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
