Benjamin Darling and the Malaga Island community illustrate how post-Civil War vagrancy laws, like the 1866 Massachusetts Act, criminalized freedom to enforce forced labor. While islanders thrived off-grid until the late 1800s, mainland reformers used these statutes to target freed Black people, framing isolation as backwardness. Ultimately, this historical erasure reveals that modern homelessness laws stem from a deliberate strategy to suppress marginalized autonomy rather than address poverty. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:03:14
This is an iHeart podcast.
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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
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You know the famous author Roll Dahl.
He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
All episodes are out now.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, I was a spy.
Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists.
We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire 2 a.m. video on Demand This Guy's 2 a.m. 2 a.m. whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm like wild bats.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like.
Listen to Last Culturalistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's not sending Sophie the script, my Robert?
This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about anti-authoritarianism.
And as an anti-authoritarian, I reject the hierarchy of Sophie demanding my scripts before the episode.
Here's my question.
Power to the people.
School's out for summer, motherfuckers.
Okay, but here's my question.
Here's my question.
Would you have survived the last five years without me?
No, that's not what it's about.
This is about principle, Sophie.
This is about, you know, a higher ethics.
Daniel, I would appreciate it if you would put in a clip from the song School's Outsummer.
No, as the authority on this, Sophie, come on.
No.
No, it's summer.
Okay.
All right.
We can have one sound bite.
Thank you.
Thank you, Sophie.
Did you all listen to that song every summer, like on the bus home?
On the live stream?
I think I listened to it every year because there was always like some sort of TV special or whatever that was summer themed that always had it.
That's important.
Back to back to, can I have the script, please?
No, Sophie.
But yes, because I sent it.
So, Margaret, Killjoy.
How are we doing today?
Good?
I'm doing great.
Origins of the War on Vagrants00:14:56
How do you feel about our nation's escalating war on the existence of people who don't have the money to stay indoors?
Well, someone's got to, I think I'm going to join that war, but on the other side.
Yeah.
It's it's it's pretty like dark times right now in terms of like right now we're kind of living through this this intense scapegoating period because the right has kind of gotten their their ducks in a row in terms of how to like push insurgent camp like moral panic hatred campaigns.
And they've launched a few in a row.
And one of the ones that's really taken off in the last, really the last two years has been this kind of 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 like a broken window anywhere, you get these 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 is in chaos.
And kind of as a result.
And it's never because people have been kicked out of their houses.
It's always because there's people who have been paid.
It's not that like rent has doubled in like the last three or four years or anything like that, or that like a bunch of the companies that are responsible for making our food have seen record profits because they used stories about inflation as an excuse to jack up the cost of basic foodstuffs that made it untenable for a lot of people to like continue surviving in the same way that they had.
No, we don't blame any of that.
We blame 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 1st 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 $750 in fines and get up to 15 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 500 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 putting those people in fucking camps where children won't have to realize that perhaps there are injustices in the system they live under.
And none of those people in those camps are children, so it's not a problem.
Is um James, actually just before uh uh, we started recording this sent me a link to uh, an article by um, or sent me a link to a post from the uh, from Alliance SAN Diego um, which is a community organization, um organized around kind of building collective power in San Diego and is uh trying to fight back against this criminalization of homelessness that the mayor is pushing for.
Um, and they had an interview with a woman named Zulema 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.
Um, it's cool stuff uh anyway, this is all very anti-human and fucked up.
Um, and there's a shitload of bastardry um in all of this.
I mean Todd Glory is a motherfucker, but there's Toddler is a piece of.
There's many Todd Glorias.
That that yeah yeah, Todd's Gloria, I think is the proper Holy Fuck Gloria.
But yeah, yeah.
Also, there's that wonderful thing where the 13th amendment that abolished oh yeah, has that clause.
Guess what that says, in case.
Guess where we're heading Margaret okay, that's uh what this episode's actually about, because i'm not just complaining yeah, I have no idea.
Mostly be me vetching about uh, these modern laws.
This is kind of explaining the surprisingly deep and and surprising origins of our, of our war on uh, on what have been most commonly called vagrants and we will be using that term because that's the legal term that's often used.
