrolled at the Glasnevin Model Farm School outside of Dublin, to study how to better manage his family’s lands and tenants through modern farming techniques. He anticipated serving as his brother’s estate agent.11 While still enrolled at the Glasnevin School, Vere used a portion of his personal allowance to fund the passage of forty emigrants from County Louth, whose “character and industrious habits” he had vetted through interviews with police and clergy, a method that he would adopt as standard.12 For reasons unknown, in 1850 he decided to abandon his plans to serve as estate agent in favor of pursuing assisted migration as a form of philanthropic social work, and, for the next decade, his primary vocation.
Foster was enamored of areas of the United States that existed beyond the Appalachian Mountains but east of the Mississippi River. In his opinion, these were the destinations where Irish migrants could best prosper. To Foster, the ideal course for an Irish woman he sponsored had her leave Castle Garden without delay for states such as Illinois and Wisconsin. Harlon disregarded this advice, although she did not reject job mobility outright. When she wrote to Foster in June 1864, she informed him that she was contemplating a move to California. Cheekily, she explained that she had decided not to go because he had once told her that the state was too distant for him to visit. A month later, Harlon again raised the possibility of relocating to California. She was no doubt tempted by the high wages for servants on the Pacific Coast, which averaged between twenty and twenty-five dollars per month compared to the ten dollars she could earn in New York City.13 Still, the journey to San Francisco took a month or more and in 1864 could be accomplished only by boat and then railroad across the Isthmus of Panama. The trip was expensive and fraught with health risks, and ended in an unfamiliar place. Nor was there any guarantee that work would be as readily available and well-compensated as she had heard.
Irish wage laborers were understandably daunted by the upfront capital investment that secondary migrations required, and individuals like Foster, similar to commercial brokers, staked their authority on being able to intervene and help overcome this obstacle. Visiting California in 1867, Charles Loring Brace, the founder of the Children’s Aid Society, estimated that female domestics in San Francisco made on average three times more than the monthly wages paid to their counterparts in eastern cities and that ambitious women could enter into contracts where employers paid the cost of their passage to San Francisco.14 In 1869, the Dublin-based Freeman’s Journal published an advertisement from an unnamed San Francisco company that offered to pay Irish women a hundred fifty dollars in gold for a year’s work and to cover the expensive, lengthy journey. Receipt of the full sum was contingent, however, on the contracted servants’ remaining at their jobs for a year.15 As these offers indicate, Foster competed against other brokers who had commercial incentives to try to recruit white servants to areas where labor shortages existed. In New York, Harlon had the ability to earn steady wages while healthy. Not having to pay for rent or board, she kept her expenses minimal. She gave no indication that she supported her brothers with remittances. The city abounded with job opportunities for experienced servants like Harlon. In her June 1864 letter, Harlon inquired as to whether Foster had “herd of a place to sute me better.”16 She continued to view Foster as an intermediary who might be called on to assist her, albeit through references rather than immediate material support.
When the Taylors refused Harlon’s request for a raise in August 1864, she responded to a newspaper advertisement seeking a servant willing to accompany a woman to Key West, Florida, and to work there at a salary of twelve dollars a month. Whether wanderlust or higher wages enticed Harlon to go “out South,” as she put it, this was a speculative move on her part. In Key West, Harlon was employed by Walter McFarland and his family at Fort Zachary Taylor, a base in the Union’s naval blockade. In a letter to Foster dated December 20, 1864, Harlon described falling seriously ill upon her arrival in Key West—malaria had long plagued the base—which had forced her to spend a long period convalescing. Whether or not she received pay while recovering was not stated; if she was not working, wages were not guaranteed. At the McFarlands’ house, Harlon’s only companion was a hired black freeman who did occasional work around the home. She lent him books and tried to teach him to read.17 Melancholy permeates the letter. Relegated to the social margins of the household, Harlon felt “all alone.” Her vulnerability is a subtext to the letter. If illness returned, who would look after her and ensure that she got back to New York City?
Harlon made it back to New York, her health intact. October 1865 found her writing from Litchfield, Connecticut, where her wealthy New York employers, the Whites, kept a second home. Upon returning to the city, Harlon had stayed with the Corcoran family, whom she described as her first employers in the United States. The Corcorans, their name suggests, were probably Irish Catholic. Whereas the McFarlands treated Harlon as a servant to be grouped with the rest of the hired help, the elderly Mrs. Corcoran viewed her as a member of the extended family deserving of free lodging while she looked for work in the city. Harlon’s economic success as an independent wage earner led her to be disinterested in marriage. She turned down the engagement proposal of a suitor, telling Foster in her October letter—in a flirtatious tone—that a man of his class and intellect was the only type she wanted to wed.18 This was the last letter from Harlon that Foster archived.
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From the colonial era onward local policies had required shipmasters transporting immigrants to indemnify municipalities and states against having to provide public relief toward the care of foreign paupers. The insistence of cities like New York and Boston on the need to restrict the entry of economically dependent migrants was instrumental in prompting Congress to act on its plenary power to regulate immigration, and offered the template for the first federal policies enacted in the early 1880s.19 Despite the existence of such regulations, Foster’s interventions are best understood not through the framework of exclusion, but rather as policies that modeled a particular form of integration for Irish women. He engaged in a mid-nineteenth-century version of “salvage accumulation,” albeit without a personal profit motive, in which his assistance programs doubled as a transatlantic refugee policy. As anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing notes, “salvage accumulation” refers to the processes in which actors “amass capital without controlling the conditions under which the commodities are produced.”20
Foster viewed Irish women as human capital being squandered, since Ireland lacked both the land and employment markets for their labor and reproductive capabilities—as wives and mothers—to have real exchange and use value. The export of Irish women as sentimental commodities and republican mothers in the making was routinely cited by Foster as the attainable social reality that justified his endeavors. An ideological liberal when it came to his approach to political economy and markets, Foster was nonetheless aware that few Irish emigrants had the wherewithal to pay for their own passage. A self-styled entrepreneur, Foster routinely alluded to his charitable investments in the potential of the Irish people. Horace Greeley, one of the initial subscribers to Foster’s Irish Pioneer Emigration Fund, editorialized in his New York Tribune that Foster’s work represented a “systematic” approach to population transfers that was preferable to the “No-System” it supplanted. Foster’s method of assistance, Greeley contended, meant the women could be relocated from Ireland to an interior state like Wisconsin for less than twenty-five dollars, and with an expediency that meant “they were hardly six weeks from work to work.” These technical advantages did not even account for how Foster’s supervision also impeded “the usual temptations to intemperance, lewdness and vagrancy, and the exposure to imposition, fraud and robbery.”21
