Robert Love’s searches for strangers grew out of early modern European debates over how best to organize public charity and govern cities. The Massachusetts solution drew largely on seventeenth-century English settlement law and parish experimentation. But Bay Colony officials did not simply copy English procedures. In adapting humanist and Reformation goals to New World conditions, they innovated, elevating an obscure legal writ to serve as the lynchpin of a welfare regime that was arguably more effective than many others.
All British colonial cities contended with influxes of laboring people, disabled seamen, and distressed travelers. Aghast at rising poor relief costs, officials in New York and Philadelphia were unable to convince provincial authorities to share the costs of aiding needy strangers. Adopting warning would have helped them do so. And yet these colonial leaders drew on the same legal heritage and expressed just as intense concerns for the poor as their counterparts in Massachusetts. Partly an exploration of what warning was and was not, partly an exercise in comparative legal history, this chapter addresses what set New England’s approach apart.
Comparing warning to techniques used in continental Europe to mark strangers illuminates the choices made by Massachusetts. Some early modern municipalities closely monitored strangers’ entrances and exits. In the Vatican-controlled town of Avignon, visitors were issued a ticket by the border guard to be submitted to their innkeeper. Within three days, the traveling party was required to appear at the town hall to register their names. There they received yet another piece of paper to take back to their innkeeper, who would tender it to authorities when the travelers departed. One young visiting scholar wrote of this rigmarole, perhaps tongue in cheek: “that is how they maintain good order, so that they know at all times what foreigners are in their town.” In contrast, the interviewing of strangers in Massachusetts was not chiefly directed at foreigners—subjects of a ruler other than George III—and newcomers received no badge or documentation to carry with them.1
Nor did warning generate internal passes marking certain classes. In Leipzig and other early modern German towns, some residents—poorer renters who lived in low-rent neighborhoods—were called “paper citizens,” Zettelbürgers, “because they were required to have paper permits bearing their landlord’s surety” while moving around the city. A similar system existed largely as a racial marker in British America, not affecting warned strangers in Boston who were perceived to be white, but rather directed at indentured servants and slaves and all people of color moving about after the curfew of nine o’clock at night.2
Warning bore little kinship to schemes that imagined all residents should be tagged. Johann Gottlieb Fichte opined in 1796 that in “a well-regulated police state,” each citizen should at all times be recognizable “as this or that particular person,” and to that end every person “must carry a pass . . . in which his person is accurately described.” Jeremy Bentham advocated that all persons should have their name and place and date of birth tattooed on the wrist. Jean Bodin saw universal registration as a route to identifying the idle and the dangerous. As a register, the warning ledgers created a very incomplete census. At best, the lists functioned to divide Boston’s population into three groups: legal inhabitants (who were implied by their absence from the lists), sojourners with settlement elsewhere in the province, and those from outside the colony. Warning had the same purpose as Nuremberg’s and Bern’s marking of local versus stranger paupers. In those cities, the local poor were given badges and listed in town books, indicating their right to public support or license to solicit alms, while the foreign destitute were supposedly banished.3 The Massachusetts system worked differently and was more capacious in extending alms. The recording of names permitted relief given to the unsettled (those without legal inhabitancy) to be charged to the province rather than the town.
In sum, warning was a rather relaxed registration system. It did not stem from bureaucratic fantasies of establishing an all-seeing gaze or total control. It did not prevent eighteenth-century Boston from being a fairly porous place. It was less an oppressive instance of surveillance than a means of clarifying who could make a claim on which relief funds.4 To assess how distinctive warning was both in the context of western European history and in the Anglo-American legal tradition, we need to take a closer look at English approaches to poor relief and settlement.
