An Illegal Immigrant in Antebellum Kentucky: Race and Migration Control before Reconstruction

In 1850, Helen McGregor was arrested and declared an illegal immigrant. This arrest did not occur in Boston or New York or San Francisco, the places that received the lion’s share of international migrants during the antebellum period. Helen McGregor was not from Ireland either, as her name might suggest. Rather, Helen McGregor was arrested in Louisville, Kentucky, just upriver from her hometown of Evanston, Indiana. Though she was an American, a Kentucky court nonetheless found Helen McGregor guilty of illegally immigrating and subsequently sold her at auction for a one-year term for $120. As it turns out, Kentucky lawmakers had banned “Free negroes from immigrating” regardless of their nationality. Helen McGregor was one of many “illegal immigrants" convicted by the city courts in Louisville. This paper unpacks the stories of free Black persons who were arrested and declared illegal migrants during the antebellum period, and recasts the history of the “illegal immigrant” in relation to state control over the movement of free Black people. In the antebellum period, slavery inhibited federal interference in state race law and states developed their own legal mechanisms to control immigration. Convinced that free Black persons posed a direct threat to the state’s well-being as in Kentucky, state lawmakers across the country enacted border control measures against free Black people. As a result, immigration laws targeted interstate migrants as well as international ones. Race, in effect, became the fulcrum on which the legality of interstate and international migration turned. By situating the history of illegal immigration within histories of slavery, this research builds on the work of recent historians who have overturned the once ubiquitous belief that American immigration law began in 1880s with the Chinese Exclusion Acts.