American public opinion most favored European immigration in the nineteenth century when immigrants were perceived as contributing to the continued settlement and development of regions marked as peripheral to the metropolitan core of the nation.22 Foster’s loans to emigrant women, whether he recuperated these expenses or not, enabled him to assert a type of coercive power—rooted in social debt rather than violence or formal legal guardianship—over the immigrants he sponsored. With varied success, as Harlon’s case demonstrates, Foster tried to dictate where the Irish women he sponsored would settle. In the United States, he worked with third-party intermediaries such as priests to negotiate the contract of Irish women’s labor to local employers in Canandaigua, New York, and Janesville, Wisconsin. Like most of the “friends” of migrants active in the cities of the Eastern Seaboard, Foster believed that urban settlement patterns left young Irish women vulnerable to sexual and economic exploitation, and that sprawling Irish slums were dangerous barriers to cultural assimilation. Foster’s bias against eastern cities reflected the republican cast of his liberalism, and the deep-seated suspicions that he and others harbored against both “wage slavery” and, in contradictory terms, women wage workers who were content to forgo secondary migrations and marriage to male landowners in favor of maintaining their independence. Commentators framed immigrants’ settlement choices as matters of personal character. An 1857 Harper’s Weekly article, for instance, complained that since more ambitious German immigrant women were “shipped, on arrival, directly into the insatiable maw of the Great West,” Irish women were able to monopolize domestic service in New York and demand wages incommensurate to their skill level.23
As Harlon’s experiences demonstrate, Irish women had significant leeway in determining whether or not they would abide by Foster’s advice. Although Irish women had to satisfy questions about their character and industry in order to receive his funds while still in Ireland, once they were in the United States, Foster’s control over the migrants he assisted was indirect and based on persuasion rather than explicit coercion. Such were the perils of enabling free migration. Foster’s work offers important insights into how gender and race factored into efforts that were designed to convince migrants to voluntarily surrender their independence. Irish servants were instructed to relinquish their liberty of contract in favor of assuming positions as wives and mothers—ideally in homes far removed from New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Empirically, historian Cormac Ó Gráda suggests that midcentury Irish immigrant women, in contrast to their male counterparts, had few reasons to expect that upward mobility would result from secondary, westward migrations. Discounting interpretations that have attributed Irish women’s entrenchment in urban areas solely to their lack of capital, Ó Gráda points out that it may not be “correct to see these Irishwomen as ‘locked in’ to the city and domestic service by poverty.”24 For young women, situations as servants in New York City were virtually guaranteed, even if the quality of available positions varied widely. Unclear as to what relocation and marriage offered them in concrete material terms, many Irish women resisted.
Foster was adamant that the Irish women he sponsored were free to leave the situations he ushered them to—often quite literally as a chaperone accompanying their secondary migrations—and that he would not seek to recover the funds given them.25 But these were largely moot points for women who had already acquiesced to being sent to interior locations, without money or contacts of their own. In bad work situations, young Irish women were vulnerable to immediate exploitation. Their vaunted positions as future wives and mothers offered little in the way of protection against such abuses. As historian Clay Gish has argued, the disjuncture between discourse and material reality was a defining feature of many assisted migration programs created during the midcentury.26 Legally, employers were permitted to dismiss household servants without cause. At best, servants might have a civil claim to their last month’s wages, but only if they worked the majority of that period, had the time and resources to go to court, and found a sympathetic judge. In addition, employers had no legal obligation to provide character references to their servants even though, as the literary historian Bruce Robbins has noted, for nineteenth-century domestics this was akin to a “labor passport.”27 As was the case for all female servants, sexual harassment and rape were consistent dangers as well. Away from eastern cities, Irish immigrant women were far more likely to be isolated from networks of friends and family and commercial establishments such as intelligence offices, which provided resources—namely temporary housing—that allowed servants who left bad work situations to survive without public relief. During the economic crisis of 1857, Foster took a position with the Women’s Protective Emigration Society and turned to unemployed women and widowed and abandoned mothers in New York as new targets for sponsored migrations to domestic labor jobs in the interior. As was so often the case in his work, these women (and their children) were the most economically vulnerable source of potential domestic labor. They were also the most susceptible to being coerced into taking jobs in unknown locations, where risks were highest.
After a fifteen-year hiatus from assisting emigration, Foster returned to this work in 1880. The situation, by then, was quite different. Whereas Foster’s work in the 1850s was marked by his careful personal orchestration of the migration process, he assumed a more detached supervisory capacity in the 1880s that mirrored the corporate and industrial scale that had come to define global migration as whole. In the 1880s, Foster also had to contend with more formidable Irish nationalist resistance to emigration, and what the Irish Land League argued was the forced exile of young Irish women. He also had to navigate new federal policies in the United States that regulated and restricted assisted immigration. In this environment, Foster’s work became divisively politicized. His claims to being a neutral, disinterested broker of migration—spurious to begin with—were no longer tenable.
Surplus Irish Labor, White Settler Capital
Foster’s involvement as a broker of assisted emigration originated in the ideological conflicts over population management that dominated post-famine Ireland. Foster believed that it was imperative for Irish tenants and their families to maximize possible returns on the sole commodity they possessed: their laboring power. Bluntly, he encouraged young men and women in rural Ireland to abandon any hope that there were sufficient natural resources or hiring opportunities—at least for the foreseeable future—that would allow them to remain on their island of birth. Foster characterized assisted emigration as the “most speedy and effectual present means” of aiding Ireland.28 Like many British liberals, he blamed the famine on the failure of the British government to adopt reforms in the decades leading up to 1845. Throughout his career he would support legislation that promoted the sale of encumbered estates to landowners who were intent on introducing better practices. He also backed measures designed to facilitate landlords’ voluntary sale of land as freeholds to successful tenants, which he argued incentivized prudent management.29 On the other hand, Foster drew a hard line against compulsory estate sales. When the Land War racked Ireland during the 1880s, this was a position that squarely aligned him with members of the Anglo-Irish gentry who argued that private property—even though the land in question was obtained in the seventeenth century through colonization and conquest—was sacrosanct.