I don't think being a vagrant's a bad thing, very pro-vagrant but um, you know, it's it, 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.
Um, i've been a vagrant a little bit when I was younger and then my grandfather was a hobo in World War II or not World War Ii, in the Great Depression, you know, rode freight trains around looking for work.
Oh, that's a crowd 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 that generation gets lionized so much, particularly by conservatives, and like yeah, a most many, if not most of like those people had a, a hobo period.
My grandpa, when he was 17, his dad was like we can't feed you anymore Garland and gave him like, a pocket full of cornbread and he just like hiked two or three states down to Oklahoma where he found work.
But like, how is that not being a hobo?
Like right, like he, he figured his shit out and good for him.
But like it's, it's.
I don't see A big difference between that and people who are like yeah, I couldn't make rent.
You know, I work a job.
Most homeless people work a job.
Um, like this is just what's open to me.
You know, my granddad was my granddad was like greatest generation.
He went from being a hobo to being a torpedo man in the South Pacific and fighting in the one war that the?
U.s can say well, that was good, that we did that yeah, and it it's a it's.
This is because I I didn't include as much of the Australia context, but like Australia has a long history of anti-vagrancy laws.
But also like One of their proudest songs about like World War I, Waltzing Matilda, is about a guy who was like, Yeah, I used to just kind of wander around without like, you know, a backpack and shit.
And then I went and got my legs blown off by the Turks at Gallipoli.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, homelessness, this is a story kind of about our Western civilization's war on people who, yeah, don't fall through 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 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 bastardry 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 people who are 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 serf.
And in England, like serfdom 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 villain 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 serf, basically.
They're a person who's bound to a parcel of land 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, 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 the 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 seeds 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 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's.
So you could graze your sheep on it.
You could grow stuff on it.
And over time, like Lord, 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 forced 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 or your duke or whatever and you lose an arm.
Good luck.
Sucks to be here.
You're not getting like, you're not getting like a fucking disability payment, right?
Like there's not a VA.
You know, there are some things that kind of fill that gap, but not well.
Yeah, generally.
Yeah.
I looked up the etymology of villain and village and they are the same.
Excellent.
Hot.
And it comes from, and villain basically came from like a rustic.
Oh, okay, cool.
Gotcha.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because that's kind of the way people lived out, you know, in the countryside.
So there was always kind of a degree of sympathy and acceptance of the need for sort of charity for like, you know, some guy who's lost his arms or some woman who's got like a family, but no one to help raise them because, you know, the husband died or whatever.
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 in like the 16, late 1500s, early 1600s, 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.
And towns and cities started keeping lists of sturdy beggars and their supposed crimes.
And if you are looking to make some DD characters this weekend, these are these are pretty good.
So I'm just going to read one from the 1600s, but 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 rad.
Hell yeah.
I do love Tom O'Bedlam.
Fucking cool name, guys.
So in 1547, 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.
Yeah, it's pretty, pretty bad.
There were no sort of like there was no like separation between like if this happens to like a dude in his 30s 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 in.
Yeah, teach him some life skills.
Exactly.
And these kind of these laws spread from the UK to other parts of Western Euro 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 1600s, while kind of this, this, this sort of war on vagrancy, that's when it really starts, kind of the late 1500s, you get these very first laws.
And in the 1600s, it kind of 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 1600s, a couple of other big things are happening.
Atlantic Slave Trade in Maine00:04:23
One of those big things is the Atlantic slave trade, right?
That's really, that's really starting to cook in the 1600s.
And another thing that's really starting to cook in the 1600s 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, whoa, if we mix slavery and colonies together, govna.
And, you know, that's a, you know, that story, right?
Like everybody's aware of kind of where that goes.
It didn't go well.
I mean, no, it does not go well.
Morally.
No.
Morally, it did not go well.
Morally, it's a fucking nightmare.
But yeah, two-thirds of economic power of empire did good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They make a lot of money off of it.
So this, that starts cooking.
And, you know, fast forward like 160, 170 years, something like that.
And, you know, you start to get, I mean, I'm flattening out a lot of things, but it takes, you know, 160, 170 years before kind of the crusade for abolition, which had always existed from as soon as like people were doing the African slave trade.
