Brokering the Domestic Labor of Black Refugees, 1861–1872
Introduction: “Destitute in Female Help”
On January 23, 1867, Josiah Crawford, a fifty-nine-year-old white farmer living in Skull Creek, Nebraska, wrote to the Washington, D.C., office of the Freedmen’s Bureau. He had read in a local newspaper that thousands of black refugees crowded the nation’s capital in a state of destitution. Calling himself a “true Union man,” Crawford offered a solution that he claimed could remove at least one refugee family from public relief. The bureau would send him “a good woman” with “two or three children” who together would cook, keep house, and perform other domestic labor.1 In exchange, he would gift the family a homestead consisting of eighty acres if they chose a plot ten miles removed from the railroad line or forty acres if they selected a location closer to transit. He would build and maintain a house for them on the property. Whereas land was abundant and surplus to white settlers in the area, hired domestic labor was a scarce commodity that even more affluent farmers could not acquire. Crawford explained that his part of Nebraska “was very destitute in female help” and could accommodate thousands of black women and children sent from Washington. If his neighbors did not wish to barter land for labor, as he was willing to do, they would gladly pay three to five dollars a week in wages.2 As a farmer, Crawford may have been indirectly motivated by a desire to see the high tariffs on imported manufactured goods, which helped finance Reconstruction, reduced. Crawford may have also been affected by the newly implemented federal income tax; the 1870 census recorded his property holdings as one thousand dollars, which put him above the minimum threshold for those who had to pay.3 Federal expenditures on the Freedmen’s Bureau and refugee relief were charged topics that, for the first time in the country’s history, made social welfare a matter of national rather than local politics.
Crawford’s proposal shared a similar rationale to migration schemes that were advanced after the Panic of 1857. When surplus and unemployed female labor could not meet household demand due to geographic isolation, political economists consistently held that using state and private charitable funds to subsidize migration represented a practical investment in developing the nation’s infrastructure. The race of those targeted for assistance, however, accounted for significant differences in how migration programs were implemented and understood, and the agency that individuals and families had to accept or reject the help being offered. Strict prohibitions against interracial marriages, covenants against black landownership, and the relative absence of single black men in places like Nebraska meant that the black women who agreed to resettlement were unlikely to move out of a position of hired servitude. The 1860 census counted 82 free black residents in the state, and in 1870 that number had increased to only 789. Antebellum army officers brought black servants with them to remote outposts on the Nebraska frontier, where workers’ dependency rendered their status as free or enslaved—at least in an immediate material sense—inconsequential. Black refugees in Washington may have been aware of such legacies.4
Crawford’s apparent generosity notwithstanding, his proposal failed to account for the long-term prospects or local reception of single black women sent to remote areas of the interior. What would his neighbors say about the arrangement? Nor did Crawford’s letter address what would happen if the black family sent to him decided that the situation was not to their liking. Would he finance their return to Washington? Would the agreement granting the land to them be nullified? Would they be able to find alternative shelter, if the need suddenly arose? Crawford did not seek to eradicate the complicated dependencies facing recently emancipated black persons, as much as he wanted to enmesh them in new ones. Consent, independent contract, and wages—the hallmarks of the free labor system that the Union had fought for—are afterthoughts in his correspondence.
In the end, Crawford proved unsuccessful in convincing the Freedmen’s Bureau to send him refugee laborers. In 1870, he shared his domicile with a man who appears to have been his nephew, but the census lists no servants in the Crawford household and there are no black female homeowners in the surrounding area. The distance from Nebraska to Washington, D.C., made Crawford’s request an outlier to begin with—most black women and children were sent to locations in the Northeast or to places in the Midwest where free black communities had been established before the war.5 Since the government had to pay the cost of transportation, and would not have paid for a chaperone to accompany a single family, fronting the money for this purpose would have also been viewed as a risky prospect. Numerous black refugees chose to abscond before arriving at their intended destinations if better employment options were presented en route. Whether or not any of the bureau’s officials in Washington tried to persuade a family on relief to take Crawford’s offer went unrecorded. Had bureau agents pressed the case, they could have threatened to remove from relief the refugee family to whom Crawford’s offer was tendered. To white officials, the successful commodification of black labor relied on the ability to assert these types of coercive pressures.
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The end of slavery spurred experiments in how the provision of welfare, migration, and fulfillment of demand for household labor might be dealt with as imbricated social concerns. At a time when Irish immigrant women were increasingly perceived as wielding the menacing ability to win advantageous work contracts through their manipulation of northern domestic labor scarcities, the war provided employers with an opportunity to counteract this perceived threat through the brokered import of black labor. White northerners eagerly hypothesized about the potential value of black migrants’ labor power, and how this supply of labor might be produced for market through various forms of state intervention. Brokers of refugee labor financed and controlled migrations from the South and Washington, D.C., by attaching numerous restrictions on how these funds were to be dispensed. In comparison to the assistance that was made available to white women, whether for transatlantic or internal migrations, black refugees interacted with a welfare program that was explicitly rather than passively disciplinary in the market behavior that it sought to effect. A question haunts this chapter: what would have happened if migration assistance was extended to black refugees without punitive conditions? Engagement with this counterfactual premise yields important insights into what forms mid-nineteenth-century white racial privilege took, and how servants’ liberty to contract their labor power was shaped by private and state actions.
Northern households’ covetous impulses inaugurated what would be, for the next half century, a near constant quest to colonize and expropriate new supplies of workers. From these new sources, employers and labor brokers aspired to create social relations in which hired laborers were less able to withdraw themselves from the production of domesticity, or to control the means by which it was performed. Northern households aimed to detach independence—as a formal status—from the ability to refuse or reshape job situations that workers deemed undesirable. Among proponents of free labor, wages and other benefits to workers were proxies for consent and more important than whether or not a contraband or refugee entered into a contract voluntarily.6 Free market advocates urged displaced black migrants to forgo their own conceptions of what constituted economic and social security and to abandon the prerogative to choose where they wanted to live and work. Instead, they instructed refugee populations to consummate the commodified exchange of what was typically framed as their most valuable asset: their power to labor in servility. The Union Army’s “liberation” of their enslaved labor, white northerners smugly declared, had made this possible.7 There were fundamental paradoxes and myopic assumptions built into northern liberals’ vision of how freedom would govern emancipated slaves. Literary scholar Saidiya Hartman uses the evocative phrase “burdened individuality” to signify the fraught position that freed blacks, deprived of the material and other resources necessary to self-sufficiency, occupied in society.8
Racial discrimination meant that it was more difficult for black men to claim a republican identity as heads of households and independent producers than it was for Irish women—even though both groups of workers performed service work. When it came to placing contrabands and refugees in northern homes, white employers analyzed and disputed whether or not blacks were innately predisposed to servile labor, or whether servitude was cultural behavior produced through the disciplinary regime of slavery and therefore an attribute that might be lost with free labor. (As chapter