Читать книгу Brokering Servitude - Andrew Urban - Страница 12

2

Humanitarianism’s Markets

Brokering the Domestic Labor of Black Refugees, 1861–1872

Introduction: “Destitute in Female Help”

On January 23, 1867, Josiah Crawford, a fifty-nine-year-old white farmer living in Skull Creek, Nebraska, wrote to the Washington, D.C., office of the Freedmen’s Bureau. He had read in a local newspaper that thousands of black refugees crowded the nation’s capital in a state of destitution. Calling himself a “true Union man,” Crawford offered a solution that he claimed could remove at least one refugee family from public relief. The bureau would send him “a good woman” with “two or three children” who together would cook, keep house, and perform other domestic labor.1 In exchange, he would gift the family a homestead consisting of eighty acres if they chose a plot ten miles removed from the railroad line or forty acres if they selected a location closer to transit. He would build and maintain a house for them on the property. Whereas land was abundant and surplus to white settlers in the area, hired domestic labor was a scarce commodity that even more affluent farmers could not acquire. Crawford explained that his part of Nebraska “was very destitute in female help” and could accommodate thousands of black women and children sent from Washington. If his neighbors did not wish to barter land for labor, as he was willing to do, they would gladly pay three to five dollars a week in wages.2 As a farmer, Crawford may have been indirectly motivated by a desire to see the high tariffs on imported manufactured goods, which helped finance Reconstruction, reduced. Crawford may have also been affected by the newly implemented federal income tax; the 1870 census recorded his property holdings as one thousand dollars, which put him above the minimum threshold for those who had to pay.3 Federal expenditures on the Freedmen’s Bureau and refugee relief were charged topics that, for the first time in the country’s history, made social welfare a matter of national rather than local politics.

Crawford’s proposal shared a similar rationale to migration schemes that were advanced after the Panic of 1857. When surplus and unemployed female labor could not meet household demand due to geographic isolation, political economists consistently held that using state and private charitable funds to subsidize migration represented a practical investment in developing the nation’s infrastructure. The race of those targeted for assistance, however, accounted for significant differences in how migration programs were implemented and understood, and the agency that individuals and families had to accept or reject the help being offered. Strict prohibitions against interracial marriages, covenants against black landownership, and the relative absence of single black men in places like Nebraska meant that the black women who agreed to resettlement were unlikely to move out of a position of hired servitude. The 1860 census counted 82 free black residents in the state, and in 1870 that number had increased to only 789. Antebellum army officers brought black servants with them to remote outposts on the Nebraska frontier, where workers’ dependency rendered their status as free or enslaved—at least in an immediate material sense—inconsequential. Black refugees in Washington may have been aware of such legacies.4

Crawford’s apparent generosity notwithstanding, his proposal failed to account for the long-term prospects or local reception of single black women sent to remote areas of the interior. What would his neighbors say about the arrangement? Nor did Crawford’s letter address what would happen if the black family sent to him decided that the situation was not to their liking. Would he finance their return to Washington? Would the agreement granting the land to them be nullified? Would they be able to find alternative shelter, if the need suddenly arose? Crawford did not seek to eradicate the complicated dependencies facing recently emancipated black persons, as much as he wanted to enmesh them in new ones. Consent, independent contract, and wages—the hallmarks of the free labor system that the Union had fought for—are afterthoughts in his correspondence.

In the end, Crawford proved unsuccessful in convincing the Freedmen’s Bureau to send him refugee laborers. In 1870, he shared his domicile with a man who appears to have been his nephew, but the census lists no servants in the Crawford household and there are no black female homeowners in the surrounding area. The distance from Nebraska to Washington, D.C., made Crawford’s request an outlier to begin with—most black women and children were sent to locations in the Northeast or to places in the Midwest where free black communities had been established before the war.5 Since the government had to pay the cost of transportation, and would not have paid for a chaperone to accompany a single family, fronting the money for this purpose would have also been viewed as a risky prospect. Numerous black refugees chose to abscond before arriving at their intended destinations if better employment options were presented en route. Whether or not any of the bureau’s officials in Washington tried to persuade a family on relief to take Crawford’s offer went unrecorded. Had bureau agents pressed the case, they could have threatened to remove from relief the refugee family to whom Crawford’s offer was tendered. To white officials, the successful commodification of black labor relied on the ability to assert these types of coercive pressures.

* * *

The end of slavery spurred experiments in how the provision of welfare, migration, and fulfillment of demand for household labor might be dealt with as imbricated social concerns. At a time when Irish immigrant women were increasingly perceived as wielding the menacing ability to win advantageous work contracts through their manipulation of northern domestic labor scarcities, the war provided employers with an opportunity to counteract this perceived threat through the brokered import of black labor. White northerners eagerly hypothesized about the potential value of black migrants’ labor power, and how this supply of labor might be produced for market through various forms of state intervention. Brokers of refugee labor financed and controlled migrations from the South and Washington, D.C., by attaching numerous restrictions on how these funds were to be dispensed. In comparison to the assistance that was made available to white women, whether for transatlantic or internal migrations, black refugees interacted with a welfare program that was explicitly rather than passively disciplinary in the market behavior that it sought to effect. A question haunts this chapter: what would have happened if migration assistance was extended to black refugees without punitive conditions? Engagement with this counterfactual premise yields important insights into what forms mid-nineteenth-century white racial privilege took, and how servants’ liberty to contract their labor power was shaped by private and state actions.