People were like, that's bad.
But it really, abolitionism starts to really pick up legal momentum kind of 160, 170 years later in the late 1700s.
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 1783.
By the early 1800s, 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 involves 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 looked 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 in 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 in these small communities in Maine and throughout New England.
So a lot of what becomes kind of the upper class 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 Maine, the people who have like nice houses and money now 200 years later, it's because, you know, their ancestors enslaved somebody and it let them get a leg up.
No, and that's so important for people to realize.
I hadn't known as much about New England slavery, but that makes so much sense that basically like all of the aristocracy of the United States comes from this.
Yeah, it's cool to look into the people who are doing stuff like funding the Daily Wire now and see where their ancestors, what they were getting up to.
Ah, Margaret.
This is an awkward thing we recorded later for me to throw to ads because I forgot to do it when I was supposed to.
Ancestors Funding the Daily Wire00:02:14
Yay.
I love being good at my job.
If only somebody was messaging you to do them.
I never read messages, Sophie.
I just, just vibes.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Free Black Man in Rural Maine00:15:27
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Motor.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
So, yeah, since Maine had no giant plantations, most enslaved people are used as personal servants or laborers in industries often like shipbuilding and fishing.
So, the state, you know, this is because Maine is part of the Massachusetts colony, right?
So, when Massachusetts, the new state, makes slavery illegal in 1783 or whatever, like that applies to Maine as well.
You're not like supposed to be, you know, buying these 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.
Okay.
I'm proud of me for not laughing when I said seamen twice.
You know, I feel like we should acknowledge that.
I laughed.
I'm sorry.
I know.
I'm not sorry.
It's deeply disrespectful.
Very, very good.
All of this brings us to the life of a single sea people is the current.
Yeah, that's a real new one.
It's funny when Maggie says it.
It's not funny when you make that turn.
It's all about delivery.
It's all about delivery.
So, yeah, yeah, yeah.
All of this brings us to the life of a single enslaved black American in Maine in the late 1700s.
His name was Benjamin Darling, and we have no idea where or when he was born.
He was probably somewhere in like his 20s, maybe 30s by the start of the 1790s, but he might have been older.
It is unlikely that he himself knew precisely when he was born.
There's a good chance he was born somewhere in 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 and 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 hog's head of rum.
One Negro woman, marked Y 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 Pepperill, June 25th, 1719, which is maybe a decade 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 a guarantee, one way or 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 free man.
That is not the most common version of the story.
The most, you know, there are a couple that are 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 1790s, 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 Portland, 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 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 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 is 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.
Yeah.
Like incredibly difficult, backbreaking labor on the sea.
No, 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 swimming.
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 shadow pulls him out of the water and to shore saves his life.
Um, the captain, uh, 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, uh, 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.
P-H-I-P-P-S-B-U-R-G.
I want to say Phillipsburg every time I look at it.
I'm livid.
Fuck you people.
Fuck Phippsburg.
Anyway, Benjamin lives in Phippsburg 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 dangerous, you know, natives, right?
Yeah.
There were there was this is like the historians I've read would be like, he might have faced kind of less discrimination in this particular period in Maine 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.
He saves people.
Yeah, you can rely on Ben.
He's got your back.
Yeah.
So, you know, he and 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.
I feel you, but Proverbs is weird.
It is weird in a nice way.
I mean, if anyone listening to this whose last name is Proverbs, congratulations.
You seem like you are a character who exists to make everything more interesting.
If I, if I get a time machine, Margaret, I'm going back to these people and I'm going to explain to them our modern concept of hyphenating names because darling Proverbs would be a pretty cool last name, right?
Yeah.
Totally.
So he's, he's, he develops a lot of respect in his local community.
He seems to be like having a pretty good life.
He gets married.
He has kids.
You know, this is at the time a crime called miscegenation.
But also he's kind of in rural Maine.
So it may just have been a thing where like people aren't really like flipping out about it right now so much.
Although they could have and they were in most of the United States.
That said, that may have been something that did cause him problems because in about 1794, 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 you're holding money.
Yeah.
It's a big thing.
Back then, it's like, oh, you want like a rock to die on?
Like, it's like, do you have any idea how hard these islands are to live on?
