Brokering Servitude. Andrew Urban

with the Carrigan family came to an abrupt end. To Foster, Harlon vented anger at having spent seventeen months working for the Carrigans only to be let go with one day’s notice. She was upset that the Carrigans had provided no explanation as to why she was dismissed, since her service—to the best of her knowledge—had been exemplary. Her disappointment notwithstanding, Harlon had managed to put away eighty dollars in savings and found new employment, with the Taylor family, almost immediately.

      In defiance of the thrift that Foster preached, Harlon communicated her plans to purchase a new silk dress.6 This act of personal indulgence was perhaps intended to numb the sting of her sudden dismissal. It can also be read as an assertion of her continued autonomy. Clothing was a frequent flash point in conflicts between Irish servants and their Anglo-American employers. In the 1850s, middle-class employers were already complaining that Irish servants wasted their wages on unneeded and unbecoming consumer luxuries. When dressed in fine clothes, an Irish servant challenged the visible markers of class difference that separated capital from labor, and immigrants from the native-born. An 1863 cartoon in Harper’s Weekly gave visual form to employers’ anxieties, and the ways in which fashion and Irish servants’ liberty of contract had become conflated. In the image, “Bridget O’Flaherty” wears a dress with a large bustle and sports an ornamental umbrella while she awaits hire in an intelligence office. The office’s proprietor, Mrs. Blackstone, presents to O’Flaherty a “Mr. Jones,” who is looking for a cook and assures his prospective domestic that he has a “fair character” and is “steady.” Harper’s readers would have appreciated the irony. It is Jones getting scrutinized rather than the other way around.7

      Figure 1.1. “The Present Intelligence Offices,” Harper’s Weekly, 1863.

      The Catholic Church and middle-class employers were in agreement that Irish servants had no business concerning themselves with personal appearance, albeit for different reasons. Sister Mary Frances Cusack lectured in Advice to Irish Girls in America that the servant who bought “fine clothes, which are not suitable to her station in life,” put “herself in danger both in this world and the next.” Cusack was undoubtedly also worried that individual purchases would cut into the amount of remittances that Irish women were able to send back to Ireland. In this vein as well, Irish Catholic commentators sometimes dissuaded single women from marrying, since marital obligations—and the need to keep their own homes—hindered their ability to earn wages.8

      There is an insular quality to Harlon’s correspondence that gestures to ways in which immediate material concerns dominated the perspective of the immigrant wage worker. Written during the Civil War, her letters contain only passing mentions of the conflict. The New York City Draft Riots, which led some Anglo-American employers to allege that their Irish servants were plotting to loot their workplaces, merit no attention at all. The only biographical details Harlon provides in her letters are references to two brothers still in Ireland, and a one-line lament about the “loss” of her parents.9 Harlon frequently prayed for Foster in order to express her “gratitude” for his “kindness,” and concluded her letters with the valediction “your friend and servant.” Deference coexists with an intimate and open tone in which Harlon appears almost indifferent to the chasm of social class between the two. Foster responded to the correspondence he received from Harlon—although the copies of his letters are unavailable—and she mentions in one of her letters that he called on her in person when he visited New York in 1864.10

      Much more is known about Foster, unsurprisingly. Born in 1819 in Copenhagen, Vere spent his youth in Turin, before enrolling at Eton and then Oxford. His father, Augustus John Foster, was a career diplomat who served as minister plenipotentiary (the equivalent of ambassador) to the United States before vacating his position at the start of the War of 1812. Vere, if he set foot on Irish soil at all before 1847, left no record of having visited. Both he and his eldest brother, Frederick, pursued careers in diplomacy following their father, while the middle of the three brothers, Cavendish, became an Anglican minister. When Augustus committed suicide in 1848, Frederick took charge of Glyde Court. After touring famine-ravished southern and western Ireland in the autumn of 1849, Vere enrolled at the Glasnevin Model Farm School outside of Dublin, to study how to better manage his family’s lands and tenants through modern farming techniques. He anticipated serving as his brother’s estate agent.11 While still enrolled at the Glasnevin School, Vere used a portion of his personal allowance to fund the passage of forty emigrants from County Louth, whose “character and industrious habits” he had vetted through interviews with police and clergy, a method that he would adopt as standard.12 For reasons unknown, in 1850 he decided to abandon his plans to serve as estate agent in favor of pursuing assisted migration as a form of philanthropic social work, and, for the next decade, his primary vocation.

      Foster was enamored of areas of the United States that existed beyond the Appalachian Mountains but east of the Mississippi River. In his opinion, these were the destinations where Irish migrants could best prosper. To Foster, the ideal course for an Irish woman he sponsored had her leave Castle Garden without delay for states such as Illinois and Wisconsin. Harlon disregarded this advice, although she did not reject job mobility outright. When she wrote to Foster in June 1864, she informed him that she was contemplating a move to California. Cheekily, she explained that she had decided not to go because he had once told her that the state was too distant for him to visit. A month later, Harlon again raised the possibility of relocating to California. She was no doubt tempted by the high wages for servants on the Pacific Coast, which averaged between twenty and twenty-five dollars per month compared to the ten dollars she could earn in New York City.13 Still, the journey to San Francisco took a month or more and in 1864 could be accomplished only by boat and then railroad across the Isthmus of Panama. The trip was expensive and fraught with health risks, and ended in an unfamiliar place. Nor was there any guarantee that work would be as readily available and well-compensated as she had heard.

      Irish wage laborers were understandably daunted by the upfront capital investment that secondary migrations required, and individuals like Foster, similar to commercial brokers, staked their authority on being able to intervene and help overcome this obstacle. Visiting California in 1867, Charles Loring Brace, the founder of the Children’s Aid Society, estimated that female domestics in San Francisco made on average three times more than the monthly wages paid to their counterparts in eastern cities and that ambitious women could enter into contracts where employers paid the cost of their passage to San Francisco.14 In 1869, the Dublin-based Freeman’s Journal published an advertisement from an unnamed San Francisco company that offered to pay Irish women a hundred fifty dollars in gold for a year’s work and to cover the expensive, lengthy journey. Receipt of the full sum was contingent, however, on the contracted servants’ remaining at their jobs for a year.15 As these offers indicate, Foster competed against other brokers who had commercial incentives to try to recruit white servants to areas where labor shortages existed. In New York, Harlon had the ability to earn steady wages while healthy. Not having to pay for rent or board, she kept her expenses minimal. She gave no indication that she supported her brothers with remittances. The city abounded with job opportunities for experienced servants like Harlon. In her June 1864 letter, Harlon inquired as to whether Foster had “herd of a place to sute me better.”16 She continued to view Foster as an intermediary who might be called on to assist her, albeit through references rather than immediate material support.

      When the Taylors refused Harlon’s request for a raise in August 1864, she responded to a newspaper advertisement seeking a servant willing to accompany a woman to Key West, Florida, and to work there at a salary of twelve dollars a month. Whether wanderlust or higher wages enticed Harlon to go “out South,” as she put it, this was a speculative move on her part. In Key West, Harlon was employed by Walter McFarland and his family at Fort Zachary Taylor, a base in the Union’s naval blockade. In a letter to Foster dated December 20, 1864, Harlon described falling seriously ill upon her arrival in Key West—malaria had long plagued the base—which had forced her to spend a long period convalescing. Whether or not she received pay while recovering was not stated; if she was not working, wages were not guaranteed. At the McFarlands’ house, Harlon’s only companion was a hired black freeman who did occasional work around the home. She lent him books and