In Chapter One, I outline a brief history of the representation of US transiency from the postbellum period into the early twentieth century. I explore how the term ‘tramp’ developed as a term of moral and legal exclusion to describe the mobile poor, who were felt to be opting out of the capitalist work ethos. I show that while the tramp had been a figure of mockery in popular culture, during the late nineteenth century the problem began to be treated more seriously by a range of proto-sociological figures. In the early twentieth century, investigators increasingly accepted a connection between vagrancy and unemployment, and representations became less hyperbolic as a result, although no less tainted by class bias. Finally, the chapter shows how the term ‘hobo’, constructed to mean a transient wage-worker, was developed by the IBWA, the IWW and others to fight back against the cultural meaning and legal implications of the term tramp, creating what I call the ‘frontier defence’ of transiency. However, this defence had problematic connotations and exclusions based on gender and race.

In 1833, the British Parliament voted to abolish slavery in its overseas colonies, establishing a four-year “apprenticeship” system to gradually transition the slave-based agricultural system to a wage-based economy. This chapter focuses on American responses to British abolition. People on both sides of the slavery issue were keen to observe the outcome of freedom at the heart of Britain’s lucrative plantation economy, and both Americans and the British clamored to witness and record the unfolding of emancipation on the black-majority sugar islands. In the process, this chapter shows, anti-slavery advocates honed various forms of social investigation to prove and publicize their belief that emancipation could succeed in the sectionally divided United States.