Part One: The War On Vagrants

escalating war against the houseless. And kind of on one side, you've got this huge right wing media ecosystem that like anytime there's like a homeless person who's set up near a fancy building somewhere in the West Coast, or anytime like some right winger sees poop on the street, or anytime there's there's like a broken window anywhere, you get these like like this whole fucking ecosystem of shitty websites and sites like The Post being kind of the bigger

ones putting up these articles about how San Francisco's in chaos, or you know, Portland is in chaos, or New York City's in chaos, and kind of as a result.

any of that. We blame you know, the folks who need to live in a tent because that's the only thing they can afford. And kind of a surge of fun new laws has come down the pipeline in the very recent past. This kind of like moral panic has sort of metastasized this year into a sweeping wave of new laws to criminalize houselessness. In Missouri, a state law recently took effect January of this year that makes it a crime for any person to sleep on state property.

This doesn't just mean like you can't crash on the steps of the Capitol building or whatever. It means like if you're sleeping in a public park or under a highway, you can face up to seven hundred and fifty dollars in fines and get up to fifteen days in prison. The law went into effect right as Missouri cut funding for homeless services, making incarceration the best funded option for a lot of people living on the streets right now.

Last August, Los Angeles' city council banned homeless encampments within five hundred feet of schools and daycares. This mirrored comments made two days before we recorded this episode by San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, alongside a video that was just like these dramatic shots of homeless camps and like parents walking their kids to school and looking frightened. He made this post quote, the encampments make it hard for kids walking to school. They are forced into the street to

get around them. Plus they're seeing things kids should never see now. Yeah, definitely, it's bad for kids to realize that, like our addiction to capitalism has human consequences. We should be we should be putting those people in fucking camps where where children won't have to realize that perhaps there are injustices in the system they live under.

mayor is pushing for. And they had an interview with a woman named Zuleima who is homeless alongside her six year old son, and she's like, this means that my six year old son won't be able to, like, we won't be able to sleep near the school that he goes to. It's cool stuff, anyway, this is all very anti human and fucked up, and there's a shipload of bastardry in all of this.

all used. I don't think being a vagrant is a bad thing, very pro vagrant, but you know, it's it is the legal term that for most of our nation's history, and for most of like Western modern Western history, has been used for people who like don't have a home in the traditional sense of the word. I've been a vagrant a little bit when I was younger, and then my grandfather was a hobo in World War two or not World War two, in the Great Depression, you know,

road freight trains around looking for work. Oh that's the oid line of yeah, yeah, no, I mean I think it's interesting when you kind of bring up the Great Depression generation because like that that generation gets lionized so much, particularly by conservatives, and like a most many, if not most, of like those people.

work a job. Most homeless people work a job. Like this is just what's the open meaning? You know?

the cracks really, And it didn't start that way. This episode started because there's a band that I listened to a lot when I was younger called State Radio, and they've got a song called The Story of Benjamin Darling Part one, and it's based on the story of the It's based on the largely apocryphal details about the life of a very real guy. He's a was a freed slave who established an island community for mixed race people

off the coast of Maine. And I wanted to tell that story because there's a lot of bastardury and like why the community stopped existing, And so I thought, just kind of based on my surface level knowledge of the story before I started digging in, I thought, Okay, this is going to be like a story about like a bunch of racists from cities and towns in Maine, you know, just going after these these people who were kind of

like living off grid, doing their own thing. But the more I dug into the story, the more I found out that the evil in the story of like what Happened to Benjamin Darling's Descendants is a story about vagrancy and a story about the way our culture prosecutes these people. So let's get into it, because I think this is going to go some places you may not anticipate. The concept of vagrancy was established in the West in the early modern period, kind of the end of the medieval

early modern period. During most of the medieval era, most poor people in kind of Western European countries were some kind of like peasant or surf and in England, like surfdom is kind of more of an Eastern thing, but in England and a lot of Western Europe there was this status called villainage. And it's not villains spelled the way we spell it, it's v I L L E I N. I don't know, maybe there's I should have checked to see if that was the root of our

term villain. But I'm a hack and a fraud. But a villain, like in the medieval context, was a kind of surf. Basically, they're a person who's bound to a parcel of life and got to occupy it and farm it in return for laboring for his liege lord, usually working in the lord's fields, although I'm sure there were other options and thus in the countryside. For most of kind of this medieval period, anything approaching homelessness on a large scale was usually uncommon. You would have some people

who were, you know, kind of roving between. Some of them would be like entertainers, some of them would be you know, you know, merchants, some of them would be kind of folks in a more desperate state. But there usually weren't like huge numbers of folks like that because it was kind of part of the system. Was like people generally had like a place they were supposed to be, and yeah, it was kind of when you sort of got large numbers of people who were, you know, didn't

have a set place to occupy to live. It was generally because like a war or something had swept through their land, right and you'd have had like a bunch of villages burnt down and people uprooted. But the growth of cities kind of as the medieval period sort of leads to early modernity, the sort of growth of cities leads to larger and larger numbers of people who have no real means of support. A lot of this was the result of the increase increasing enclosure of common lands,

which forced people out of their rural lifestyles. That's where there used to just kind of be land that was everyone, so you could graze your sheep on it, you could grow stuff on it, you know. And over time, like that started becoming the property of like generally members of the nobility, and so it was fenced off and separated from the people who had been using it, which made them unable to live the way that they had lived

and force them generally into cities. Cities are rancid pits of disease in this period, So a lot of times people would die and they'd leave their kids orphaned, or like you know, a woman who'd had like you know, a husband who was supporting her would suddenly have no method of support, and this led to a growing vagrant class, and a lot of vagrants, by the way, were former soldiers, right, because in this period, you go to war for the king, your duke or whatever, and you lose an arm, good

luck to you. You're not getting like you're not getting like a fucking disability payment, right, Like, there's not a va Yeah, you know, there are some things that kind of fill that gap, but not well, yeah, generally. Yeah.

