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.
* * *
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
