Brokering Servitude. Andrew Urban

conversions. In a letter to the New York Tribune, Farnham, like Foster, touted white mutuality. She included testimonies from farmers in Elkhart County, Indiana, where Foster had drummed up interest in the society’s efforts, to illustrate the warm embrace that awaited migrant women. Farnham’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, the testimonies she offered contained mixed messages. One writer noted that because male hired hands were so scarce, he and others planned on training the migrant women in “Western work,” which apparently meant performing outdoor labor alongside household duties. Another writer depicted a bunch of bachelor farmers stalking the Elkhart railroad station, hoping that each arriving train might bear the cargo that Farnham and Foster had pledged.68

      In addition to placing migrants selected by the society, Foster—working independently—also identified situations for women with children. Foster posted circulars in Chicago and other western cities soliciting employers who might receive one hundred women with children under the age of two for household service. He advertised that all of the candidates for situations had shown him marriage certificates that proved that they had been either abandoned by laggard husbands or widowed. None, he claimed, had given birth out of wedlock.69 During the 1850s, the children of indigent women were often the subjects of placing out schemes, but rarely with their mothers. It is unknown whether this particular initiative met with any success, and Foster’s foray into this work raises more questions than it answers. One wonders, for instance, whether any of the applicants for resettlement tricked Foster as to their marital status and whether their choice to accept his offer of assistance was made freely or came only after they were pressured by New York workhouses and orphanages—as was often the case—to migrate.

      Always conscious of growing Irish nationalist resistance to assisted emigration, Foster never passed up the opportunity to broadcast the significance of his work. Whereas an Irish servant like Mary Harlon assessed domestic work in terms of material benefits and how she was treated, Foster was more willing to impart abstract social meanings to the meeting of American capital and Irish labor. Shortly after President Lincoln’s assassination, Foster recalled meeting the future president and his wife Mary Todd while in Springfield, Illinois, during the winter of 1857, and recounted to Irish readers how the couple made a “promise to treat any girl we direct to them as one of the family, and to give her a home certain for a month, so as to give her time to settle in a place.”70 That the future martyr to the cause of free labor would embrace the Irish on such generous and egalitarian terms was freighted with symbolism. It was also perhaps fanciful. In other contexts, Mary Todd Lincoln voiced resentment at Irish domestics. She wrote to her half sister Emilie after the 1856 election that “if some of you Kentuckians, had to deal with the ‘wild Irish,’ as we housekeepers are sometimes called upon to do, the south would certainly elect Mr. Fillmore”—the nativist Know-Nothing candidate.71 The placement of migrants in Illinois generated more serious incidents as well. The rape of a sixteen-year-old migrant girl that Foster had helped to place with a male employer provoked outrage and anger in newspapers throughout the state, and led to accusations that he was not properly screening the households to which servants were destined.72 Again, the critique was not that Foster had used too heavy a hand in controlling migrant women as dependents; it was that he had been too lax in overseeing the contract of their labor.

      Whiteness, Nationalism, and Irish Servitude

      In trying to channel the migratory course of Irish women away from the cities of the Eastern Seaboard, Foster was a small obstruction in a much larger stream. Between 1851 and 1921, 1.2 million Irish girls and women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four arrived in the United States.73 By 1855, Irish immigrants accounted for 74 percent of the approximately 31,000 female domestics working in New York City, at a time when slightly more than one-quarter of all households in the city employed paid servants.74 Even though significant Irish communities formed in urban areas and towns in states like Minnesota and Wisconsin, and Chicago developed as an important hub for the Irish diaspora, in 1870 the Irish-born population remained concentrated in eastern states, with Massachusetts and New York leading the way. In 1900, 54 percent of all Irish immigrant women wage earners continued to be employed in domestic service, even as their waning significance to the occupation was being proclaimed.75 Female Irish servants composed a distinct class in the cultural imagination of urban Americans and the national media. Their representation as laborers was an important touchstone in midcentury debates concerning the racial division of labor, wage slavery, the rights of free laborers, and the legitimacy of British colonial rule in Ireland. As much as Foster tried to redefine the terms of Irish women’s incorporation, he could not escape these contexts. Irish servants—captured in the stereotype of “Biddy”—were caricatured as colonial threats to the sovereign domestic rule of their Anglo-American mistresses. These depictions of conflict circulated in sharp contrast to the revered republican mutuality that Foster and others claimed characterized American households. Yet they also gave Irish domestics an independent political identity that reaffirmed their status as free (and white) laborers.

      During the 1850s, fierce condemnations of “wage slavery” provided proslavery commentators with a basis to compare the treatment of Irish servants to that of black slaves, and to argue that low pay made young Irish women more disposable than laborers owned as property. Racial slavery, they argued, was a more “natural” way of organizing the social relations of production that reflected innate and permanent differences in status. These same critics in turn highlighted the “unnatural” role that for-profit brokers played when they abetted commerce in white women’s wage labor. While living in New York, William Bobo, a white South Carolinian, expressed shock at what he considered to be the degraded manner in which Irish women were forced to sell their labor power. Encountering “fifty or sixty” Irish girls waiting in the tenement basement of an intelligence office on Nassau Street, Bobo commented that the room’s sanitary conditions and crowdedness were far worse than what could be found in Richmond’s slave markets. Because “Yankees are generally very rigid in requiring their papers,” Bobo added, it was not uncommon for employers to strategically withhold character references in order to keep favored Irish servants captive. Intelligence offices had such a bad reputation that even northerners opposed to slavery compared them to slave markets. In doing so, they ignored very real differences in how the labor of poor but free Irish immigrant women was marketed relative to involuntary transactions where enslaved persons were sold as chattel. In 1856, for instance, Frederick Law Olmsted described the facilities of the slave dealers he observed in Washington, D.C., as “much like Intelligence Offices, being large rooms partly occupied by ranges of forms.”76 Bobo concluded that the Irish would not achieve real citizenship until they went “where the country is in its maiden purity, among the forests of the far West.” There Irish women could “rear a home and a family, build up a character and a reputation that their children will be proud of, and not skulk about the palaces of the wealthy.”77 Bobo unwittingly called attention to how the social construction of whiteness in the mid-nineteenth-century United States had both occupational and geographic dimensions.

      The racialization of servitude was by no means an issue exclusive to the United States. The term “servantgalism,” which American newspapers and magazines embraced, was first coined as the title of a cartoon series that John Leech drew for the English humor magazine Punch in 1853, during the height of the “wage slavery” debates. The ideology of “servant gals,” “servantgalism” referenced a fictitious movement of domestic laborers who conspired to win greater sovereignty over their jobs, and to elevate their social position. In one cartoon, the joke hinges on the quip of an English nursemaid to a cook that they should refuse to work “like Negroes”—an exchange that takes place as the two read and crochet before a fire.

      Figure 1.4. “Servantgalism—No. II,” Punch, 1853. Courtesy of Rutgers University Libraries.

      Although Leech’s cartoon appealed to employers who felt that white workers overstated their exploitation in comparison to workers who were actually enslaved, it also illustrates how servants disagreed with the notion that wages alone could make work dignified. In both London and New York, employers accused white servants of using race to justify laziness and bad work habits.78

      Irish immigrant servants featured prominently in celebrations of white workers’