In his 1867 account of Irish life in the United States, John Francis Maguire proudly recounted how Kate, an Irish servant working in an unnamed American city, dealt with the frequent harassment she received from a local Protestant minister. Although Kate typically brushed aside his patronizing humor, which included calling her Bridget and taunting her Catholicism, when the minister announced during a dinner party at her employers’ home that he was willing to pay her whatever “Father Pat” was seeking for her absolution, she lost her temper. With evident glee, Maguire described how “she flung the hot steaming liquid,” a tureen of pea soup, at the minister’s “face, neck, [and] breast.”86 No amount of money, Kate’s actions implied, could convince her to renounce her faith, heritage, or racial birthright.
Charity or Depopulation? Foster and Assisted Emigration in the 1880s
When crop failures and famine conditions struck the west of Ireland in 1879, Foster resumed work as a broker of assisted emigration.87 He knowingly entered into a highly charged political debate about whether emigration, land reform, or home rule best served the island’s interests.88 While Foster claimed that his work was apolitical, this was unconvincing in light of how he set about announcing the revival of his assisted emigration campaign. In a public letter to Charles Stewart Parnell, the leader of the Irish Land League, Foster alleged that it was “unstatesmanlike and cruel to the poor to contravene the laws of nature by decrying emigration as some people do.”89 The more than twenty thousand women whom Foster sponsored in the 1880s were issued two-pound vouchers, and selected based on the recommendations of clergy. The vouchers were then redeemable at any of the Irish ports of departure or in Liverpool, with the steamship companies billing Foster. Together, passage and the mandatory outfit of food and clothing that emigrants had to acquire before sailing cost slightly more than four pounds, and assisted emigrants had to make up the difference on their own. In cases where prospective emigrants already had a prepaid ticket, yet lacked the funds to purchase supplies or to pay for the intermediate journey to a port, Foster donated one pound.90
In the eyes of home rule advocates and the Irish Land League, assisted emigration was at best a minor remedy that dodged the lasting question of Irish sovereignty and land reform. At worst, it was a scheme to depopulate Ireland and neutralize its resistance. The liberty of Irish women to forge their own destiny in Ireland, freed from pressure to leave, became a mantra to nationalists. If free labor in the United States often revolved around a narrow definition of what defined consent within specific employment relations, in the context of Irish emigration it became a more philosophical question about whether or not an individual’s departure was truly voluntary. Public attacks directed at Foster regularly appeared in the nationalist press during the early 1880s. An editorial in the Dublin-based Freeman’s Journal in May 1880, for instance, assailed Foster by name for failing to see how emigration led to “the sad life and sadder death of many an Irish girl in the slums of American cities.” During a September 1880 anti-eviction protest meeting in Prouglish, County Leitrim, one tenant farmer familiar with Foster’s work suggested to the laughter of the audience that he finance a boat to take landlords away instead. Foster received threats that promised violent retribution if he continued his work.91 Even though the bulk of emigrants Foster sponsored made the transatlantic trip without ordeal, incidents to the contrary garnered significant negative attention. In August 1883, for instance, the Freeman’s Journal reported on sixteen-year-old Margaret Moran, who had traveled on a voucher that Foster had provided only to be turned away by American immigration officials on the grounds that she was likely to become a public charge.92
The Irish nationalist media depicted Foster as a dotty, paternalistic figure who was incapable of adapting to changes in either Ireland or the United States. An 1884 editorial in the Irish Nation mocked Foster for clinging to the outdated notion that the American West was a region where any European immigrant, regardless of circumstances, could expect to be instantaneously rewarded. The West, the paper lectured, was no longer “the El Dorado of the European peasant.” Foster’s unconditional embrace of emigration had blinded him to the United States’ economic woes during the tumultuous years of the 1870s and 1880s, and caused him to ignore the high costs of transportation to the interior, the industrialization of agriculture, and the railroads’ monopolization of public lands.93 Charlotte Grace O’Brien, the transatlantic Irish reformer and advocate for immigrant protections, wrote in the English periodical Nineteenth Century that although Foster was an “excellent man,” and his desire to help the Irish genuine, his method of assistance was reckless and “a most dangerous experiment, if not a complete mistake.” In response, Foster cited O’Brien’s failure to provide any concrete evidence of abuses. Consistent with his liberal principles, he argued that since the women he supported pleaded for aid and consented to the assistance offered, it was unfair for them to be “denied the opportunity to emigrate in order to better their condition.”94 Still, by 1880 the Irish American community was more established and better equipped to receive immigrants than it had been in the 1850s. Accordingly, members were less reliant on elite intermediaries such as Foster for assistance. Many were no longer willing to support a market-oriented philanthropy that sidestepped the issue of Irish home rule and merely took for granted that young Irish women’s labor was destined to be commodified abroad.95
During the 1880s, there was also mounting opposition to “pauper” immigration from the American public and elected officials. The United States experienced an economic depression that began in 1873 and lasted until 1880. The downturn would resume in 1882. The pro-immigration mood that had prevailed in the period that immediately followed the Civil War dampened considerably. Raising concerns similar to those that had surfaced during the post-famine period of the early 1850s, Congress accused the British officials of supporting the emigration of paupers from English and Irish workhouses so as to rid themselves of their care. The Select Committee to Investigate Foreign Immigration, convened by Congress in 1888, blamed the Tuke Society—the government-sponsored social welfare organization led by the Quaker businessman and philanthropist James Hack Tuke—for paying for the passage of more than forty-nine hundred immigrants to the United States since 1882. Many of these arrivals, the report claimed, “subsequently became inmates of charitable institutions in this country.”96 On at least two occasions in the 1880s, Foster’s assisted emigration program was investigated by the American consuls in Cork and Liverpool. Although State Department officials concluded that Foster’s vetting methods and reputation for calculated philanthropy meant that he was a low risk when it came to sending indigent migrants, many of his critics were uninterested in acknowledging such distinctions.97
Foster had also lost influence as broker. By the 1880s, migration was big business and the sale of steamship tickets an occupational pursuit for thousands of agents in Ireland and Britain. Steamship agents besieged Foster and tried to persuade him to steer the migrants he was assisting in their direction, so they would earn the commission. In November 1882, the Northern Police Court in Dublin fined Martin Gallagher fifty pounds after the local Board of Trade discovered that he was selling steamship tickets without a license. One of the violations Gallagher committed was the resale of vouchers that Foster had issued to a group of Irish women at the behest of a parish priest.98 Steamship companies also took a more active role in steering prospective migrants to Foster’s “discounted” rate of passage. After inaugurating steamship service from Liverpool and Queenstown to New York in 1881, the Beaver Line included in its Irish newspaper advertisements a notice that “female domestic servants of good character” could subsidize the cost of their passage by applying to Foster. A frequent recipient of free passes from both American railroads and the transatlantic steamship companies, these corporations adopted Foster as a broker who drummed up business.99
Finally, Foster could no longer rely on the Catholic Church for support. In July 1883, Catholic bishops in the west of Ireland ordered priests and curates to cease working with Foster altogether. They declared, under pressure from nationalists, that his assisted emigration schemes were a danger to the “faith and morals” of the Irish people.100 On February 24, 1886, with his assisted emigration work at a virtual standstill, Foster again lashed out at political proposals that he believed would unnaturally stifle emigration. This time it was British Prime Minister William Gladstone, who had announced his support for Irish home rule a year earlier. Although
