defecting to the newly formed Liberal Unionist Party. In his letter to Gladstone, Foster insisted that he was not uniformly against state-backed land reforms. As for home rule, however, Foster expressed absolute opposition to any plan that would separate Ireland from the British Empire, and warned Gladstone that “the Loyalist population of Ulster may be expected to make itself unmistakeably and effectually heard in opposition to any such project.” Home rule’s “realization would be a bloody Civil War between different portions of the Irish people, and between Great Britain and Ireland.” Foster’s letter concluded with a postscript proposing a government office to formally promote assisted emigration—with him in charge. Disingenuously, Foster assured Gladstone that his work in the West and South of Ireland had been pursued “without encountering any opposition whatever.”101
With the passage of the 1891 Immigration Act, Congress stipulated that “any person whose ticket or passage is paid for with the money of another or who is assisted by others to come” could be prevented from landing. Except in cases where immediate family members provided the funds, assisted immigrants were mandated to appear before immigration officials to determine whether they were likely to become a public charge. Officials were also tasked with evaluating whether the assistance immigrants received had left them in a state of debt bondage or violated the terms of the 1885 Alien Contract Labor Law (the Foran Act).102 With the law’s enforcement, Foster received letters from various steamship companies stating that they would no longer be able to accept his vouchers, since they did not want to risk having to bear the return cost of any immigrants who were rejected.103 In response to a letter that Foster wrote to the State Department, Hermann Stump, the superintendent of immigration, informed him in May 1893 that the law’s requirements could not be waived on behalf of his charitable designs, which brought his work to a halt.104 Foster passed away on December 21, 1900, in the flat he rented in a Belfast lodging house.
Conclusion
Foster’s work anticipated many of the dilemmas that the 1864 Act to Encourage Immigration would encounter. Urged on by President Lincoln, the 1864 act empowered employers—primarily in the fields of agriculture, manufacturing, and mining—to enter into contracts with European immigrants. Although Congress provided only minimal funding to back the initiative, it placed the federal government’s imprint on recruitment efforts already taking place in European ports of departure. Contracted for a term not to exceed one year, immigrants were to repay the cost of their passage from future wages earned. Ambiguously, the legislation prohibited indenture, bondage, and slavery as forms of compulsion that employers could use to recover sunk costs—even as they were prompted to extend credit. In 1868, after employers pushed to criminalize immigrants’ breaches of contracts, thereby moving the matter out of civil courts, Congress repealed the act.105 Capital investment in growing the labor supply and the maintenance of free migration and contract liberty, it seemed, were incompatible. In this context, Foster’s work was the exception that proved the rule. Because he did not seek to profit from his brokerage, and assumed costs in the name of philanthropy, he was not motivated to pursue harsh and punitive measures against the migrants whose passages he had funded.
The assisted migration of recently freed black women and children during and after the Civil War raised many of the same issues that Foster’s work encountered. With the end of slavery, northern household employers became infatuated with opportunities to hire black refugees as servants. Private and government brokers flocked to meet this demand. Despite their newly won liberty to consent to work, in practice black refugees were a commodity whose dependency on relief meant that they might be deployed to wherever labor scarcities—or overly empowered Irish domestics—existed as a problem of household production. Unlike the Irish migrants whom Foster sponsored, black women and children would not be treated as potentially equal participants in national projects of expansion and white social reproduction. Nor would they be extolled for their labor republicanism, even though many displayed an independence that was just as fierce as their Irish counterparts. As the next chapter addresses, black refugees faced far greater constraints when it came to their ability to dictate the conditions under which they labored. Brokers of their labor banked on this very point.
2
Humanitarianism’s Markets
Brokering the Domestic Labor of Black Refugees, 1861–1872
Introduction: “Destitute in Female Help”
On January 23, 1867, Josiah Crawford, a fifty-nine-year-old white farmer living in Skull Creek, Nebraska, wrote to the Washington, D.C., office of the Freedmen’s Bureau. He had read in a local newspaper that thousands of black refugees crowded the nation’s capital in a state of destitution. Calling himself a “true Union man,” Crawford offered a solution that he claimed could remove at least one refugee family from public relief. The bureau would send him “a good woman” with “two or three children” who together would cook, keep house, and perform other domestic labor.1 In exchange, he would gift the family a homestead consisting of eighty acres if they chose a plot ten miles removed from the railroad line or forty acres if they selected a location closer to transit. He would build and maintain a house for them on the property. Whereas land was abundant and surplus to white settlers in the area, hired domestic labor was a scarce commodity that even more affluent farmers could not acquire. Crawford explained that his part of Nebraska “was very destitute in female help” and could accommodate thousands of black women and children sent from Washington. If his neighbors did not wish to barter land for labor, as he was willing to do, they would gladly pay three to five dollars a week in wages.2 As a farmer, Crawford may have been indirectly motivated by a desire to see the high tariffs on imported manufactured goods, which helped finance Reconstruction, reduced. Crawford may have also been affected by the newly implemented federal income tax; the 1870 census recorded his property holdings as one thousand dollars, which put him above the minimum threshold for those who had to pay.3 Federal expenditures on the Freedmen’s Bureau and refugee relief were charged topics that, for the first time in the country’s history, made social welfare a matter of national rather than local politics.
Crawford’s proposal shared a similar rationale to migration schemes that were advanced after the Panic of 1857. When surplus and unemployed female labor could not meet household demand due to geographic isolation, political economists consistently held that using state and private charitable funds to subsidize migration represented a practical investment in developing the nation’s infrastructure. The race of those targeted for assistance, however, accounted for significant differences in how migration programs were implemented and understood, and the agency that individuals and families had to accept or reject the help being offered. Strict prohibitions against interracial marriages, covenants against black landownership, and the relative absence of single black men in places like Nebraska meant that the black women who agreed to resettlement were unlikely to move out of a position of hired servitude. The 1860 census counted 82 free black residents in the state, and in 1870 that number had increased to only 789. Antebellum army officers brought black servants with them to remote outposts on the Nebraska frontier, where workers’ dependency rendered their status as free or enslaved—at least in an immediate material sense—inconsequential. Black refugees in Washington may have been aware of such legacies.4
Crawford’s apparent generosity notwithstanding, his proposal failed to account for the long-term prospects or local reception of single black women sent to remote areas of the interior. What would his neighbors say about the arrangement? Nor did Crawford’s letter address what would happen if the black family sent to him decided that the situation was not to their liking. Would he finance their return to Washington? Would the agreement granting the land to them be nullified? Would they be able to find alternative shelter, if the need suddenly arose? Crawford did not seek to eradicate the complicated dependencies facing recently emancipated black persons, as much as he wanted to enmesh them in new ones. Consent, independent contract, and wages—the hallmarks of the free labor system that the Union had fought for—are afterthoughts in his correspondence.
In the end,
