Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan, Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic
| Published date | 01 October 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221079291 |
| Author | Stephen E. Tillotson |
| Date | 01 October 2023 |
Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan, Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the
Early American Republic, New York University Press: New York, NY, 2019;
225 pp. (including index). ISBN 9781479845255, $35.00
Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan’sVagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early
American Republic represents a recent addition to the historical scholarship on early
19
th
-century social control in the United States. The book explores the lived experiences
of a group the author terms “indigent transients,”a mélange including the wandering
homeless, unemployed migrant workers, criminal vagrants, and all manner of otherwise
impoverished and geographically mobile groups subject to state control owing to their
status. The author approaches this groups’travails through the lenses of vagrancy laws
and settlement laws, or laws governing individual rights to domicile, labour, and
receive public support. Each of the six chapters of Vagrants and Vagabonds ties the struc-
tures and effects of these laws to a broader issue related to indigent transients in the Early
American Republic, including poverty, geography, enforced physical exclusion, race,
punishment, and public health. To explore the lives of this historically marginalized
group, the author qualitatively analyzes institutional records, legislative actions, reform-
society publications, public discourse, and individual accounts from the period.
For the general reader, Vagrants and Vagabonds represents not only a welcome add-
ition to the historical scholarship, but a timely glimpse into the past with relevance to the
present. Although written before the emergence of COVID-19 and the subsequent pan-
demic, many of the issues discussed in this work can be connected to the challenges
of the present. Fears regarding transience and disease, differential treatment of the geo-
graphically dislocated based on race and gender, the desire to compel work from the pur-
posefully idle, and the limitation of public provision based on insider or outsider status
are all issues raised by O’Brassill-Kulfan from which one can draw analogy to the
present. Indeed, amid a pandemic where cross-boundary differences in public policy
with regard to public health can have significant consequences, Vagrants and
Vagabonds also draws attention to the ways in which the federalist nature of the
American state can lead to a haphazard landscape of state interventions.
With respect to the more particular concerns of the regular Punishment & Society con-
sumer, O’Brassill-Kulfan’s work provides several additional contributions. At the cross-
roads of punishment and economics, Vagrants and Vagabonds examines how a control
strategy prominent in colonial American life –settlement laws –became ill-suited to the
challenges of the early 19th century. The uncertain nature of the period’s economy com-
bined with seasonal oscillations in employment opportunities to render movement a
necessity for individuals seeking subsistence and survival. As the author convincingly
argues, laws demanding fixity of residence were very much at odds with the nascent cap-
italism of the Early American Republic. Likewise, without employing the term, this work
provides a further example of historical penal layering, or the imbrication of novel penal
practices with extant structures. Even as states began to erect penitentiaries as sites for the
internal exclusion of serious criminals, they retained and enforced settlement laws as a
tool to (attempt to) exclude those deemed as lesser dangers from civic life through the
combined use of banishment (via enforced relocation) and incarceration (in local jails
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