As a member of the local gentry, Foster was obsessed with his standing among the Irish Catholic tenant farmers who lived on his family’s estate and on nearby lands. To this end, he worked to soothe the many anxieties that these communities had about inserting young women into the global market economy of the mid-nineteenth century. Emigration disrupted the protected status of gendered dependents. Racial and linguistic affinities that connected English-speaking migrants to each other at a familial level, Foster argued, could help offset the impact of these dislocations. Anglophone settler societies, regardless of their specific sovereign status, offered a field of opportunity for white migrants from all classes and were therefore essential spaces for perpetuating a form of democratic capitalism that might allay the internecine class and ethnic conflict that threatened social relations between whites in Ireland, Britain, and the cities of the Atlantic Seaboard.30 In this respect, Foster’s work is emblematic of the complex relationship that Ireland and the Irish people had to the British Empire.31 Foster believed that the nineteenth-century “Settler Revolution,” to use the historian James Belich’s term for the explosive movement of capital, population, and cultural institutions from the British Isles and Ireland to settlements in lands seized by white, English-speaking populations, could be instrumentalized as a policy that included Irish men and women.32
Along with critiquing British state policies concerning assisted family emigration, Foster also lobbied government officials to be more proactive when it came to protecting emigrants’ rights as transatlantic passengers. He pressured British parliamentary officials to protect Irish emigrants as full-fledged members of the Union with rights that transatlantic passenger ship companies were legally compelled to acknowledge. In 1850, for instance, Foster lobbied the British Colonial Land and Emigration Office to better enforce parliamentary measures that required captains to distribute a set amount of rations to passengers.33 This was borne out of his personal experience as a passenger on the Liverpool-based sailing ship Washington. Foster observed that the already perilous five-week voyage was made even more brutal by the fact that the captain withheld the allotted provisions and medical services that he was legally mandated to provide. The Washington’s crew treated Irish steerage passengers with disdain and amused themselves by “drenching them from head to foot” when they used the vessel’s water closets.34 Upon the ship’s arrival in New York, its passengers were discharged without supervision and left to navigate the “various fleecing houses, to be partially or entirely disabled for pursuing their travels into the interior in search of employment.”35 Foster’s anger at the inhumane treatment that the ship’s Irish passengers received was sincere, but he was also aware that Americans were more likely to embrace immigrants if the British imperial government affirmed their right to humane treatment. Technological change would end up having the biggest impact in ensuring Irish immigrants’ healthy arrival. By the end of the 1850s, steamships had all but replaced sail-powered vessels, and cut the length of the journey to just ten days.
Foster’s work shared many similarities with programs that targeted Irish and British women in workhouses for resettlement as servants in Australia and Canada. It was dogmatic for British imperialists to cast these migrations as bolstering settler colonies’ labor supply, and their ability to grow their populations through reproduction.36 To Foster, whether an emigrant was destined for Australia, Canada, or the United States, or came from Ireland, England, or Scotland, mattered only in respect to how these factors determined the bottom line when it came to the cost of moving a person—at least in theory. Assisted emigration to North America represented a more productive intervention because six emigrants could be sent across the Atlantic for every one emigrant financed to go to Australia. According to Foster, the United States held an advantage over Canada because the voyage was quicker, wages were higher, more public lands were available for sale at a cheaper price, and the federal 1847 Passengers Act better ensured that vessels arriving in American ports met a minimum standard of accommodations and sanitation.37
A free labor advocate, Foster promoted wage work as the transitional means by which Irish tenants could secure self-sufficiency and eventually put themselves in a position to become landowning capitalists in their own right. Wage labor tested individuals’ fitness for self-governance and, when scaled to a group or people as a whole, fitness for national or collective self-rule. This philosophy informed both the position of liberal imperialists in Britain and, after the American Civil War, that of federal officials working with freemen and women.38 Foster premised that the Irish population’s fitness for liberal citizenship could not be gauged at home, since overpopulation and poor land were barriers that even the most industrious individuals could not surmount. The Irish demonstrated fitness for self-governance when they relinquished their attachment to Ireland and instead embraced opportunities to maximize the return on the sale of their labor power abroad. Foster forcefully condemned Irish tenant farmers whom he claimed ignorantly prohibited their daughters from seeking wage work abroad. In an 1857 letter to his local Irish newspaper, Foster promised that “the ensuing scarcity of labor” resulting from emigration would result in an “increase in wages and comfort,” and “produce America in Ireland.”39
America was less a distinct cultural and political realm than it was a set of advantageous market relations. Foster believed that access to “new” settlements was a vehicle that would allow immigrant wage laborers to compete equally in the primitive accumulation of capital—through land and property ownership—without the prohibitive economic, legal, or social barriers that doomed such endeavors within Ireland.40 Following the passage of the Irish Poor Law Act of 1838, entry into workhouses became a mandatory condition for indigent populations seeking relief.41 To Foster, this merely created an artificial and poorly run market for Irish labor that was reliant on the taxation of landlords rather than actual demand. It was harrowing to hear, he proclaimed in an 1851 circular, that more than 1,650 Irish men and women were alleged to have died from “neglect and starvation” while toiling in the workhouses of Ennistymon and Kilrush, County Clare, when a whole continent awaited their labors.42 Even though economic conditions in Ireland improved from 1852 onward, Foster remained a vocal critic of the workhouse system’s inefficiencies—a sentiment that many inmates of these institutions, who desired to emigrate, shared.43
Unlike many of his peers, Foster did not think that there was an innate backwardness and racial primitiveness to Irish Catholics.44 In the United States, Foster critiqued nativism as a disingenuous stance that was bent on writing Irish labor out of narratives of American expansion and nation building. Even the most “arrantly bigoted know-nothings,” he observed, were reliant on Irish servants and other laborers to perform work they saw as beneath them. Nativists falsely touted their republican self-sufficiency, yet were “so inconsistent as to pay others to work for them.”45 Ever the optimist, Foster claimed that this merely meant that ambitious Irish women faced less in the way of job competition. Foster praised Catholicism when it was useful to constructing the labor supply chains he envisioned. He worked closely with the Catholic clergy in both Ireland and the United States, and won the endorsement of the powerful New York archbishop, John Hughes, for his programs. Foster placated Hughes’s concerns about the preservation of Catholicism in areas removed from Irish immigrant hubs by arguing that even if Irish women might temporarily labor in Protestant households as domestics, over the long run, they would eventually transition to new roles as married homesteaders in Catholic families.46 Foster maintained contacts with Catholic clergy and bishops in major cities such as Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, and Rochester, as well as in Hamilton and Toronto, Canada. He also worked with the Church in aforementioned rural town centers such as Janesville, Wisconsin, and Canandaigua, New York. Upon their arrival in these places, the “batches of girls” that Foster sent—as one Canadian newspaper described them—were transferred to Catholic authorities who brokered their local employment.47
When Foster did turn his attention to the cultural and behavioral stereotypes that surrounded Irish immigrants in the United States, it was mainly out of concern for laborers’ marketability. To Foster, the Irish existed on the threshold of liberal modernity; they were, as he told the American Emigrants’ Friend Society in 1851, “the poorest and most uneducated portion of what is termed the civilized population of the world.”48 During his first visit to the United States, he wrote to the Irish Farmer’s Gazette to express his disappointment at having learned that Irish immigrants—“and even many of the girls”—had a reputation for being “drunken, riotous, and quarrelsome.” This led American employers to prefer German immigrant labor when available. Rather than grapple with the stereotype, Foster instead argued that Irish immigrants were obligated to silence detractors by proving their industry and commitment to self-improvement. Respectability politics, this suggests, saturated the self-policing discourse of all groups where laborers’ cultural backgrounds, whether defined in religious, racial, or ethnic terms, conflated marketability and social inclusion.49 Foster himself subscribed to Father Theobald Mathew’s stance on complete abstinence from alcohol, which he informed his readers gave him license to “preach to others to do so” as well.50
Foster denounced slavery and acts of racial discrimination and hatred carried out by individuals. The emigrants he sponsored, for instance, were required to sign a pledge that stated they would “love liberty and fair play for others as well as yourself, without distinction of race, religion or colour.”51 Foster had no problem accepting on a structural level, however, that Irish and British immigrants deserved to be, along with native-born white Americans, the beneficiaries of the federal policies that transferred land and natural resources to white settlers as private property. In an August 1851 letter to the Irish Farmer’s Gazette, Foster compared the gaunt and poorly clothed Mdewakanton and Wahpekute Dakota women he observed at the signing of the Treaty of Mendota in Minnesota Territory to the “dishevelled Irishwomen” of Connemara, where two years earlier he had toured the devastation caused by the famine.52 Whereas the Dakota women faced a precarious future due to dispossession, markets for the labor of Irish immigrant servants and their ability to win social inclusion as whites—despite a comparable expulsion from native lands—ensured them a more secure future. In his advice guide Work and Wages, which was distributed for free to more than a quarter million readers in Ireland and Great Britain in the 1850s (and to many thousands more who paid a penny in postage), Foster praised Minnesota’s “judicious mixture of timber and pasture” as ideal for homesteading. Treaty lands that had belonged to the Dakota could be bought from the federal government at a standard rate of $1.25 per acre.53 Foster’s schemes were developed in concert with other state-backed settler colonial projects, such as the construction of railroads linking interior regions to markets. A farmer in Drury Creek, Illinois, for instance, wrote to Foster in October 1852 to dissuade him from sending Irish women to the region. A railroad connection would not arrive in nearby Carbondale until 1854. The farmer explained to Foster that when he was able to hire hands at all, it was only on a seasonal basis and the workers were compensated with cattle and surplus produce. These items were of little use to female migrants hoping to send remittances back to Ireland.54 Irish servants’ contributions to the project of long-term white settlement in the region would have to wait.
