Vagrants and Vagabonds

Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic

Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781479850952
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The riveting story of control over the mobility of poor migrants, and how their movements shaped current perceptions of class and status in the United States Vagrants. Vagabonds. Hoboes. Identified by myriad names, the homeless and geographically mobile have been with us since the earliest periods of recorded history. In the early days of the United States, these poor migrants – consisting of everyone from work-seekers to runaway slaves – populated the roads and streets of major cities and towns. These individuals were a part of a social class whose geographical movements broke settlement laws, penal codes, and welfare policies. This book documents their travels and experiences across the Atlantic world, excavating their life stories from the records of criminal justice systems and relief organizations. Vagrants and Vagabonds examines the subsistence activities of the mobile poor, from migration to wage labor to petty theft, and how local and state municipal authorities criminalized these activities, prompting extensive punishment. Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan examines the intertwined legal constructions, experiences, and responses to these so-called “vagrants,” arguing that we can glean important insights about poverty and class in this period by paying careful attention to mobility. This book charts why and how the itinerant poor were subject to imprisonment and forced migration, and considers the relationship between race and the right to movement and residence in the antebellum US. Ultimately, Vagrants and Vagabonds argues that poor migrants, the laws designed to curtail their movements, and the people charged with managing them, were central to shaping everything from the role of the state to contemporary conceptions of community to class and labor status, the spread of disease, and punishment in the early American republic.

1 / “She Is Doubtless a Very Vagrant”: Poverty and Mobility on the Legal Landscape

“What constitutes a vagrant?” asked a headline above a sarcastic anecdote that was reprinted in numerous nineteenth-century publications. The story described a vagabond who was met on the street by a magistrate, who accused him of being a vagrant who did not possess visible means of subsistence. When asked to give an account of himself, as was customary, the man extracted from the pocket of “his tattered coat a loaf of bread, and half of a dried codfish. Holding them up, with a triumphant look and gesture to the magistrate, exclaimed . . . I’m no vagrant! An’t them visible means o’ support, I should like to know?”1 The clause in most vagrancy statutes that rendered the largest number of individuals vulnerable to arrest was the one requiring individuals to have “visible means of support,” that is, the obvious ability to provide for oneself or one’s family the basic necessities of life—food, shelter, clothing. Those who could not do so were vulnerable to punishment under vagrancy law, exactly what the man with the bread and codfish in his pocket was symbolically trying to avoid.

Vagrancy has been defined in many ways across centuries and national borders. Vagrants have, in an Anglo-American tradition, been viewed as a group of individuals linked by law whose bodily movements were in some way threatening to the state, writ large.2 But this definition stretched beyond convicted vagrants and encompassed the more widely defined population of itinerant workers and the wandering poor—essentially, indigent transients. These persons, on whom this study focuses, traversed not only a physical landscape but one marked by policies and bounded by laws. Since its inception, the United States was a society that embodied a contradiction consisting of two sides of a coin; the one enshrining a right to freedom of movement and the other suspicious of any who might exercise it.3 To early Americans, strangers, those without a personal or professional connection to a community—whether born in the United States or abroad—were regarded as suspect.4

This chapter will explore the laws that governed the mobility of the lower classes in the Mid-Atlantic region in the early nineteenth century, namely poor laws and vagrancy statutes, as well as the impact they had on individuals subject to them. It argues that vagrancy and settlement laws ought to be viewed in concert with each other in order to evaluate the significance of mobility in the lives of the poor in this period. It also discusses the ways in which residence, transiency, and poverty shaped the construction of citizenship in the United States and established a legal and social landscape in which the actions of the poor, and especially the mobile poor, were criminalized.

Distrust of strangers, and especially poor strangers, was embodied in Anglo-American legal traditions. To the English settlers in North America, as Christopher Tomlins has explained, “law was the conceptual structure, the organizational discourse, by which their moves were enabled, the bridge that bore them across the ocean and planted them on the other side.” It “established the context for migrants’ liberty to be mobile by prescribing its extent; that is, the extent of their freedom to depart one place and move and set down elsewhere,” and in so doing, “established the actual conditions and effects of mobility and settlement, influencing who might go where” in this newly constructed legal territory. Most importantly, as Tomlins argues, this conceptualization of law “organized mobile migrating masses into discrete socioeconomic segments with very distinct legal-relational profiles: freemen; households . . . landowners and the landless; the settled and the wanderers; vagrants and runaways; slaves.” The transplantation of these social relationships onto the landscape that would become the United States essentially transferred the power of the English monarch to control the mobility or immobility of the population within its jurisdiction “according to the best interests of the state,” which was so often utilized to maintain the boundaries of the socioeconomic categories laid out in law.5