There was some degree of sympathy for that, but there was a great deal and it kind of becomes this growing moral panic, particularly in England, and like the sixteen late fifteen hundreds early sixteen hundreds, about people who were in physically good shape but didn't have any means of support, and the term that started being used for them was sturdy beggars. This is a kind of slur, sturdy beggar. It's meant to imply both that a person is like

healthy and can work and chooses not to. And the common idea was that, like, these people are con men. Right if like you're able to work and you don't have some sort of job, you're a con man. In townshend cities started keeping lists of sturdy beggars and their supposed crimes. And if you are looking to make some D and D characters this weekend, are these are pretty good places. So I'm just gonna read one from the

sixteen hundreds. But the guy the guys like crime was pretending to be insane and like following people until they gave him money to go away. And his nickname, his nickname was tom O Bedlam, which is fucking hell. I do love tom O Bedlam. Fucking cool name, guys. So in fifteen forty seven, furious British elites pushed through the First Vagrancy Act, which declared that any able bodied person who lacked employment should be branded with a V, so should be like branded with a V and sold into

slavery for two years. It's pretty pretty bad. There were no sort of like there was no like separation between like if this happens like a dude in his thirties or like a six year old, and in fact, child vagabonds were regularly forced into labor. It was thought to be good for them. Laws agin teach them some life skill exactly. And these kind of these laws spread from the UK to other parts of Western year or to

parts of Western Europe. Some of the laws are not it's not always like you get branded and sold into slavery. Laws in other places would demand that vagrants be whipped and then returned to their birthplaces. The idea was like, well, their people will like make them work, right, you know. Throughout the sixteen hundreds, while kind of this this sort

of war on vagrancy, that's when it really starts. Kind of the late fifteen hundreds you get these very first laws, and then the sixteen hundreds it kind of it becomes the norm that it will be criminalized to be out and about in cities and towns without a visible means of support. Right now, while this is going on throughout the early sixteen hundreds, a couple of other big things are happening. One of those big things is the Atlantic slave trade, right, that's really starting to cook in the

sixteen hundreds. And another thing that's really starting to cook in the sixteen hundreds is the British colonies in the New World, right in the northeast coast of North America. And kind of while both of these things are happening, everyone has one of those like Reese's Pieces Peanut butter Cup moments where they're like, well, if we mix slavery and qualities to get a govna and you know, that's a you know that story, right, Like everybody's aware of kind of where that goes.

But it really abolitionism starts to really pick up legal momentum kind of one hundred and sixty hundred and seventy years later, in the late seventeen hundreds. Popular summaries of the battle to abolish slavery tend to focus on the first electoral successes of state abolitionist movements, which started when slavery was made illegal by Massachusetts in seventeen eighty three. By the early eighteen hundreds, the legal Atlantic slave trade had been ended, although that did not mean that people

stopped doing that sort of shit. It just meant that, like they could get in trouble for it. And yeah, it's interesting to me that like kind of when we talk about, at least when I think about my education on sort of the history of slavery and abolitionism, it's sort of portrayed fairly quickly in this period sweeping over the North. And so there's this very quickly we have our good guys and our bad guys. Right, you've got the free States and the slave States, and that all

builds up to the Civil War. That cuts out the fairly long period in which slavery was real popular in New England. And yeah, I think that's probably a mistake. And since our story involved slavery in New England today, I want to talk a little bit about that. So here's a quote from an article on slavery in Maine in the Portland Press Herald. Quote, slavery in New England

look much different than those large southern plantations. In New England, enslaved men, women and children were owned by prominent and wealthy merchants, but also by families of less prominence who used slaves to do the manual labor they had once done themselves. Northern slave owners were more likely to own one or two slaves than hundreds. The enslaved people became the foundation that moves those early household economies to a market economy because of the labor that the slave owner

was previously was responsible for. Once he has the enslaved person, it frees him up to begin to build his own economic base, said author Patricia Wall, who researches and writes about slavery and Maine. Well, there weren't hundreds and thousands the way there were in the South. You can see that the enslaved people were at the base of the economy and these small communities in Maine and throughout New England.

So a lot of what becomes kind of the upper class in these in these colonies, particularly these more rural areas, are families who start out with a couple of slaves to help them with, like you know, they're cooking food, they're cleaning, doing the laundry and stuff, and that frees up the free people to like make money which generate you know, in a lot of cases, when you're looking at a place like mad and the people who have like nice houses and money now two hundred years later,

it's because you know, their ancestors enslaved somebody and it let him get a leg up.

those slaves or bringing them in and stuff. But that does not mean that, like after that point, Maine stops playing a role in the spread of slavery. For one thing, Maine has the second highest percentage of registered seamen in the United States and is a shipbuilding hub. And there's a lot of stories in this period of like seamen from Maine taking slaves and like selling them in places like the Caribbean, and like illegally doing like slave runs and stuff. I'm proud of me for not laughing when

I said seaman twice. You know, I feel like we should have known I laughed.