But, you know, that does probably also insinuate that he was pretty thrifty and resourceful.
I mean, I guess it wasn't like nothing.
But anyway, he buys this island, Horse Island.
Probably saved the life of the person who is saved.
He just keeps saving people until he's given an island.
So he gets this island.
Mountain Lion just jumps out of nowhere.
Fucking cold cocks it.
Here's the deed to my lion.
Or island.
I don't know why I said lion.
Oh, you said mountain lion.
Anyway, whatever.
So he and Sarah and their sons move 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 Phippsburg 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, you know?
Either way, he kind of establishes this, you might call it like a mixed race commune kind of, you know, I don't think there's like a, like a lot of, you know, it's not like a political thing, but it's like, that's the way it works, right?
Like when you've got people living off grid in a place like these islands off the main coast, which are desperately hard places 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 pulling stuff out of the sea and 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 coast of Maine.
And kind of in this period of time, these islands, because 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, anyone trying to come and get me is probably going to die finding me, right?
Like it's hard out here.
Yeah.
One source I found on the matter notes, quote, these early settlers maintained 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 Ben and his family kind of lived this way, but 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-1800s, from Horse Island and some of the areas in the mainland around Phippsburg down to Portland.
And his descendants, it seems like, are as thrifty and successful as their paterfamilius.
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 U.S. towards that, I think it's 1847.
Two of Darling's granddaughters sell the family interest in Horse Island and use it to buy all 41 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.
I wonder if it was like one of the other languages that people were speaking around there.
I don't know because you're saying that people were like speaking African languages there.
Yeah, but Malaga is also a place in Spain.
So I kind of wonder if it's maybe like some, you know, some kid, you know, as their kids, he's gotten, bought them some books or something and they're like reading about other parts of the world.
And they're just like, when they buy this island, I've heard about this place called Malaga.
That's a pretty name.
Let's call it that.
Floating Houses and Sea Survival00:06:01
I don't really know.
No one does.
It 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 Kinnebec Kennel.
But back in the late 80s, 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 1800s.
Antique 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, 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 grid, right?
Like you are really kind of 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's central coast then are kind of settled over the late 1800s.
You know, it started out as a lot of these maroon communities and people like Darling.
They get added to by these sort of ragged bands of loners, madmen, and people whose existence had been criminalized by the state.
Darling's granddaughters and...
This place sounds like it rules.
It does.
You're not going to stop thinking that.
It sounds pretty fucking cool.
Hell yeah.
So Darling's granddaughters and their families establish an isolated free community on Malaga Island.
And over time, they're joined by a couple of dozen other refugees from mainstream.
Do you get what I did there?
Yeah, no, I was trying to make this pun earlier, but I didn't have a good space to do it.
I wrote it into the script, Margaret, and I capitalized the M so people would know it wasn't just a misspelling if anyone caught a glimpse of my script.
Proud of me.
So the people who kind of join with the Darling's descendants on this island are a mix of there's some white folks in there.
There's some a number obviously of like freed 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 write-up from soulofamerica.com makes clear.
Malaga Island was typical of many island communities of the eastern Casco Bay, 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 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 14 children.
Over time, other groups also inhabited the island, including Irish, Scottish, and Portuguese.
And again, this is a tough place.
The soil's 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, they would toss the shells in 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 Phippsburg Historical Society notes, the papers written by the students show their pinmanship 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 50 people live on Malaga at its height.
Again, 41 acres is not big, especially considering not all of the land is land that you could like 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 cool.
Yeah.
Like basically.
Mine's going to be on goat back.
I'm just going to get like six goats and then a house.
Yeah.
Yeah.
On the goats.
Have a palanquin of goats.
Absolutely.
Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Like if you're thinking about life in the 1850s, 1860s, rough for everybody compared to modern standards, this seems like one of the better places to live.
That's where that's kind of how I'm thinking about it right now.
The Portland Press Herald notes: Malaga's people lived like so many others, eking out an existence, trapping lobsters, hooking cod, digging clams, or laboring at boarding houses and farms on the mainland.
And so, yeah, that's also an important point: 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 Phippsburg, so she would take their wash their laundry, handle a large volume of washing, and then return it once it was dried.