In his 1911 history of warning out, lawyer and amateur historian Josiah Henry Benton Jr. argued that the concept of settlement-by-residence reached back to Saxon England and even further—to ancient German customs and “the remote villages of the Aryan East.” Benton cited evidence that the Teutonic village communities of England followed the rule that if a “stranger remained . . . without challenge” and without being removed for “twelve months, he was from thenceforth allowed to dwell in peace and security.”5 If this is accurate, it is not clear how long such a one-year residency requirement lasted past the Norman invasion and into the medieval period. The ecclesiastical court records of the late 1400s contain rare deployments of the verb “monuit” (Latin for warn) as a command to depart. The context was not that of strangers intruding into a parish, but sinners convicted of serious crimes (sorcery, adultery) and punished partly by being banished from the parish.6 In seeking the legal origins of warning out, we do better turning to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century landscape of welfare experimentation and law than to the far distant past.
In England and Europe in the 1500s, authorities put into place a variety of new poor relief schemes. In the medieval period, the onus was on the pauper, who was expected to secure a source of alms. Poor relief was a patchwork affair, with monasteries limiting themselves to aiding a customary number of local poor (twelve, for example) annually and offering short-term lodging and alms to beggars or travelers in distress. Personal alms giving—whether offered spontaneously when one encountered a plaintive soul or given ritually at the church steps or wedding feasts—was the general rule. Critics of this haphazard system lamented that such habits of indiscriminate alms giving meant that much-needed relief never reached many of the deserving poor—those disabled in accidents, those chronically ill, the infirm elderly—unless they were out on the roads begging.7
As early as the 1520s, humanists expressed deep compassion for the plight of needy persons and advocated that poor relief be secularized and its delivery rationalized. An influential plan for the Flemish town of Bruges, circulated by Juan Luis Vives, envisioned that officials canvas the city in order to understand the various categories of poor within the walls and then establish discrete institutions and methods of aid for each. Propertied city residents were to be cajoled into contributing to a poor fund. Descriptions of Vives’s plan and one implemented in Ypres, another Flanders port town, were translated and published in England, thus shaping early discussions about how to address poverty. The Catholics and Protestants who embraced these ideas were convinced that a disciplined and rational approach to poor relief would lead to one of their vaunted goals for earthly godliness—effective stewardship.8
During the reign of Elizabeth I, England departed from Continental practices by mandating collection of funds for the poor in all parts of the kingdom: these were the now-famous poor law statutes passed in 1572, 1598, and 1601. Yet, even with the establishment of such a radical policy, advocates of reform in England recognized that national enforcement mechanisms were weak and thus initiative and willpower had to be exercised at the local level. Puritans were often at the forefront of the ongoing attempts to implement effective systems of poor relief, taking their cues from Calvinist communities across Europe. Following the model set in Geneva, Bordeaux’s two thousand Calvinists forged a notably efficient poor relief system for their coreligionists. Features included weekly meetings of elders to identify needy recipients and twice-weekly visits to sick persons. In addition to this intensive investment of lay personnel in knitting their beleaguered community together through a pattern of visiting, the French Calvinists’ aim was to “make it possible for the poor to help themselves.” Assistance usually took the form of temporary supplements aimed to help craftsmen secure employment or tide families through periods of serious illness. Many English parish officials were already adopting this model by appointing overseers of the poor and instructing them to be in close communication with needy residents.9
The most energetic efforts to implement effective welfare regimes occurred first in towns such as Norwich and Ipswich in the 1570s. Municipal leaders began by taking a detailed, parish-by-parish census of the poor and working poor, listing “the name, age, occupation and dwelling of every man, woman and child.” The next steps included sending small numbers away to their place of legal settlement, placing youths with masters, reestablishing a small orphanage, and dividing the city into wards for better oversight of the needy. Norwich pursued several additional planks of poor relief reform: increasing the amounts that could go to individual recipients, organizing a well-run workhouse, forbidding begging altogether, and strictly enforcing settlement regulations. Their campaign approach hinged on the assumption that only by a rigorous patrolling of the town to remove those who did not belong could officials offer generous and systematic relief to the poor.10
Although Anglican leaders were included among those advocating these innovative improvements at the local level in advance of parliamentary action, puritans (or the “godly,” as they called themselves) brought a particular religious zeal to urban reform efforts. Inspired by the model of John Calvin’s Geneva, they believed, as one cleric wrote, that God would watch over them “in special manner,” and ensure that they would “escape . . . many dangers.” Besides systematizing the delivery of relief, reforms that signaled a godly city included providing education for young people, punishing vice, eliminating disorderly alehouses, and providing for clean water and swept streets.11
