women no longer had to degrade themselves with visits to Irish slums, where competing institutions dealing in Irish labor operated.39 Back in New York City, although the Draft Riots did lead some white employers to boycott Irish labor, the threat of further violence against Manhattan’s black community accelerated an exodus to Brooklyn and places farther afield. The riots, as they were designed to do, strengthened the position of white workers in the labor market.40
Stories were also realms where employers disseminated comparisons of servants’ attributes, and produced racial difference as market knowledge. Literary fiction provided an important venue for airing wonder and anxiety about the integration of contraband domestic workers into northern homes. Mary E. Dodge’s story “Our Contraband,” published by Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in August 1863, centers on a white narrator’s interactions with Aggie, a young black woman. The story begins with Aggie being dropped off at the Ladies’ Soldiers’ Aid Society by two Union soldiers passing through New York City on leave. Her removal to the city follows her failed stint as a servant in a Union camp in Virginia, where she and her father fled after escaping slavery. The narrator explains that Aggie’s “insubordination and impishness” were too much for her previous employers to handle. Her Union escorts hoped that domestic supervision, provided by middle-class white women, would prove more successful.41
In her analysis of “Our Contraband,” historian Kate Masur reasons that Aggie symbolizes northerners’ fears that emancipated blacks were indelibly marked in attitude and behavior by the institution of slavery. Aggie ultimately fails as a servant after being placed by the society in the narrator’s household. She is prone to talking to herself, sneaking down at night to steal food, and breaking household objects. In the end, her care and employment pass to a Quaker woman, who discovers Aggie wandering the streets with the narrator’s child.42
Although Aggie’s character is used by Dodge to probe the question of black laborers’ effectiveness, she is equally emblematic of white employers’ speculative belief that black migrants might rescue the system of free labor as it related to household service. In “Our Contraband,” the narrator at first withholds Aggie’s race and background from her husband, and describes her only as a “raw girl; one that is not hopelessly set in other people’s ways.” His assumption is that she means “a fair Hibernian … newly landed, or a blushing Huytur-spluyter fresh from the Vaterland.” When the truth is exposed, the narrator reassures him that Aggie is not “one of those deceitful, half-and-half yellow kind that are neither one thing nor the other, but a genuine negress.” The narrator’s description attempts to draw equivalencies between unassimilated European immigrant women yet to have acquired a disdain for being ordered around, and black women whose history of slavery has accustomed them to such controls.
Dodge’s treatment of the narrator’s three Irish servants is also worth parsing beyond calling attention to their stereotypical animus toward blacks.43 The Irish servants in the story stake their claims to whiteness both within and against the work that the production of domesticity entailed. Ann, the cook, exercises “local supremacy” over the kitchen, and bars unwanted persons from this space at her whim; Nora gathers coals wearing a “crinoline twice as expensive” as her employer’s; Ellen, the family’s chief waitress, vainly believes in her “impeachability” as an employee. The three Irish women announce that they refuse to “slape and ate wid nagers,” but it is the narrator—after claiming that she has no other choice—who sends Aggie away. The narrator brags that the new racial division of labor that she introduced, despite failing to take, has appropriately disrupted her Irish servants’ confidence in their guaranteed employment and preference as workers.44
In other contexts, employers feared that insolent Irish servants, rather than being properly chastened, would instead corrupt black coworkers new to free labor. In an 1866 story that Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote for the Atlantic Monthly, for instance, one of her characters complains that whatever laziness black domestics might come to display, it would not be due to innate racial traits, but rather to their mastery of “imitation.”45 The need to isolate Chinese servants from the bad attitudes and habits of Irish coworkers was promoted as a wise managerial strategy as well. With Irish servants themselves, Anglo-American commentators emphasized hiring immigrant laborers in their “raw” state, before they became acculturated to market behavior in a democracy. In Patience Price’s 1868 story “The Revolt in the Kitchen,” the narrator earns the praise of her husband after she designs a scheme where she plucks Irish immigrant women from Manhattan’s streets as she spies them about to enter into intelligence offices.46
Moral Markets: Missionary-Run Intelligence Offices
During the Civil War, recently emancipated slaves’ choices and actions were cause for special concern. Even liberals who believed that there were no inherent racial limitations to blacks’ fitness for freedom still felt that the experience of slavery had left black workers perfectly ignorant of the rituals and practices that marketing their labor necessitated.47 Oliver Otis Howard, shortly after being appointed commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, issued a circular in May 1865 affirming that one of the agency’s main goals was “to correct the false impressions sometimes entertained by the freedmen, that they can live without labor, and to overcome that false pride which renders some of the refugees more willing to be supported in idleness than to support themselves.”48
This was no empty dictate. The records of the bureau abound with examples of this philosophy being implemented in practice. When black men and women chose to care for their own children rather than work for wages, local white officials punished them with expulsion from relief rolls. Ann Brown, for instance, a freedwoman living in Fairfax Court House, Virginia, was forcefully escorted by Union soldiers to a six-dollar-a-month job as a servant in the house of a white neighbor after local officials discovered that she had been drawing rations of firewood and straw. Local bureau officials also sought to discipline black recipients of relief who were not appropriately humble, or hatched their own plans to migrate. Bureau officials in Chestertown, Maryland, petitioned to exclude from relief a group of free black house servants who, unemployed in the aftermath of the war, had taken to “constantly gadding about the streets,” as the report described, and relaying to each other their “great desire” to relocate to Baltimore, which the author attributed to their childlike wonderment with the big city.49 As historian Eric Foner has documented, Freedmen’s Bureau agents in the South dismissed questions concerned with whether or not the involuntary year-long contracts that they mandated between freed people and white planters were legal—despite the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865—since maximizing production and obtaining full employment were the most salient priorities. In states like North Carolina, legislators found ways to circumvent the constitutional prohibition on keeping workers in a state of bondage by making it illegal for employers to entice or harbor servants who were already under contract, thereby denying black domestic laborers the right to take advantage of competitive hiring.50
The discipline urged upon free black laborers in these contexts rarely took into account the structural legacy of slavery, and what blacks defined as freedom. The bureau’s willingness to naturalize wage labor as the sine qua non of postwar liberalism moved the Republican Party further away from the “free soil” mantle that had been a crucial component of the party’s ideology in the decade leading up to the conflict.51 Despite the attempts of Radical Republicans in Congress to create a Freedmen’s Bureau bill that would have extended measures for Confederate land confiscation and redistribution to freed black men—a version of the famous “Forty Acres and a Mule” provision that General William Tecumseh Sherman implemented on a more local basis in the Sea Islands region of Georgia—these efforts were blocked by President Andrew Johnson and other opponents who argued that such a policy was too generous in the entitlements it proposed meting out. From the very beginning of the war, black newspapers, such as the New York–based Anglo African, lobbied for policies that made land confiscation and redistribution the basis for Reconstruction.52 When Congress did pass the Southern Homestead Act in 1866, it allocated only the poorest lands to black settlers and was underfunded and lacking in enforcement. Even so, it was still met with fierce resistance by local
