Brokering Servitude - Andrew Urban Culture, Labor, History

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high costs of transportation to the interior, the industrialization of agriculture, and the railroads’ monopolization of public lands.93 Charlotte Grace O’Brien, the transatlantic Irish reformer and advocate for immigrant protections, wrote in the English periodical Nineteenth Century that although Foster was an “excellent man,” and his desire to help the Irish genuine, his method of assistance was reckless and “a most dangerous experiment, if not a complete mistake.” In response, Foster cited O’Brien’s failure to provide any concrete evidence of abuses. Consistent with his liberal principles, he argued that since the women he supported pleaded for aid and consented to the assistance offered, it was unfair for them to be “denied the opportunity to emigrate in order to better their condition.”94 Still, by 1880 the Irish American community was more established and better equipped to receive immigrants than it had been in the 1850s. Accordingly, members were less reliant on elite intermediaries such as Foster for assistance. Many were no longer willing to support a market-oriented philanthropy that sidestepped the issue of Irish home rule and merely took for granted that young Irish women’s labor was destined to be commodified abroad.95

      During the 1880s, there was also mounting opposition to “pauper” immigration from the American public and elected officials. The United States experienced an economic depression that began in 1873 and lasted until 1880. The downturn would resume in 1882. The pro-immigration mood that had prevailed in the period that immediately followed the Civil War dampened considerably. Raising concerns similar to those that had surfaced during the post-famine period of the early 1850s, Congress accused the British officials of supporting the emigration of paupers from English and Irish workhouses so as to rid themselves of their care. The Select Committee to Investigate Foreign Immigration, convened by Congress in 1888, blamed the Tuke Society—the government-sponsored social welfare organization led by the Quaker businessman and philanthropist James Hack Tuke—for paying for the passage of more than forty-nine hundred immigrants to the United States since 1882. Many of these arrivals, the report claimed, “subsequently became inmates of charitable institutions in this country.”96 On at least two occasions in the 1880s, Foster’s assisted emigration program was investigated by the American consuls in Cork and Liverpool. Although State Department officials concluded that Foster’s vetting methods and reputation for calculated philanthropy meant that he was a low risk when it came to sending indigent migrants, many of his critics were uninterested in acknowledging such distinctions.97

      Foster had also lost influence as broker. By the 1880s, migration was big business and the sale of steamship tickets an occupational pursuit for thousands of agents in Ireland and Britain. Steamship agents besieged Foster and tried to persuade him to steer the migrants he was assisting in their direction, so they would earn the commission. In November 1882, the Northern Police Court in Dublin fined Martin Gallagher fifty pounds after the local Board of Trade discovered that he was selling steamship tickets without a license. One of the violations Gallagher committed was the resale of vouchers that Foster had issued to a group of Irish women at the behest of a parish priest.98 Steamship companies also took a more active role in steering prospective migrants to Foster’s “discounted” rate of passage. After inaugurating steamship service from Liverpool and Queenstown to New York in 1881, the Beaver Line included in its Irish newspaper advertisements a notice that “female domestic servants of good character” could subsidize the cost of their passage by applying to Foster. A frequent recipient of free passes from both American railroads and the transatlantic steamship companies, these corporations adopted Foster as a broker who drummed up business.99

      Finally, Foster could no longer rely on the Catholic Church for support. In July 1883, Catholic bishops in the west of Ireland ordered priests and curates to cease working with Foster altogether. They declared, under pressure from nationalists, that his assisted emigration schemes were a danger to the “faith and morals” of the Irish people.100 On February 24, 1886, with his assisted emigration work at a virtual standstill, Foster again lashed out at political proposals that he believed would unnaturally stifle emigration. This time it was British Prime Minister William Gladstone, who had announced his support for Irish home rule a year earlier. Although Foster had been a supporter of Gladstone’s Liberal Party, he joined many of his peers in defecting to the newly formed Liberal Unionist Party. In his letter to Gladstone, Foster insisted that he was not uniformly against state-backed land reforms. As for home rule, however, Foster expressed absolute opposition to any plan that would separate Ireland from the British Empire, and warned Gladstone that “the Loyalist population of Ulster may be expected to make itself unmistakeably and effectually heard in opposition to any such project.” Home rule’s “realization would be a bloody Civil War between different portions of the Irish people, and between Great Britain and Ireland.” Foster’s letter concluded with a postscript proposing a government office to formally promote assisted emigration—with him in charge. Disingenuously, Foster assured Gladstone that his work in the West and South of Ireland had been pursued “without encountering any opposition whatever.”101

      With the passage of the 1891 Immigration Act, Congress stipulated that “any person whose ticket or passage is paid for with the money of another or who is assisted by others to come” could be prevented from landing. Except in cases where immediate family members provided the funds, assisted immigrants were mandated to appear before immigration officials to determine whether they were likely to become a public charge. Officials were also tasked with evaluating whether the assistance immigrants received had left them in a state of debt bondage or violated the terms of the 1885 Alien Contract Labor Law (the Foran Act).102 With the law’s enforcement, Foster received letters from various steamship companies stating that they would no longer be able to accept his vouchers, since they did not want to risk having to bear the return cost of any immigrants who were rejected.103 In response to a letter that Foster wrote to the State Department, Hermann Stump, the superintendent of immigration, informed him in May 1893 that the law’s requirements could not be waived on behalf of his charitable designs, which brought his work to a halt.104 Foster passed away on December 21, 1900, in the flat he rented in a Belfast lodging house.

      Conclusion

      Foster’s work anticipated many of the dilemmas that the 1864 Act to Encourage Immigration would encounter. Urged on by President Lincoln, the 1864 act empowered employers—primarily in the fields of agriculture, manufacturing, and mining—to enter into contracts with European immigrants. Although Congress provided only minimal funding to back the initiative, it placed the federal government’s imprint on recruitment efforts already taking place in European ports of departure. Contracted for a term not to exceed one year, immigrants were to repay the cost of their passage from future wages earned. Ambiguously, the legislation prohibited indenture, bondage, and slavery as forms of compulsion that employers could use to recover sunk costs—even as they were prompted to extend credit. In 1868, after employers pushed to criminalize immigrants’ breaches of contracts, thereby moving the matter out of civil courts, Congress repealed the act.105 Capital investment in growing the labor supply and the maintenance of free migration and contract liberty, it seemed, were incompatible. In this context, Foster’s work was the exception that proved the rule. Because he did not seek to profit from his brokerage, and assumed costs in the name of philanthropy, he was not motivated to pursue harsh and punitive measures against the migrants whose passages he had funded.

      The assisted migration of recently freed black women and children during and after the Civil War raised many of the same issues that Foster’s work encountered. With the end of slavery, northern household employers became infatuated with opportunities to hire black refugees as servants. Private and government brokers flocked to meet this demand. Despite their newly won liberty to consent to work, in practice black refugees were a commodity whose dependency on relief meant that they might be deployed to wherever labor scarcities—or overly empowered Irish domestics—existed as a problem of household production. Unlike the Irish migrants whom Foster sponsored, black women and children would not be treated as potentially equal participants in national projects of expansion and white social reproduction. Nor would they be extolled for their labor republicanism, even though many displayed an independence that was just as fierce as their Irish counterparts. As the next chapter addresses, black refugees faced far greater constraints when it came to their ability to dictate the conditions under which they labored. Brokers of their labor banked on this very point.

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