Whether cities and parishes took an early initiative or were jarred into action by the laws making poor rates compulsory, new attention was directed to the monitoring of incomers. Localities turned to four methods, none of which yet had statutory backing. These portend the techniques later used in Massachusetts. One was the interview with the local officials. For example, in Leicester starting in 1562, “no stranger could be admitted as a tenant” until he was examined by the mayor and the ward’s aldermen to discover “from when he comyth & what honest behavior such forren person or persons be of.” To get newcomers before the aldermen, however, one usually had to search them out—a second mechanism in the parish’s new toolkit. Thus we find references to “searchers”—men whose task resembled that of Boston’s Robert Love. Ipswich was very early in this respect, implementing a compulsory poor rate and instructing the bailiffs in 1557 to “order searchers for new commers into the Towne, and idle persons and vagabonds.” By the 1580s, constables in each ward were to “make search every month for needy, impotent and vagrant p’sons, and therof make certifficate that they may be settled according to law.” In the Surrey parish of St. Savior, Southwark, in 1606 two men were paid twenty shillings each to be “surveyore[s] of Inmates” for the year.12
Besides searching for newcomers and interviewing them, some towns used a third mechanism to minimize the poor rolls: they gave newcomers who were not abjectly indigent the chance to give security (in the form of a bond) that they would not become chargeable. A fourth approach involved fining landlords who entertained or rented to lodgers for more than seven days without notifying town leaders. All of these mechanisms—searching, interviewing, demanding security from strangers, and putting restrictions on landlords—became elements of New England’s warning-out system.13
With a string of statutes starting with the Settlement Act of 1662, Parliament laid down a set of national policies for the monitoring and removal of intruding inmates. These statutes introduced both the certificate (a sort of worker passport) and an enumeration of ways to gain settlement in a new parish—by paying taxes, holding office, and paying over £10 in annual rent, for example. From 1685 onward, no longer could a newcomer gain inhabitancy by residing in a place for a certain time without detection. And yet parishes continued to monitor migrants, conducting “prudential” examinations so that their place of settlement would be on record should they ever need relief.14
Taken together, the statutory and local practices in place by the early 1700s in England took cognizance of at least six groups of people on the move—including servants contracted for one year, demobilized soldiers, and “certificate men.” In other words, the measures constituted an interlocking system, the regulatory details of which often emerged from litigation between parishes. The ins and outs of settlement law—when a person was removable, what writ must be used, when children’s settlement followed their parents—occupied 230 pages in the eleventh edition of Richard Burn’s much relied upon justice of the peace manual published in 1769.15
In contrast to England’s complicated regulatory matrix, Massachusetts adopted a single law (in 1692) and a single registration system (warning) to encompass the diverse types of mobile people. Building on reformers’ ideas and on seventeenth-century English practice, legislators introduced two unique features. One was the province account—a truly radical commitment by the state to extend alms and relief to incoming strangers and sojourners. This novel fiscal arrangement, often unnoticed by scholars, provided a fix for the aid that parishes and municipalities extended to travelers and sojourners who had no local settlement. The second departure from English and European patterns was the provision that the verbal warning to depart in itself was sufficient to block one from gaining settlement. With this, Massachusetts did away with formal settlement hearings before justices of the peace and decoupled warning from removal. When forty-year-old James Miller walked all the way “By Land” from New York to Boston in autumn 1767 and was warned by Love on the very day he entered the port town, the language of the warning sounded as if King George himself had commanded the lame and “poorly” Miller to “depart this town of Boston.” But Miller and everyone in earshot knew that he could stay and that being warned meant being put on notice with respect to settlement.16
Warning in eighteenth-century Massachusetts paralleled English settlement examinations that did not lead to removal. Both operated as insurance for the local governing unit (parish or town) in case the newcomer stayed and at some point became needy. A great many Britons moved frequently, crossing parish lines, often over short distances. Establishing an individual’s settlement was often not a simple matter. In a typical English examination, justices asked a string of questions similar to but more extensive than the ones posed in Boston:
Where born? Where Father was settled? If ever apprenticed? To whom? for how long, how long served? . . . If served as a yearly Servant? for how long? . . . if married? How many Children? their Ages, Sexes and Names? If rented any House or Land? how much rent? Whether ever Rated to the poor? What Parish Land in or Rates paid?