Northern households’ covetous impulses inaugurated what would be, for the next half century, a near constant quest to colonize and expropriate new supplies of workers. From these new sources, employers and labor brokers aspired to create social relations in which hired laborers were less able to withdraw themselves from the production of domesticity, or to control the means by which it was performed. Northern households aimed to detach independence—as a formal status—from the ability to refuse or reshape job situations that workers deemed undesirable. Among proponents of free labor, wages and other benefits to workers were proxies for consent and more important than whether or not a contraband or refugee entered into a contract voluntarily.6 Free market advocates urged displaced black migrants to forgo their own conceptions of what constituted economic and social security and to abandon the prerogative to choose where they wanted to live and work. Instead, they instructed refugee populations to consummate the commodified exchange of what was typically framed as their most valuable asset: their power to labor in servility. The Union Army’s “liberation” of their enslaved labor, white northerners smugly declared, had made this possible.7 There were fundamental paradoxes and myopic assumptions built into northern liberals’ vision of how freedom would govern emancipated slaves. Literary scholar Saidiya Hartman uses the evocative phrase “burdened individuality” to signify the fraught position that freed blacks, deprived of the material and other resources necessary to self-sufficiency, occupied in society.8

Racial discrimination meant that it was more difficult for black men to claim a republican identity as heads of households and independent producers than it was for Irish women—even though both groups of workers performed service work. When it came to placing contrabands and refugees in northern homes, white employers analyzed and disputed whether or not blacks were innately predisposed to servile labor, or whether servitude was cultural behavior produced through the disciplinary regime of slavery and therefore an attribute that might be lost with free labor. (As chapter 6 returns to, this debate lingered into the twentieth century.) Observations of black laborers’ work habits were transmitted from the Union front lines in the South back to northern households. Domestic labor’s status as women’s work, to be performed within the confines of homes, was upended by the exigent needs that the war created. When white officers and soldiers enlisted freed black workers, labor that had been gendered—such as cooking and cleaning—became racialized instead.9 Although refugee women and their children command the bulk of attention in this chapter, the funneling of black men into positions of service work had a lasting impact on white Americans’ perception of what a postwar racial division of labor might look like. Whether as porters, hotel workers, or waiters, black men—like Chinese immigrant men—were relegated to jobs in the growing service sector of the late nineteenth century, and denied employment opportunities in areas of the economy that would link industrial labor with manhood and citizenship. Union officials and their successors in the Freedmen’s Bureau were concerned with refugee women, and especially single women with children, as subjects who they feared were most likely to fall into a state of permanent dependency.

An aim of this chapter is to refocus attention on American refugee policies and emphasize how government-run camps—whether created adjacent to the occupying armies of the Union or away from the front lines in Washington, D.C.—became sites of labor recruitment. In relation to the longer arc of federal policies governing displaced persons, internally or abroad, the Civil War–era plight of freed persons demonstrates that refugee sponsorship, while often cast as a humanitarian impulse, usually involved exploitative instincts as well.10 To be critical and perhaps even cynical about it, refugee sponsorship has always been a form of labor brokerage, and where refugees have not been accepted for asylum, it is typically because demand has not been marshalled to justify the action.11 White employers and brokers scavenged contraband and refugee camps for black bodies to enlist into wage servitude. Camps, in this regard, were places where emancipated slaves—resurrected from the social death of slavery—became sovereign economic subjects in a carefully orchestrated and limited fashion.12 The Freedmen’s Bureau was granted unique and unprecedented powers to regulate economic, political, and social behavior. From its commissioner, Oliver Otis Howard, on down, the bureau tended to employ self-styled Christian soldiers who viewed their work as a missionary intervention.13 Black refugees, like Catholic “soupers” in Ireland and “rice-Christians” in China, performed a version of want that responded to their very real material needs. In the context of American racial politics, refugees’ reliance on relief, and what white missionaries demanded of them as part of this exchange, helped produce a safe and unthreatening black subjectivity.

Acknowledging the myriad obstacles the bureau faced as an administrative body under attack does not change the legacies of its particular approach. White northern officials required that displaced black persons accept their transformation from chattel to transportable “free” labor as a condition of their need. Anxieties about the mass migration of blacks conducted under more voluntary conditions fueled antipathy and opposition from northern whites who believed that blacks were incapable of being integrated as both laborers and citizens, except at the peripheries of economic and social life.14 Even though assisted migrations were met with white resistance as well, the contractual conditions that such programs imposed were understood as important checks on wanton black freedoms.

