This was no empty dictate. The records of the bureau abound with examples of this philosophy being implemented in practice. When black men and women chose to care for their own children rather than work for wages, local white officials punished them with expulsion from relief rolls. Ann Brown, for instance, a freedwoman living in Fairfax Court House, Virginia, was forcefully escorted by Union soldiers to a six-dollar-a-month job as a servant in the house of a white neighbor after local officials discovered that she had been drawing rations of firewood and straw. Local bureau officials also sought to discipline black recipients of relief who were not appropriately humble, or hatched their own plans to migrate. Bureau officials in Chestertown, Maryland, petitioned to exclude from relief a group of free black house servants who, unemployed in the aftermath of the war, had taken to “constantly gadding about the streets,” as the report described, and relaying to each other their “great desire” to relocate to Baltimore, which the author attributed to their childlike wonderment with the big city.49 As historian Eric Foner has documented, Freedmen’s Bureau agents in the South dismissed questions concerned with whether or not the involuntary year-long contracts that they mandated between freed people and white planters were legal—despite the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865—since maximizing production and obtaining full employment were the most salient priorities. In states like North Carolina, legislators found ways to circumvent the constitutional prohibition on keeping workers in a state of bondage by making it illegal for employers to entice or harbor servants who were already under contract, thereby denying black domestic laborers the right to take advantage of competitive hiring.50
The discipline urged upon free black laborers in these contexts rarely took into account the structural legacy of slavery, and what blacks defined as freedom. The bureau’s willingness to naturalize wage labor as the sine qua non of postwar liberalism moved the Republican Party further away from the “free soil” mantle that had been a crucial component of the party’s ideology in the decade leading up to the conflict.51 Despite the attempts of Radical Republicans in Congress to create a Freedmen’s Bureau bill that would have extended measures for Confederate land confiscation and redistribution to freed black men—a version of the famous “Forty Acres and a Mule” provision that General William Tecumseh Sherman implemented on a more local basis in the Sea Islands region of Georgia—these efforts were blocked by President Andrew Johnson and other opponents who argued that such a policy was too generous in the entitlements it proposed meting out. From the very beginning of the war, black newspapers, such as the New York–based Anglo African, lobbied for policies that made land confiscation and redistribution the basis for Reconstruction.52 When Congress did pass the Southern Homestead Act in 1866, it allocated only the poorest lands to black settlers and was underfunded and lacking in enforcement. Even so, it was still met with fierce resistance by local whites.53
In the absence of policies empowering blacks as autonomous economic producers and landowners, markets and wage work were the means by which the bureau governed freed persons as economic actors. It is ironic though that Howard, in his December 1865 report to Congress, would propose having the Freedmen’s Bureau’s agents “adopt a system like the ordinary intelligence office” to “procure good places” for freedmen and women unable to find work. As a member of the middle class Howard would have been all too aware of the scorn these institutions generated, and the lack of confidence that they inspired among employers.54 Northern employers blamed intelligence offices for corrupting the principles of a free market rather than assisting in their realization. As historian Brian Luskey observes, intelligence offices “defined wage labor relations in the era of slave emancipation with far greater precision than the hopeful narratives of free labor ideology that have taken precedence in the historical literature.”55 They were problems in practice.
Most of the intelligence offices involved in placing black refugees traced their origins to the missionary-run freedmen’s relief agencies, which shielded them—at least to some degree—from the opprobrium that their commercial counterparts received. To offset anxieties about how long-distance transactions in black labor might replicate the slave trade—which would continue to dog intelligence offices into the twentieth century—missionaries presented their work as free of commercial motives. Oliver St. John, a Dutch Reformed pastor and the corresponding secretary for the New York and Brooklyn Freedmen’s Employment Bureau, wrote to the general superintendent of freedmen’s affairs for the Army’s Department of Virginia and North Carolina in November 1864, claiming that New York and New England could absorb at least ten thousand freedwomen and children in domestic service positions. St. John stipulated that “residence of only a few months in our free states will be of very great service in lifting them up into a higher civilization than they have ever known.” St. John arranged for the transport of fifty freedwomen to Brooklyn in August 1864, and bragged that “not one, so far as we know, have [sic] failed to find a good home through our Agency.” If money could be raised to hire a vessel to depart Norfolk with a “load of 200,” prospective employers could be brought down to the docks to meet the vessel and hire servants on the spot.56
Mission-inspired intelligence offices were not concerned with whether the interests and needs of employers were made legible to the laborers they recruited. In contrast, employers using the New York and Brooklyn Freedmen’s Employment Bureau were treated as consumers who needed to be provided with information about the goods they were obtaining. Employers were required to pay a subscription fee of five dollars, deductible from their servant’s future wages, as a down payment toward lasting employment. Children aged ten to fifteen could be procured without wages, as legal dependents, so long as employers pledged to comply with the New York statute dictating that fostered orphans receive “the advantages of a common school education.” Prospective employers were asked to indicate whether they needed a chambermaid or a cook, in addition to marking off whether they wanted a child or an adult.57 St. John, despite his public enthusiasm about the ability of northern markets to absorb black labor, expressed private concerns about whether large-scale refugee resettlement would result in pauperism in northern cities caused by an oversaturated market. To safeguard against this possibility, his bureau’s program was designed to ensure that only women and children with jobs contracted prior to their departure were sent.58 Unlike commercial intelligence offices, missionary agencies were not willing to provide resources to unemployed laborers, which would have allowed them to test the market.
Other missionary labor brokers concentrated on how to remove black mothers with children from relief while keeping families together. The free market, they discovered, contained few incentives for keeping these families intact. A letter in the February 1865 issue of the Pennsylvania Freedmen’s Bulletin called attention to the reluctance of white employers to provide room and board to refugee children who were too young to work. The author noted that even though most women with children being placed in household service were widows or the common-law wives of black men serving in the Union Army, communicating their respectability did not overcome employers’ reluctance to hire them. Northern missionaries, including the author of the letter, worked to open foster homes where black children could be cared for while their mothers lived out in service.59 By socializing child care, local and federal officials avoided having to pay relief on able-bodied adults. Later, when the bureau was forced to suspend paying for the transportation costs of refugees contracted to domestic jobs in the North, funds continued to be available for the transportation of women with children so as to incentivize their hire.60
The Refugee Community as Labor Supply: Washington, D.C.
During the war and its aftermath, Washington became a crucial node in the movement of black migrant labor and a city defined by its refugee population and relief needs. In 1860, Washington included 3,185 slaves among its population; by 1867, it was home to 38,663 free blacks, two-thirds of whom were newcomers to the city.61 Before it was ordered closed in December 1863 for lack of adequate sanitary conditions, Camp Barker—located adjacent to what is now the intersection