practice, contraband laborers were productive contributors to the Union war effort rather than dependents of largesse, especially since they could be compelled to perform gendered and racialized work that white soldiers disdained. Before freedmen became eligible to assume combat roles after the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation, they performed drudge work digging ditches, cleaning latrines, and chopping wood. They also supplied more intimate forms of labor marked as feminine and domestic, namely as personal servants to officers and as company cooks. Black servants were not just employed in camps behind battle lines. One military official estimated, for instance, that of the 10,000 freed blacks employed in August 1863 by the Department of the Cumberland Army in Tennessee, 3,700 worked as cooks and servants in active combat zones.28 In a December 1863 message to President Lincoln, representatives from the Freedman’s Aid Societies in Boston, Cincinnati, New York, and Philadelphia predicted that recently emancipated slaves were “destined to be the great want of the country over which we are extending our victorious dominion.” In the interim, however, the representatives urged the president to respond on the record to complaints that federal money was being wasted on feeding and clothing contrabands. They pleaded with him to publicize how expenditures in this area represented an initial investment in the production of servants who were necessary to the war effort. Moreover, as other commentators argued, every adult male slave who escaped forced the Confederacy, in theory, to replace his labor with that of a white person.29
It was not until the middle of the war that the Union began to regularly pay black laborers, servants, and cooks. Equal wages for black workers remained a constant point of tension, even after the federal government made this official policy. At Fortress Monroe, where Butler had first initiated the Union Army’s policy of refusing to return Confederate property in the form of enslaved persons, his successor General John Wool required army officers and civilians employing contrabands to deposit wages in a general fund, which was subsequently used to support refugees whose age or condition made them camp dependents. Refugee laborers’ protests that this “Contraband Tax” was unjust and rife with corruption were met with imprisonment and whippings. The policy prompted some of Fortress Monroe’s black workers to independently contract out their labor to civilians in order to circumvent the military’s oversight altogether. A military commission appointed to investigate the situation questioned, in telling language, why “Irish souphouse” relief policies were needed at all, when the free market, its authors concluded, ought to suffice. Gainfully employed black laborers, the commission argued, could be charged with taking care of their fellow refugees without government oversight. (In 1863, undeterred Union officials introduced a Contraband Tax at the newly created Freedman’s Village in Arlington Heights as well.)30 The very existence of a refugee tax deserves comparative attention. It was not until the 1870s that American ports began levying a commutation tax on Irish and other European immigrants, and required them to offset the costs of providing public relief to fellow arrivals who became public charges. But even then, these taxes were not enacted under the same guise of inducing racial responsibility.
While blacks’ martial service has received substantial attention from scholars as the means by which they proved, under fire, their worthiness for citizenship, the relationship between the performance of “unmanly” and menial servitude and social inclusion was more ambiguous.31 Historian Micki McElya argues that the focus on free blacks’ claims to citizenship through martial service has obscured struggles for rights that were organized around other contributions and actions.32 Contrabands discovered that being relegated to menial and servile labor, even when they were granted the freedom to consent to work, represented a tortuous path to a form of economic and social citizenship that warranted respect in the eyes of white soldiers and officers. An article published in the United States Service Magazine, for instance, described how a contraband who had wandered into the camp of the First Iowa Cavalry in Tennessee was administered an oath by a Union corporal in which he had to solemnly swear to not only uphold the Constitution, but also “see that there are no grounds floating upon the coffee.”33 To counter perceptions that blacks were fit only for dependent service work, the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission found it prudent to include in the report it submitted to Congress a letter to the Galena (IL) Advertiser from M. M. Miller, the white captain of the Ninth Louisiana Colored Regiment. Narrating the gory details of the recently fought battle at Milliken’s Bend, Mississippi, Miller described not only the valor of the black soldiers under his command but also how “a boy” who cooked for him had “begged a gun when the rebels were advancing,” so that he too could defend the Union position. The cook was “badly wounded with one gunshot and two bayonet wounds.”34 Testimonials such as this aimed to prove that black men and boys would proudly abandon service work and its emasculating status, if only given the opportunity.
Some Union officers treated contraband servants’ labor as their personal property. As historian David Cecere has documented, Union officers secured their own differentiated status by having contraband servants complete tasks that enlisted men were required to do on their own. They also created impromptu brokerage networks to fulfill their civilian families’ domestic labor needs. Enoch Adams, who hailed from a prominent New Hampshire family, invited his wife Sarah to visit him at Point Lookout, Maryland, where he oversaw the prisoner-of-war camp there, and promised she could hire a “black girl” to take home. Adams also wrote to his mother inquiring if she had any interest in laborers he described as “my contrabands,” whom he pledged to deliver when granted leave. Union officers seemed to have little patience or tolerance for black servants who pursued independent goals. Cecere describes one officer who became enraged when he learned that his contraband servant had left without permission to search for his mother who had been separated from him during slavery.35
Boycotts and Job Competition
The start of the Civil War had a varied impact on how Irish immigrants were viewed as a resource. On one hand, white immigrant labor gave the Union a distinct advantage over the Confederacy in respect to manpower, and the wartime recruitment of immigrants flourished in many European ports of departure even before the 1864 Act to Encourage Immigration was passed into law.36 On the other hand, there was backlash against Irish immigrants accused of being disloyal to the Union cause and overly supportive of antiwar Democrats.
Campaigns denouncing the employment of Irish servants peaked in the aftermath of the July 1863 Draft Riots in New York City. It became popular for Anglo-American household employers, especially those who identified as staunchly Republican, to declare that they were boycotting Irish domestic labor altogether. A persistent rumor alleged that Irish domestics were involved in a citywide arson plot against the homes and families of those who had supported the Union conscription policy that had set off the disturbances. The Tribune published an editorial shortly after the riots, leaking a note that one of Democratic Governor Horatio Seymour’s assistants had—allegedly—forwarded to the White House. In this note, Seymour was depicted as asking President Lincoln to end conscription due to the “gravest apprehension that the Irish servant-girls will, in case the draft is enforced, turn incendiaries in a body, and burn down their masters’ homes.” The paper chided Seymour for exaggerating the threat of civil disorder, which played into his calls to end the draft, while simultaneously mocking him for being a coward in the face of this feminine menace. Whether the missive was real or not, the Freeman’s Journal, the leading Irish nationalist newspaper, felt obliged to issue a response denouncing the accusations.37
Northerners’ elevated antipathy toward Irish servants remained palpable for some time after the riots. A representative of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society’s employment office wrote to the Union superintendent at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, in September 1863, for instance, to request that refugee women and children be sent to Philadelphia, where demand for black servants had been stoked by the events of the previous summer.38 After the war’s end, the Freedmen’s Bureau would continue to receive correspondence from northern employers urging the agency to redouble efforts to deliver black women and children as domestics, since, as one writer noted, a “general disgust with Irish help” prevailed. A white woman from East Bloomfield, New York, petitioned the bureau for a job as a broker of black domestic labor by explaining how she would use the position as “the means of getting in a class of laboring people who