There's a good chance he was born somewhere and after Africa and was taken over to North America kind of during the latter stages of the Atlantic slave trade. He may have been born here and then separated from his family when he was sold as an adult, or as

at least like a teenager. We simply don't know. But while we lack details about his life, we do have archives of history of slavery in Massachusetts in Maine which are filled with letters from slave traders that provide some grim context as to the kind of experience he might have had, especially if he was brought over from Africa. And I'm going to quote from one of these letters now, Sir, I received yours by Captain Morris with bills of lading

for five negroes and one hogshead of rum. One negro woman marked why on the left breast, died in about three weeks after her arrival, in spite of medical aid which I procured. All the rest died at sea. I am sorry for your loss. It may have resulted in deficient clothing so early in the spring. Benjamin Bullard to Sir William Pepperrell, June twenty fifth, seventeen nineteen. She is maybe a deck or two before this guy was born. Yeah, I hope they died pooping themselves to death pretty badly.

But you see, like it's like it was pretty there's a decent chance, like almost to guarantee one where the other. This guy's got some pretty intense trauma in his childhood or early life. Now, there's two kind of broad versions of the story of Benjamin Darling. One was that his mother smuggled him out of slavery and into freedom and he just kind of entered life in Maine as a freeman. That is not the most common version of the story. The most you know, there are a couple little like

he escaped on his own too, you get that. But the most widely told and enduring myth of Benjamin Darling, who was a real dude, is the one I'm going to relate to you right now. So whatever went on with this guy when he's you know, a kid and a young man. By the start of the seventeen nineties, he had been purchased by the captain of a small merchant vessel that ran the coast of New England up at least as far as Port and probably hauling Timber.

The exact story of what happened is apocryphal, but the most common version of it is that one day, you know, this captain basically is this kind of he's a small business owner. He's somebody who has like a boat, probably not a huge one, doesn't really have the money for a large crew, and in order to kind of like make his business more efficient, and as we've talked about, build his economic base up, this guy buys Benjamin, right, and you know, they're they're running the coast of New

England together, doing kind of like cargo loads. And one day, you know, they judge things wrong. A storm comes in stronger and bigger than kind of they had anticipated, and they're they're kind of caught with their pants down. This fierce gale overtakes the small ship. Buffeted by winds and waves, the boat crashes into a brace of jagged rocks off the North Main coast, and the captain has flung into

the frigid, churning waters. Now ben in this situation is a dude who has been like probably ripped away from his family one way or the other to work for this guy. Ye like incredibly difficult backbreaking labor by on

the sea. No reasonable person could have judged him for leaving that man to drown, especially given the fact that, like, I don't know, most people don't know how to swim, even if you're on a boat in this period, like it's not common to be good at swim, and even if you are, like fuck, it doesn't matter how good you are at swimming. Diving in to try to save someone who's drowning is a terribly dangerous thing for the

best swimmers in the world. Like, it's incredibly anyway, So for a lot of reasons, no one could have blamed ben for just kind of like trying to get his own ass out of here. But he dives into the water after this man who like bought and like uses him as chattel, pulls him out of the water and to Shuore saves his life. The captain, so the legend goes,

was basically just overcome with shame. Once she regained consciousness realizes like, oh my god, I was like treating this person as like a fucking can opener, and they just saved my life like for no reason other than the goodness in their heart. So he immediately frees Benjamin and making Benjamin a freedman and disappears hereafter from the pages of history. Benjamin Darling does not disappear. He takes a job at a salt mill near Phippsburg, which is a

ridiculously named town in Maine. I do not like it Phipps b U r G. I want to say Phillipsburg. Every time I look at it. I'm livid. Fuck you people, Fuck Phipsburg. Anyway, Benjamin lives in Phipsburg, and he takes a job at a salt mill, and he develops a reputation very quickly as a reliable worker and a good citizen.

And this may seem hard to believe, given where the story goes, but from what I've read, it seems fair to say, actually that like a free black man in rural Maine in this period was one of the better situations you could be as like a free black guy. For one thing, fear and hatred of Indigenous Americans by white settlers was much more like the thing that white people were flipped out about in Maine in this period.

So like a free black dude was seen as like, well, if he's like one of us, then it's it's us against these these dangerous you know natives, Right, yeah, there was there was. This is like the historians ever would be like he might have faced kind of less discrimination in this particular period in main than you might expect. Yeah, and what we have, the actual like official documents from like that that kind of got recorded in the local

government about Ben are all really positive. He's described as a sturdy and industrious individual. He marries a white woman named Sarah Proverbs, and one of the very few details we get about his life after this point is that he is mauled by a bear defending his neighbor's corn patch, which probably yeah, yeah, which probably describes why local records call him a man with many staunch friends, right, Like he's he's like, he's like a solid just saves people.