In England, the migrant was typically put under oath when answering about what was his or her last place of legal settlement. In New England, no oath was applied. Both practices established prima facie evidence that the person had settlement elsewhere. Both practices allowed for a flow of labor into the town and avoided the expense entailed by physical removals. Given that yearly censuses of parish or town populations were not conducted, keeping a running log of those arriving enabled parishes and towns, when necessary, to distinguish settled from unsettled inhabitants.17
Settlement examinations in England and the issuing of verbal warnings in New England could operate as a valve. Local authorities could use the various means at their disposal to increase or diminish the flow of laborers over their boundaries depending on the needs of local employers. In good economic times, for example, towns might relax their attentiveness to settlement restriction. Moreover, labor needs, while important, were not the only consideration. Especially in certain rural areas of England, sojourners were monitored to prevent accelerated depletion of the commons—woods, wastes, and grazing land that many in these communities depended on. In the north Atlantic seaboard colonies, the sustained demand for white laborers or settlers outweighed anxiety over the commons. An urban seaport like Boston, experiencing at midcentury the out-migration of many native-born artisans and workers, had few incentives to follow up verbal warnings with removals.18
Despite the affinity between warning in New England and settlement examinations in old England, a major difference occurred in the realm of vocabulary. Warning, in its specialized meaning of ordering noninhabitants to depart a legal jurisdiction, is absent from most English legal sources. It appears in neither parliamentary legislation nor English dictionaries of the period. It is mentioned in only one of the many legal manuals published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to help parish officers and justices of the peace understand the statute and case law pertaining to the poor. The exception is Richard Kilburne’s book entitled Choice Presidents [Precedents], which included “A Warrant to warn one to depart out of a Parish . . . or to give sufficient Security to indempnifie the Parish.” Kilburne’s sample warrant gives us the clue that warning to depart was not entirely unknown in local English practice.19
The warning warrant and the verb warn crop up occasionally in English parish and town records. Officials in Ipswich, East Anglia, a region of puritan strength from which many seventeenth-century New England settlers came, used the verb in a December 10, 1578, order: “searches shall be made forthwith [by Constables] for new Commers, . . . and to . . . warne new Commers to depart the Towne.” Evidence suggests that warning warrants were sometimes issued at the parish level in the seventeenth century in hopes that the recipient would depart without having to be removed. By the early eighteenth century, the writ was no longer in use.20 The overall picture, then, is that English officials rarely relied on the language of warning. Yet New Englanders formulating their own policies toward intruders and strangers starting in the 1670s knew of the term and understood its utility as a preremoval mechanism. They expanded its use such that it became their chief instrument for monitoring immigration and protecting community resources.