So, for on the main land, yeah, on the main note very nice, very nice.
We're getting away with a lot of that.
Lobster Trapping and Mainland Work00:02:55
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Abolitionists vs Deserving Poor00:12:40
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So, yeah, you know, for a time, life seems to have been about as good for the denizens of Malaga as it could be, particularly for people who like weren't white as hell in the United States in this period of time.
They were isolated and in like 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 1862, 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 war's end, the city's black population had gone from 3,000 to 20,000.
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 is an advertiser, budget.
The Bass Pro Shop.
Yeah, the Bass 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 Zocalo by Christopher Hager.
Quote, the growth of Memphis's 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 and impressment into the agricultural labor force.
They were brought back onto the plantations and forced to sign labor contracts.
Yeah, it's 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 1800s.
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 enslaved 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 terrible 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 push them, right?
In the South, it's former Confederates who want to get black people back on the plantation.
In the North, it's abolitionists.
They're a huge part of this.
And it's interesting.
Because they want people to work.
Because they want people to work, right?
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 they become charity reformers afterwards.
Part of why is that the 1870s, right after the Civil War, the U.S. has its first really great depression, right?
Like I think 1875 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 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, right?
That's a big part of this to them.
And I'm going to quote from a paper in the Journal of American History by A.D. Stanley.
In the eyes of charity reformers, there was a clearly etched line of distinction between laboring for wages and begging.
The wage laborer was an independent person, self-supporting, one who participated in the vast social exchange of the marketplace and obeyed its rules, the polar opposite of the slave.
The beggar was a dependent person who neither bought nor sold, but preyed on others.
The wage earner 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 reformers, most of whom had been abolitionists.
They were heir 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.
I hate it.
I didn't know that at all.
Yeah.
And it's interesting.
Stanley points out that like to wage laborers who none of these wealthy liberals are talking to ever in their entire lives.
To wage laborers, this does not make sense because wage laborers know that like, yeah, man, sometimes there's no work, right?
Sometimes the, you know, the factory is closed.
Sometimes you can't make money and you like have to beg or your family's going to starve.
That's like begging.
Wage laborers don't see begging as separate from like them.
They be like, yeah, sometimes you wind up like eating charity because like shit's fucked.
It's tough out there.
Yeah.
But these liberals have all the part communities take care of each other.
Yeah, yeah.
That is not how these wealthy liberals think, these kind of intellectual leaders, because they've been building in their head this kind of this kind of like belief system that is kind of going to become what we, you know, a lot of it's going to become like kind of the traditions of modern capitalism.
But they're sort of building this belief system based on how they think the social order works between wage earners and, you know, the poor and the rich and all this stuff.
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 uh situations that they're trying to define.
And it has it 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?
Um, it is, it is an act of social evil to not have a means of visible support.
Um, we get the like we talked about a little bit of the medieval stuff, but you have like the deserving poor concept, yes, and so there's this like very Protestant idea of like the deserving poor should get something, but most people are not deserving poor.
Yeah, and that that's when this is starting to really get cooked up.
And there's this idea, like the kind of conclusion these people come to is that like giving money to beggars or is um is going to disincline people to work.
So when you have deserving poor, the social aid they receive needs to be so painful to receive that no one but the deserving poor will seek it out, right?
Um, totally, 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 are utterly dependent on the state.
Um, and that's seen as anti-American.
Um, 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?
Um, yeah, interesting to me.
I didn't know that either.
Yeah.
One of the things that really um, just really quickly, the one of the things that really like I read this book called Russia Through a Shot Glass about a hobo in Soviet Russia, right?
And I didn't know about poverty in Soviet Russia, right?
In the USSR.
And there's this conversation with a beggar who's like, oh, I do this.
I don't actually need to go beg.
I mean, he kind of needs to, right?
He 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 20 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 directly to people who are 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.
Anyway, it's, I, I, I think that there's a, yeah, the, the, the, like, panhandling is a, a complicated historical topic.
I do think there's a degree to which it's, it's, uh, one of our, one of our like dying communal art forms.
Um, but yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting.
The, um, I think a lot about the way homelessness works in the United States and how how not inevitable it is that that be the way society like treats this sort 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 airstrikes and shit.