You can rely on Ben, He's got your back. Yeah. So you know he lives up to his last name. Yeah, yeah, he's a darling. And so he marries Sarah Proverbs, giving her a much better last name. Like I cannot overstate what a glow up darling is over Proverbs.

the United States. That said, that may have been something that did cause him problems because in about seventeen ninety four, when he and Sarah have two sons, he buys an island off the coast of Maine. So he's like, now, islands aren't that expensive back then, right, Like, now having an island means like island of money. Yeah, it's a big thing. Back then, it's like, oh, you want like a rock to die on. Like yeah, it's like, do you have any idea how are these islands are to

live on? But you know, that does probably also insinuate that he was pretty thrifty and resourceful. I'm gonna guess it wasn't like nothing. But anyway, he buys this island, Horse Island, probably saved the life of the person who is selling. Just keeps saving people, getting till he's given an island. So he gets this.

know why I said lion. Oh you said mountain lion. Anyway, whatever, So he and Sarah and their sons moved to this island, Horse Island, and kind of, you know, they have some more kids, their kids get married to other people, and they this community starts to build on Horse Island, mostly of mixed race people, right, And it's it's kind of like you do kind of get the feeling that like, well, maybe once they started to have kids, the white people

in Pitpsburg and stuff were a little bit less welcoming of Benjamin. Either that or he was just smart enough to be like, you know, it's probably not going to be safe forever to hang out around all of these like white people who are not going to treat my kids. Well, we should just kind of do our own thing out in the sticks.

to survive. We are not talking fertile soil. We are not talking a shitload of stuff that you can like you know, pick out of the ground or whatever to live off of. You're you're pulling stuff out of the sea, and you're you are you are working your ass off

to like make that place habitable. That said, you know, when he moves to Horse Island, part of what drew him there may have been the fact that he had, you know, lived in the area for a while, and he had heard plenty of stories about the folks who lived out in those islands off the off the coast of Maine, and kind of in this period of time, these islands, because there's there's hundreds of them, had come to be inhabited by this kind of growing population of

people who were considered who were either considered undesirable by mainstream society back on land, or who themselves considered settled society back on land undesirable. A good number of them were what you'd call were what was called maroons, and these were formerly enslaved Africans who had freed themselves, right, who had gotten away. But like that's not a safe

legal position to be in. And they figure, if I'm hanging out in this fucking island off the coast of Maine, people will anyone trying to come and get me is probably got to die finding me, right, Like it's sorry out here. Yeah. One source I found on the matter notes quote, these early settlers maintain their ancestral languages and lived in caves to avoid detection, which is pretty dope,

cool story. Yeah, it is unlikely. Well it's possible that Been and his family kind of lived this way, but you know, they had been pretty integrated to some extent into kind of like mainstream American society for a while. Kind of however, life, whatever life was like on Horse Island for this community. They established the relationship that he has with his wife, and the existence of their kids is illegal in the state of Maine, as are the marriages that all of their kids are going to have

later on, because they're all mixed race. Heedless of this, though, the Darlings spread and multiply and start to kind of like seed into little communities all throughout these islands through the early to mid eighteen hundreds, from Horse Island and some of the areas and the mainland around Pitpsburg down to Portland and his descendants, it seems like are as, you know, thrifty and successful as their patter familias, and right as the Civil War starts to or sorry not

right as the Civil War comes to an end, and kind of like the period where shit's starting to build in the US towards that I think it's eighteen forty seven, two of Darling's granddaughters sell the family interest in Horse Island and use it to buy all forty one acres of a nearby island, which they start calling Malaga for reasons that aren't really known. We don't really know why they called it that, but they start calling it Malaga Island.

is a mystery. Today. Malaga Island, population zero, lies just a short span of water away from the Krabby Lobster Shack on the mainland and directly across from the Kennebec Kennel. But back in the late so it's like today, if you look at it, it's not that far from stuff. Like you know, you can kind of like take a boat across in a few minutes and then you're back on the mainland where there's like city or towns and stuff. But back in the late eighteen hundreds, antiques stores I've

been to, I've been to the coast of Maine. It's antique stores. It's nothing but antique stores back then. It is I cannot exaggerate. This is like maybe the most isolated place in the United States, or these islands off the coast of Maine. Like you are out off the fucking grid, right, I mean there's not a grid, nobody has power, but like everyone's off grid, I guess. But these guys are off off grid, right, like you are

really kind of out out in the wilds. And as a result, the people who live in these islands are able to kind of develop communities separate from mainland culture and the rest of the world in a way that does not exist anymore. These little islands around Maine central coast then are kind of settled over the late eighteen hundreds, you know that started out as a lot of these maroon communities and people like Darling. They get added to by these sort of ragged bands of loaners, madmen, and

people whose existence had been criminalized by the state. Darling's granddaughters, and this sounds like a rule it does, it's you're not going to stop thinking that it sounds pretty fucking cool.

like free black people. There's Native Americans, and there's mixed race residents and these kind of These folks all come from very different backgrounds, but they're united primarily in their desire to get away from the rest of the country and raise their children in peace. This is not an easy life, as this rite up from Soulofamerica dot com makes clear, Malaga Island was typical of many island communities of the eastern Castbay, which were seldom occupied by legal owners.

