Ideal Workers and Citizens: Race, Gender, and Immigrant Recruitment in the Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century South

Beginning in the immediate postbellum period and continuing into the early 20th century, several states across the U.S. South, from Maryland and Virginia to Louisiana and Mississippi, launched active programs to recruit new European immigrants. Central to these endeavors was a desire to replace African Americans as the states' primary sources of agricultural and domestic labor. But this goal was motivated by a variety of impulses, from maximizing profit and maintaining the most pliable workforce possible, to ideologies of American national, ethnic, and gendered identities. Nor did African American leaders -- many of whom saw these efforts as a way to elevate black laborers to more well paying, higher status professions -- necessarily oppose the aims of these programs. The result was an array of efforts geared to redefine the gendered and racialized nature of work across the South.     On a broad scale these programs failed, and perhaps for this reason, scholars have largely ignored the development of these programs. But the impact of these endeavors on local labor markets was often quite significant. It is thus a history very much worth rescuing, one that links the historical process of international migration directly to African American history and the history of America's working classes.     This paper explores the contours of these recruitment efforts and their outcomes, focusing especially on Maryland and Virginia. Using sources drawn from a range of local repositories in Baltimore and Richmond, as well as the National Archives and Library of Congress, this paper will outline just how these programs developed, evaluate their relative successes and failures, focusing in particular on the impact of these endeavors for domestic laborers, such as household servants, maids, nannies, groundskeepers, and kindred workers.