Abstract
Mobile populations are among the most difficult to study in any society or time period. This carefully researched book provides a valuable window on the world of vagrants and other transients through their encounters with authority in the early years of the newly independent American Republic. The central focus of the book is on the extent and nature of the poverty and unemployment that generated a large transient population, and on the harsh methods used by the police and other authorities to criminalise and punish those identified as vagrants. Although the book makes good use of individual testimonies to describe the extent and nature of the mobile population, readers of this journal should be aware that the main argument of the book focuses on the regulation of transients. There is relatively little detail on either the journeys made, or on the modes of transport used to travel from place to place in early-nineteenth century America.
A short introductory chapter outlines the origins of the vagrancy laws in America and introduces the social and demographic context of itinerant vagrants. The large number of archival sources used in the research are also briefly outlined. The first substantive chapter defines vagrancy (as it was understood at the time), and examines the evolution and operation of the vagrancy laws in different parts of America. In chapter two Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan makes excellent use of individual testimonies given to the police and poor law authorities to illustrate the range of complex journeys that different people were undertaking. She also explores in detail the demographic characteristics of this mobile population, stressing that whereas in the later-nineteenth century vagrants were predominantly young white men, in the first half of the nineteenth century their profile was rather different. Based on a sample from Philadelphia approximately half of the vagrants and transients dealt with by the authorities were African Americans and almost half were female.
Chapter three uses individual case studies to look in detail at the ways in which the laws of settlement and removal operated in Pennsylvania and New York. These were based on the English poor law system and enabled authorities to forcibly remove vagrants to their community of settlement, and to incarcerate any who refused to travel or who illegally returned. One of the many strengths of the book is the way in which it stresses the diversity of the transient population in early America, and chapter four provides a valuable account of the ways in which both fugitive slaves and transient freed slaves were dealt with by the authorities, set within the context of debates about race and slavery at the time. Many transients were imprisoned under the vagrancy laws, and chapter six describes the penal policies of the period and compares the treatment of transients with other criminals that were dealt with by the judicial system. Unsurprisingly, disease was rife among those who lived much of their life on the road, and transients were frequently blamed for spreading infectious disease within the communities they passed through. They were especially targeted during cholera epidemics with the homeless and other transients suffering disproportionately. A final concluding chapter briefly raises some broader issues, including comparison of the management of transients in America with systems in other countries, and discussion of the role of the state within society. It is a shame that some of these issues were not more fully developed.
This is a good book that is very well researched (there are some 46 pages of footnotes at the end of the volume), and which tackles a difficult and often neglected topic and time period. It will provide an important text on transiency and the ways in which it was managed by authorities in the years after American independence. Of course, the population discussed in this volume were not the only people who travelled frequently in America. Rates of mobility would have been high for much of the population. What the book does do is to explain how and why one particular subset of those who travelled were singled out and, in many cases, criminalised by the authorities of the time.
