Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [65]
This was, then, a society based on mobility and immigration; but it was also a society suspicious of immigrants and strangers, especially those who were detached and alone, without community or social circle or family, without fixed setting. Fear and hatred of the deracinated is a theme that runs through much of the history of American law. This fear was, of course, not completely irrational. Most serious criminals, serial murderers, “bad hombres” in general, come out of the ranks of rootless men.
The hobo or tramp—that is, the unsettled, unattached male—crops up throughout the nineteenth century as an object of fear and scorn; people accused tramps of every conceivable crime or vice; they were probably the most common, most widespread of all nineteenth-century bogeymen.78 Christopher Tiedman wrote in 1886 that the vagrant was “the chrysalis of every-species of criminal. A wanderer through the land, without home ties, idle, and without apparent means of support, what but criminality is to be expected from such a person?”79
Yet, beyond a doubt, the vagrant, or tramp, was often more a victim than a predator. Under this heading people lumped together a wild miscellany of men. Certainly, there were roving thieves and lowlifes; a few were mentally disturbed; others were itinerant laborers, derelicts, the unemployed, the cast-off debris of capitalism, the casualties of an open and mobile society; some were men on the loose, seeking their fortune—or at least a living—far from home. Charles Sutton described the “tattered army of Vagrancy” in post—Civil War New York as a army of drunken, hopeless men, marching “to a pauper’s grave under the same ragged banner”; they drifted in and out of station houses and jails; the police called them “Revolvers,” and jails were “their only home.”80 What they had in common, if anything, was lack of family and home. This was the underlying problem. They represented a “deeply disrupted social order, a society without the stable nuclear family.”81
The fear of tramps reminds us of the fear of “masterless men,” from an earlier period, in England. In a tight, authoritarian society, such people were a tremendous threat to the established order. They were men out of place, men whose vibrations shook society like a house of cards. But nineteenth-century democracy, in its own way, was just as horrified by “masterless men,” though for different reasons. The masterless men of the nineteenth century were men who were not part of the moral and social order. This order depended on family connections, above all. Rootless, normless people were a special threat to society because the whole grand experiment in self-rule depended on discipline and self-control. That is, a free country, a free society, a country with fluid class lines and freedom of movement assumed that people would play according to the rules; that they would put on, of their own free will, the yoke of conventional morality, the handcuffs of moderate behavior and self-discipline. And if they did not, they had to be punished.
Vagrancy laws are a case in point. These laws, to be sure, go back far into English history—to the Middle Ages, to be exact. They carried over to the colonies, and survived into the republican period. A law of Indiana Territory (1807) “concerning Vagrants,” applied to gamblers, people loitering around without “wherewithal to maintain” themselves by some “visible property,” and all “idle, vagrant and dissolute persons, rambling about without any visible means of subsistence.” If the vagrant was under twenty-one, the sheriff could “bind him to some person of useful trade” until he reached twenty-one; if he was over twenty-one, the local justice could direct the sheriff to “hire him out for any term not exceeding nine months”; if nobody wanted to take the vagrant, the court could order him to be whipped on his bare back, up to thirty-nine lashes.82
This was not exceptional. The old settled states all had vagrancy laws. The laws also made the cross-country