In terms of practice, Massachusetts was not departing in dramatic ways from the parent country. Yet in settlement law as in other areas, the province steered an independent route in terms of statutes, neither incorporating nor revising the relevant parliamentary laws.21 For example, towns began using certificates in the 1680s, at the same time that England increasingly embraced them, but the province never mentioned the practice in its law books as other colonies did. Certificates were useful in situations in which a person with settlement in Massachusetts was presently living in a town other than where she or he had inhabitancy. Issued after the two towns had corresponded and agreed on the facts of the case, the document functioned as a contract between them. When widow Susanna Hewes moved from Boston—where she had been receiving relief—to neighboring Roxbury in order to live in her married daughter’s household, the Boston selectmen wrote to their Roxbury counterparts that they “acknowledge [d] . . . Hewes as an Inhabit [an] t of Boston” and would cover any reasonable charges that had to be expended on her behalf. In England, certificates were typically prospective—they identified the migrant worker’s parish of settlement, where he could return if he needed relief in the future. Given that the vast majority of people on the move in the Bay province were not currently chargeable, the most suitable and economical device to protect a town’s poor relief funds was a simple verbal warning.22
Overall, the aim of settlement law in both regions was not to prohibit mobility but to help communities protect their resources and channel poor relief to deserving locals and, when circumstances demanded it, impoverished outsiders. All European jurisdictions struggled with the influx of laborers from the immediate hinterland and places farther afield who might fall ill and become needy. In an era when secular governing units had taken on responsibility to care for the local poor, how was a Christian polity to respond? The solution in Massachusetts was the province account. It originated when the province took financial responsibility for the upkeep of white settler refugees burnt out of their houses and towns in King Philip’s and King William’s wars of the late 1600s. The account’s statutory basis was a 1701 law providing that passengers arriving by sea who fell ill on the passage would be relieved “at the charge of the province.” This was soon expanded to include any sick person not “belonging to any town or place within this province” who was unable to pay their own medical bills.23
By the 1760s, the province poor account had become an entrenched and fiscally significant aspect of Massachusetts governance. Town authorities who extended public aid to a needy stranger became accustomed to petitioning the governor and council for reimbursement. They were rarely refused; after the medical and other bills were scrutinized, the province treasurer was authorized to make payment. Sickness and infectious disease were not the only conditions covered; neediness that arose out of indigence, pregnancy, physical and mental disability, and old age led to care being given and the province picking up the tab. After being duly warned in Uxbridge in autumn 1759, Betty Trifle and her “bastard” daughter Mary continued to reside in town. They were constantly in need of aid because Betty suffered from an incapacitating mental disorder. The province treasurer reimbursed the town for their care until at least 1777. In Medway, the overseers of the poor arranged for the care of John Williams, a native of Exeter in old England; when he made known that he was “desirous of returning” there, the assembly ordered that he “be transported as soon as may be to Great Britain at the charge of this Province.”24
By far the largest payouts from the province account each year went to Boston. One-third of the city’s almshouse residents were on the province charge. In the fiscal year 1769–70, the selectmen received £677 sterling for the relief strangers received while in the house. In addition, the treasurer divided £171 between the almshouse keeper and the institution’s physician for special ministrations to these inmates. In that year, the Boston-based expenses accounted for two-thirds of the total annual province poor outlay of £1,040. In other pre-revolutionary years, the annual bills for the province poor ranged from £813 to £1,073 and made up about 10 percent of all province appropriations, excluding payments to fund the public debt.25
Like warning, the province account system was capacious. It covered the towns’ expenses for housing and upkeep for the roughly eleven hundred Acadians forced to endure eleven years of internal exile in Massachusetts starting in 1755. Legislators estimated in 1763 that the province’s costs for caring for Acadians had mounted to £10,000. When some Massachusetts towns such as Natick refused to categorize Indians who had been longtime residents as town poor, the province account stepped into the breach. After the revolution, the numbers of formerly enslaved persons facing impoverishment rose. Unable to find work and denied legal settlement in the towns where they grew up, many African New Englanders admitted to the almshouse were counted as state charges.26
In adapting their settlement practices to the colonial social landscape, New Englanders made warning a flexible instrument. Massachusetts warnings accommodated a broad range of persons: unmarried male and female youths entering short-term work arrangements, families relocating, Britons who had served in the Seven Years War, and beggars and strollers. Inspired by civic betterment schemes on the Continent and in England, province lawmakers transformed an obscure warrant into a recording mechanism that permitted sizable amounts of aid to support both the town poor and sojourning strangers.
Large port towns along the eastern North American seaboard faced explosively rising relief costs due to influxes of newcomers. By 1770, New York and Philadelphia had populations larger than Boston’s and greater inmigration. To Love’s way of thinking, these port cities warned strangers just as Boston did. Twice, he wrote about a stranger who had recently arrived from one or the other city: “he Lived Some years” there and was “Never Warned Out.”27 However, the vocabulary of warning is absent from the minutes of the New York mayor’s court and the Philadelphia Common Council. Was Love mistaken?
