laborers. In 1870, he shared his domicile with a man who appears to have been his nephew, but the census lists no servants in the Crawford household and there are no black female homeowners in the surrounding area. The distance from Nebraska to Washington, D.C., made Crawford’s request an outlier to begin with—most black women and children were sent to locations in the Northeast or to places in the Midwest where free black communities had been established before the war.5 Since the government had to pay the cost of transportation, and would not have paid for a chaperone to accompany a single family, fronting the money for this purpose would have also been viewed as a risky prospect. Numerous black refugees chose to abscond before arriving at their intended destinations if better employment options were presented en route. Whether or not any of the bureau’s officials in Washington tried to persuade a family on relief to take Crawford’s offer went unrecorded. Had bureau agents pressed the case, they could have threatened to remove from relief the refugee family to whom Crawford’s offer was tendered. To white officials, the successful commodification of black labor relied on the ability to assert these types of coercive pressures.
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The end of slavery spurred experiments in how the provision of welfare, migration, and fulfillment of demand for household labor might be dealt with as imbricated social concerns. At a time when Irish immigrant women were increasingly perceived as wielding the menacing ability to win advantageous work contracts through their manipulation of northern domestic labor scarcities, the war provided employers with an opportunity to counteract this perceived threat through the brokered import of black labor. White northerners eagerly hypothesized about the potential value of black migrants’ labor power, and how this supply of labor might be produced for market through various forms of state intervention. Brokers of refugee labor financed and controlled migrations from the South and Washington, D.C., by attaching numerous restrictions on how these funds were to be dispensed. In comparison to the assistance that was made available to white women, whether for transatlantic or internal migrations, black refugees interacted with a welfare program that was explicitly rather than passively disciplinary in the market behavior that it sought to effect. A question haunts this chapter: what would have happened if migration assistance was extended to black refugees without punitive conditions? Engagement with this counterfactual premise yields important insights into what forms mid-nineteenth-century white racial privilege took, and how servants’ liberty to contract their labor power was shaped by private and state actions.
Northern households’ covetous impulses inaugurated what would be, for the next half century, a near constant quest to colonize and expropriate new supplies of workers. From these new sources, employers and labor brokers aspired to create social relations in which hired laborers were less able to withdraw themselves from the production of domesticity, or to control the means by which it was performed. Northern households aimed to detach independence—as a formal status—from the ability to refuse or reshape job situations that workers deemed undesirable. Among proponents of free labor, wages and other benefits to workers were proxies for consent and more important than whether or not a contraband or refugee entered into a contract voluntarily.6 Free market advocates urged displaced black migrants to forgo their own conceptions of what constituted economic and social security and to abandon the prerogative to choose where they wanted to live and work. Instead, they instructed refugee populations to consummate the commodified exchange of what was typically framed as their most valuable asset: their power to labor in servility. The Union Army’s “liberation” of their enslaved labor, white northerners smugly declared, had made this possible.7 There were fundamental paradoxes and myopic assumptions built into northern liberals’ vision of how freedom would govern emancipated slaves. Literary scholar Saidiya Hartman uses the evocative phrase “burdened individuality” to signify the fraught position that freed blacks, deprived of the material and other resources necessary to self-sufficiency, occupied in society.8
Racial discrimination meant that it was more difficult for black men to claim a republican identity as heads of households and independent producers than it was for Irish women—even though both groups of workers performed service work. When it came to placing contrabands and refugees in northern homes, white employers analyzed and disputed whether or not blacks were innately predisposed to servile labor, or whether servitude was cultural behavior produced through the disciplinary regime of slavery and therefore an attribute that might be lost with free labor. (As chapter 6 returns to, this debate lingered into the twentieth century.) Observations of black laborers’ work habits were transmitted from the Union front lines in the South back to northern households. Domestic labor’s status as women’s work, to be performed within the confines of homes, was upended by the exigent needs that the war created. When white officers and soldiers enlisted freed black workers, labor that had been gendered—such as cooking and cleaning—became racialized instead.9 Although refugee women and their children command the bulk of attention in this chapter, the funneling of black men into positions of service work had a lasting impact on white Americans’ perception of what a postwar racial division of labor might look like. Whether as porters, hotel workers, or waiters, black men—like Chinese immigrant men—were relegated to jobs in the growing service sector of the late nineteenth century, and denied employment opportunities in areas of the economy that would link industrial labor with manhood and citizenship. Union officials and their successors in the Freedmen’s Bureau were concerned with refugee women, and especially single women with children, as subjects who they feared were most likely to fall into a state of permanent dependency.
An aim of this chapter is to refocus attention on American refugee policies and emphasize how government-run camps—whether created adjacent to the occupying armies of the Union or away from the front lines in Washington, D.C.—became sites of labor recruitment. In relation to the longer arc of federal policies governing displaced persons, internally or abroad, the Civil War–era plight of freed persons demonstrates that refugee sponsorship, while often cast as a humanitarian impulse, usually involved exploitative instincts as well.10 To be critical and perhaps even cynical about it, refugee sponsorship has always been a form of labor brokerage, and where refugees have not been accepted for asylum, it is typically because demand has not been marshalled to justify the action.11 White employers and brokers scavenged contraband and refugee camps for black bodies to enlist into wage servitude. Camps, in this regard, were places where emancipated slaves—resurrected from the social death of slavery—became sovereign economic subjects in a carefully orchestrated and limited fashion.12 The Freedmen’s Bureau was granted unique and unprecedented powers to regulate economic, political, and social behavior. From its commissioner, Oliver Otis Howard, on down, the bureau tended to employ self-styled Christian soldiers who viewed their work as a missionary intervention.13 Black refugees, like Catholic “soupers” in Ireland and “rice-Christians” in China, performed a version of want that responded to their very real material needs. In the context of American racial politics, refugees’ reliance on relief, and what white missionaries demanded of them as part of this exchange, helped produce a safe and unthreatening black subjectivity.
Acknowledging the myriad obstacles the bureau faced as an administrative body under attack does not change the legacies of its particular approach. White northern officials required that displaced black persons accept their transformation from chattel to transportable “free” labor as a condition of their need. Anxieties about the mass migration of blacks conducted under more voluntary conditions fueled antipathy and opposition from northern whites who believed that blacks were incapable of being integrated as both laborers and citizens, except at the peripheries of economic and social life.14 Even though assisted migrations were met with white resistance as well, the contractual conditions that such programs imposed were understood as important checks on wanton black freedoms.
Servitude and Autonomy in the Antebellum Era
Prior to the Civil War, free blacks in the North struggled to balance their economic reliance on service work, as a source of wages, with the stigma that marked this labor. In New York, slavery was not completely abolished until 1827. By 1840, Manhattan’s black community had grown to sixteen thousand people and accounted for roughly 5 percent of