This transplantation led to limitations on the physical movements of the poor being written into the founding documents of the United States.6 The Articles of Confederation, the proto-constitutional document that comprised the first attempt to unite the states under a centralized government, banned interstate travel by vagrants and the poor. Article 4 granted that “the free inhabitants of each of these states, paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted . . . shall have free ingress and regress to and from any other state.”7 As historians of travel have recognized, in the early republic, the act, circumstances, and process of travel were integral to how Americans conceived of the privileges of citizenship.8 At the moment of the founding of the United States, the revocable right to be mobile was tied to class status. By curtailing freedom of travel for certain groups within the United States, lawmakers sent a clear message about citizenship, delineating the classes who were worthy of participating in its privileges.9 As the transportation revolution in the early nineteenth century gradually allowed greater segments of the population the ability to move more easily and at greater speeds, efforts to curtail undesirable mobility increased. States that had not already done so went on to legislate their own limits on the ingress of paupers, as Pennsylvania did in 1821, out of a proprietary effort to “prevent the increase of pauperism in this Commonwealth.”10

People who traveled too much or participated in any form of mobility deemed inappropriate or excessive were stripped of their right to be mobile.11 In this legal climate, then, any discussion of indigent transients is a discussion of an illicit form of mobility. Such a categorization could include one pauper’s journey on foot across a bridge from New Jersey to Philadelphia, or from New York to Pittsburgh to Ohio via boat and stagecoach. It could describe the clandestine movement northward of a fugitive slave under cover of night out of Virginia, facilitated by the Underground Railroad, or the relocation of a Marylander following his imprisonment for vagrancy. All these actions were viewed as disorderly occupations of space. The policing of vagrancy was meant to reorder that space.12

States used vagrancy statutes and settlement laws to uphold this ban on indigent transiency. In these laws, the distinction between resident and nonresident poor was of utmost importance because vagrants and other transients were subject to harsher punishments and less likely to be eligible for subsistence aid.13 Vagrancy statutes functioned as forms of antimigratory policing that contravened the rights of free ingress and regress afforded to residents of the United States. But the pauper and vagabond provision in the Articles of Confederation provided a window through which law creators and law enforcers were able to control the movements of the unemployed and destitute classes that was not declared unconstitutional until 1940. Even then, the ruling came only after states had mobilized border patrols to keep migrants from entering their territory during the Great Depression.14 These efforts were slightly more modern versions of settlement and removal laws.15

Regulation of legal settlements was bound up in state poor laws. Possessing legal settlement usually entitled one to receive poor relief in that location, as a privilege of municipal citizenship. In Pennsylvania after 1803, one could gain a legal settlement in a number of ways: by holding public office for one year, paying public poor taxes for two years, leasing a residence valued at over ten pounds for at least one year, serving at least a one-year term as an unmarried, childless indentured servant, or being a woman married to a man or widowed by a man with a legal settlement. Delaware and Maryland’s provisions for gaining legal settlement rights were very similar, stipulating a year’s residence, property ownership, payment of poor taxes, or service as an indentured servant. In Delaware, an individual also gained a legal settlement in a district by being born there.16 New Jersey required only a year’s continuous residence by a property holder, migrant, or indentured servant in order to gain a legal settlement.17 In New York after 1801, one could gain a legal settlement by holding public office for one year, renting and occupying a residence valued at a minimum of thirty dollars for two years, paying public poor tax for two years, or being an indentured servant in a New York district for at least two years.18 After 1812, Pennsylvania held transients to the standards for gaining a legal settlement in whatever state they held one, as opposed to the standards in the state they’d entered. This suggests an expectation of awareness of law and process for one’s home or place of official residence, but not necessarily the same level of knowledge for anywhere else one resided.19

By the early twentieth century, states had introduced many amendments to settlement statutes resulting from “the increased volume of migration” that began during the Great Depression. These were primarily designed to make it more challenging to gain settlement in a given district, discouraging migration by the poor to prevent increased welfare costs. The intervening century appears to have had little effect on lawmakers’ perspectives; the mobility of the underclasses continued to be viewed as a threat, and it was the indigent who suffered the consequences of stagnant opportunities, lack of relief, and involuntary removal.20

Just as early nineteenth-century poor laws did not account for the exponentially increasing mobility of the poor, as they were rooted in colonial and even Elizabethan expectations, so too, in the early twentieth century, laws were not adjusted to reflect the changes the previous century had brought but rather drew on earlier iterations of poor laws.21 Legislation managing mobile poor populations throughout much of United States history addressed two forms of indigent transiency: physical homelessness and legal homelessness. Individuals who experienced one or both fell under the purview of vagrancy law as individuals who “lodg[ed] . . . in the open air” or who did not possess any legal settlement.22 Mobility and work shaped not only the prosecution of vagrancy but also the distribution of food and fuel to the poor, qualifications for suffrage, and social constructions of morality in general. Debates over the rights of indigent transients to participate in either form of so-called membership—territorial or civic—generally concluded that citizenship was a laurel to be earned rather than a recognition of participation. In order for lawmakers, police, and guardians of the poor to ward off the admission of unworthy individuals to this imagined community, they sought to regulate the physical locations of indigent transients’ bodies.23

