The paper explores the dynamics and moral economy surrounding vagrancy mass arrests in New Orleans following the Civil War. While vagrancy laws receive a brief mention in many Reconstruction studies, scholars have overlooked the phenomenon's remarkable particulars, under which Federal and local authorities incarcerated and forcibly relocated thousands of black and white children, women and men in New Orleans alone. More broadly, the paper interrogates the dynamics between race, labor, class, and constructions of criminality.
