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
