Surplus Irish Labor, White Settler Capital
Foster’s involvement as a broker of assisted emigration originated in the ideological conflicts over population management that dominated post-famine Ireland. Foster believed that it was imperative for Irish tenants and their families to maximize possible returns on the sole commodity they possessed: their laboring power. Bluntly, he encouraged young men and women in rural Ireland to abandon any hope that there were sufficient natural resources or hiring opportunities—at least for the foreseeable future—that would allow them to remain on their island of birth. Foster characterized assisted emigration as the “most speedy and effectual present means” of aiding Ireland.28 Like many British liberals, he blamed the famine on the failure of the British government to adopt reforms in the decades leading up to 1845. Throughout his career he would support legislation that promoted the sale of encumbered estates to landowners who were intent on introducing better practices. He also backed measures designed to facilitate landlords’ voluntary sale of land as freeholds to successful tenants, which he argued incentivized prudent management.29 On the other hand, Foster drew a hard line against compulsory estate sales. When the Land War racked Ireland during the 1880s, this was a position that squarely aligned him with members of the Anglo-Irish gentry who argued that private property—even though the land in question was obtained in the seventeenth century through colonization and conquest—was sacrosanct.
As a member of the local gentry, Foster was obsessed with his standing among the Irish Catholic tenant farmers who lived on his family’s estate and on nearby lands. To this end, he worked to soothe the many anxieties that these communities had about inserting young women into the global market economy of the mid-nineteenth century. Emigration disrupted the protected status of gendered dependents. Racial and linguistic affinities that connected English-speaking migrants to each other at a familial level, Foster argued, could help offset the impact of these dislocations. Anglophone settler societies, regardless of their specific sovereign status, offered a field of opportunity for white migrants from all classes and were therefore essential spaces for perpetuating a form of democratic capitalism that might allay the internecine class and ethnic conflict that threatened social relations between whites in Ireland, Britain, and the cities of the Atlantic Seaboard.30 In this respect, Foster’s work is emblematic of the complex relationship that Ireland and the Irish people had to the British Empire.31 Foster believed that the nineteenth-century “Settler Revolution,” to use the historian James Belich’s term for the explosive movement of capital, population, and cultural institutions from the British Isles and Ireland to settlements in lands seized by white, English-speaking populations, could be instrumentalized as a policy that included Irish men and women.32
Along with critiquing British state policies concerning assisted family emigration, Foster also lobbied government officials to be more proactive when it came to protecting emigrants’ rights as transatlantic passengers. He pressured British parliamentary officials to protect Irish emigrants as full-fledged members of the Union with rights that transatlantic passenger ship companies were legally compelled to acknowledge. In 1850, for instance, Foster lobbied the British Colonial Land and Emigration Office to better enforce parliamentary measures that required captains to distribute a set amount of rations to passengers.33 This was borne out of his personal experience as a passenger on the Liverpool-based sailing ship Washington. Foster observed that the already perilous five-week voyage was made even more brutal by the fact that the captain withheld the allotted provisions and medical services that he was legally mandated to provide. The Washington’s crew treated Irish steerage passengers with disdain and amused themselves by “drenching them from head to foot” when they used the vessel’s water closets.34 Upon the ship’s arrival in New York, its passengers were discharged without supervision and left to navigate the “various fleecing houses, to be partially or entirely disabled for pursuing their travels into the interior in search of employment.”35 Foster’s anger at the inhumane treatment that the ship’s Irish passengers received was sincere, but he was also aware that Americans were more likely to embrace immigrants if the British imperial government affirmed their right to humane treatment. Technological change would end up having the biggest impact in ensuring Irish immigrants’ healthy arrival. By the end of the 1850s, steamships had all but replaced sail-powered vessels, and cut the length of the journey to just ten days.
Foster’s work shared many similarities with programs that targeted Irish and British women in workhouses for resettlement as servants in Australia and Canada. It was dogmatic for British imperialists to cast these migrations as bolstering settler colonies’ labor supply, and their ability to grow their populations through reproduction.36 To Foster, whether an emigrant was destined for Australia, Canada, or the United States, or came from Ireland, England, or Scotland, mattered only in respect to how these factors determined the bottom line when it came to the cost of moving a person—at least in theory. Assisted emigration to North America represented a more productive intervention because six emigrants could be sent across the Atlantic for every one emigrant financed to go to Australia. According to Foster, the United States held an advantage over Canada because the voyage was quicker, wages were higher, more public lands were available for sale at a cheaper price, and the federal 1847 Passengers Act better ensured that vessels arriving in American ports met a minimum standard of accommodations and sanitation.37
A free labor advocate, Foster promoted wage work as the transitional means by which Irish tenants could secure self-sufficiency and eventually put themselves in a position to become landowning capitalists in their own right. Wage labor tested individuals’ fitness for self-governance and, when scaled to a group or people as a whole, fitness for national or collective self-rule. This philosophy informed both the position of liberal imperialists in Britain and, after the American Civil War, that of federal officials working with freemen and women.38 Foster premised that the Irish population’s fitness for liberal citizenship could not be gauged at home, since overpopulation and poor land were barriers that even the most industrious individuals could not surmount. The Irish demonstrated fitness for self-governance when they relinquished their attachment to Ireland and instead embraced opportunities to maximize the return on the sale of their labor power abroad. Foster forcefully condemned Irish tenant farmers whom he claimed ignorantly prohibited their daughters from seeking wage work abroad. In an 1857 letter to his local Irish newspaper, Foster promised that “the ensuing scarcity of labor” resulting from emigration would result in an “increase in wages and comfort,” and “produce America in Ireland.”39
America was less a distinct cultural and political realm than it was a set of advantageous market relations. Foster believed that access to “new” settlements was a vehicle that would allow immigrant wage laborers to compete equally in the primitive accumulation of capital—through land and property ownership—without the prohibitive economic, legal, or social barriers that doomed such endeavors within Ireland.40 Following the passage of the Irish Poor Law Act of 1838, entry into workhouses became a mandatory condition for indigent populations seeking relief.41 To Foster, this merely created an artificial and poorly run market for Irish labor that was reliant on the taxation of landlords rather than actual demand. It was harrowing to hear, he proclaimed in an 1851 circular, that more than 1,650 Irish men and women were alleged to have died from “neglect and starvation” while toiling in the workhouses of Ennistymon and Kilrush, County Clare, when a whole continent awaited their labors.42 Even though economic conditions in Ireland improved from 1852 onward, Foster remained a vocal critic of the workhouse system’s inefficiencies—a sentiment that many inmates of these institutions, who desired to emigrate, shared.43
Unlike many of his peers, Foster did not think that there was an innate backwardness and racial primitiveness to Irish Catholics.44 In the United