Railroads were crucial elements in how Foster designed for the efficient movement and placement of laborers. The networks that allowed agricultural producers in the interior to move commodities to eastern markets and distribution points also permitted these areas to import labor as a consumer good.55 Janesville, Wisconsin, is a representative example of the type of settlement that Foster sought out. Founded in 1835 from treaty lands ceded by Sauk and Fox Indians after their defeat in the Black Hawk War three years earlier, the white settlement of Janesville was less than two decades old when thirty-nine migrants that Foster had sponsored disembarked there in 1857. The arrival of the railroad in 1850 not only contributed to Janesville’s preeminence as a regional city, but also brought hundreds of male Irish laborers who laid the tracks. The Catholic infrastructure that Foster would later rely on in placing domestic laborers followed.56 By 1860, the Janesville census would list 160 Irish-born women as live-in servants working in Anglo-American households.57
Disciplining Free Women: Marriage and Labor
As historian Jeanne Boydston notes, brokers like Foster had to contend with fundamental suspicions concerning the marketing of women’s wage labor, and the widespread belief that “femaleness was inappropriate to the public realm of commerce and trade and could exist there only as a personal degradation (seduction) and a public danger (prostitution), both of these being monstrous abnormalities.”58 Foster promised to protect Irish women from exploitation, and vouch for their reputations as prospective servants, so long as they accepted his advice to continue westward in their migrations. Foster resorted to the language of boosterism, even though he did not have a direct commercial stake in placing migrants. In Work and Wages he boasted that it was “customary” for American families in western states and territories to treat Irish servants as “daughters, sitting at the same table, dressing as well or better.” Servants, Foster proclaimed, were likely to get married sooner than the daughters of their employers. He offered the story of one western homeowner who had lost nineteen of the twenty-three servants he had employed over the course of the previous eight years to marriage.59 Foster appeared to relish the fact that assisted migration work made him both a labor and marriage broker. In 1864, during his first visit to North America in six years, he traveled to St. Joseph, Michigan, to see “two of my girls married,” as he put it, and to sample the region’s flour, which his friend Greeley had dubbed the best in the country. The same trip also brought him to London, Ontario, where his hostess reported that he had inquired and was pleased to learn that the “Irish servant girls” he had brought there were “married and doing well.”60
These accounts, with their untroubled depictions of Irish women achieving equality, situated domestic wage labor on a progressive continuum toward motherhood and gendered republican citizenship. They invoked the popular and familiar republican trope of “help,” and beckoned to a romanticized vision of peaceful social relations between labor and capital, where hired hands and mistresses worked side by side with no distinction in status. At a time when this very concept was under assault, with Anglo-American employers lamenting the disappearance of native-born women willing to enter into domestic service, Foster insisted that Irish immigrants could revive such arrangements in Western locales uncorrupted by hardened class and ethnic distinctions. Visually, Work and Wages included a “before and after” tableau that captured the domestic and economic transformation that migration allegedly portended to Irish (and British) paupers. At the beginning of the guide, a shoeless Irish emigrant wearing only rags is depicted departing his thatched-roof cottage, accompanied by the title “As I Was.” Toward the end of the pamphlet, the same individual is shown sitting with his family before a well-stocked kitchen table. Although the protagonist is male, female readers would not have missed the detail of his wife being waited on by a hired domestic.
Figure 1.2. and Figure 1.3. “As I Was” and “As I Am.” Vere Foster, Work and Wages; or, The Penny Emigrant’s Guide to the United States and Canada, 5th ed. (London: W. & F. G. Cash, 1855).
Figure 1.2. and Figure 1.3. (continued)
If marriage resided at one end of the spectrum as the most prudent course of self-governance for migrant Irish women, and the best long-term choice they could make when it came to the disposal of their labor power, then the sale of their sexual labor represented the opposite pole. Foster was no stranger to controversy in this respect. His work was enveloped in scandal when twenty-six of the one hundred twenty women whose passage he had paid for on the City of Mobile, which departed Liverpool in May 1857, spurned final destinations in the interior in order to stay in New York City. More scandalous, twelve of the women who remained in New York had snuck off the Mobile with sailors while the boat was anchored overnight off of Castle Garden. Two of those women, Susan Smith and Ellen Neary, eventually ended up at a brothel at 32 Water Street in Lower Manhattan, which was run by the notorious “sportsman” and Irish American gang leader Kit Burns. All of this came to light when Smith was found wandering aimlessly down Broadway, her face “covered with bruises and her body with rags.” Police brought her before city officials to swear out a deposition on what had occurred, before sending her to the state-run Emigrant Refuge on Ward’s Island.61
When the incident made newspapers in New York, Ireland, and Britain, Foster and his allies attacked the women for their excessive and dangerous pursuit of personal independence. They pointed toward the fact that the majority of women who arrived on the Mobile were in New York for less than a day, and that their socializing was limited to attending lectures delivered by a priest who had worked in the American West and by Greeley. They were instructed, in regard to travel into the interior, “the farther the better.” In its coverage, the New York Tribune blamed Captain Marshall of the Mobile for failing to closely guard who had access to the women on the vessel, despite the fact that Foster had paid extra to sequester the migrants in second-class cabins. As the newspaper editorialized, during the transatlantic voyage, with Foster not present (he was already in the United States), it was the captain’s responsibility to ensure that no harm came to the women. As their protector, he assumed the “same relation as a father to his children; his power is absolute and undisputed, and wherever he resolutely sets himself about it, he can always enforce obedience to orders.” If the captain was to shoulder some of the blame, then the rest belonged to the twenty-six emigrants who had deceived Foster about their true character. Emigrants in the future, he warned, needed to “shew by their conduct on board ship and in America that they deserve the good recommendations on account of which they receive a free passage.”62
Sensational incidents like the ones surrounding the City of Mobile cannot be attributed to Foster’s particular method of sponsoring emigrants; all young women who traveled on their own faced the dangers of sexual assault and enticement. Without diminishing the ordeals of Neary and Smith, the moral panic that their enlistment as prostitutes fueled helped to rationalize the need for programs such as Foster’s, and worked to keep Irish women in positions where they were more likely to remain subordinate.
