The geographic orientation of this book corresponds to the fluid labor market dynamics it analyzes. The brokers in this study specifically tried to defy spatial limitations on the supply of domestic laborers. Moments when brokers, whether in the form of private philanthropists or government agencies like the Freedmen’s Bureau, took measures to collapse barriers to the placement of servants by offsetting the cost of their transportation receive special attention here. The ability to engineer movement represented a form of expertise that was both venerated and despised, and the production of knowledge on these practices developed in conjunction with the introduction of steamships, better railroad connections, and new methods for financing migration that were also heralded as ushering in a “modern” era of migration and immigration.58 The major ports of Atlantic and Pacific entry, New York and San Francisco, and the hub for black refugees during and after the Civil War, Washington, D.C., receive particular focus here as nodes of distribution that supplied markets.
Finally, this book is transnational in multiple ways, and heeds the charge that historians of migration need to be attentive to how mobility gets governed at the point of departure as well as at the point of reception. Throughout this book, I shed light on the ways in which the brokerage of service relations, like migrants themselves, straddled the territorial boundaries that defined the nation-state. Individuals like the white Methodist missionary to China Esther Baldwin, for instance, made the availability of domestic laborers for hire by American household consumers a matter of foreign relations. This book also takes on how domesticity itself became transnational and no longer a spatially fixed social relation of production. Servants had to be mobile actors befitting U.S. overseas expansion and imperial aspirations.
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Beginning with immigration that took place in the decade following the Irish Famine, this book’s initial focus is on how relief efforts marked as humanitarian steered and compelled recipients of assistance into domestic service. Servitude was viewed as an ideal means by which to salvage the laboring capacity of women whose sudden autonomy became potentially burdensome to the American and British states. Chapter 1 follows the enterprising activities of Vere Foster, a member of the Anglo-Irish gentry who funded the emigration of approximately 1,250 Irish women from post-famine Ireland during the 1850s. Foster’s efforts serve as a case study that illuminates the ideologies of white settlerism and Anglophone imperial unity, and shows how they worked together in concert. Foster was convinced that the best way to govern rural Ireland’s surplus population and inadequate lands was to finance and coordinate the integration of young migrant women into wage labor positions as servants in the United States, in areas of the country where the supply of white female workers was inadequate. In order to assuage concerns about the moral and sexual dangers that free markets and migration posed to young Irish women, Foster endeavored to establish transatlantic networks of migration rooted in what he presented as racial and familial values of protection and mutuality. Chapter 2 turns its attention to the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction, when formerly enslaved persons, classified as “contrabands” and refugees, were placed as domestic workers in northern households. The involvement of the Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees, and Abandoned Lands (the Freedmen’s Bureau) in the placement of refugees as servants prefigured the federal government’s expanded role as a broker of immigrant labor in the decades that followed, yet proved controversial. Designed to reduce government expenditures on the relief of refugees in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, the Freedmen’s Bureau’s financing of black servants’ migration was viewed with skepticism by detractors who claimed that it revived—under the thin veneer of “free” labor—a version of the slave trade. Due to insufficient federal funding, the reluctance of black refugees to relocate to uncertain job situations in the North, and constant questions about its efficacy, the Freedmen’s Bureau—after contracting thousands of women and children to service positions—was ultimately forced to disband this initiative.
By the late 1860s, middle-class employers in eastern cities had shifted their attention to the labor supply of Chinese immigrants in California, and the possible importation of male servants who were portrayed as invaluable assets to western homes. In this period, Democrats seized upon abolitionism and free labor ideology, which were previously associated with Republicans, to critique Chinese laborers as “coolies” and push for restriction.59 Chapter 3 argues that employers produced a version of Chinese servants’ difference that referenced how they were naturally submissive and mechanically efficient—and therefore ideal as domestics. Employers overlooked the more complicated structural dynamics that relegated Chinese immigrants to service work through racial discrimination and legal marginalization as migrants barred from naturalizing. In these contexts, this chapter also explores the doubts that surrounded Chinese restriction as a policy and how proponents of allowing Chinese immigrants to do work labeled menial and unworthy of citizenship linked the continued employment of Chinese servants to the Pacific Coast’s imperial advantages as the gateway to Asian labor supplies.
By 1882, federal immigration officials had assumed sole responsibility for determining who qualified as eligible to enter the United States. By the 1890s, they also wielded the power to deport immigrants—what legal historian Daniel Kanstroom has called “post-entry social control”—who violated the terms of their admission.60 Building on Kanstroom’s framework, chapter 4 grapples with the ways that government-appointed immigration officers and employment agents, first at Castle Garden and then at Ellis Island and the immigration station in Philadelphia, used the threat of barred entry and informal prohibitions on the release of unaccompanied female immigrants to compel these white women into taking jobs in domestic labor. Committed to the idea that young, white European women, when subjected to the right types of controls, remained a vital and privileged source of immigrants, officials devised and implemented practices and regulations that allowed for their foreign contract and for them to circumvent restrictions that would have otherwise prohibited their entry on the grounds that they were likely to become public charges.
Chapter 5 continues this thread, although it contends that in the context of Chinese servants exempted from the exclusion laws and granted temporary admission as laborers, officials implemented post-entry controls aimed at containment rather than protection. Following the passage of the 1882 Chinese Restriction Act, immigration officials brokered special arrangements that allowed white employers to continue to enter the country with Chinese servants in their employ, so long as they took out surety bonds that indemnified the government against the possibility that their Chinese servants might leave their service and remain in the United States on an unauthorized basis. How to gain access to foreign labor without having to dispense with the entitlements that would accompany more substantive or permanent incorporation has always made domestic work, along with agricultural labor, a salient area of concern for policymakers. The Chinese who entered as temporary laborers were governed as a legally captive supply of labor for select classes of imperialists working overseas—businessmen, military officials, and missionaries—and came to symbolize the compromise between the privileged, free mobility that imperial elites required, and, in a national setting, the need to shore up the sovereign boundaries of the nation against the permanent settlement of Asian laborers. In this respect, the temporary admission of Chinese servants and the bonded conditions that defined their stay offer examples of what I argue was an incipient guestworker program.61 Chinese immigrant servants who lived in the United States legally—as well as birthright American citizens of Chinese descent—were also subject to various requirements by immigration officials that reinforced these workers’ dependency on white employers. During exclusion, the testimony of white employers became a crucial factor in determining whether Chinese servants would be credentialed as authorized residents, even in cases where they claimed to be birthright American citizens. This was essential to avoiding deportation but also to being allowed to depart and reenter the United States.
Stymied by the refusal of “new” immigrant women from Eastern and Southern Europe to pursue work as domestic laborers at the turn of the century,