From the nation’s earliest days, many laws that singled people out by race had been connected to those that targeted people based on their economic status. Americans readily accepted policies that cast suspicion on dependent poor people, particularly those who were moving from one jurisdiction to another, and subjected them to deportation, incarceration, and even sale. In places such as Ohio and Illinois, early legislatures had constructed their black laws atop old and accepted poor-law structures, justifying this matrix of regulation as necessary for the “domestic police” of the state. State
...more
