The vagrancy laws in states like Virginia, Maryland and Delaware were also utilized to control the settlement of freed African-Americans and assist in enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
The economic pressures generated forms of social control disproportionately besetting the poor, and therefore a portion of the Irish immigrants. This legislation and policing of people’s activities for the need of the economy, local and national, led to the criminalization of social and economic agency by the lower economic classes by outlawing their migration and attempts at subsistence.
In Lowell, MA, two camps were established in the 1820s, one for the Corkians and one for the Far Downers. Some Irish set up “Paddy Camps,” think shantytown and shanty Irish. Many were forced to search for work and that placed individuals in a precarious legal position. Real estate prices collapsed, and farmers could not get a fair price for their goods.ġ837 is the year of the first plea bargain. The Panic of 1837 was the second longest economic depression in U.S. However, the United States suffered from financial panics in 1819, 1837, 1857, 18. The enforcement of these laws was an attempt to make it illegal to not work. If you appeared to lack funding, you would be detained and the determination would be made to transport you back to your last residence or to send you to the almshouse. Communities did not want to allocate resources to vagrants who did not have legal residence in that community.Īpparently, the Protestant elite let the right hand know what the left hand was doing. Some were in America after being sentenced to transportation and never had resources, others were freed indentured servants, and others where just down on their luck. Many Irish immigrants were among those interviewed by the courts to determine their status. Vagrancy statutes were enacted in the early 19 th century along the east coast to address the numbers of unemployed who attempted to be migrant labors. Vagrancy laws are the genesis of this evolving legal system. That is a discussion of how the law was utilized to address immigration concerns and how the Irish participated in the various contexts within this developing system. The last two columns have discussed the origin of the plea bargain in American judicial history and the temporal intersections with Irish immigration and industrialization. Samuel Starkweather, Mayor of Cleveland, 1858. “In my administration of the Police, which in every city is a source of more care and responsibility than any other department connected with a city government,…I am satisfied that there is no service which may be more utterly useless, or more valuable, according to the character and conduct of the men employed in it.”
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