Since neither New York nor Pennsylvania instituted a province poor account, we would not expect them to have resorted to a registration system like warning that entailed diligent searchers and scads of paperwork. For the most part, taxpayers in these major seaports were expected to absorb the costs of the relief offered to the nonsettled. Indeed, city authorities forgave the jail costs and fines of petty criminals who were not province inhabitants and paid the passages home by land or sea of many displaced colonists and Britons. They also admitted strangers in distress to their overcrowded almshouses, frequently begging their legislatures to help cover the costs.28
New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians did not mobilize to create province poor accounts to relieve the undue burden borne by taxpayers in their major cities. Conversely, Massachusetts taxpayers accepted and did not protest the tax responsibility represented by the province account. Politics, and the identity of those who would be aided, supply an explanation for this difference. At its genesis, funds from the Massachusetts province account went to colonists who had lost their homes in wars with Indians and France. Because these needy came from towns in all parts of the province, legislators supported drawing down provincial revenues for their relief. Only later did the bulk of such compensation cover outsiders and get funneled mostly to Boston. In the mid-Atlantic colonies where the inmigration of Britons, Germans, and other Europeans was phenomenally high, the seaports’ assembly representatives never managed to mobilize sufficient support for a dual accounting system from colleagues representing rural, interior townships.
But even without dual poor relief accounts in place, local jurisdictions outside New England could have drawn on legal precedent and used warning.29 Although scholars have associated warning exclusively with New England, this equation needs reexamination. The most likely place to find warning deployed as a legal step potentially leading to removal would be in the legal papers filed with the county sessions courts relating to pauper support suits.30 In Chester County, just west of Philadelphia, one finds the occasional use of the verb warn. On at least six occasions from the 1720s to the 1750s, officials in various townships warned strangers to depart in the same way that Massachusetts towns did. An overseer in Concord recalled how, in 1726, the overseers handled the case of Margaret Power, who was originally from Ireland and came “to reside among us”; we found “that She was a transient person . . . very old [with] no viseble estate to support her.” Her grown son, a “transient,” also living there, must have been unable to maintain her. The overseers interviewed Power, and upon discovering that she could not give security for indemnifying the township should she become chargeable, they warned her to depart and explained that “She Should not have any Settlement here.” Rather than petition to have the elderly woman removed, the Concord overseers obtained a court order requiring the county commissioners to acknowledge that “her Support and maintenance ought to be at the publick Charge” of the County; they refused to comply. Other litigation in the county shows overseers using warning as a prerequisite to obtaining removal orders; they followed the form laid out in the English legal manual Choice Presidents.31
Warning strangers thus occurred in at least one local jurisdiction in Pennsylvania, albeit in a limited fashion. Associated with removal, the verb warn crops up intermittently only in two genres of documents: overseers’ testimony and removal orders by justices of the peace. By the 1760s, it was no longer in use. The word is not found in the quarter sessions docket books, the life narratives that “poor and Impotent” persons gave when submitting to settlement examinations, or the pertinent 1718 and 1734 statutes. Thus, surviving references to warning are so rare and obscure that they have been missed by historians of colonial Pennsylvania.32
The Chester County evidence suggests that the warning writ was used as a precursor to removal in parts of British America other than New England at least sometimes, especially in the early decades of the eighteenth century. In New York, eastern Long Island communities founded by puritans adopted the warning practice, but other townships seem not to have done so. The units charged with dispensing poor relief in Virginia and the Carolinas (Anglican parishes) and Maryland (counties) are described by scholars as not bothering much with removals.33 The level of government higher than the locality entrusted with care of the poor—such as the county—occasionally acknowledged an obligation to cover relief costs for individuals lacking settlement in the colony. But these ad hoc reimbursements were few and far between.34