Servitude and Autonomy in the Antebellum Era

Prior to the Civil War, free blacks in the North struggled to balance their economic reliance on service work, as a source of wages, with the stigma that marked this labor. In New York, slavery was not completely abolished until 1827. By 1840, Manhattan’s black community had grown to sixteen thousand people and accounted for roughly 5 percent of the city’s total population. During the 1850s, the influx of Irish immigrants reduced the number of blacks employed as household servants to only 3 percent of the occupation’s total workforce, even if the number of black men working as body servants remained proportionately higher—a reflection on the discrimination they faced in trades dominated by white laborers. Wages for black domestics declined as a result of the expansion of the labor supply. Black servants faced additional economic injury due to the fact that certain white employers seized upon Irish immigration to hire white servants exclusively.15

Even before European immigration spiked in the late 1840s, middle-class employers worried about their capacity to control how wage servants were hired, and to dictate how workers approached contractual obligations and loyalty to their employers. In 1826, New York elites led by Arthur Tappan, the abolitionist, chartered the Society for the Encouragement of Faithful Domestic Servants. Despite petering out of existence in 1830, the society’s philosophy would be widely replicated in decades to follow. The New York Society was modeled after an organization by the same name in London, which had been active there since the eighteenth century. The New York Society offered bonuses (and free Bibles) to servants who stayed with a single household for longer than a year. As an employment agency, it promised employers that it would place only reputable, trustworthy women. While an estimated 60 percent of the women who used the service identified as Irish immigrants, the society also recruited black labor. Black workers used its services to obtain character references and win coveted placements in more affluent homes.16 Even when organizations like the New York Society were not attempting to exercise direct influence over black servants’ market and work behavior, as historian Kathleen Brown has argued, black domestics, cooks, and butlers in white northern households often practiced an extreme form of self-discipline and held themselves to trying standards of industry, hygiene, and loyalty. They understood that their value as workers would always be qualified in racial terms that made deference and comportment key measures of their worth above and beyond the caliber of their labor.17

Wage servitude haunted black families in ways that single Irish women, acting as transnational breadwinners, did not have to contend with. Historian Leslie Harris has shown how delegates at the Colored National Convention that took place in Cleveland in 1848 vociferously debated a resolution, which they ultimately passed, denouncing live-in domestic service as “a badge of degradation” to blacks. This position was vehemently espoused by black men who aspired to a form of republican citizenship and manhood that was defined by the ability of their wives and daughters to avoid having to work for wages.18 Martin Robinson Delany, the intellectual and black separatist who by the 1850s would emerge as a fervent proponent of black emigration from the United States, played a key role at the Cleveland Convention advancing this position. In 1844, Delany was already articulating the difference between those who hired out as servants as a matter of “necessity,” which he felt was the plight of black women with no choice but to pursue this work, and the white women who entered service because they had squandered racial privilege and opportunity.19 Even though Delany’s wife, Catherine Richards, was the interracial daughter of an Irish immigrant and black butcher, he did not parse where in-between Irish immigrants, who in cultural terms were not yet understood to be fully white, fit into this picture. He seemed to insinuate that white women’s failure to marry landowners and tradesmen who could provide for them was a fault rather than a strategic choice. In his 1852 publication, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Delany more forcefully stipulated that when it came to free blacks, “We cannot at the same time, be domestic and lady; servant and gentleman. We must be the one or the other.”20

Delany believed that prohibitions against black landownership, education, and commercial pursuits meant that free blacks would never find a community in the United States where their enlistment as servants would be temporary rather than permanent.21 Instead he promoted black colonization of “uninhabited” lands in South America or Africa.22 Not only did new opportunities for acquiring unclaimed (or conquerable) lands have to be forged, but labor markets, and the existing social relations of production that demarcated racial subject positions in the United States, had to be remade as well. Delany was but one voice in this particular debate. Although Harriet Beecher Stowe, upon the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was criticized within the abolitionist community for imagining Liberia as the best solution to the problem of an emancipated, surplus black population, it is important to note that peers like Delany had similar reservations about whether racial divisions of labor—beyond slavery—could ever be overcome.23

Wartime Patriotism, Contrabands, and Private Importation

With Union armies conducting the war primarily in Confederate territory, white northerners gained access to the labor power of runaways and refugees from slavery on a scale that few had predicted. The dispatches that Union officers and soldiers sent, in addition to the reports that northern journalists and missionaries filed, brimmed with enthusiasm about the productive value of contraband labor. The humanitarian crisis of sudden emancipation became an opportunity of political economy. Before the war, northern states like Ohio had in place statutes that required free blacks to post surety bonds before entering as migrants, which they used to limit black settlement.24 The war ended the enforcement of these laws and what had been, for all intents and purposes, more restrictive migration laws than what German and Irish arrivals to New York encountered. Writings from this period illustrate that many white northerners viewed emancipated slaves as a distinct species of labor whose value came from the fact that they were unacculturated to the free labor system. In July 1861, with the conflict only three months old, the Independent magazine proclaimed that the “troublesome experience of Northern households” was on the verge of being transformed. “The immigration of runaway slaves” with their “peculiar talent for service,” the magazine noted, represented the spoils of war.25

