Book Review: Pere Marquette: A Michigan Railroad System before 1900 by Graydon M. Meints

Abstract

to their community of settlement, and to incarcerate any who refused to travel or who illegally returned. One of the many strengths of the book is the way in which it stresses the diversity of the transient population in early America, and chapter four provides a valuable account of the ways in which both fugitive slaves and transient freed slaves were dealt with by the authorities, set within the context of debates about race and slavery at the time. Many transients were imprisoned under the vagrancy laws, and chapter six describes the penal policies of the period and compares the treatment of transients with other criminals that were dealt with by the judicial system. Unsurprisingly, disease was rife among those who lived much of their life on the road, and transients were frequently blamed for spreading infectious disease within the communities they passed through. They were especially targeted during cholera epidemics with the homeless and other transients suffering disproportionately. A final concluding chapter briefly raises some broader issues, including comparison of the management of transients in America with systems in other countries, and discussion of the role of the state within society. It is a shame that some of these issues were not more fully developed. This is a good book that is very well researched (there are some 46 pages of footnotes at the end of the volume), and which tackles a difficult and often neglected topic and time period. It will provide an important text on transiency and the ways in which it was managed by authorities in the years after American independence. Of course, the population discussed in this volume were not the only people who travelled frequently in America. Rates of mobility would have been high for much of the population. What the book does do is to explain how and why one particular subset of those who travelled were singled out and, in many cases, criminalised by the authorities of the time.