Brokering Servitude - Andrew Urban Culture, Labor, History

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secured their own differentiated status by having contraband servants complete tasks that enlisted men were required to do on their own. They also created impromptu brokerage networks to fulfill their civilian families’ domestic labor needs. Enoch Adams, who hailed from a prominent New Hampshire family, invited his wife Sarah to visit him at Point Lookout, Maryland, where he oversaw the prisoner-of-war camp there, and promised she could hire a “black girl” to take home. Adams also wrote to his mother inquiring if she had any interest in laborers he described as “my contrabands,” whom he pledged to deliver when granted leave. Union officers seemed to have little patience or tolerance for black servants who pursued independent goals. Cecere describes one officer who became enraged when he learned that his contraband servant had left without permission to search for his mother who had been separated from him during slavery.35

      Boycotts and Job Competition

      The start of the Civil War had a varied impact on how Irish immigrants were viewed as a resource. On one hand, white immigrant labor gave the Union a distinct advantage over the Confederacy in respect to manpower, and the wartime recruitment of immigrants flourished in many European ports of departure even before the 1864 Act to Encourage Immigration was passed into law.36 On the other hand, there was backlash against Irish immigrants accused of being disloyal to the Union cause and overly supportive of antiwar Democrats.

      Campaigns denouncing the employment of Irish servants peaked in the aftermath of the July 1863 Draft Riots in New York City. It became popular for Anglo-American household employers, especially those who identified as staunchly Republican, to declare that they were boycotting Irish domestic labor altogether. A persistent rumor alleged that Irish domestics were involved in a citywide arson plot against the homes and families of those who had supported the Union conscription policy that had set off the disturbances. The Tribune published an editorial shortly after the riots, leaking a note that one of Democratic Governor Horatio Seymour’s assistants had—allegedly—forwarded to the White House. In this note, Seymour was depicted as asking President Lincoln to end conscription due to the “gravest apprehension that the Irish servant-girls will, in case the draft is enforced, turn incendiaries in a body, and burn down their masters’ homes.” The paper chided Seymour for exaggerating the threat of civil disorder, which played into his calls to end the draft, while simultaneously mocking him for being a coward in the face of this feminine menace. Whether the missive was real or not, the Freeman’s Journal, the leading Irish nationalist newspaper, felt obliged to issue a response denouncing the accusations.37

      Northerners’ elevated antipathy toward Irish servants remained palpable for some time after the riots. A representative of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society’s employment office wrote to the Union superintendent at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, in September 1863, for instance, to request that refugee women and children be sent to Philadelphia, where demand for black servants had been stoked by the events of the previous summer.38 After the war’s end, the Freedmen’s Bureau would continue to receive correspondence from northern employers urging the agency to redouble efforts to deliver black women and children as domestics, since, as one writer noted, a “general disgust with Irish help” prevailed. A white woman from East Bloomfield, New York, petitioned the bureau for a job as a broker of black domestic labor by explaining how she would use the position as “the means of getting in a class of laboring people who are not Irish.” In Worcester, Massachusetts, an intelligence office promoted its ability to procure black servants by highlighting how this meant that middle-class 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

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