Settler Vagrancy

Abstract

This chapter assesses the legal and imaginative specificity of vagrancy law and its relation to land in North America. It reads Charles Brockden Brown's novels Wieland (1798) and Edgar Huntly (1799) — both long regarded as crucial and ambivalent meditations on the viability of the new American republic — alongside archival records of vagrancy arrests in Philadelphia in the 1790s. The chapter shows how the emergent category of nationally distinct American whiteness relied on figures of mobility through the frontier, yet remained uncomfortably difficult to distinguish from the criminalized (and often differently racialized) category of vagrancy. It also looks at the startling prominence of literary history in the landmark 1972 Supreme Court case Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, which struck down vagrancy laws as unconstitutional. The chapter argues that a particularly potent literary afterlife of the figure of the vagrant rendered this figure a symbol of free, white settler mobility.