Like their job every day was to like go and help people who had been injured in the bombings and fighting 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 everybody knows about Hollywood, even if they don't know like 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, Well, 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 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 uh country, you know, on a daily basis.
Police Criminalizing Homelessness00:12:06
Um, but like, yeah, that was it was really just like the kind of disbelief they had that like this could happen that could happen on any kind of large scale, um, that people would just like let it occur was so interesting to me.
Um, yeah, anyway, so we had talked about a little earlier that uh in the late or in the 1780s, Massachusetts is the first U.S. state to ban slavery, right?
Um, that's something Massachusetts can take great pride in.
Massachusetts is also the first northern state to criminalize begging.
In 1866, the Republican legislature of Massachusetts passes the Act Concerning Vagrants and Vagabonds.
A.D. Stanley writes: Massachusetts was the first of the northern states to enact new rules against beggars in 1866.
The Republican-dominated legislature passed an act concerning vagrants and vagabonds.
The 1860 criminal code had punished beggars along with a motley band of jugglers, tricksters, common pipers and fiddlers, pilferers, brawlers, and lewd persons.
Sounds like literally my friends.
All the best people.
Yeah, like everyone I hang out with on a daily basis.
Yeah, tricksters, jugglers, common pipers, 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, or 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 around towards the northern states kind of outside of Massachusetts.
Over the next 20 years, many states followed mass.
The Tramp Acts, as they were often called, were passed in Pennsylvania in 1871, in Illinois in 1874, and in New York in 1880 and 1885.
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 sentence 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.
A.D. Stanley writes: 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 and 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 labor.
By 1866, 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-1870s for what one police chief called 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 hate Republicans around here.
When we're talking about Republicans this period, we're talking about liberals.
That's who is basically liberals.
It's 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 a vagrant and then they get to do anything they want to them.
That's cool.
Yay.
Great.
I hate this so much.
Yeah.
It's deeply infuriating, Margaret.
In former slave states, a good deal of the you got something.
Oh, I was just thinking about how.
Okay, so like in my current life, I don't get harassed by police very much.
But when I lived out of a backpack and hitchhiked, and to be clear, I chose that because of the way that I was choosing to do activism.
I chose that riding freight trains and hitchhiking was a good way to do activism, right?
Just to be clear about that.
But I interacted with police so, so much that like roughly daily, I would have my ID run.
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 it, I don't think people quite understand the degree to which that harassment is just ever present, even when you're not.
And it, and it annoys the shit out of me because you have this like ostensible freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, but you don't.
And then also capitalism presents itself as the system that you're like, well, if you don't like it, just don't do it, right?
Capitalism is all about choice and the freedom of the individual.
It is not.
Like, if you don't work, if you choose not to work, if you ask other people for money, or just choose to just eat trash instead of asking people for money, you are breaking the law.
I hate this stuff so much.
No, it's like, yeah, I, you know, I, I, I lived out of a car, again, by choice, uh, with two other people, you know, and it was kind of like an adventure.
We were going up and down all throughout the US and Canada.
Um, I had like three notable interactions with police, and all of them were really negative and took like an hour or two to get through.
Like they tried to bring out dogs and shit.
But that was all.
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 shit from the cops.
If cops just see people in a car, they think like that is a that is the world happening as 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's it is interesting the way that that works because we were like just as vagrant as anybody.
Like we were walking around running out of the back of a Toyota Prius.
Um, but you know, if you don't look like they expect, you know, then you're you're generally okay.
Um, yep, cool stuff.
So, uh, in former slave states, a great deal of the actual punishment work of the vagrant law system was done by employees of the Freedmen's Bureau, which had been created in March 1865 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 6,000 black people who were lazy, worthless vagrants.
And so in Memphis, the Freedmen'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 $1 to $5 per head, right?
And just told, like, get us people.
You know, they recreate slave patrols.
But the Freedmen's Bureau is running them and they're doing it to provide cheap labor for plantations and shit.
Oh, God.
This pisses 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.
Obviously, 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 or 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 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 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 prose is obviously it's not like as polished as the writing in, say, the government notices organizing vagrant patrols, but he got his point across.