Antimigratory Policies

American lawmakers did not invent new policies from whole cloth in the nineteenth century. During the colonial period, settlement and removal laws, poor laws, and, often under the purview of poor laws, vagrancy statutes were imported wholesale from England. These laws had been used to curb the movements of—and enforce punishments against—the mobile poor, beggars, and the homeless since the fourteenth century. When the anticipated prosperity in Massachusetts and Virginia did not meet the needs of all those colonies’ inhabitants, a class of wandering beggars emerged, leading colonial authorities to implement English poor laws in their own territories, many of which matched very closely the Vagabond Code of 1531 and the Vagrancy Act of 1824. Poor laws provided financial relief for the needy while simultaneously punishing expressions of said neediness deemed inappropriate.24 The Revolutionary War plunged the new nation into an economic crisis, with formerly lucrative British commerce cut off, rampant inflation, and large debts from the war effort.25 As a result, the 1780s saw the first dramatic upturn in the numbers of the homeless and mobile poor in the new nation, individuals who came to comprise a new and more transient lower class that filled the roads and cities.26

It was at the tail end of the eighteenth century that many state legislatures began to revise the colonial poor laws that had governed the needy and disorderly classes up to that point. Thereafter, most states did not amend these laws or pass new legislation until after the Panic of 1819, when a deep economic recession took hold.27 In New York and Pennsylvania, the changes that were made in the 1780s were similar and substantive. Both states (Pennsylvania in 1782 and New York in 1784 and 1785), whose poor laws were dominated by the needs of their large cities, restructured the authoritative bodies that administered poor relief to increase efficiency across their jurisdictions. In 1784, New York also passed a new law requiring legal settlement for poor relief, which effectively reimplemented colonial settlement law. New York’s revisions also granted local municipalities the ability to manage the disorderly or burdensome poor as they saw fit, which led to a rise in the auctioning of pauper labor “to the highest bidder” and the forced indenturing of children, all in an effort to recoup the costs of welfare provision and to prevent idleness among the poor.28 Pennsylvania’s 1782 poor law revision similarly provided for forced indenture of poor people who might “become chargeable” to the public welfare as a result of “their own lewdness, drunkenness, or other evil practices,” in order to alleviate the financial burden incurred by providing for their maintenance and to prevent the congregation of vagrants and other unwanted indigents in Philadelphia.29 The swelling poor population in these years also prompted the creation of a system of almshouse administration in Delaware in 1791, which previously had only a limited de facto provision in place to house the homeless indigent among local citizens.30

Poor laws and statutes regulating relief administration were inextricably linked to vagrancy statutes, and provisions for the management of vagrants and the disorderly were often written into states’ welfare laws. This was the case, for example, in New Jersey, where the vagrancy provisions of colonial welfare statutes survived well into the nineteenth century.31 In Maryland, law enforcement officers were instructed to observe the movements of the poor in order to, as an 1811 law stipulated, “restrain poor people from going . . . from one county to another.”32 Any poor person who attempted to travel outside of their district was subject to vagrancy arrest, in punishment for their withdrawal of their labor. The availability and stability of their labor was viewed as so essential as to warrant the policing of their movement for economic purposes.33

Towns, cities, counties, and states expended huge portions of their municipal budgets in providing for the emergency and maintenance needs of the indigent. Payment into these budgets was considered an obligation of taxable citizens, and, generally, only residents were eligible for poor relief. Some estimates suggest that in Philadelphia, “roughly one-quarter of the population” was classified as laboring poor, paying only “the minimum amount of taxes.”34 Transients often paid no taxes: one of the common rules in the complex settlement qualification process was the payment of poor taxes, which were seen as a way for paupers to balance out the use of resources for their care. This provide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 “She Is Doubtless a Very Vagrant”: Poverty and Mobility on the Legal Landscape
• 2 “A Wandering Life”: The Physical Landscape of Indigent Transiency
• 3 “The Removal of So Many Human Beings . . . Like Felons”: Forced Migration of the Poor
• 4 “Since He Was Free”: Vagabondage, Race, and Emancipation
• 5 “Punishment for Their Misfortunes”: Discretion, Incarceration, and Resistance
• 6 “It Was amongst the Vagrant Class . . . That Cholera Was Most Fatal”: Mobility, Poverty, and Disease
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Appendix
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author