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

by Kate Masur

But race was not the only kind of difference that was significant in this society, and many of the racist laws in Ohio and elsewhere were built atop laws designed to address challenges of poverty and dependency. These legal structures dated back to the sixteenth century and the English tradition of managing the poor. Local governments in England had responded to a rising population of mobile poor people and their demands for aid by establishing regulations designed to distinguish between those who belonged in the community and those who did not. The core idea in the English poor-law tradition was that families and communities were obliged to provide for their own dependent poor, but not for transients and strangers.