The concerns Irish women raised as migrants went beyond dangers having to do with sex alone. As Foster learned, assisted migration invariably had to contend with the political economy of chattel slavery. Early on, Foster abandoned any plans he had to send migrants to the American South after hearing from a correspondent in Monticello, Florida, that the racial division of labor there was so fixed that white households refused to hire white servants, even when the cost of wages was less than what they would pay in leasing a black slave.63 Moreover, whereas assisted migration to places like Illinois and Wisconsin referenced nationalistic images of maturing white settler colonialism, it was also framed in relation to the internal slave trade, and the inability of enslaved peoples to maintain family integrity and control their own mobility. Anxieties about Irish women’s bondage infringed upon Foster’s plans on both sides of the Atlantic. While transporting a group of women from County Louth to the port city of Drogheda in the 1850s, he was accosted by a mob of Irish farmers enraged by a rumor that he was readying Irish girls for sale to Mormons and black Americans. Years later, Foster would recall this episode to underscore the local superstitions that his work encountered.64 Given that much of what constituted domestic work was still performed as involuntary and unpaid labor in the 1850s, these fears were more valid than Foster acknowledged. Local farmers had every reason to question what Foster stood to gain from sponsoring transatlantic migration. Population management, if Foster even bothered to explain the philosophy underlining his actions, would have come across as an ideological abstraction. Local farmers were more familiar with indenture and debt bondage as means by which migrations were financed.
Seeking Out Precarity
The enticements of yeomen farming and republican marriages aside, Foster understood that the willingness of unmarried Irish women to migrate west corresponded directly to their economic and social vulnerability. The Panic of 1857, which began with bank failures in late August, led Foster to become involved in brokering and chaperoning the westward migrations of New York women receiving relief. During the winter of 1857–58, Foster served as an unpaid agent for the Women’s Protective Emigration Society. Founded by women’s rights advocates Elizabeth B. Phelps and Eliza Farnham, the society solicited funds to support the westward migration of women who had lost their jobs in the economic depression. In New York City, the needle trades in particular were hard hit by a shortage of capital, creating relief needs in excess of what city agencies could handle.65
Foster was an obvious asset to the Women’s Protective Emigration Society. His preexisting network of contacts throughout the “Old Northwest” meant that he could identify employment possibilities in regions less affected by the collapse of the banks. Moreover, the society’s agenda mirrored Foster’s. Moving laborers to more favorable markets was seen as an efficient means to reduce public relief outlays and to stave off the temptation that unemployed women might have to engage in sex work. As Farnham and Phelps would stipulate in an appeal “to the Friends of the Helpless,” the economic crisis had left thousands of women “cast upon the world—homeless, friendless, penniless—and who now, in the madness of desolation and want, are trembling on the verge of the dark stream of vice which pollutes our streets.” An editorial in the New York Tribune estimated that there were seven thousand women prepared to take advantage of the society’s assistance if funds could be procured. Referencing a proposal by the secretary of war that called for an increase in the military recruitment of unemployed men, Greeley lamented that the government had no plans but the “almshouse” for women. “Colossal prostitution” awaited, the newspaper warned, if New York donors persisted in their “elegant indifference.”66
References to deserving paupers featured prominently in the society’s rationalizations for why interventions into the lives of the women it hoped to relocate were justified, and worth supporting. Citing her partnership with Foster and what she had learned about “systematised” migration through their collaboration, Farnham argued that women who applied to be relocated automatically proved themselves to be of a better class than counterparts who chose to stay behind. Trying to counteract the negative associations that surrounded recipients of welfare, Farnham asserted that women seeking to migrate demonstrated that they were “energetic, pure, conscientious women” possessed with an “earnest resolve to help themselves honorably to a better lot.” One might deduce that the women who sought the society’s help acted out of desperation. Farnham was reluctant to acknowledge this, however, since it gave her relocation scheme a coercive rather than voluntary cast. More than six hundred women were placed in Illinois alone by Foster during the winter of 1857, and by the middle of 1858, the society had sent approximately a thousand women to points west. The cost of placing a woman in a new locale was between ten and twelve dollars. Farnham, a former resident of California, wrote to the California Farmer in March 1858 to encourage leading citizens to charter a steamer to deliver destitute women from New York to San Francisco, since the demand for servants remained unaffected “in our Golden State.”67 The society also followed Foster’s lead by sending Irish Catholic women from New York to locations where Catholic parishes existed, in order to avoid accusations that they were using financial assistance to coerce conversions. In a letter to the New York Tribune, Farnham, like Foster, touted white mutuality. She included testimonies from farmers in Elkhart County, Indiana, where Foster had drummed up interest in the society’s efforts, to illustrate the warm embrace that awaited migrant women. Farnham’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, the testimonies she offered contained mixed messages. One writer noted that because male hired hands were so scarce, he and others planned on training the migrant women in “Western work,” which apparently meant performing outdoor labor alongside household duties. Another writer depicted a bunch of bachelor farmers stalking the Elkhart railroad station, hoping that each arriving train might bear the cargo that Farnham and Foster had pledged.68
In addition to placing migrants selected by the society, Foster—working independently—also identified situations for women with children. Foster posted circulars in Chicago and other western cities soliciting employers who might receive one hundred women with children under the age of two for household service. He advertised that all of the candidates for situations had shown him marriage certificates that proved that they had been either abandoned by laggard husbands or widowed. None, he claimed, had given birth out of wedlock.69 During the 1850s, the children of indigent women were often the subjects of placing out schemes, but rarely with their mothers. It is unknown whether this particular initiative met with any success, and Foster’s foray into this work raises more questions than it answers. One wonders, for instance, whether any of the applicants for resettlement tricked Foster as to their marital status and whether their choice to accept his offer of assistance was made freely or came only after they were pressured by New York workhouses and orphanages—as was often the case—to migrate.