The exception may be South Carolina, where an alternative path was forged to provide for both strangers of free status and those whites who were considered the town and colony poor. Wealthy St. Philip’s parish in the major port of Charles Town shouldered the double costs of caring for the town poor and aiding the nonsettled. Some strangers were housed in the poorhouse, disabled sailors were given passage home, backcountry settlers fleeing Indian raids were succored. The assembly reimbursed the parish infrequently. Rather than create a province poor account and deploy warning to differentiate legal inhabitants from nonsettled folk, the legislators and the vestrymen (who were often the same men) dispensed aid on an ad hoc basis—whenever whites were seen as deserving.35
The South Carolina–Massachusetts comparison raises a thorny issue about levels of public relief. In polities’ efforts to fashion what they perceived to be effective welfare regimes, what constituted generosity to the needy? Historians argue that poor relief for white residents of South Carolina was more generous than in the north, supporting “a reasonable standard of living rather than merely subsistence” and marking off an entitlement denied to persons of color. Charles Town pensioners received on average 8 shillings, 7 pence per month (which exceeded the estimated cost of food by three shillings), whereas their counterparts in Boston and Philadelphia received between four and six shillings monthly (an amount that fell short of the cost of food). To conclude from this comparison that the major concern of northern authorities was “reducing expenses” rather than relieving want and suffering belies the evidence. Everywhere, elites, clerics, and overseers believed that the principles of Christian charity guided their efforts.36 In all parts of the British Atlantic, those in control of governance condoned a political order that visited the most entrenched impoverishment and the most sustained denial of human rights on enslaved men, women, and children. The modest geographical comparisons presented here suggest that we need a more fine-tuned calculus of where the boundaries of sympathy were drawn in the colonies and a better understanding of the tax and donation schemas undergirding public and private relief.37
In the eighteenth century, the largest British American mainland ports experienced rapidly growing Euro-American populations and sizable in-migration from the nearby countryside and often from abroad. Each struggled with the problem of distinguishing poor relief for residents and strangers. What stands out is how long one of these towns, Robert Love’s Boston, and a set of colonies, Massachusetts and most of its neighbors, monitored newcomers as a means of extending Christian charity to all of the deserving poor. Anyone sojourning in or moving to a town in the region could expect to receive a verbal warning to depart. Authorities and lay people alike understood that this legal gesture saved towns from uncontrollable poor relief without impeding the movement of people. Warning coupled with the province poor account was the innovation that most distinguished Boston from Ypres and Norwich, Paris and Lyons—cities with much praised and much advertised welfare systems inaugurated in the sixteenth century. Nowhere else in the West did taxpayers in a jurisdiction as extensive as Massachusetts prove willing to pay what were in effect two poor rates. And unlike South Carolina, which could boast making the highest payments to the town poor, the Massachusetts system made it possible for people of color to claim aid.38
Was the warning system “puritan”? Yes and no. Its impetus and its staying power can be explained by religious and civic commitments of the puritan-minded men and women who founded and provided leadership for most of the New England colonies. But the ideas behind the system were not uniquely puritan. In adopting the practice of searching for strangers, New England settlers followed reform ideas that had found widespread approval among seventeenth-century English elites—puritan and non-puritan alike. In this era of municipal experimentation, certain towns like Norwich and Boston stood out for the thoroughness of implementation. Hiring searchers, expecting overseers to walk their wards, maintaining a large almshouse, and using watchmen to ensure the Lord’s Day was not profaned required volunteers and a few paid townsmen to commit huge amounts of time. In England, many towns “fell far short of the ideal,” and by the 1640s most had abandoned any comprehensive program.39
As a warner who walked the streets almost daily and identified up to 420 strangers per year, Robert Love epitomized this “constant supervision” that early modern visionaries knew was requisite to maintain a well-ordered town. To the rituals of perambulation that greased the system, New Englanders could afford to add an element. Because of phenomenally high literacy rates among adult white men, walking and writing were paired tasks that could be asked of the low-profile men who filled the posts of night constables and warners. Just as Love with his phonetic spelling and inelegant penmanship filled out hundreds of pages, night constables such as Isaac Townsend and Valentine Sullivan took pains to detail in monthly journals the drunkards and domestic disputes they encountered on their watch.40 The walking, warning, and recording that became Love’s drill in his older years announced that Boston adhered to its particular vision for disciplining the urban landscape far into the eighteenth century.