Figure 1.2. and Figure 1.3. “As I Was” and “As I Am.” Vere Foster, Work and Wages; or, The Penny Emigrant’s Guide to the United States and Canada, 5th ed. (London: W. & F. G. Cash, 1855).
Figure 1.2. and Figure 1.3. (continued)
If marriage resided at one end of the spectrum as the most prudent course of self-governance for migrant Irish women, and the best long-term choice they could make when it came to the disposal of their labor power, then the sale of their sexual labor represented the opposite pole. Foster was no stranger to controversy in this respect. His work was enveloped in scandal when twenty-six of the one hundred twenty women whose passage he had paid for on the City of Mobile, which departed Liverpool in May 1857, spurned final destinations in the interior in order to stay in New York City. More scandalous, twelve of the women who remained in New York had snuck off the Mobile with sailors while the boat was anchored overnight off of Castle Garden. Two of those women, Susan Smith and Ellen Neary, eventually ended up at a brothel at 32 Water Street in Lower Manhattan, which was run by the notorious “sportsman” and Irish American gang leader Kit Burns. All of this came to light when Smith was found wandering aimlessly down Broadway, her face “covered with bruises and her body with rags.” Police brought her before city officials to swear out a deposition on what had occurred, before sending her to the state-run Emigrant Refuge on Ward’s Island.61
When the incident made newspapers in New York, Ireland, and Britain, Foster and his allies attacked the women for their excessive and dangerous pursuit of personal independence. They pointed toward the fact that the majority of women who arrived on the Mobile were in New York for less than a day, and that their socializing was limited to attending lectures delivered by a priest who had worked in the American West and by Greeley. They were instructed, in regard to travel into the interior, “the farther the better.” In its coverage, the New York Tribune blamed Captain Marshall of the Mobile for failing to closely guard who had access to the women on the vessel, despite the fact that Foster had paid extra to sequester the migrants in second-class cabins. As the newspaper editorialized, during the transatlantic voyage, with Foster not present (he was already in the United States), it was the captain’s responsibility to ensure that no harm came to the women. As their protector, he assumed the “same relation as a father to his children; his power is absolute and undisputed, and wherever he resolutely sets himself about it, he can always enforce obedience to orders.” If the captain was to shoulder some of the blame, then the rest belonged to the twenty-six emigrants who had deceived Foster about their true character. Emigrants in the future, he warned, needed to “shew by their conduct on board ship and in America that they deserve the good recommendations on account of which they receive a free passage.”62
Sensational incidents like the ones surrounding the City of Mobile cannot be attributed to Foster’s particular method of sponsoring emigrants; all young women who traveled on their own faced the dangers of sexual assault and enticement. Without diminishing the ordeals of Neary and Smith, the moral panic that their enlistment as prostitutes fueled helped to rationalize the need for programs such as Foster’s, and worked to keep Irish women in positions where they were more likely to remain subordinate.
The concerns Irish women raised as migrants went beyond dangers having to do with sex alone. As Foster learned, assisted migration invariably had to contend with the political economy of chattel slavery. Early on, Foster abandoned any plans he had to send migrants to the American South after hearing from a correspondent in Monticello, Florida, that the racial division of labor there was so fixed that white households refused to hire white servants, even when the cost of wages was less than what they would pay in leasing a black slave.63 Moreover, whereas assisted migration to places like Illinois and Wisconsin referenced nationalistic images of maturing white settler colonialism, it was also framed in relation to the internal slave trade, and the inability of enslaved peoples to maintain family integrity and control their own mobility. Anxieties about Irish women’s bondage infringed upon Foster’s plans on both sides of the Atlantic. While transporting a group of women from County Louth to the port city of Drogheda in the 1850s, he was accosted by a mob of Irish farmers enraged by a rumor that he was readying Irish girls for sale to Mormons and black Americans. Years later, Foster would recall this episode to underscore the local superstitions that his work encountered.64 Given that much of what constituted domestic work was still performed as involuntary and unpaid labor in the 1850s, these fears were more valid than Foster acknowledged. Local farmers had every reason to question what Foster stood to gain from sponsoring transatlantic migration. Population management, if Foster even bothered to explain the philosophy underlining his actions, would have come across as an ideological abstraction. Local farmers were more familiar with indenture and debt bondage as means by which migrations were financed.
Seeking Out Precarity
The enticements of yeomen farming and republican marriages aside, Foster understood that the willingness of unmarried Irish women to migrate west corresponded directly to their economic and social vulnerability. The Panic of 1857, which began with bank failures in late August, led Foster to become involved in brokering and chaperoning the westward migrations of New York women receiving relief. During the winter of 1857–58, Foster served as an unpaid agent for the Women’s Protective Emigration Society. Founded by women’s rights advocates Elizabeth B. Phelps and Eliza Farnham, the society solicited funds to support the westward migration of women who had lost their jobs in the economic depression. In New York City, the needle trades in particular were hard hit by a shortage of capital, creating relief needs in excess of what city agencies could handle.65
Foster was an obvious asset to the Women’s Protective Emigration Society. His preexisting network of contacts throughout the “Old Northwest” meant that he could identify employment possibilities in regions less affected by the collapse of the banks. Moreover, the society’s agenda mirrored Foster’s. Moving laborers to more favorable markets was seen as an efficient means to reduce public relief outlays and to stave off the temptation that unemployed women might have to engage in sex work. As Farnham and Phelps would stipulate in an appeal “to the Friends of the Helpless,” the economic crisis had left thousands of women “cast upon the world—homeless, friendless, penniless—and who now, in the madness of desolation and want, are trembling on the verge of the dark stream of vice which pollutes our streets.” An editorial in the New York Tribune estimated that there were seven thousand women prepared to take advantage of the society’s assistance if funds could be procured. Referencing a proposal by the secretary of war that called for an increase in the military recruitment of unemployed men, Greeley lamented that the government had no plans but the “almshouse” for women. “Colossal prostitution” awaited, the newspaper warned, if New York donors persisted in their “elegant indifference.”66
References to deserving paupers featured prominently in the society’s rationalizations for why interventions into the lives of the women it hoped to relocate were justified, and worth supporting. Citing her partnership with Foster and what she had learned about “systematised” migration through their collaboration, Farnham argued that women who applied to be relocated automatically proved themselves to be of a better class than counterparts who chose to stay behind. Trying to counteract the negative associations that surrounded recipients of welfare, Farnham asserted that women seeking to migrate demonstrated that they were “energetic, pure, conscientious women” possessed with an “earnest resolve to help themselves honorably to a better lot.” One might deduce that the women who sought the society’s help acted out of desperation. Farnham was reluctant to acknowledge this, however, since it gave her relocation scheme a coercive rather than voluntary cast. More than six hundred women were placed in Illinois alone by Foster during the winter of 1857, and by the middle of 1858, the society had sent approximately a thousand women to points west. The cost of placing a woman in a new locale was between ten and twelve dollars. Farnham, a former resident of California, wrote to the California Farmer in March 1858 to encourage leading citizens to charter a steamer to deliver destitute women from New York to San Francisco, since the demand for servants remained unaffected “in our Golden State.”67 The society also followed Foster’s lead by sending Irish Catholic women from New York to locations