Fishermen would store their gear in crudely constructed sheds or shacks and often remain on the islands as unchallenged squatters for generations. Having little contact with the mainland. These individuals, who are not counted in the census, seldom paid taxes and rarely voted. Illness and even death were taken care

of at home, as was education. Most of the inhabitants of Malaga Island were direct descendants of Darling, including his sons Isaac and Benjamin, both of whom married women of the island and raised a total of fourteen children over time. Other groups also inhabited the island, including Irish, Scottish and Portuguese. And again this is a tough place. The soil shit, so you're not going to grow a lot of food.

You can raise some livestock, but they've got to be like goats and shit, really like hardy animals, and most of what they live on period is going to be taken from the sea. This includes huge quantities of like shellfish, which is part of why we know what we do about them, because when they would shell you know, the stuff they were eating would toss the shells and these large middens in the community, and they would toss other stuff there. And that's a really good way to preserve

certain things. So actually, like a surprising amount gets preserved because of the nature of their diet. One of the things that's preserved this way are ledgers and papers from a school that was established on the island. Linda Wyman of the Pitpsburg Historical Society notes, the papers written by the students show their penmanship was perfect and their spelling was better than mine. It absolutely shows that kids were educated, not illiterate or so called feeble minded or any of

those things. They're going to be accused of being that quite later. But from everything we know, not only did these people survive in this difficult place, but they put a premium on making sure their kids were educated, which is pretty fucking dope, I think. So something like fifty people live on Malaga at its height. Again, forty one acres is not big, especially considering not all of the land is the land that you could put a house on. They survived in a mix of Some people would build

these small houses. A lot of folks are basically like taking boats and shoving them up on land and then converting the boats into houses. Some of the houses like float and they can float them to other islands if they like decide to move, which is pretty It's kind of it's kind of dope. It's kind of cool.

houses and farms on the mainland. And so yeah, that's also an important point is these people are not totally isolated. A lot of them make money, at least a side income, sometimes seasonal, working for folks on the mainland. One woman on the island. We know, was a laundress for a bunch of boarding houses in Pitpsburg. So she would take their water, their laundry handle, you know, a large volume of washing, and then return it once it was dried. So for on the main land, Yeah, on the main

very nice, very nice, getting away with a lot of that. Well, you know who else likes ads, Sophie, You the listeners. I was going to say, the same people who were largely responsible for the worst parts of this story. Anyway, here's ads. So yeah, you know, for a time, life seems to have been is about as good for the denizens of Mlaga as it could be, particular for people

who weren't white as hell in the United States. In this period of time, they were isolated and in very poor obviously, but they were pretty much completely free, right in a way that very few people in all of history have ever been. Yeah. Yeah, So back on the mainland. Slavery reaches its peak in the United States and shortly thereafter its calamitous end. Freedom comes to black men and women in the United States, but it was not freedom

as the Malagites knew it. In the occupied South, white men started even before the end of the war, scheming for a way to maintain what they saw as the natural order. In eighteen sixty two, Union troops took the city of Memphis. Quite understandably, freed black people started fleeing there right There was a lot of areas where they

had been kept in bondage near Memphis. If you could kind of escape and get through the Confederate lines, then you get to be a free person in Memphis, which sounds a lot better than not being a free person. So it kind of was for a while. Memphis is sort of this like Southern Canada almost. You might see it that way, where it's like, if we can get

to fucking Memphis, then we're, you know, we're free. By the wars end, the city's black population had gone from three thousand to twenty thousand, So this is a pretty dramatic change. But while that's great, you know who's not going to be happy about a demographic change like that. This isn't an advertiser based pro shop. Yeah, yeah, the Beast pro shop pyramid owners, who I am blaming for all of what we're about to talk to. So I'm going to quote next from an article and a website

called Zocallo by Christopher Hager quote. The growth of Memphis free black population meant that West Tennessee plantations were proportionally emptied. To the dismay of cotton planters who needed laborers in their fields, vagrancy laws provided a convenient solution to the labor shortage. Memphis blacks who could not prove gainful employment in the city were presumed guilty of vagrancy and subject to arrest impressment into the agricultural labor force. They were

brought back onto the plantations and forced to sign labor contracts. Yeah, it's pretty pretty fucked up and terrible. So vagrancy laws had come to the United States from like our whole legal system, right, We get it from England, you know, for obvious reasons. And so during the colonial days, the

British had kindly given us their anti vagrancy laws. Now these had for the most part, these were not commonly enforced in most parts of the United States prior to the late eighteen hundreds, and when they were, it was mostly in the South against freed black people who had

the bad luck to exist in slave states. These laws were also enforced on the border between free and slave states and places like Pennsylvania, where such laws were used to maintain a form of racial hierarchy, even in an area in which black people were supposed to not be

subject to slavery. But as the Civil War came to an end, white people across the political spectrum were faced with a tear rible specter large numbers of black people with, as they saw it, nothing to do, and so the enforcement of vagrancy laws against black Americans became one of the first political issues to unite Northern abolitionists and Southern

plantation owners. Because when these laws are instituted and executed in the North, it's going to be abolitionists who pushed them right, and the South it's former Confederates who want to get black people back on the plantation. In the North it's abolitionists. They are a huge part of this. And it's it's interesting they want people to work because they want people to work, right. That's that's the short

end of the story. So in the South, the use of law enforcement to cement racial violence should not surprise anybody, But the North was host to a dedicated population of what were called charity reformers, and most of them, including most of the kind of driving figures behind this movement were people who had been dedicated radical abolitionists prior to the Civil War and kind of the become charity reformers afterwards.

