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
