Brokering Servitude - Andrew Urban Culture, Labor, History

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lingered into the twentieth century.) Observations of black laborers’ work habits were transmitted from the Union front lines in the South back to northern households. Domestic labor’s status as women’s work, to be performed within the confines of homes, was upended by the exigent needs that the war created. When white officers and soldiers enlisted freed black workers, labor that had been gendered—such as cooking and cleaning—became racialized instead.9 Although refugee women and their children command the bulk of attention in this chapter, the funneling of black men into positions of service work had a lasting impact on white Americans’ perception of what a postwar racial division of labor might look like. Whether as porters, hotel workers, or waiters, black men—like Chinese immigrant men—were relegated to jobs in the growing service sector of the late nineteenth century, and denied employment opportunities in areas of the economy that would link industrial labor with manhood and citizenship. Union officials and their successors in the Freedmen’s Bureau were concerned with refugee women, and especially single women with children, as subjects who they feared were most likely to fall into a state of permanent dependency.

      An aim of this chapter is to refocus attention on American refugee policies and emphasize how government-run camps—whether created adjacent to the occupying armies of the Union or away from the front lines in Washington, D.C.—became sites of labor recruitment. In relation to the longer arc of federal policies governing displaced persons, internally or abroad, the Civil War–era plight of freed persons demonstrates that refugee sponsorship, while often cast as a humanitarian impulse, usually involved exploitative instincts as well.10 To be critical and perhaps even cynical about it, refugee sponsorship has always been a form of labor brokerage, and where refugees have not been accepted for asylum, it is typically because demand has not been marshalled to justify the action.11 White employers and brokers scavenged contraband and refugee camps for black bodies to enlist into wage servitude. Camps, in this regard, were places where emancipated slaves—resurrected from the social death of slavery—became sovereign economic subjects in a carefully orchestrated and limited fashion.12 The Freedmen’s Bureau was granted unique and unprecedented powers to regulate economic, political, and social behavior. From its commissioner, Oliver Otis Howard, on down, the bureau tended to employ self-styled Christian soldiers who viewed their work as a missionary intervention.13 Black refugees, like Catholic “soupers” in Ireland and “rice-Christians” in China, performed a version of want that responded to their very real material needs. In the context of American racial politics, refugees’ reliance on relief, and what white missionaries demanded of them as part of this exchange, helped produce a safe and unthreatening black subjectivity.

      Acknowledging the myriad obstacles the bureau faced as an administrative body under attack does not change the legacies of its particular approach. White northern officials required that displaced black persons accept their transformation from chattel to transportable “free” labor as a condition of their need. Anxieties about the mass migration of blacks conducted under more voluntary conditions fueled antipathy and opposition from northern whites who believed that blacks were incapable of being integrated as both laborers and citizens, except at the peripheries of economic and social life.14 Even though assisted migrations were met with white resistance as well, the contractual conditions that such programs imposed were understood as important checks on wanton black freedoms.

      Servitude and Autonomy in the Antebellum Era

      Prior to the Civil War, free blacks in the North struggled to balance their economic reliance on service work, as a source of wages, with the stigma that marked this labor. In New York, slavery was not completely abolished until 1827. By 1840, Manhattan’s black community had grown to sixteen thousand people and accounted for roughly 5 percent of the city’s total population. During the 1850s, the influx of Irish immigrants reduced the number of blacks employed as household servants to only 3 percent of the occupation’s total workforce, even if the number of black men working as body servants remained proportionately higher—a reflection on the discrimination they faced in trades dominated by white laborers. Wages for black domestics declined as a result of the expansion of the labor supply. Black servants faced additional economic injury due to the fact that certain white employers seized upon Irish immigration to hire white servants exclusively.15

      Even before European immigration spiked in the late 1840s, middle-class employers worried about their capacity to control how wage servants were hired, and to dictate how workers approached contractual obligations and loyalty to their employers. In 1826, New York elites led by Arthur Tappan, the abolitionist, chartered the Society for the Encouragement of Faithful Domestic Servants. Despite petering out of existence in 1830, the society’s philosophy would be widely replicated in decades to follow. The New York Society was modeled after an organization by the same name in London, which had been active there since the eighteenth century. The New York Society offered bonuses (and free Bibles) to servants who stayed with a single household for longer than a year. As an employment agency, it promised employers that it would place only reputable, trustworthy women. While an estimated 60 percent of the women who used the service identified as Irish immigrants, the society also recruited black labor. Black workers used its services to obtain character references and win coveted placements in more affluent homes.16 Even when organizations like the New York Society were not attempting to exercise direct influence over black servants’ market and work behavior, as historian Kathleen Brown has argued, black domestics, cooks, and butlers in white northern households often practiced an extreme form of self-discipline and held themselves to trying standards of industry, hygiene, and loyalty. They understood that their value as workers would always be qualified in racial terms that made deference and comportment key measures of their worth above and beyond the caliber of their labor.17

      Wage servitude haunted black families in ways that single Irish women, acting as transnational breadwinners, did not have to contend with. Historian Leslie Harris has shown how delegates at the Colored National Convention that took place in Cleveland in 1848 vociferously debated a resolution, which they ultimately passed, denouncing live-in domestic service as “a badge of degradation” to blacks. This position was vehemently espoused by black men who aspired to a form of republican citizenship and manhood that was defined by the ability of their wives and daughters to avoid having to work for wages.18 Martin Robinson Delany, the intellectual and black separatist who by the 1850s would emerge as a fervent proponent of black emigration from the United States, played a key role at the Cleveland Convention advancing this position. In 1844, Delany was already articulating the difference between those who hired out as servants as a matter of “necessity,” which he felt was the plight of black women with no choice but to pursue this work, and the white women who entered service because they had squandered racial privilege and opportunity.19 Even though Delany’s wife, Catherine Richards, was the interracial daughter of an Irish immigrant and black butcher, he did not parse where in-between Irish immigrants, who in cultural terms were not yet understood to be fully white, fit into this picture. He seemed to insinuate that white women’s failure to marry landowners and tradesmen who could provide for them was a fault rather than a strategic choice. In his 1852 publication, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Delany more forcefully stipulated that when it came to free blacks, “We cannot at the same time, be domestic and lady; servant and gentleman. We must be the one or the other.”20

      Delany believed that prohibitions against black landownership, education, and commercial pursuits meant that free blacks would never find a community in the United States where their enlistment as servants would be temporary rather than permanent.21 Instead he promoted black colonization of “uninhabited” lands in South America or Africa.22 Not only did new opportunities for acquiring unclaimed (or conquerable) lands have to be forged, but labor markets, and the existing social relations of production that demarcated racial subject positions in the United States, had to be remade as well. Delany was but one voice in this particular debate. Although Harriet Beecher Stowe, upon the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was criticized within the abolitionist community for imagining Liberia as the best solution to the problem of an emancipated, surplus black population, it is important to note that peers like Delany had similar reservations about whether racial divisions of labor—beyond slavery—could ever be overcome.23

      Wartime Patriotism, Contrabands, and Private Importation

      With

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