![]() ![]() But once freed from slavery, black people were slapped with all the standard labels for vagrants. “Worthless” and “idle”-two of the adjectives that most commonly modified the word “vagrants” in the antebellum United States-were ill-suited to describe enslaved people, who had tremendous market value as commodities and were forced to labor unceasingly. Some whites believed blacks were inherently lazy and would not work if not forced to even many abolitionists worried that slavery had so brutalized African Americans that they would be incapable of self-sufficiency.Īs Anthony Motley, an African-American barber, put it in a letter to Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner Clinton Fisk, “the great Slave trade Seems To be Revived in Memphis.” #Vagrant laws free#In free states along the border, like Pennsylvania, rising numbers of fugitives from slavery found themselves ensnared in vagrancy’s legal web.īy the 1860s, with the wholesale abolition of slavery appearing on the horizon, standard rhetoric about vagrants merged with white anxieties about labor markets swamped by a wave of freed slaves. In parts of the South, where modest populations of free blacks stood outside the purview of slave codes, vagrancy laws had restrained the movements and behaviors of those African Americans who weren’t enslaved. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, the figure of the vagrant had become distinctly entangled with race, and rhetoric about vagrancy had bled into national debate about emancipation. Using vagrancy laws to enforce “ slavery by another name” was an innovation of the post-war South, but the way had been paved long before. They were brought back onto the plantations, and forced to sign labor contracts. ![]() Vagrancy laws provided a convenient solution to the labor shortage: Memphis blacks who could not prove gainful employment in the city were presumed guilty of vagrancy and subject to arrest and impressment into the agricultural labor force. The growth of Memphis’s free black population meant that west Tennessee plantations were proportionally emptied-to the dismay of cotton planters who needed laborers in their fields. By the end of the war, Memphis’s black population had grown from 3,000 to 20,000. But as the war went on, they came seeking jobs, reunion with loved ones, and a sense of community. The city became a magnet for African Americans in the surrounding countryside, who first came behind Union lines to flee slavery. One of the testing grounds for the post-war racial order was Memphis, a Southern city that fell to federal forces only about a year into the Civil War, in June 1862. In the wake of the Civil War, African Americans found themselves caught amid the same kind of dissonance: What freedom meant to them-unfettered mobility, access to education, and the security of their families-was not what it meant to white people. Vagabondage may sound like freedom to a hobo singing “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” but to the upstanding citizen it sounds like crime. But, in the Civil War-era United States, that described nearly everyone who had been a slave. And the idea of criminalizing people who are “wandering about without proper means of livelihood” (as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it) has been around since medieval England. The homeless and the jobless come in all colors. On the surface, vagrancy has nothing to do with race. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |