No memoirist recounted how it felt to be accosted and verbally warned to depart. Diaries, letters, and travel accounts contain no descriptive scenes of warnings. Despite their formulaic character, Love’s notes divulge quite a lot about the warning encounter. They reveal the warner’s rhythms of walking and warning, including the gaps of time between when newcomers arrived and when Love found them. They allow us to partially overhear the conversations he held with strangers, and to perceive the reactions of the warned. Most answered Love’s questions in a straightforward manner, but some were cantankerous and set him on edge. Others talked a blue streak, divulging their faraway birthplaces, Atlantic journeys, and hopes for the future. Occasionally they asked advice about work or lodging. Bystanders and landlords joined in these exchanges, making Love’s capsule biographies a collective product. Indeed, the meticulous paper trail that the warner left underscores the layered way in which local knowledge of strangers was compiled. Love could successfully fulfill his mission on behalf of the town only through careful attention to a series of personal transactions: with the strangers he warned, with his network of informants, and with the officials he reported to.
Love took care to write down what he believed was the salient information he gathered from each stranger. In each entry, the warner followed a ritualized sequence. While adherence to this particular ordering of information would not have mattered to his employers, the repetitive act was probably a helpful mnemonic device for Love as a record keeper. His most fulsome records contained: the names of strangers in the group; where they were “last from”; the date they entered Boston; whether they came “by land” or “by sea,” and, if the latter, the name of the captain and the ship; with whom they were lodging and in what neighborhood; additional information such as occupation or personal appearance; and the words of the warning (Figure 5, for two entries).
A good example is his record of an encounter with a Frenchman in early August 1766:
Larance Gillerest Last from QueBeck Come to town July 26 1766 With Captn. David Weir in the Scooner Rainbowe he is a Baker to traid he Entends to Work Journey work if he Can Gett itt to Doe Warned in His Majestys Name to depart the town of Boston in 14 days.
Many entries are shorter. Love recorded occupations for only a small percentage of the travelers. “By land or sea” information could be left out for the numerous people who walked into Boston from nearby Massachusetts towns. And at times Love was forced to be terse because the subject refused to tell him much. Hence, in September 1765: “William Doty Last from Plymouth Come to town yesterday he would not tell me Where he Lodged.”1
Love, although a minor town official appointed to act in lieu of the selectmen, seemed proudly conscious of his ability to present himself as an agent of George III. As he walked the streets, alleys, and docks, and visited landlords and tavern keepers in search of strangers, the public nature of his job followed him throughout Boston, legitimizing a considerable amount of what otherwise would be snooping and verbal badgering. Love did not take along just his voice (was it stern or kindly, mellifluous or croaking?) and his powerful memory for faces. He also must have carried his warning book, or at least some place where he jotted preliminary notes before transferring them into his calf-bound logbooks. Given the crowded conditions of the town, Love’s individual acts of warning were witnessed by many townspeople and thus were public performances. His pen and paper were physical artifacts marking the warner’s efficacy as an agent of the king.2
Surprise was one tactic that Boston officials had at their disposal. In smaller country towns in Massachusetts, strangers often knew in advance that they were about to be warned. Selectmen first issued a warrant naming newcomers who needed to be warned. After a gap of a few days, the town constable set out to find the strangers, display the warrant, and verbally warn them “to Depart out of town.”3 The gap must have given noninhabitants the opportunity to evade the constable, if they so wished. However, in the long run, if the sojourner stayed in town, warnings undoubtedly were served. Love and his fellow warners in the provincial capital had the power to issue warnings without getting prior direction from the selectmen.4 Hence a Boston warner could arrive unannounced at tenements or workplaces. He could hail unfamiliar figures in the street and demand that they state their business in Boston, their place of legal settlement, and the day of their arrival.
FIGURE 5. A page from Robert Love’s 1765–66 record book.
Image courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Newcomers found it hard to hide from the indefatigable Love. The intervals between a stranger’s arrival and the day on which Love found and warned him or her reveal just how good he was at his job. Love warned an astonishing 63 percent within one month of their arrival. He encountered 20 percent on the first or second day they were in town, and another 19 percent within the first week. Only 4 percent of the strangers had been in town ten months or more. Of course, despite his assiduity, Love must have missed spotting some sojourners, but given the high turnover in the urban population, chances were good that they left town on their own accord within a year.5
The quickness with which Love identified newcomers is of a piece with other evidence that he was a man with a remarkable memory. Historians recognize that, given the paucity of personal written records relative to modern times, eighteenth-century denizens had well-developed oral memories. Court records reveal that many could recall conversations and business reckonings from years past in fine detail, when these became a matter of serious dispute or litigation. Similarly, residents of port cities would have built up an impressive memory bank of the faces, gaits, hats, clothes, voices, and laughs of all who lived in the neighborhoods where their own living quarters and workplaces were located. Those who regularly perambulated all parts of the city and had an incentive to memorize faces, as Love did, might come to believe that they “knew every person white & black[,] men[,] women & children in the City . . . by name.”6 While Love might not have claimed such encyclopedic and intimate knowledge, he had to have carried with him on his walks an extraordinarily acute “facebook” of the permanent and recent residents of Boston.
