Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

by Kate Masur

In Ohio in 1849, the assembly that repealed most of the black laws adopted a new statute designed to reduce migration by people who were “likely to become chargeable as paupers in any township … or to become vagrants.” A similar fungibility of race and class continued after the Civil War. The idea persisted in many quarters that poor people who were transient or appeared not to be working posed a threat to public peace and good order, and that such people were not entitled to the same basic rights as others. Freedmen’s Bureau agents and other northerners in the post–Civil War South insisted on racial equality before the law but felt entirely free to crack down on “vagrancy” and “vagabondage.”