The Emancipation Proclamation, which on January 1, 1863, decreed a formal end to slavery in the states of the Confederacy, generated excitement as well. Horace James, a Congregationalist minister from Massachusetts commissioned to serve as the superintendent of Negro affairs in North Carolina, effused in 1864 that the abolition of slavery had created a “nation of servants” awaiting employment. “The foolish prejudice against color which prevails … even among the best people of the North,” James declared, “should immediately give way, that they may take their proper place in all our households.” James underscored that proposals to send freedwomen and children to the North were not intended “to throw white laborers out of employment” but rather would “lift them higher in the social scale, and engage them in labors which require more skill.” All of this was simply a natural function of how free labor markets operated, James insisted, even as he sought the federal backing that was necessary to orchestrate a massive population transfer. “In the successive orders or ranks of industrial pursuits,” he concluded, “those who have the least intelligence must perform the more menial services, without respect to color or birth.”26 Irish immigrants who had paid their dues at the bottom of the free labor hierarchy were now ready to be elevated to more skilled pursuits, property ownership, and occupations that conferred upon them independence rather than dependence. During the 1870s, the theme of occupational succession and advancement would be picked up by proponents of Chinese immigration, who, in similar terms, insisted that Irish immigrants and other white laborers stood to be the primary beneficiaries of the introduction of nonwhite labor to menial positions. These new supplies of labor, they claimed, could be exploited by the white working and middle classes alike.

As historian Kate Masur argues, Major General Benjamin Butler’s decision early in the war to treat runaway slaves who crossed over Union lines as “contrabands” meant that white northern officers and soldiers first interacted with emancipated slaves as service workers in military encampments, which framed their calculations on how free black incorporation was to proceed. Contrabands quickly became subjects of northern popular culture as well, appearing not only in journals and newspapers, but in minstrel shows and fiction. Masur notes that white northern missionaries exaggerated contrabands’ status “as victims of a war they could not understand, [and] as illiterate, unworldly, and disorderly in their appearance and personal relationships.” Paternalistic depictions such as these also helped to assuage white workers’ fears that contrabands sent farther north were legitimate threats to take their jobs.27

In practice, contraband laborers were productive contributors to the Union war effort rather than dependents of largesse, especially since they could be compelled to perform gendered and racialized work that white soldiers disdained. Before freedmen became eligible to assume combat roles after the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation, they performed drudge work digging ditches, cleaning latrines, and chopping wood. They also supplied more intimate forms of labor marked as feminine and domestic, namely as personal servants to officers and as company cooks. Black servants were not just employed in camps behind battle lines. One military official estimated, for instance, that of the 10,000 freed blacks employed in August 1863 by the Department of the Cumberland Army in Tennessee, 3,700 worked as cooks and servants in active combat zones.28 In a December 1863 message to President Lincoln, representatives from the Freedman’s Aid Societies in Boston, Cincinnati, New York, and Philadelphia predicted that recently emancipated slaves were “destined to be the great want of the country over which we are extending our victorious dominion.” In the interim, however, the representatives urged the president to respond on the record to complaints that federal money was being wasted on feeding and clothing contrabands. They pleaded with him to publicize how expenditures in this area represented an initial investment in the production of servants who were necessary to the war effort. Moreover, as other commentators argued, every adult male slave who escaped forced the Confederacy, in theory, to replace his labor with that of a white person.29

It was not until the middle of the war that the Union began to regularly pay black laborers, servants, and cooks. Equal wages for black workers remained a constant point of tension, even after the federal government made this official policy. At Fortress Monroe, where Butler had first initiated the Union Army’s policy of refusing to return Confederate property in the form of enslaved persons, his successor General John Wool required army officers and civilians employing contrabands to deposit wages in a general fund, which was subsequently used to support refugees whose age or condition made them camp dependents. Refugee laborers’ protests that this “Contraband Tax” was unjust and rife with corruption were met with imprisonment and whippings. The policy prompted some of Fortress Monroe’s black workers to independently contract out their labor to civilians in order to circumvent the military’s oversight altogether. A military commission appointed to investigate the situation questioned, in telling language, why “Irish souphouse” relief policies were needed at all, when the free market, its authors concluded, ought to suffice. Gainfully employed black laborers, the commission argued, could be charged with taking care of their fellow refugees without government oversight. (In 1863, undeterred Union officials introduced a Contraband Tax at the newly created Freedman’s Village in Arlington Heights as well.)30 The very existence of a refugee tax deserves comparative attention. It was not until the 1870s that American ports began levying a commutation tax on Irish and other European immigrants, and required them to offset the costs of providing public relief to fellow arrivals who became public charges. But even then, these taxes were not enacted under the same guise of inducing racial responsibility.