Always conscious of growing Irish nationalist resistance to assisted emigration, Foster never passed up the opportunity to broadcast the significance of his work. Whereas an Irish servant like Mary Harlon assessed domestic work in terms of material benefits and how she was treated, Foster was more willing to impart abstract social meanings to the meeting of American capital and Irish labor. Shortly after President Lincoln’s assassination, Foster recalled meeting the future president and his wife Mary Todd while in Springfield, Illinois, during the winter of 1857, and recounted to Irish readers how the couple made a “promise to treat any girl we direct to them as one of the family, and to give her a home certain for a month, so as to give her time to settle in a place.”70 That the future martyr to the cause of free labor would embrace the Irish on such generous and egalitarian terms was freighted with symbolism. It was also perhaps fanciful. In other contexts, Mary Todd Lincoln voiced resentment at Irish domestics. She wrote to her half sister Emilie after the 1856 election that “if some of you Kentuckians, had to deal with the ‘wild Irish,’ as we housekeepers are sometimes called upon to do, the south would certainly elect Mr. Fillmore”—the nativist Know-Nothing candidate.71 The placement of migrants in Illinois generated more serious incidents as well. The rape of a sixteen-year-old migrant girl that Foster had helped to place with a male employer provoked outrage and anger in newspapers throughout the state, and led to accusations that he was not properly screening the households to which servants were destined.72 Again, the critique was not that Foster had used too heavy a hand in controlling migrant women as dependents; it was that he had been too lax in overseeing the contract of their labor.
Whiteness, Nationalism, and Irish Servitude
In trying to channel the migratory course of Irish women away from the cities of the Eastern Seaboard, Foster was a small obstruction in a much larger stream. Between 1851 and 1921, 1.2 million Irish girls and women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four arrived in the United States.73 By 1855, Irish immigrants accounted for 74 percent of the approximately 31,000 female domestics working in New York City, at a time when slightly more than one-quarter of all households in the city employed paid servants.74 Even though significant Irish communities formed in urban areas and towns in states like Minnesota and Wisconsin, and Chicago developed as an important hub for the Irish diaspora, in 1870 the Irish-born population remained concentrated in eastern states, with Massachusetts and New York leading the way. In 1900, 54 percent of all Irish immigrant women wage earners continued to be employed in domestic service, even as their waning significance to the occupation was being proclaimed.75 Female Irish servants composed a distinct class in the cultural imagination of urban Americans and the national media. Their representation as laborers was an important touchstone in midcentury debates concerning the racial division of labor, wage slavery, the rights of free laborers, and the legitimacy of British colonial rule in Ireland. As much as Foster tried to redefine the terms of Irish women’s incorporation, he could not escape these contexts. Irish servants—captured in the stereotype of “Biddy”—were caricatured as colonial threats to the sovereign domestic rule of their Anglo-American mistresses. These depictions of conflict circulated in sharp contrast to the revered republican mutuality that Foster and others claimed characterized American households. Yet they also gave Irish domestics an independent political identity that reaffirmed their status as free (and white) laborers.
During the 1850s, fierce condemnations of “wage slavery” provided proslavery commentators with a basis to compare the treatment of Irish servants to that of black slaves, and to argue that low pay made young Irish women more disposable than laborers owned as property. Racial slavery, they argued, was a more “natural” way of organizing the social relations of production that reflected innate and permanent differences in status. These same critics in turn highlighted the “unnatural” role that for-profit brokers played when they abetted commerce in white women’s wage labor. While living in New York, William Bobo, a white South Carolinian, expressed shock at what he considered to be the degraded manner in which Irish women were forced to sell their labor power. Encountering “fifty or sixty” Irish girls waiting in the tenement basement of an intelligence office on Nassau Street, Bobo commented that the room’s sanitary conditions and crowdedness were far worse than what could be found in Richmond’s slave markets. Because “Yankees are generally very rigid in requiring their papers,” Bobo added, it was not uncommon for employers to strategically withhold character references in order to keep favored Irish servants captive. Intelligence offices had such a bad reputation that even northerners opposed to slavery compared them to slave markets. In doing so, they ignored very real differences in how the labor of poor but free Irish immigrant women was marketed relative to involuntary transactions where enslaved persons were sold as chattel. In 1856, for instance, Frederick Law Olmsted described the facilities of the slave dealers he observed in Washington, D.C., as “much like Intelligence Offices, being large rooms partly occupied by ranges of forms.”76 Bobo concluded that the Irish would not achieve real citizenship until they went “where the country is in its maiden purity, among the forests of the far West.” There Irish women could “rear a home and a family, build up a character and a reputation that their children will be proud of, and not skulk about the palaces of the wealthy.”77 Bobo unwittingly called attention to how the social construction of whiteness in the mid-nineteenth-century United States had both occupational and geographic dimensions.
The racialization of servitude was by no means an issue exclusive to the United States. The term “servantgalism,” which American newspapers and magazines embraced, was first coined as the title of a cartoon series that John Leech drew for the English humor magazine Punch in 1853, during the height of the “wage slavery” debates. The ideology of “servant gals,” “servantgalism” referenced a fictitious movement of domestic laborers who conspired to win greater sovereignty over their jobs, and to elevate their social position. In one cartoon, the joke hinges on the quip of an English nursemaid to a cook that they should refuse to work “like Negroes”—an exchange that takes place as the two read and crochet before a fire.
Figure 1.4. “Servantgalism—No. II,” Punch, 1853. Courtesy of Rutgers University Libraries.
Although Leech’s cartoon appealed to employers who felt that white workers overstated their exploitation in comparison to workers who were actually enslaved, it also illustrates how servants disagreed with the notion that wages alone could make work dignified. In both London and New York, employers accused white servants of using race to justify laziness and bad work habits.78
Irish immigrant servants featured prominently in celebrations of white workers’ labor republicanism and radicalism, and were venerated for their blunt resistance to the forces of capitalist alienation. Their steady earning ability often made Irish servants the most important breadwinners in transnational families, and upended conventional gender roles. Irish Catholic elites applauded Irish laborers’ vigor and rejected the more fragile ideal of femininity that the Anglo-American middle class often fetishized. In an account published by the Catholic Sisters of Mercy, for instance, the physical strength and rural simplicity of Irish women were depicted as virtues that kept Irish women moored to the mutually reinforcing causes of family, religion, and community. Hanna Flynn, who received domestic training at the Sisters’ House of Mercy on Houston Street in Manhattan, exemplified the type of migrant woman the publication found worthy of admiration. After securing a job, Flynn’s thriftiness enabled her to send the bulk of her earnings to her brother and sister back in Ireland. The Sisters proudly described Flynn as “a woman of masculine strength and endurance” whose “utmost limit of travel was her crowded parish chapel.” Flynn was illiterate and the “alphabet was to her as the hieroglyphics of Egypt,” but this did not stop her from being “a heroine” who honored her parents and her faith, and who “was honest, upright, truthful, laborious and capable of self-sacrifice.”79
Because the appearance of more aggressive forms of Irish servants’ workplace resistance and their growing power over the labor market coincided with the rise of Irish nationalism, domestic employers had an immediate colonial framework through which to assess the social relations of production taking shape.80 Addressing an 1872 speaking tour by English historian James Anthony Froude, who warned Americans not to be seduced to the Irish cause of independence by a naïve love of all republicanism, E. L. Godkin, the founder and editor of the Nation, added that “the memory of burned steaks, of hard-boiled potatoes, of smoked milk, would have done for [Froude] what no state papers, or records, or correspondence of the illustrious dead can ever do; it had prepared the American mind to believe the worst he could say of Irish turbulence and disorder.” Indeed, Irish servants were political, and on occasion transformed their workplaces into sites of protest. When Froude lectured in Boston, the Irish servants employed by his hosts, the Peabodys, initiated a work stoppage rather than serve him. Dispatches from the Times of London’s foreign correspondents in the United States routinely updated English readers on visiting Irish politicians’ appeals to the “servant girls” of New York and Boston for financial support.81 In its account of a meeting of Irish nationalists that was convened in Philadelphia in 1883, the humor magazine Puck commented that “the Irish declaration of independence has been read in our kitchens, many and many a time, to frightened housewives, and the fruits of that declaration are to be seen in thousands of ill-cooked meals on ill-served tables, in unswept rooms and unmade beds, in dirt, confusion, insubordination and general disorder, taking the sweetness out of life.”82 An accompanying cartoon, which portrayed a muscular, ape-like Irish servant bullying her cowering Anglo-American employer, hammered home this point. (The cartoon appears as Figure 3 in the insert to this book.)