And even with this kind of distance, 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 Freedmen'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 Mr. 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 an instance of a young African-American man being taken away by the point of the bayonet at the direction of a Freedmen'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 Freedmen'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 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 happening.
Very funny.
Not funny.
Infuriating, but you know, it happened.
So, yeah, that's frustrating.
Yeah.
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.
Frustration with Missing Evidence00:09:38
Have a lot of protection from this wave of vagrancy laws sweeping the country.
So, you know, the 1870s, 1880s, this stuff, they're not really dealing with consequences of this because of how far off the grid they are.
But by the start of the 1900s, late 1800s, early 1900s, the unique communities that had formed both on Malaga and these surrounding islands were starting to gain the attention of mainland culture and 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 1850 to Isaac and Rebecca Wallace Darling in Phippsburg.
His brother remained in the area, marrying and having children.
At 21, 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 29, John married again to a woman named Albertina Gilliam from Orrs Island, and the family moved to Ors Island to live with her parents.
This was a good life for some years, but then in 1897, 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 mile 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 ABCs.
The story of finding John frozen solid in his bed of rags and eaten by everything from rats to seagulls has been told around Midia 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 local like mockery, right?
Because he's he's living alone out there.
Now, despite kind of this public image of him, John is by all accounts a resourceful and tough man who like lived alone in the most like and made a life for himself, built a fucking house out there and survived to an advanced age.
He 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 120.
Fine.
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 1900s were to life, he represented to people on Maine and places like Phippsburg and Portland a provincial 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 decrying his primitive state and the fact that he was a squatter.
John's physicality was particularly well suited to this sort of thing.
He was over six feet tall and at least 250 pounds, which again suggests he's pretty good at surviving out there if he's that big.
Yeah.
But they're like, look, he'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?
No more ads.
I don't know.
It's time to advertise myself.
Yeah, it's time to plug your pluggables.
Well, if you like the opposite of this show, where we talk about people who fought these things, you might like my show, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, available wherever podcasts are found, specifically from CoolZone Media.
Also, I am.
I don't know whether I don't know this comes out.
I'm either kickstarting or have kick-started a tabletop role-playing game called Penumbra City that I'm making with a bunch of people.
I've been working on it for a very long time.
The Kickstarter is doing amazingly.
We're at like 300% or something of our goal.
And so you should check out Penumbra City and/or Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
Excellent.
And you can check out me.
Anyway, you can also get this podcast and, you know, presumably other podcasts, but I hate all other podcasts except for the one that we're recording right now and the other ones that we've recorded.
If you go to Apple and Sophie, how do we, what am I supposed to do?
How do I say this?
How do we do this?
Go to Apple and buy CoolerZone Media, give them money, and then you won't have ads on any of our shows, including Margaret's show, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, including Hood Politics with our good friend Prop, including It Could Happen Here, the daily news show that is slowly destroying all of our sanities.
You know, you can get no more ads, not a single ad, motherfuckers.
And hey, here's what makes it better: if you go on and get an account with CoolerZone Media right now and get that fucking give us, give us, you know, sign up for that, then we'll go up the charts and we can, we are, we are right underneath Radio Lab and most subscribers on Apple.
And I have hated the Radio Lab people for years now.
That's no real reason.
That seems logical to me.
You have to pick an enemy and then destroy them with almost unthinkable violence.
And that's what I want to do to those Radio Lab motherfuckers.
Do you know what else people can listen to now?
And they can listen to Dun the Ad-Free or the free version with ads.
No, I don't know.
Our dear friend Jake Canrahan's newest podcast that is part of CoolZone Media.
Jay Canrahan or Janrahan, as he has never been called by anyone.
Don't call him that.
It'll make him angry.
But you should check out his new show.
It's called Sad Oligarch.
It's a modern true pair style investigative series that looks into why these Russian oligarchs keep just dying.
All of these Russian oligarchs keep like falling out of windows in hotels, surprisingly.
Just downstairs.
Clumsy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Clumsy oligarchs.
Ah, the classic.
So check that out, you know, and you know, check it out ad-free and help us destroy Radio Lab, you know?
Please.
And we'll be back.
That's right.
Yeah.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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