While blacks’ martial service has received substantial attention from scholars as the means by which they proved, under fire, their worthiness for citizenship, the relationship between the performance of “unmanly” and menial servitude and social inclusion was more ambiguous.31 Historian Micki McElya argues that the focus on free blacks’ claims to citizenship through martial service has obscured struggles for rights that were organized around other contributions and actions.32 Contrabands discovered that being relegated to menial and servile labor, even when they were granted the freedom to consent to work, represented a tortuous path to a form of economic and social citizenship that warranted respect in the eyes of white soldiers and officers. An article published in the United States Service Magazine, for instance, described how a contraband who had wandered into the camp of the First Iowa Cavalry in Tennessee was administered an oath by a Union corporal in which he had to solemnly swear to not only uphold the Constitution, but also “see that there are no grounds floating upon the coffee.”33 To counter perceptions that blacks were fit only for dependent service work, the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission found it prudent to include in the report it submitted to Congress a letter to the Galena (IL) Advertiser from M. M. Miller, the white captain of the Ninth Louisiana Colored Regiment. Narrating the gory details of the recently fought battle at Milliken’s Bend, Mississippi, Miller described not only the valor of the black soldiers under his command but also how “a boy” who cooked for him had “begged a gun when the rebels were advancing,” so that he too could defend the Union position. The cook was “badly wounded with one gunshot and two bayonet wounds.”34 Testimonials such as this aimed to prove that black men and boys would proudly abandon service work and its emasculating status, if only given the opportunity.

Some Union officers treated contraband servants’ labor as their personal property. As historian David Cecere has documented, Union officers secured their own differentiated status by having contraband servants complete tasks that enlisted men were required to do on their own. They also created impromptu brokerage networks to fulfill their civilian families’ domestic labor needs. Enoch Adams, who hailed from a prominent New Hampshire family, invited his wife Sarah to visit him at Point Lookout, Maryland, where he oversaw the prisoner-of-war camp there, and promised she could hire a “black girl” to take home. Adams also wrote to his mother inquiring if she had any interest in laborers he described as “my contrabands,” whom he pledged to deliver when granted leave. Union officers seemed to have little patience or tolerance for black servants who pursued independent goals. Cecere describes one officer who became enraged when he learned that his contraband servant had left without permission to search for his mother who had been separated from him during slavery.35

Boycotts and Job Competition

The start of the Civil War had a varied impact on how Irish immigrants were viewed as a resource. On one hand, white immigrant labor gave the Union a distinct advantage over the Confederacy in respect to manpower, and the wartime recruitment of immigrants flourished in many European ports of departure even before the 1864 Act to Encourage Immigration was passed into law.36 On the other hand, there was backlash against Irish immigrants accused of being disloyal to the Union cause and overly supportive of antiwar Democrats.

Campaigns denouncing the employment of Irish servants peaked in the aftermath of the July 1863 Draft Riots in New York City. It became popular for Anglo-American household employers, especially those who identified as staunchly Republican, to declare that they were boycotting Irish domestic labor altogether. A persistent rumor alleged that Irish domestics were involved in a citywide arson plot against the homes and families of those who had supported the Union conscription policy that had set off the disturbances. The Tribune published an editorial shortly after the riots, leaking a note that one of Democratic Governor Horatio Seymour’s assistants had—allegedly—forwarded to the White House. In this note, Seymour was depicted as asking President Lincoln to end conscription due to the “gravest apprehension that the Irish servant-girls will, in case the draft is enforced, turn incendiaries in a body, and burn down their masters’ homes.” The paper chided Seymour for exaggerating the threat of civil disorder, which played into his calls to end the draft, while simultaneously mocking him for being a coward in the face of this feminine menace. Whether the missive was real or not, the Freeman’s Journal, the leading Irish nationalist newspaper, felt obliged to issue a response denouncing the accusations.37

Northerners’ elevated antipathy toward Irish servants remained palpable for some time after the riots. A representative of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society’s employment office wrote to the Union superintendent at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, in September 1863, for instance, to request that refugee women and children be sent to Philadelphia, where demand for black servants had been stoked by the events of the previous summer.38 After the war’s end, the Freedmen’s Bureau would continue to receive correspondence from northern employers urging the agency to redouble efforts to deliver black women and children as domestics, since, as one writer noted, a “general disgust with Irish help” prevailed. A white woman from East Bloomfield, New York, petitioned the bureau for a job as a broker of black domestic labor by explaining how she would use the position as “the means of getting in a class of laboring people who are not Irish.” In Worcester, Massachusetts, an intelligence office promoted its ability to procure black servants by highlighting how this meant that middle-class women no longer had to degrade themselves with visits to Irish slums, where competing institutions dealing in Irish labor operated.39 Back in New York City, although the Draft Riots did lead some white employers to boycott Irish labor, the threat of further violence against Manhattan’s black community accelerated an exodus to Brooklyn and places farther afield. The riots, as they were designed to do, strengthened the position of white workers in the labor market.40

