empowering blacks as autonomous economic producers and landowners, markets and wage work were the means by which the bureau governed freed persons as economic actors. It is ironic though that Howard, in his December 1865 report to Congress, would propose having the Freedmen’s Bureau’s agents “adopt a system like the ordinary intelligence office” to “procure good places” for freedmen and women unable to find work. As a member of the middle class Howard would have been all too aware of the scorn these institutions generated, and the lack of confidence that they inspired among employers.54 Northern employers blamed intelligence offices for corrupting the principles of a free market rather than assisting in their realization. As historian Brian Luskey observes, intelligence offices “defined wage labor relations in the era of slave emancipation with far greater precision than the hopeful narratives of free labor ideology that have taken precedence in the historical literature.”55 They were problems in practice.
Most of the intelligence offices involved in placing black refugees traced their origins to the missionary-run freedmen’s relief agencies, which shielded them—at least to some degree—from the opprobrium that their commercial counterparts received. To offset anxieties about how long-distance transactions in black labor might replicate the slave trade—which would continue to dog intelligence offices into the twentieth century—missionaries presented their work as free of commercial motives. Oliver St. John, a Dutch Reformed pastor and the corresponding secretary for the New York and Brooklyn Freedmen’s Employment Bureau, wrote to the general superintendent of freedmen’s affairs for the Army’s Department of Virginia and North Carolina in November 1864, claiming that New York and New England could absorb at least ten thousand freedwomen and children in domestic service positions. St. John stipulated that “residence of only a few months in our free states will be of very great service in lifting them up into a higher civilization than they have ever known.” St. John arranged for the transport of fifty freedwomen to Brooklyn in August 1864, and bragged that “not one, so far as we know, have [sic] failed to find a good home through our Agency.” If money could be raised to hire a vessel to depart Norfolk with a “load of 200,” prospective employers could be brought down to the docks to meet the vessel and hire servants on the spot.56
Mission-inspired intelligence offices were not concerned with whether the interests and needs of employers were made legible to the laborers they recruited. In contrast, employers using the New York and Brooklyn Freedmen’s Employment Bureau were treated as consumers who needed to be provided with information about the goods they were obtaining. Employers were required to pay a subscription fee of five dollars, deductible from their servant’s future wages, as a down payment toward lasting employment. Children aged ten to fifteen could be procured without wages, as legal dependents, so long as employers pledged to comply with the New York statute dictating that fostered orphans receive “the advantages of a common school education.” Prospective employers were asked to indicate whether they needed a chambermaid or a cook, in addition to marking off whether they wanted a child or an adult.57 St. John, despite his public enthusiasm about the ability of northern markets to absorb black labor, expressed private concerns about whether large-scale refugee resettlement would result in pauperism in northern cities caused by an oversaturated market. To safeguard against this possibility, his bureau’s program was designed to ensure that only women and children with jobs contracted prior to their departure were sent.58 Unlike commercial intelligence offices, missionary agencies were not willing to provide resources to unemployed laborers, which would have allowed them to test the market.
Other missionary labor brokers concentrated on how to remove black mothers with children from relief while keeping families together. The free market, they discovered, contained few incentives for keeping these families intact. A letter in the February 1865 issue of the Pennsylvania Freedmen’s Bulletin called attention to the reluctance of white employers to provide room and board to refugee children who were too young to work. The author noted that even though most women with children being placed in household service were widows or the common-law wives of black men serving in the Union Army, communicating their respectability did not overcome employers’ reluctance to hire them. Northern missionaries, including the author of the letter, worked to open foster homes where black children could be cared for while their mothers lived out in service.59 By socializing child care, local and federal officials avoided having to pay relief on able-bodied adults. Later, when the bureau was forced to suspend paying for the transportation costs of refugees contracted to domestic jobs in the North, funds continued to be available for the transportation of women with children so as to incentivize their hire.60
The Refugee Community as Labor Supply: Washington, D.C.
During the war and its aftermath, Washington became a crucial node in the movement of black migrant labor and a city defined by its refugee population and relief needs. In 1860, Washington included 3,185 slaves among its population; by 1867, it was home to 38,663 free blacks, two-thirds of whom were newcomers to the city.61 Before it was ordered closed in December 1863 for lack of adequate sanitary conditions, Camp Barker—located adjacent to what is now the intersection of R Street and Vermont Avenue—was the largest refugee camp in the city. Although fifteen thousand people would pass through Camp Barker, most refugees resided there for only a brief period. Even if many refugees were dependent on some form of relief, they preferred, whenever possible, to live independently. For freedmen with families, this was paramount to establishing patriarchal authority over their households. Across the Potomac River in Arlington Heights, Union officials created what would become known as the Freedman’s Village on the estate—now part of Arlington National Cemetery—that had belonged to Robert E. Lee and, before that, the adopted grandson of George Washington. The community was founded as a model village that would demonstrate the progress that black persons were making in their transition to freedom, but its administration raised serious questions about what rights refugees had to mobility and liberty of contract. White officers used a system of passes, for instance, in order to limit the ability of black laborers to travel into the District. In 1864, Union officers heightened restrictions on refugees’ movement after they reported being overwhelmed by complaints from Freedman’s Village residents about the poor working conditions and withheld wages at the jobs they were compelled to take as a condition of receiving housing.62
Figure 2.1. “The New York and Brooklyn Freedmen’s Bureau, Application Blank.” Courtesy of the Collection of Brooklyn, NY, Civil War Relief Associations Records, Ephemera, and Other Material, ARC.245, box 5, folder 7, Brooklyn Historical Society.
After Congress passed a bill creating the Freedmen’s Bureau in March 1865, the agency took over relief efforts in the city and surrounding areas. Charles Henry (C. H.) Howard, Oliver’s brother and the bureau’s assistant commissioner in Washington, ordered that black refugees refusing situations offered to them—whether in the District or elsewhere—would be removed from relief rolls and prohibited from government-run camps.63 This policy prevailed even though a considerable number of local white employers, conditioned to slavery, which was abolished in Washington in 1862 with the Compensated Emancipation Act, refused to pay the black laborers they hired. Officials at Camp Barker reported that civilians regularly used its employment agency to hire black women as domestics, then denied them wages on the grounds that they had been paid in room and board.64 Although the bureau did establish primary education for blacks in the District, and opened seven industrial sewing schools, programs designed to enhance the long-term prospects of the city’s black population often took a backseat to more immediate concerns of shrinking relief expenditures.65
The policies directed at refugees bore resemblance to the treatment of Irish women in the 1850s. Both black and Irish women were faulted for displaying agency that went against what third parties had determined constituted their greatest good, when they chose to remain in Washington or New York, respectively. In June 1865, Assistant Commissioner John Eaton ordered bureau agents in Washington to scout for work opportunities that might allow for refugees’ removal from “abodes of filth,” “idleness,” and the “social peril” that makeshift and overcrowded dwellings cultivated.66 Although
