When Foster did turn his attention to the cultural and behavioral stereotypes that surrounded Irish immigrants in the United States, it was mainly out of concern for laborers’ marketability. To Foster, the Irish existed on the threshold of liberal modernity; they were, as he told the American Emigrants’ Friend Society in 1851, “the poorest and most uneducated portion of what is termed the civilized population of the world.”48 During his first visit to the United States, he wrote to the Irish Farmer’s Gazette to express his disappointment at having learned that Irish immigrants—“and even many of the girls”—had a reputation for being “drunken, riotous, and quarrelsome.” This led American employers to prefer German immigrant labor when available. Rather than grapple with the stereotype, Foster instead argued that Irish immigrants were obligated to silence detractors by proving their industry and commitment to self-improvement. Respectability politics, this suggests, saturated the self-policing discourse of all groups where laborers’ cultural backgrounds, whether defined in religious, racial, or ethnic terms, conflated marketability and social inclusion.49 Foster himself subscribed to Father Theobald Mathew’s stance on complete abstinence from alcohol, which he informed his readers gave him license to “preach to others to do so” as well.50
Foster denounced slavery and acts of racial discrimination and hatred carried out by individuals. The emigrants he sponsored, for instance, were required to sign a pledge that stated they would “love liberty and fair play for others as well as yourself, without distinction of race, religion or colour.”51 Foster had no problem accepting on a structural level, however, that Irish and British immigrants deserved to be, along with native-born white Americans, the beneficiaries of the federal policies that transferred land and natural resources to white settlers as private property. In an August 1851 letter to the Irish Farmer’s Gazette, Foster compared the gaunt and poorly clothed Mdewakanton and Wahpekute Dakota women he observed at the signing of the Treaty of Mendota in Minnesota Territory to the “dishevelled Irishwomen” of Connemara, where two years earlier he had toured the devastation caused by the famine.52 Whereas the Dakota women faced a precarious future due to dispossession, markets for the labor of Irish immigrant servants and their ability to win social inclusion as whites—despite a comparable expulsion from native lands—ensured them a more secure future. In his advice guide Work and Wages, which was distributed for free to more than a quarter million readers in Ireland and Great Britain in the 1850s (and to many thousands more who paid a penny in postage), Foster praised Minnesota’s “judicious mixture of timber and pasture” as ideal for homesteading. Treaty lands that had belonged to the Dakota could be bought from the federal government at a standard rate of $1.25 per acre.53 Foster’s schemes were developed in concert with other state-backed settler colonial projects, such as the construction of railroads linking interior regions to markets. A farmer in Drury Creek, Illinois, for instance, wrote to Foster in October 1852 to dissuade him from sending Irish women to the region. A railroad connection would not arrive in nearby Carbondale until 1854. The farmer explained to Foster that when he was able to hire hands at all, it was only on a seasonal basis and the workers were compensated with cattle and surplus produce. These items were of little use to female migrants hoping to send remittances back to Ireland.54 Irish servants’ contributions to the project of long-term white settlement in the region would have to wait.
Railroads were crucial elements in how Foster designed for the efficient movement and placement of laborers. The networks that allowed agricultural producers in the interior to move commodities to eastern markets and distribution points also permitted these areas to import labor as a consumer good.55 Janesville, Wisconsin, is a representative example of the type of settlement that Foster sought out. Founded in 1835 from treaty lands ceded by Sauk and Fox Indians after their defeat in the Black Hawk War three years earlier, the white settlement of Janesville was less than two decades old when thirty-nine migrants that Foster had sponsored disembarked there in 1857. The arrival of the railroad in 1850 not only contributed to Janesville’s preeminence as a regional city, but also brought hundreds of male Irish laborers who laid the tracks. The Catholic infrastructure that Foster would later rely on in placing domestic laborers followed.56 By 1860, the Janesville census would list 160 Irish-born women as live-in servants working in Anglo-American households.57
Disciplining Free Women: Marriage and Labor
As historian Jeanne Boydston notes, brokers like Foster had to contend with fundamental suspicions concerning the marketing of women’s wage labor, and the widespread belief that “femaleness was inappropriate to the public realm of commerce and trade and could exist there only as a personal degradation (seduction) and a public danger (prostitution), both of these being monstrous abnormalities.”58 Foster promised to protect Irish women from exploitation, and vouch for their reputations as prospective servants, so long as they accepted his advice to continue westward in their migrations. Foster resorted to the language of boosterism, even though he did not have a direct commercial stake in placing migrants. In Work and Wages he boasted that it was “customary” for American families in western states and territories to treat Irish servants as “daughters, sitting at the same table, dressing as well or better.” Servants, Foster proclaimed, were likely to get married sooner than the daughters of their employers. He offered the story of one western homeowner who had lost nineteen of the twenty-three servants he had employed over the course of the previous eight years to marriage.59 Foster appeared to relish the fact that assisted migration work made him both a labor and marriage broker. In 1864, during his first visit to North America in six years, he traveled to St. Joseph, Michigan, to see “two of my girls married,” as he put it, and to sample the region’s flour, which his friend Greeley had dubbed the best in the country. The same trip also brought him to London, Ontario, where his hostess reported that he had inquired and was pleased to learn that the “Irish servant girls” he had brought there were “married and doing well.”60
These accounts, with their untroubled depictions of Irish women achieving equality, situated domestic wage labor on a progressive continuum toward motherhood and gendered republican citizenship. They invoked the popular and familiar republican trope of “help,” and beckoned to a romanticized vision of peaceful social relations between labor and capital, where hired hands and mistresses worked side by side with no distinction in status. At a time when this very concept was under assault, with Anglo-American employers lamenting the disappearance of native-born women willing to enter into domestic service, Foster insisted that Irish immigrants could revive such arrangements in Western locales uncorrupted by hardened class and ethnic distinctions. Visually, Work and Wages included a “before and after” tableau that captured the domestic and economic transformation that migration allegedly portended to Irish (and British) paupers. At the beginning of the guide, a shoeless Irish emigrant wearing only rags is depicted departing his thatched-roof cottage, accompanied by the title “As I Was.” Toward the end of the pamphlet, the same individual is shown sitting with his family before a well-stocked kitchen table. Although the protagonist is male, female readers would not have missed the detail of his wife being waited on by a hired domestic.