Stories were also realms where employers disseminated comparisons of servants’ attributes, and produced racial difference as market knowledge. Literary fiction provided an important venue for airing wonder and anxiety about the integration of contraband domestic workers into northern homes. Mary E. Dodge’s story “Our Contraband,” published by Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in August 1863, centers on a white narrator’s interactions with Aggie, a young black woman. The story begins with Aggie being dropped off at the Ladies’ Soldiers’ Aid Society by two Union soldiers passing through New York City on leave. Her removal to the city follows her failed stint as a servant in a Union camp in Virginia, where she and her father fled after escaping slavery. The narrator explains that Aggie’s “insubordination and impishness” were too much for her previous employers to handle. Her Union escorts hoped that domestic supervision, provided by middle-class white women, would prove more successful.41

In her analysis of “Our Contraband,” historian Kate Masur reasons that Aggie symbolizes northerners’ fears that emancipated blacks were indelibly marked in attitude and behavior by the institution of slavery. Aggie ultimately fails as a servant after being placed by the society in the narrator’s household. She is prone to talking to herself, sneaking down at night to steal food, and breaking household objects. In the end, her care and employment pass to a Quaker woman, who discovers Aggie wandering the streets with the narrator’s child.42

Although Aggie’s character is used by Dodge to probe the question of black laborers’ effectiveness, she is equally emblematic of white employers’ speculative belief that black migrants might rescue the system of free labor as it related to household service. In “Our Contraband,” the narrator at first withholds Aggie’s race and background from her husband, and describes her only as a “raw girl; one that is not hopelessly set in other people’s ways.” His assumption is that she means “a fair Hibernian … newly landed, or a blushing Huytur-spluyter fresh from the Vaterland.” When the truth is exposed, the narrator reassures him that Aggie is not “one of those deceitful, half-and-half yellow kind that are neither one thing nor the other, but a genuine negress.” The narrator’s description attempts to draw equivalencies between unassimilated European immigrant women yet to have acquired a disdain for being ordered around, and black women whose history of slavery has accustomed them to such controls.

Dodge’s treatment of the narrator’s three Irish servants is also worth parsing beyond calling attention to their stereotypical animus toward blacks.43 The Irish servants in the story stake their claims to whiteness both within and against the work that the production of domesticity entailed. Ann, the cook, exercises “local supremacy” over the kitchen, and bars unwanted persons from this space at her whim; Nora gathers coals wearing a “crinoline twice as expensive” as her employer’s; Ellen, the family’s chief waitress, vainly believes in her “impeachability” as an employee. The three Irish women announce that they refuse to “slape and ate wid nagers,” but it is the narrator—after claiming that she has no other choice—who sends Aggie away. The narrator brags that the new racial division of labor that she introduced, despite failing to take, has appropriately disrupted her Irish servants’ confidence in their guaranteed employment and preference as workers.44

In other contexts, employers feared that insolent Irish servants, rather than being properly chastened, would instead corrupt black coworkers new to free labor. In an 1866 story that Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote for the Atlantic Monthly, for instance, one of her characters complains that whatever laziness black domestics might come to display, it would not be due to innate racial traits, but rather to their mastery of “imitation.”45 The need to isolate Chinese servants from the bad attitudes and habits of Irish coworkers was promoted as a wise managerial strategy as well. With Irish servants themselves, Anglo-American commentators emphasized hiring immigrant laborers in their “raw” state, before they became acculturated to market behavior in a democracy. In Patience Price’s 1868 story “The Revolt in the Kitchen,” the narrator earns the praise of her husband after she designs a scheme where she plucks Irish immigrant women from Manhattan’s streets as she spies them about to enter into intelligence offices.46

Moral Markets: Missionary-Run Intelligence Offices

During the Civil War, recently emancipated slaves’ choices and actions were cause for special concern. Even liberals who believed that there were no inherent racial limitations to blacks’ fitness for freedom still felt that the experience of slavery had left black workers perfectly ignorant of the rituals and practices that marketing their labor necessitated.47 Oliver Otis Howard, shortly after being appointed commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, issued a circular in May 1865 affirming that one of the agency’s main goals was “to correct the false impressions sometimes entertained by the freedmen, that they can live without labor, and to overcome that false pride which renders some of the refugees more willing to be supported in idleness than to support themselves.”48

