Brokering Servitude. Andrew Urban
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to the labor power of runaways and refugees from slavery on a scale that few had predicted. The dispatches that Union officers and soldiers sent, in addition to the reports that northern journalists and missionaries filed, brimmed with enthusiasm about the productive value of contraband labor. The humanitarian crisis of sudden emancipation became an opportunity of political economy. Before the war, northern states like Ohio had in place statutes that required free blacks to post surety bonds before entering as migrants, which they used to limit black settlement.24 The war ended the enforcement of these laws and what had been, for all intents and purposes, more restrictive migration laws than what German and Irish arrivals to New York encountered. Writings from this period illustrate that many white northerners viewed emancipated slaves as a distinct species of labor whose value came from the fact that they were unacculturated to the free labor system. In July 1861, with the conflict only three months old, the Independent magazine proclaimed that the “troublesome experience of Northern households” was on the verge of being transformed. “The immigration of runaway slaves” with their “peculiar talent for service,” the magazine noted, represented the spoils of war.25
The Emancipation Proclamation, which on January 1, 1863, decreed a formal end to slavery in the states of the Confederacy, generated excitement as well. Horace James, a Congregationalist minister from Massachusetts commissioned to serve as the superintendent of Negro affairs in North Carolina, effused in 1864 that the abolition of slavery had created a “nation of servants” awaiting employment. “The foolish prejudice against color which prevails … even among the best people of the North,” James declared, “should immediately give way, that they may take their proper place in all our households.” James underscored that proposals to send freedwomen and children to the North were not intended “to throw white laborers out of employment” but rather would “lift them higher in the social scale, and engage them in labors which require more skill.” All of this was simply a natural function of how free labor markets operated, James insisted, even as he sought the federal backing that was necessary to orchestrate a massive population transfer. “In the successive orders or ranks of industrial pursuits,” he concluded, “those who have the least intelligence must perform the more menial services, without respect to color or birth.”26 Irish immigrants who had paid their dues at the bottom of the free labor hierarchy were now ready to be elevated to more skilled pursuits, property ownership, and occupations that conferred upon them independence rather than dependence. During the 1870s, the theme of occupational succession and advancement would be picked up by proponents of Chinese immigration, who, in similar terms, insisted that Irish immigrants and other white laborers stood to be the primary beneficiaries of the introduction of nonwhite labor to menial positions. These new supplies of labor, they claimed, could be exploited by the white working and middle classes alike.
As historian Kate Masur argues, Major General Benjamin Butler’s decision early in the war to treat runaway slaves who crossed over Union lines as “contrabands” meant that white northern officers and soldiers first interacted with emancipated slaves as service workers in military encampments, which framed their calculations on how free black incorporation was to proceed. Contrabands quickly became subjects of northern popular culture as well, appearing not only in journals and newspapers, but in minstrel shows and fiction. Masur notes that white northern missionaries exaggerated contrabands’ status “as victims of a war they could not understand, [and] as illiterate, unworldly, and disorderly in their appearance and personal relationships.” Paternalistic depictions such as these also helped to assuage white workers’ fears that contrabands sent farther north were legitimate threats to take their jobs.27
In practice, contraband laborers were productive contributors to the Union war effort rather than dependents of largesse, especially since they could be compelled to perform gendered and racialized work that white soldiers disdained. Before freedmen became eligible to assume combat roles after the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation, they performed drudge work digging ditches, cleaning latrines, and chopping wood. They also supplied more intimate forms of labor marked as feminine and domestic, namely as personal servants to officers and as company cooks. Black servants were not just employed in camps behind battle lines. One military official estimated, for instance, that of the 10,000 freed blacks employed in August 1863 by the Department of the Cumberland Army in Tennessee, 3,700 worked as cooks and servants in active combat zones.28 In a December 1863 message to President Lincoln, representatives from the Freedman’s Aid Societies in Boston, Cincinnati, New York, and Philadelphia predicted that recently emancipated slaves were “destined to be the great want of the country over which we are extending our victorious dominion.” In the interim, however, the representatives urged the president to respond on the record to complaints that federal money was being wasted on feeding and clothing contrabands. They pleaded with him to publicize how expenditures in this area represented an initial investment in the production of servants who were necessary to the war effort. Moreover, as other commentators argued, every adult male slave who escaped forced the Confederacy, in theory, to replace his labor with that of a white person.29
It was not until the middle of the war that the Union began to regularly pay black laborers, servants, and cooks. Equal wages for black workers remained a constant point of tension, even after the federal government made this official policy. At Fortress Monroe, where Butler had first initiated the Union Army’s policy of refusing to return Confederate property in the form of enslaved persons, his successor General John Wool required army officers and civilians employing contrabands to deposit wages in a general fund, which was subsequently used to support refugees whose age or condition made them camp dependents. Refugee laborers’ protests that this “Contraband Tax” was unjust and rife with corruption were met with imprisonment and whippings. The policy prompted some of Fortress Monroe’s black workers to independently contract out their labor to civilians in order to circumvent the military’s oversight altogether. A military commission appointed to investigate the situation questioned, in telling language, why “Irish souphouse” relief policies were needed at all, when the free market, its authors concluded, ought to suffice. Gainfully employed black laborers, the commission argued, could be charged with taking care of their fellow refugees without government oversight. (In 1863, undeterred Union officials introduced a Contraband Tax at the newly created Freedman’s Village in Arlington Heights as well.)30 The very existence of a refugee tax deserves comparative attention. It was not until the 1870s that American ports began levying a commutation tax on Irish and other European immigrants, and required them to offset the costs of providing public relief to fellow arrivals who became public charges. But even then, these taxes were not enacted under the same guise of inducing racial responsibility.
While blacks’ martial service has received substantial attention from scholars as the means by which they proved, under fire, their worthiness for citizenship, the relationship between the performance of “unmanly” and menial servitude and social inclusion was more ambiguous.31 Historian Micki McElya argues that the focus on free blacks’ claims to citizenship through martial service has obscured struggles for rights that were organized around other contributions and actions.32 Contrabands discovered that being relegated to menial and servile labor, even when they were granted the freedom to consent to work, represented a tortuous path to a form of economic and social citizenship that warranted respect in the eyes of white soldiers and officers. An article published in the United States Service Magazine, for instance, described how a contraband who had wandered into the camp of the First Iowa Cavalry in Tennessee was administered an oath by a Union corporal in which he had to solemnly swear to not only uphold the Constitution, but also “see that there are no grounds floating upon the coffee.”33 To counter perceptions that blacks were fit only for dependent service work, the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission found it prudent to include in the report it submitted to Congress a letter to the Galena (IL) Advertiser from M. M. Miller, the white captain of the Ninth Louisiana Colored Regiment. Narrating the gory details of the recently fought battle at Milliken’s Bend, Mississippi, Miller described not only the valor of the black soldiers under his command but also how “a boy” who cooked for him had “begged a gun when the rebels were advancing,” so that he too could defend the Union position. The cook was “badly wounded with one gunshot and two bayonet wounds.”34 Testimonials such as this aimed to prove that black men and boys would proudly abandon service work and its emasculating status, if only given the opportunity.
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