Violence was a common trope in Anglo-American employers’ racialized portrayals of Irish immigrants as a people whose primitiveness meant that they had not yet evolved civilized gender distinctions. The Irish servant’s masculinized aggression signified her distance from the refined qualities of the mistress and the restraint of “true women,” whose more effeminate bearing made them the easy victims of Irish servants’ bullying.83 Irish servants were routinely accused of resorting to violence in order to get their way in disputes over the terms of their labor. Biddy’s savagery, employers alleged, prevented her from accepting reprimand. She reacted with fury to even the slightest of criticisms, and “her mistress would as soon stir up a female tiger as arouse her anger.” The Irish domestic’s “strong arm and voluble tongue keep the most tyrannical housekeeper in such awe as to save her from all invasions of her prescriptive rights.”84
Irish servants understood the social implications of doing domestic work even as they relied on the wages it provided. They realized that the racial groups believed to supply the “best” servants occupied a position at the bottom of the nation’s social and racial hierarchy for this very reason. Hanna Flynn, despite all the praise she earned, was still described as “ ‘slaving out’ her life … among strange people, in strange places, for those she loved so well.”85 Among Irish nationalists, even violence could be justified when its goal was to preserve the baseline dignity that was considered the entitlement of all whites. In his 1867 account of Irish life in the United States, John Francis Maguire proudly recounted how Kate, an Irish servant working in an unnamed American city, dealt with the frequent harassment she received from a local Protestant minister. Although Kate typically brushed aside his patronizing humor, which included calling her Bridget and taunting her Catholicism, when the minister announced during a dinner party at her employers’ home that he was willing to pay her whatever “Father Pat” was seeking for her absolution, she lost her temper. With evident glee, Maguire described how “she flung the hot steaming liquid,” a tureen of pea soup, at the minister’s “face, neck, [and] breast.”86 No amount of money, Kate’s actions implied, could convince her to renounce her faith, heritage, or racial birthright.
Charity or Depopulation? Foster and Assisted Emigration in the 1880s
When crop failures and famine conditions struck the west of Ireland in 1879, Foster resumed work as a broker of assisted emigration.87 He knowingly entered into a highly charged political debate about whether emigration, land reform, or home rule best served the island’s interests.88 While Foster claimed that his work was apolitical, this was unconvincing in light of how he set about announcing the revival of his assisted emigration campaign. In a public letter to Charles Stewart Parnell, the leader of the Irish Land League, Foster alleged that it was “unstatesmanlike and cruel to the poor to contravene the laws of nature by decrying emigration as some people do.”89 The more than twenty thousand women whom Foster sponsored in the 1880s were issued two-pound vouchers, and selected based on the recommendations of clergy. The vouchers were then redeemable at any of the Irish ports of departure or in Liverpool, with the steamship companies billing Foster. Together, passage and the mandatory outfit of food and clothing that emigrants had to acquire before sailing cost slightly more than four pounds, and assisted emigrants had to make up the difference on their own. In cases where prospective emigrants already had a prepaid ticket, yet lacked the funds to purchase supplies or to pay for the intermediate journey to a port, Foster donated one pound.90
In the eyes of home rule advocates and the Irish Land League, assisted emigration was at best a minor remedy that dodged the lasting question of Irish sovereignty and land reform. At worst, it was a scheme to depopulate Ireland and neutralize its resistance. The liberty of Irish women to forge their own destiny in Ireland, freed from pressure to leave, became a mantra to nationalists. If free labor in the United States often revolved around a narrow definition of what defined consent within specific employment relations, in the context of Irish emigration it became a more philosophical question about whether or not an individual’s departure was truly voluntary. Public attacks directed at Foster regularly appeared in the nationalist press during the early 1880s. An editorial in the Dublin-based Freeman’s Journal in May 1880, for instance, assailed Foster by name for failing to see how emigration led to “the sad life and sadder death of many an Irish girl in the slums of American cities.” During a September 1880 anti-eviction protest meeting in Prouglish, County Leitrim, one tenant farmer familiar with Foster’s work suggested to the laughter of the audience that he finance a boat to take landlords away instead. Foster received threats that promised violent retribution if he continued his work.91 Even though the bulk of emigrants Foster sponsored made the transatlantic trip without ordeal, incidents to the contrary garnered significant negative attention. In August 1883, for instance, the Freeman’s Journal reported on sixteen-year-old Margaret Moran, who had traveled on a voucher that Foster had provided only to be turned away by American immigration officials on the grounds that she was likely to become a public charge.92
The Irish nationalist media depicted Foster as a dotty, paternalistic figure who was incapable of adapting to changes in either Ireland or the United States. An 1884 editorial in the Irish Nation mocked Foster for clinging to the outdated notion that the American West was a region where any European immigrant, regardless of circumstances, could expect to be instantaneously rewarded. The West, the paper lectured, was no longer “the El Dorado of the European peasant.” Foster’s unconditional embrace of emigration had blinded him to the United States’ economic woes during the tumultuous years of the 1870s and 1880s, and caused him to ignore the high costs of transportation to the interior, the industrialization of agriculture, and the railroads’ monopolization of public lands.93 Charlotte Grace O’Brien, the transatlantic Irish reformer and advocate for immigrant protections, wrote in the English periodical Nineteenth Century that although Foster was an “excellent man,” and his desire to help the Irish genuine, his method of assistance was reckless and “a most dangerous experiment, if not a complete mistake.” In response, Foster cited O’Brien’s failure to provide any concrete evidence of abuses. Consistent with his liberal principles, he argued that since the women he supported pleaded for aid and consented to the assistance offered, it was unfair for them to be “denied the opportunity to emigrate in order to better their condition.”94 Still, by 1880 the Irish American community was more established and better equipped to receive immigrants than it had been in the 1850s. Accordingly, members were less reliant on elite intermediaries such as Foster for assistance. Many were no longer willing to support a market-oriented philanthropy that sidestepped the issue of Irish home rule and merely took for granted that young Irish women’s labor was destined to be commodified abroad.95
