number of blacks employed as household servants to only 3 percent of the occupation’s total workforce, even if the number of black men working as body servants remained proportionately higher—a reflection on the discrimination they faced in trades dominated by white laborers. Wages for black domestics declined as a result of the expansion of the labor supply. Black servants faced additional economic injury due to the fact that certain white employers seized upon Irish immigration to hire white servants exclusively.15
Even before European immigration spiked in the late 1840s, middle-class employers worried about their capacity to control how wage servants were hired, and to dictate how workers approached contractual obligations and loyalty to their employers. In 1826, New York elites led by Arthur Tappan, the abolitionist, chartered the Society for the Encouragement of Faithful Domestic Servants. Despite petering out of existence in 1830, the society’s philosophy would be widely replicated in decades to follow. The New York Society was modeled after an organization by the same name in London, which had been active there since the eighteenth century. The New York Society offered bonuses (and free Bibles) to servants who stayed with a single household for longer than a year. As an employment agency, it promised employers that it would place only reputable, trustworthy women. While an estimated 60 percent of the women who used the service identified as Irish immigrants, the society also recruited black labor. Black workers used its services to obtain character references and win coveted placements in more affluent homes.16 Even when organizations like the New York Society were not attempting to exercise direct influence over black servants’ market and work behavior, as historian Kathleen Brown has argued, black domestics, cooks, and butlers in white northern households often practiced an extreme form of self-discipline and held themselves to trying standards of industry, hygiene, and loyalty. They understood that their value as workers would always be qualified in racial terms that made deference and comportment key measures of their worth above and beyond the caliber of their labor.17
Wage servitude haunted black families in ways that single Irish women, acting as transnational breadwinners, did not have to contend with. Historian Leslie Harris has shown how delegates at the Colored National Convention that took place in Cleveland in 1848 vociferously debated a resolution, which they ultimately passed, denouncing live-in domestic service as “a badge of degradation” to blacks. This position was vehemently espoused by black men who aspired to a form of republican citizenship and manhood that was defined by the ability of their wives and daughters to avoid having to work for wages.18 Martin Robinson Delany, the intellectual and black separatist who by the 1850s would emerge as a fervent proponent of black emigration from the United States, played a key role at the Cleveland Convention advancing this position. In 1844, Delany was already articulating the difference between those who hired out as servants as a matter of “necessity,” which he felt was the plight of black women with no choice but to pursue this work, and the white women who entered service because they had squandered racial privilege and opportunity.19 Even though Delany’s wife, Catherine Richards, was the interracial daughter of an Irish immigrant and black butcher, he did not parse where in-between Irish immigrants, who in cultural terms were not yet understood to be fully white, fit into this picture. He seemed to insinuate that white women’s failure to marry landowners and tradesmen who could provide for them was a fault rather than a strategic choice. In his 1852 publication, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Delany more forcefully stipulated that when it came to free blacks, “We cannot at the same time, be domestic and lady; servant and gentleman. We must be the one or the other.”20
Delany believed that prohibitions against black landownership, education, and commercial pursuits meant that free blacks would never find a community in the United States where their enlistment as servants would be temporary rather than permanent.21 Instead he promoted black colonization of “uninhabited” lands in South America or Africa.22 Not only did new opportunities for acquiring unclaimed (or conquerable) lands have to be forged, but labor markets, and the existing social relations of production that demarcated racial subject positions in the United States, had to be remade as well. Delany was but one voice in this particular debate. Although Harriet Beecher Stowe, upon the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was criticized within the abolitionist community for imagining Liberia as the best solution to the problem of an emancipated, surplus black population, it is important to note that peers like Delany had similar reservations about whether racial divisions of labor—beyond slavery—could ever be overcome.23
Wartime Patriotism, Contrabands, and Private Importation
With Union armies conducting the war primarily in Confederate territory, white northerners gained access to the labor power of runaways and refugees from slavery on a scale that few had predicted. The dispatches that Union officers and soldiers sent, in addition to the reports that northern journalists and missionaries filed, brimmed with enthusiasm about the productive value of contraband labor. The humanitarian crisis of sudden emancipation became an opportunity of political economy. Before the war, northern states like Ohio had in place statutes that required free blacks to post surety bonds before entering as migrants, which they used to limit black settlement.24 The war ended the enforcement of these laws and what had been, for all intents and purposes, more restrictive migration laws than what German and Irish arrivals to New York encountered. Writings from this period illustrate that many white northerners viewed emancipated slaves as a distinct species of labor whose value came from the fact that they were unacculturated to the free labor system. In July 1861, with the conflict only three months old, the Independent magazine proclaimed that the “troublesome experience of Northern households” was on the verge of being transformed. “The immigration of runaway slaves” with their “peculiar talent for service,” the magazine noted, represented the spoils of war.25
The Emancipation Proclamation, which on January 1, 1863, decreed a formal end to slavery in the states of the Confederacy, generated excitement as well. Horace James, a Congregationalist minister from Massachusetts commissioned to serve as the superintendent of Negro affairs in North Carolina, effused in 1864 that the abolition of slavery had created a “nation of servants” awaiting employment. “The foolish prejudice against color which prevails … even among the best people of the North,” James declared, “should immediately give way, that they may take their proper place in all our households.” James underscored that proposals to send freedwomen and children to the North were not intended “to throw white laborers out of employment” but rather would “lift them higher in the social scale, and engage them in labors which require more skill.” All of this was simply a natural function of how free labor markets operated, James insisted, even as he sought the federal backing that was necessary to orchestrate a massive population transfer. “In the successive orders or ranks of industrial pursuits,” he concluded, “those who have the least intelligence must perform the more menial services, without respect to color or birth.”26 Irish immigrants who had paid their dues at the bottom of the free labor hierarchy were now ready to be elevated to more skilled pursuits, property ownership, and occupations that conferred upon them independence rather than dependence. During the 1870s, the theme of occupational succession and advancement would be picked up by proponents of Chinese immigration, who, in similar terms, insisted that Irish immigrants and other white laborers stood to be the primary beneficiaries of the introduction of nonwhite labor to menial positions. These new supplies of labor, they claimed, could be exploited by the white working and middle classes alike.
As historian Kate Masur argues, Major General Benjamin Butler’s decision early in the war to treat runaway slaves who crossed over Union lines as “contrabands” meant that white northern officers and soldiers first interacted with emancipated slaves as service workers in military encampments, which framed their calculations on how free black incorporation was to proceed. Contrabands quickly became subjects of northern popular culture as well, appearing not only in journals and newspapers, but in minstrel shows and fiction. Masur notes that white northern missionaries exaggerated contrabands’ status “as victims of a war they could not understand, [and] as illiterate, unworldly, and disorderly in their appearance and personal relationships.” Paternalistic depictions such as these also helped to assuage white workers’ fears that contrabands sent farther north were legitimate