This was no empty dictate. The records of the bureau abound with examples of this philosophy being implemented in practice. When black men and women chose to care for their own children rather than work for wages, local white officials punished them with expulsion from relief rolls. Ann Brown, for instance, a freedwoman living in Fairfax Court House, Virginia, was forcefully escorted by Union soldiers to a six-dollar-a-month job as a servant in the house of a white neighbor after local officials discovered that she had been drawing rations of firewood and straw. Local bureau officials also sought to discipline black recipients of relief who were not appropriately humble, or hatched their own plans to migrate. Bureau officials in Chestertown, Maryland, petitioned to exclude from relief a group of free black house servants who, unemployed in the aftermath of the war, had taken to “constantly gadding about the streets,” as the report described, and relaying to each other their “great desire” to relocate to Baltimore, which the author attributed to their childlike wonderment with the big city.49 As historian Eric Foner has documented, Freedmen’s Bureau agents in the South dismissed questions concerned with whether or not the involuntary year-long contracts that they mandated between freed people and white planters were legal—despite the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865—since maximizing production and obtaining full employment were the most salient priorities. In states like North Carolina, legislators found ways to circumvent the constitutional prohibition on keeping workers in a state of bondage by making it illegal for employers to entice or harbor servants who were already under contract, thereby denying black domestic laborers the right to take advantage of competitive hiring.50

The discipline urged upon free black laborers in these contexts rarely took into account the structural legacy of slavery, and what blacks defined as freedom. The bureau’s willingness to naturalize wage labor as the sine qua non of postwar liberalism moved the Republican Party further away from the “free soil” mantle that had been a crucial component of the party’s ideology in the decade leading up to the conflict.51 Despite the attempts of Radical Republicans in Congress to create a Freedmen’s Bureau bill that would have extended measures for Confederate land confiscation and redistribution to freed black men—a version of the famous “Forty Acres and a Mule” provision that General William Tecumseh Sherman implemented on a more local basis in the Sea Islands region of Georgia—these efforts were blocked by President Andrew Johnson and other opponents who argued that such a policy was too generous in the entitlements it proposed meting out. From the very beginning of the war, black newspapers, such as the New York–based Anglo African, lobbied for policies that made land confiscation and redistribution the basis for Reconstruction.52 When Congress did pass the Southern Homestead Act in 1866, it allocated only the poorest lands to black settlers and was underfunded and lacking in enforcement. Even so, it was still met with fierce resistance by local whites.53

In the absence of policies empowering blacks as autonomous economic producers and landowners, markets and wage work were the means by which the bureau governed freed persons as economic actors. It is ironic though that Howard, in his December 1865 report to Congress, would propose having the Freedmen’s Bureau’s agents “adopt a system like the ordinary intelligence office” to “procure good places” for freedmen and women unable to find work. As a member of the middle class Howard would have been all too aware of the scorn these institutions generated, and the lack of confidence that they inspired among employers.54 Northern employers blamed intelligence offices for corrupting the principles of a free market rather than assisting in their realization. As historian Brian Luskey observes, intelligence offices “defined wage labor relations in the era of slave emancipation with far greater precision than the hopeful narratives of free labor ideology that have taken precedence in the historical literature.”55 They were problems in practice.

Most of the intelligence offices involved in placing black refugees traced their origins to the missionary-run freedmen’s relief agencies, which shielded them—at least to some degree—from the opprobrium that their commercial counterparts received. To offset anxieties about how long-distance transactions in black labor might replicate the slave trade—which would continue to dog intelligence offices into the twentieth century—missionaries presented their work as free of commercial motives. Oliver St. John, a Dutch Reformed pastor and the corresponding secretary for the New York and Brooklyn Freedmen’s Employment Bureau, wrote to the general superintendent of freedmen’s affairs for the Army’s Department of Virginia and North Carolina in November 1864, claiming that New York and New England could absorb at least ten thousand freedwomen and children in domestic service positions. St. John stipulated that “residence of only a few months in our free states will be of very great service in lifting them up into a higher civilization than they have ever known.” St. John arranged for the transport of fifty freedwomen to Brooklyn in August 1864, and bragged that “not one, so far as we know, have [sic] failed to find a good home through our Agency.” If money could be raised to hire a vessel to depart Norfolk with a “load of 200,” prospective employers could be brought down to the docks to meet the vessel and hire servants on the spot.56

Mission-inspired intelligence offices were not concerned with whether the interests and needs of employers were made legible to the laborers they recruited. In contrast, employers using the New York and Brooklyn Freedmen’s Employment Bureau were treated as consumers who needed to be provided with information about the goods they were obtaining. Employers were required to pay a subscription fee of five dollars, deductible from their servant’s future wages, as a down payment toward lasting employment. Children aged ten to fifteen could be procured without wages, as legal dependents, so long as employers pledged to comply with the New York statute dictating that fostered orphans receive “the advantages of a common school education.” Prospective employers were asked to indicate whether they needed a chambermaid or a cook, in addition to marking off whether they wanted a child or an adult.57 St. John, despite his public enthusiasm about the ability of northern markets to absorb black labor, expressed private concerns about whether large-scale refugee resettlement would result in pauperism in northern cities caused by an oversaturated market. To safeguard against this possibility, his bureau’s program was designed to ensure that only women and children with jobs contracted prior to their departure were sent.58 Unlike commercial intelligence offices, missionary agencies were not willing to provide resources to unemployed laborers, which would have allowed them to test the market.