Part of why is that the eighteen seventies, right after the Civil War, the US has its first really great depression, right like the I think eighteen seventy five is when it kind of hits its death. But this is like a calamitous economic collapse, and it's a partial consequence. One of the things that contributes to this is that, like you've got all these soldiers who had been paid by the government and now suddenly they're all demobilized, and that

causes some problems. So one of the things that happens is there's a huge increase in starving people begging for money, and this really pisses off a large number of kind of like upper class liberals who had been who were

staunch abolitionists, and many abolitionists. One of the reasons why this is the case is that a significant chunk of the abolitionist movement hated slavery, not because they weren't racist, although they were generally less racist than you know, the plantation owners, but because they saw slavery as violating the

sacred contract between labor and its employer. Right. That was like a big part of their issue with it is that they believed that workers had a sacred right to choose where they were going to labor, but they didn't have a right to not choose to labor.

neither bought nor sold, but prayed on others. The wage journer abided by the obligations of contract, the beggar eluded them. Charity reformers derived their view of beggary from the best thought of the day, the teachings of classical economists and other liberal and scientific thinkers. Composing a constituency of state and city officials prominent industrialists and businessmen, intellectuals and moral ways,

most of whom had been abolitionists. They were air to an intellectual tradition that dissociated relations of personal dependency from transactions based on voluntary contract. That indeed had been the ideological lesson of the Civil War and emancipation the basis for vindicating the free wage system. Now, I didn't know that.

Wage laborers don't see begging as separate from like them. They be like, yeah, sometimes you wind up like yeah, meeting charity because like shit's fucked, it's it's tough out there. Yeah, but these liberals.

Like they've they've set up this kind of view of the world that they've made without talking to any of the people who like exist in the in the situations that they're trying to define. And it is one of the things that it has kind of like laid out in this belief system, which is also going to play a lot into the eugenics beliefs that are just around the corner, is that like beggars are fundamentally immoral, right, it is it is an act of social evil to not have a means of visible support.

One of the things I find interesting is that in this period, when you've got these people talking about the dangers of like charity or of social aid for folks that like don't have work, you have kind of two different boogeymen they cite. One is socialism, right, which makes sense,

you know that they're that they're they're citing that. The other is monarchism, right, because a lot of Americans in this period believe that monarchies inherently create this like huge class of dependent people who were utterly dependent on the state, and that's seen as anti American. So it's both monarchism and socialism usually by like slightly different chunks of this movement that you see cited as like the nightmare scenario, right, Yeah, interesting to me. I didn't know that idea.

I don't actually need to go beg. I mean he kind of needs to rate doesn't have a job, but he's like, I go out and beg every day because I'm doing a social good because when people give me twenty bucks or whatever, they feel better, like I am good for people. And I've thought about that ever since, like ever since now that I'm employed, when I give money to directly to people who were asking for money,

it's like I feel good about myself. They are doing a social good by like helping people feel good about themselves.

of thing. Like just one of the kind of memorable conversations I had, you know, when I was in Mosul, I was kind of bunking up with this civil defense unit, which is like they're guys who pull people out of like the wreckage of air strikes and shit. Like their job every day was to like go and help people who had been injured in the bombings and fight and stuff from the previous day. And we're kind of like

just chatting about life. I was living in Los Angeles, you know at the time, and like they're asking me about LA because you know, everybody knows about Hollywood, even if they don't know much about the city, and I'm talking about like, you know, the good things and about the problems, and I'm like, you know, there's a lot of like homelessness, and they like kept questioning me about that, and they were so upset with the idea of like people living on the street where they were like what

about like their families, Like was it like doesn't anyone take them in? Don't they have Like there was this like this is kind of like because Iraq's got plenty of problems, but like the the idea that like there would be large numbers of people just kind of completely abandoned by their families and community was like so alien to these guys who were like dealing with some really nasty aspects of their own country, you know, on a

daily basis. But like, yeah, that was it was really just like the kind of disbelief they had that like this could have, that could happen on any kind of large scale, that people would just like let it occur was so interesting to me. Yeah, anyway, So we had talked about a little earlier that in the late or in the seventeen eighties. Massachusetts is the first US state to ban slavery, right, That's something Massachusetts can take great pride in. Massachusetts is also the first Northern state to

criminalize begging. In eighteen sixty six, the Republican Legislature of Massachusetts passes the Act Concerning Vagrants and Vagabonds. Ad Stanley Wright's Massachusetts was the first of the Northern states to enact new rules against beggars. In eighteen sixty six, the Republican dominated legislature passed an Act concerning vagrants and bat vagabonds.