During the 1880s, there was also mounting opposition to “pauper” immigration from the American public and elected officials. The United States experienced an economic depression that began in 1873 and lasted until 1880. The downturn would resume in 1882. The pro-immigration mood that had prevailed in the period that immediately followed the Civil War dampened considerably. Raising concerns similar to those that had surfaced during the post-famine period of the early 1850s, Congress accused the British officials of supporting the emigration of paupers from English and Irish workhouses so as to rid themselves of their care. The Select Committee to Investigate Foreign Immigration, convened by Congress in 1888, blamed the Tuke Society—the government-sponsored social welfare organization led by the Quaker businessman and philanthropist James Hack Tuke—for paying for the passage of more than forty-nine hundred immigrants to the United States since 1882. Many of these arrivals, the report claimed, “subsequently became inmates of charitable institutions in this country.”96 On at least two occasions in the 1880s, Foster’s assisted emigration program was investigated by the American consuls in Cork and Liverpool. Although State Department officials concluded that Foster’s vetting methods and reputation for calculated philanthropy meant that he was a low risk when it came to sending indigent migrants, many of his critics were uninterested in acknowledging such distinctions.97
Foster had also lost influence as broker. By the 1880s, migration was big business and the sale of steamship tickets an occupational pursuit for thousands of agents in Ireland and Britain. Steamship agents besieged Foster and tried to persuade him to steer the migrants he was assisting in their direction, so they would earn the commission. In November 1882, the Northern Police Court in Dublin fined Martin Gallagher fifty pounds after the local Board of Trade discovered that he was selling steamship tickets without a license. One of the violations Gallagher committed was the resale of vouchers that Foster had issued to a group of Irish women at the behest of a parish priest.98 Steamship companies also took a more active role in steering prospective migrants to Foster’s “discounted” rate of passage. After inaugurating steamship service from Liverpool and Queenstown to New York in 1881, the Beaver Line included in its Irish newspaper advertisements a notice that “female domestic servants of good character” could subsidize the cost of their passage by applying to Foster. A frequent recipient of free passes from both American railroads and the transatlantic steamship companies, these corporations adopted Foster as a broker who drummed up business.99
Finally, Foster could no longer rely on the Catholic Church for support. In July 1883, Catholic bishops in the west of Ireland ordered priests and curates to cease working with Foster altogether. They declared, under pressure from nationalists, that his assisted emigration schemes were a danger to the “faith and morals” of the Irish people.100 On February 24, 1886, with his assisted emigration work at a virtual standstill, Foster again lashed out at political proposals that he believed would unnaturally stifle emigration. This time it was British Prime Minister William Gladstone, who had announced his support for Irish home rule a year earlier. Although Foster had been a supporter of Gladstone’s Liberal Party, he joined many of his peers in defecting to the newly formed Liberal Unionist Party. In his letter to Gladstone, Foster insisted that he was not uniformly against state-backed land reforms. As for home rule, however, Foster expressed absolute opposition to any plan that would separate Ireland from the British Empire, and warned Gladstone that “the Loyalist population of Ulster may be expected to make itself unmistakeably and effectually heard in opposition to any such project.” Home rule’s “realization would be a bloody Civil War between different portions of the Irish people, and between Great Britain and Ireland.” Foster’s letter concluded with a postscript proposing a government office to formally promote assisted emigration—with him in charge. Disingenuously, Foster assured Gladstone that his work in the West and South of Ireland had been pursued “without encountering any opposition whatever.”101
With the passage of the 1891 Immigration Act, Congress stipulated that “any person whose ticket or passage is paid for with the money of another or who is assisted by others to come” could be prevented from landing. Except in cases where immediate family members provided the funds, assisted immigrants were mandated to appear before immigration officials to determine whether they were likely to become a public charge. Officials were also tasked with evaluating whether the assistance immigrants received had left them in a state of debt bondage or violated the terms of the 1885 Alien Contract Labor Law (the Foran Act).102 With the law’s enforcement, Foster received letters from various steamship companies stating that they would no longer be able to accept his vouchers, since they did not want to risk having to bear the return cost of any immigrants who were rejected.103 In response to a letter that Foster wrote to the State Department, Hermann Stump, the superintendent of immigration, informed him in May 1893 that the law’s requirements could not be waived on behalf of his charitable designs, which brought his work to a halt.104 Foster passed away on December 21, 1900, in the flat he rented in a Belfast lodging house.
Conclusion
Foster’s work anticipated many of the dilemmas that the 1864 Act to Encourage Immigration would encounter. Urged on by President Lincoln, the 1864 act empowered employers—primarily in the fields of agriculture, manufacturing, and mining—to enter into contracts with European immigrants. Although Congress provided only minimal funding to back the initiative, it placed the federal government’s imprint on recruitment efforts already taking place in European ports of departure. Contracted for a term not to exceed one year, immigrants were to repay the cost of their passage from future wages earned. Ambiguously, the legislation prohibited indenture, bondage, and slavery as forms of compulsion that employers could use to recover sunk costs—even as they were prompted to extend credit. In 1868, after employers pushed to criminalize immigrants’ breaches of contracts, thereby moving the matter out of civil courts, Congress repealed the act.105 Capital investment in growing the labor supply and the maintenance of free migration and contract liberty, it seemed, were incompatible. In this context, Foster’s work was the exception that proved the rule. Because he did not seek to profit from his brokerage, and assumed costs in the name of philanthropy, he was not motivated to pursue harsh and punitive measures against the migrants whose passages he had funded.
The assisted migration of recently freed black women and children during and after the Civil War raised many of the same issues that Foster’s work encountered. With the end of slavery, northern household employers became infatuated with opportunities to hire black refugees as servants. Private and government brokers flocked to meet this demand. Despite their newly won liberty to consent to work, in practice black refugees were a commodity whose dependency on relief meant that they might be deployed to wherever labor scarcities—or overly empowered Irish domestics—existed as a problem of household production. Unlike the Irish migrants whom Foster sponsored, black women and children would not be treated as potentially equal participants in national projects of expansion and white social reproduction. Nor would they be extolled for their labor republicanism, even though many displayed an independence that was just as fierce as their Irish counterparts. As the next chapter addresses, black refugees faced far greater constraints when it came to their ability to dictate the conditions under which they labored. Brokers of their labor banked on this very point.