Other missionary labor brokers concentrated on how to remove black mothers with children from relief while keeping families together. The free market, they discovered, contained few incentives for keeping these families intact. A letter in the February 1865 issue of the Pennsylvania Freedmen’s Bulletin called attention to the reluctance of white employers to provide room and board to refugee children who were too young to work. The author noted that even though most women with children being placed in household service were widows or the common-law wives of black men serving in the Union Army, communicating their respectability did not overcome employers’ reluctance to hire them. Northern missionaries, including the author of the letter, worked to open foster homes where black children could be cared for while their mothers lived out in service.59 By socializing child care, local and federal officials avoided having to pay relief on able-bodied adults. Later, when the bureau was forced to suspend paying for the transportation costs of refugees contracted to domestic jobs in the North, funds continued to be available for the transportation of women with children so as to incentivize their hire.60

The Refugee Community as Labor Supply: Washington, D.C.

During the war and its aftermath, Washington became a crucial node in the movement of black migrant labor and a city defined by its refugee population and relief needs. In 1860, Washington included 3,185 slaves among its population; by 1867, it was home to 38,663 free blacks, two-thirds of whom were newcomers to the city.61 Before it was ordered closed in December 1863 for lack of adequate sanitary conditions, Camp Barker—located adjacent to what is now the intersection of R Street and Vermont Avenue—was the largest refugee camp in the city. Although fifteen thousand people would pass through Camp Barker, most refugees resided there for only a brief period. Even if many refugees were dependent on some form of relief, they preferred, whenever possible, to live independently. For freedmen with families, this was paramount to establishing patriarchal authority over their households. Across the Potomac River in Arlington Heights, Union officials created what would become known as the Freedman’s Village on the estate—now part of Arlington National Cemetery—that had belonged to Robert E. Lee and, before that, the adopted grandson of George Washington. The community was founded as a model village that would demonstrate the progress that black persons were making in their transition to freedom, but its administration raised serious questions about what rights refugees had to mobility and liberty of contract. White officers used a system of passes, for instance, in order to limit the ability of black laborers to travel into the District. In 1864, Union officers heightened restrictions on refugees’ movement after they reported being overwhelmed by complaints from Freedman’s Village residents about the poor working conditions and withheld wages at the jobs they were compelled to take as a condition of receiving housing.62

Figure 2.1. “The New York and Brooklyn Freedmen’s Bureau, Application Blank.” Courtesy of the Collection of Brooklyn, NY, Civil War Relief Associations Records, Ephemera, and Other Material, ARC.245, box 5, folder 7, Brooklyn Historical Society.

After Congress passed a bill creating the Freedmen’s Bureau in March 1865, the agency took over relief efforts in the city and surrounding areas. Charles Henry (C. H.) Howard, Oliver’s brother and the bureau’s assistant commissioner in Washington, ordered that black refugees refusing situations offered to them—whether in the District or elsewhere—would be removed from relief rolls and prohibited from government-run camps.63 This policy prevailed even though a considerable number of local white employers, conditioned to slavery, which was abolished in Washington in 1862 with the Compensated Emancipation Act, refused to pay the black laborers they hired. Officials at Camp Barker reported that civilians regularly used its employment agency to hire black women as domestics, then denied them wages on the grounds that they had been paid in room and board.64 Although the bureau did establish primary education for blacks in the District, and opened seven industrial sewing schools, programs designed to enhance the long-term prospects of the city’s black population often took a backseat to more immediate concerns of shrinking relief expenditures.65

The policies directed at refugees bore resemblance to the treatment of Irish women in the 1850s. Both black and Irish women were faulted for displaying agency that went against what third parties had determined constituted their greatest good, when they chose to remain in Washington or New York, respectively. In June 1865, Assistant Commissioner John Eaton ordered bureau agents in Washington to scout for work opportunities that might allow for refugees’ removal from “abodes of filth,” “idleness,” and the “social peril” that makeshift and overcrowded dwellings cultivated.66 Although such efforts were already under way before Eaton’s order, the growing size of the refugee community in Washington, and difficulties finding employment, made the matter more pressing. On occasion, the reality of labor market conditions in Washington did cause bureau officials to reconsider their opinions about the factors contributing to black unemployment. In May 1867, for instance, Howard wrote to the Industrial School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which trained and placed black refugees from Washington in service positions in the Boston area, to negotiate an agreement where the bureau would pay the salary of the school’s matron and rent on its building in exchange for the institution accepting, unequivocally, any of the migrants the bureau sent. Although Howard admitted that he had previously pledged that “no paupers should be sent” to the school, he hedged by explaining that Washington was “so overcrowded it is impossible for all to be employed.”67 In the context of Washington’s large refugee population and the surplus labor it created, one could be—Howard suggested—a deserving black pauper. An individual surrendered this status, however, if she refused to relocate for work.