The eighteen sixty Criminal Code had punished beggars along with a motley band of jugglers, tricksters, common pipers and fiddlers, pilferers, brawlers, and lude persons. Sounds like literally my friend the best people. Yeah, everyone I hang out with on a daily basis. Yeah, tricksters, comic drivers, lewd persons, yeah, for sure. But the new

law dealt more specifically on the crime of begging. It was promoted by the Board of State Charities, which explicitly called for additional legislation sentencing sturdy beggars to enforced labor directed against idle persons without visible means of support. The Act punished at forced labor for not longer than six

months in a house of correction or workhouse. Quote, all persons wandering abroad and begging, or who go out from door to door or place themselves in the streets, highways or passages well from other public places to beg or receive alms. One month before the new law took effect, Congress enacted a civil rights The Civil Rights Act which ended the Black Codes in the South. These had been the legal basis for a lot of the vagrancy arrests

of freed black people. So Republicans both spent the post war years cutting down the legal apparatus for one means of suppression and forced labor, and voting in a new

one based around anti vagrancy laws. Because these spread rapidly towards the Northern States, towards the Northern States, kind of outside of Massachusetts, over the next twenty years, many states followed mass The Tramp Acts, as they were often called, were passed in Pennsylvania in eighteen seventy one, in Illinois in eighteen seventy four, and in New York in eighteen eighty and eighteen eighty five. Massachusetts also regularly added new

laws to their vagrancy laws. Every time the economy takes a dip, they'll make more laws to criminalize and force people who are like ruined by economic collapse into the forced labor system. Right, this is like a regular thing where they're constantly like as the economy keeps going up and down, they're constantly like making new laws to put people in workhouses. You know, when they fall through the cracks. Under the Illinois Vagabond Law, begging was punishable with six

months in the workhouse. In New York, beggars were given hard labor in prisons. States soon began extending the time of sin from generally like six months or so at the start to as long as two years. And again. The organizing impulse behind all of these laws is the work of charity reformers eighty Stanley Wrights. Many of the statutes were the direct accomplishment of charity reformers. Among the central tasks the Conference of Charities assigned itself was showing

how legislation ought to travel. As one member declared, suppression of vagrancy in street begging was probably the most important work of charity reform. Even before the Conference of Charities organized the effort, both public and private philanthropic agencies vigorously promoted laws against begging, all of which entailed forced labour. By eighteen sixty six, New York City charity officials had concluded that the only way to prevent sloth was compulsory labor.

A few years later, a commissioner of the New York State Board of Charities recommended that the laws must be

more stringent regarding vagabonds and professional beggars. In Illinois, charity, police and prison officials all pressed in the mid eighteen seventies for what one police chief cond a good vagrant law, and both the Industrial Aid Society in Boston and the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor in New York City, agencies with close ties to the Republican Party promoted penal laws and involuntary labor as a cure for begging. And again, folks, I know, you know, we all hit

Republicans around here. When we're talking about Republicans this period, we're talking about liberals. That's who is is Democrats, right, Like that's like, let's be fair here. We are talking about like liberal intellectual and social elites who are pushing these laws alongside the police who are always super supportive of criminalizing homelessness. Because these vagrant laws. Here's a fun thing.

We'll talk about this more at the end. The way they're written means that cops can just decide someone's vagrant and then they get to do anything they want to them. That's cool, yay, great, hey, great so much. Yeah, it's deeply infuriating. Margaret informersly states a good deal of the you get.

I never understood how people did crime. Like when I meet people who just sort of do drugs or like have drugs or move drugs around, I'm like, I don't understand. You get searched every day, and it's because of this vagrancy shit. It's because of this. Like everyone, if you have a backpack, you are the enemy of the police,

like and just you will be constantly harassed. And I don't think you will quite understand the degree to which that harassment is just ever present even when you're not And it annoys the shit out of me because you have this like ostensible freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.

It wasn't like a daily thing. It was because like we were in a car, right, and like, while if they see that you're sleeping in a car, you get shipped from the cops. If cops just see people in a car, they think like that is that is the

world happening? Is it's supposed to happen a person in a backpack is not supposed to exist outside of a car or a school campus, you know, like it's it is interesting the way that that works, because we were like just as vagrant a city, but like we were ye letting out of the back of a Toyota Prius. But you know, if you don't look like they expect you know, then you're you're generally okay, yep, cool stuff.

So in former slave states, a great deal of the actual punishment work of the vagrant law system was done by employees of the Freedman's Bureau, which had been created in March eighteen sixty five with the stated goal of helping freedmen adapt to their newfound liberty. The first superintendent of the Bureau, though, made it clear that his organization was about control as much as support. He stated his determination that quote freed people shall not become a worthless,

lazy set of vagrants living in vice and idleness. His successor added that Memphis had six thousand black people who were lazy, worthless vagrants, and so in Memphis, the Freedman's Bureau started organizing patrols to arrest black people at random and send them to work for white employers, often the same plantations that had owned them or their relatives. Patrolmen were given bounties of one to five dollars per head, right, and then just told like, get us people. You know,

they recreate slave patrols. They but the freedman's bureaus running them, and they're doing it to provide cheap labor for you know, plantations, and shit, oh god, h this piss is off a lot of freed people. You know, they don't take this lying down. And those who could, for one thing, wrote

letters to the Bureau commissioner. Obvious in this period, literacy is not super widespread among the community of freed people, yet for very obvious reasons, it had been illegal for them to learn to read and write in most of

the places they came from. But there were always people in the community who had either who had taught themselves to read, who had benefited from some sort of education, And so they would organize in groups where like everyone would come and bring their complaints, and like the people who could write would would write letters for everybody and then send them in right in order to kind of do like they were organizing, you know, like in order to like exert a kind of political power, right, the

way that people do so for whatever reason, And I guess it does make sense. Most often, like the most common job for the people who would be like the letter writers in their community were barbers, right, this was a lot of the people doing this are barbers. And one of these barbers is a guy named Warner Madison who had taught himself to read. Now his pros is, obviously it's not like as polished as the writing, and say the government notices organizing vagrant patrols. But he got

his point across. And even with this kind of distance, you can you can feel the rage that radiates off of his words, burning like a fucking cinder. And I'm going to quote again from that article in Zocalo. In a letter to Friedman's Bureau Commissioner Fisk, he began by describing what was going on. They go around and arrest all they can find, regardless of whether they are employed or not. Just ask if you don't want to go

with mister whoever. It may be that they don't find out whether you want to go or not at all, They make out the agreement to sell you for the price that the man gives them. Then Madison narrated in an instance of a young African American man being taken away by the point of the bayonet at the direction of a Friedman's Bureau agent. As his letter rose to a pitched fury, Madison began to punctuate almost every word

as if stabbing at the paper with his pen. I think it is one of the most obnoxious and foul and mean things that exists on any part of this bureau. Why do my children have to get passes now to go to school? Nathan Dudley of the Freedman's Bureau was sent to investigate these claims. He looks into whether or not children are getting like arrested for vagrancy while they're

heading to school, and here's here's what he writes. I can find no evidence whatever that school children with books in their hands have been arrested except in two or three cases. First off, I can't find evidence that they got arrested if they had books. And second, I can't find any evidence except for this evidence other than these people, these kids who got arrested, I can't find any evidence of this is happening. Very funny, not funny, infuriating, but

you know it happened. So, yeah, that's frustrating, you know, yeah, fair to say irritating Malaga. We're thinking back to our friends on Malaga living free of all of this bullshit because they're very isolated, have a lot of protection from this wave of vagrancy laws sweeping the country. So, you know, the eighteen seventies, eighteen eighties, the stuff, they were not really dealing with consequences of this because of how far

off the grid they are. But by the start of the nineteen hundreds, late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds, the unique communities that had formed both on Malaga and these surrounding islands were starting to gain the attention of mainland culture, in a mainland culture that had been influenced by this anti vagrant hysteria. We can illustrate this well with the story of John Darling, a third generation descendant of our buddy Benjamin. He was born in eighteen fifty to Isaac

and Rebecca Wallace Darling in Phippsburg. His brother remained in the area, marrying and having children. At twenty one, John got married to his first cousin, Aurelia Darling, and she gave birth first to a set of stillborn twins and then a son, dying soon after. At twenty nine, John married again to a woman named Albertina Gilliam from Orr's Island, and the family moved to Or's Island to live with

her parents. This was a good life for some years, but then in eighteen ninety seven, the land that his wife's family lived on was sold to a syndicate of Philadelphia businessmen who sold the land off for summer cottages. The Darlings were evicted, so they fled to Pond Island, a half miles to the south and squatted on it, building a two room house that John Darling insulated with newspaper rags and dirt, which is just kind of like what you did at the time, right You can't just

pop down to the home depot. His wife eventually took sick and had to return to the mainland for treatment, while John passed into local legend, living alone as the

Hermit of Pond Island. From a write up by the Harpswell Historical Society, the hermit was featured on postcards and histories and as an example of what might happen to a child if they didn't work hard and learn those ABC's The story of finding John frozen solid in his bed of rags and eaten by everything from rats to seagulls has been told around media campfire, So he becomes kind of this like people will like glimpse him or sail by to look at him, and he's like this

kind of figure of low like mockery, right, because he's he's living alone out there now. Despite kind of this public image of him, johnis by all accounts a resourceful and tough man who like lived alone in the most like and and made a life for himself, built a

fucking house out there and survived to an advance. Doesn't sound lazy, no, he's he sounds like today, a man with the kind of skills that he have would go on one of those game shows like Alone where you have to like live alone in the middle of nowhere with like a knife and win. He would like win every time. Like no, no modern man could compete with John Darling on one of those shows like yeah, oh I gotta be I gotta not talk to anyone for one hundred and twenty five I do that without trying,

like fuck it. Yeah, So again, he's by all accounts a pretty resourceful guy. And he minds his own fucking business. But as the nineteen hundreds were alife, he represented to people on Maine, in places like Pipsburg and Portland, a provention backwards past that they wanted to jettison because it made them feel embarrassed about themselves. Photos were taken of John and published in breathless news and magazine articles to crying his primitive state and the fact that he was

a squatterner. John's physicality was particularly well suited to this sort of thing. He was over six feet tall and at least two hundred and fifty pounds, which again suggests he's pretty good at surviving out there if he's that big. But they're like, look's they basically treat him like an ogre, right, like he's this, like this, like dangerous, like almost inhuman hobo living you know, alone on this island. There were rumors in local reporting that he was illiterate and uncultured,

although there's no actual evidence of this. The Harpswell Historical Society notes his signature has not been found on any town records or petitions, and it is quite likely that he did not read or write, but it may also be that he was just not a very sociable person and did not concern himself with the affairs of others or the town, preferring to keep to himself, and therefore did not sign or make his mark on the public record.

The treatment of John Darling would be mirrored with greatly enhanced brutality against other descendants of Benjamin Darling on their kin and their kin on Malaga Island. And that is the story we are going to talk about when we come back in part two. But Margaret, you know what time it is right now?

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