Unfortunately, Love rarely described the faces, physical attributes, or clothing of strangers. Based on his notes, a sketch artist would not have enough information to draw portraits of the warner’s interlocutors. If we were able to interview Love at the end of a warning day, he doubtless could have enumerated the height, physique, countenance, and togs of the person freshly entered in his logbook. Over and over again in the runaway notices posted in colonial newspapers, masters and ship captains displayed their intimate knowledge of what employees wore at any given moment. Love’s short-term memory must have been similarly acute. The hundreds of young people flowing into Boston varied in body type and skin tone: thick-set, slender-bodied, straight-limbed, pretty tall, of swarthy complexion or pale. People of all ages were sorted by whether they were smooth faced, or “pock freckled” because of smallpox. A man “of middling Age” might be wearing “his own black Hair, tyed with a black Ribbon,” while the woman accompanying him was “of thin Visage” and had “a wide Mouth, large Teeth, thick Lips.” Love was used to hearing stammers and other speech impediments, and many accents, including some like his own: a sailor who deserted a brig in Boston harbor in 1764 was said to be “born in the North of Ireland, and speaks like a Scotchman.” Finally, Love saw before him an enormous array of clothing: patterns of stripes, checks, flowers, and plaids; textures of velvet, leather, homespun, and superfine broadcloth; great coats, waistcoats, and petticoats of blue, green, red, purple, calico, and cinnamon; buttons and buckles galore; distinctive cravats and capes; lots of gray yarn stockings; and hats and shoes of all varieties.7
The shape of a nose or a tell-tale, well-worn jacket might have jogged Love’s memory when he warned a sojourner for a second or third time. At least seventy repeaters appear in his warning records. To be warned more than once usually meant that the stranger had come into Boston, left, and returned. Love’s decision to warn a party more than once reflects his thoroughness and his awareness of the legal and welfare ramifications of travelers’ changing circumstances—such as place of settlement or economic standing. On the occasions when a household head spent time in Boston alone and then returned some years later with his family, the original warning would not have covered the man’s dependents. Hence Hugh Thompson earned warnings both on his solo sojourn in town in the winter of 1766 and eighteen months later, when he lodged at the Sign of the Jolly Sailor with his wife and three children shortly after they all arrived from Scotland. More commonly, duplicate warnings were issued to people who were perpetually on the move on the North American continent and were needy in some way. William Harris (begging, an old man, very poor) circulated so often to towns in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island then back to Boston that Love warned him four times.8
Although Love was not explicit about where he encountered strangers and delivered his warnings, he allows us to infer the location. For the 14 percent of his warnings that were delivered on the very day the traveler arrived in Boston, almost all seem to have taken place in the streets.9 Often, Love caught the newcomer while he or she was in motion across the town landscape, heading toward a specific destination. John Green and John Smith were among those who knew in advance where they would be staying. Green told Love that he was “Gowing to Work With [laborer] Rodger Mcknights.” Smith was walking northward from the gate at Boston Neck to join his wife, Mary, who was already in town and lodging “att David Powers Neer the North Battery.” Some brand new arrivals admitted to Love that they had come to the port town not with secure prospects but with vague hopes of work or succor. Mary Chatot had walked in from nearby Brookline and told Love that she “was Looking for a place to Live att in town.” Incomers may have looked to Love, as a longtime Boston resident, to play the broker’s role, pointing them to a likely employer or affordable lodging. Whether he did so is not revealed in his warning records.10
Others whom Love found on their first days in Boston were down on their luck and told the warner that they did not expect to be in Boston long. Love judged William Rodgers, who had served in the colonial militia in 1757, “a verry Old man and verry Rag[g]ed.” The old soldier reported that “he Wants to Go to Marthers vinyard has a Brother their.” Jenkin Conway, who had been discharged from Colonel John Whitmore’s regiment in late 1762, “Wants a pasage to England.” Love’s conversations with poor or disreputable new arrivals were at times reminiscent of a negotiation. As the selectmen’s agent, Love must have cautioned men he found begging or women he suspected of loose morals that the town could prosecute them for vagrancy (punishable by a term in the workhouse). The threat was effective. Constable Isaac Townsend reported that on a winter night in 1765, the watchmen found “a Stranger . . . asleep on Bradfords Wharff being m[u]ch intoxicated with Liquor whom we kept till Morn[;] inquiring where he belong’d he said to Marblehead & had been fasting all Day & laid him[self] down to sleep He was perswaded to putt off in the first boat by [our] telling him he would be taken up as a Stroling Person.”11
Indeed, several disreputable newcomers pledged to Love that they would leave town in a few days, in effect notifying the town through the warner that they need not be prosecuted or forcibly removed. With this strategy, they bought themselves a few days to solicit alms or do business. About Richard Griffin, who had arrived “this day” from Philadelphia by land, Love wrote: “he is an old man and a beggar[;] he has promised me that he will depart this [town] in 2 or 3 days.” On Margaret Lemey: “she is a stroling womon or[i]ginally belonged to Exeter,” New Hampshire, who had come to Boston from Portsmouth; “she promesed to Return their as soon as posable.” In one encounter in March 1770, Love ventriloquized for the selectmen. Lee Wolfindine had come in by land from New York two days earlier: “he is a Kind of a Crasey man he has No place of Abode but . . . Lodges in the WatchHouses and makes a Grate noise with Boys in the Streets & in the town house[.] I told him he Must Get a pasage to England soon or he must Return soon to New York again.”12
While it was in the streets that Love most often encountered migrants arriving “this day,” one of his chief strategies for discovering who had entered Boston days or weeks before was to frequent landlords’ establishments. Like warners before him, Love would have been told when he took office that he was to “Visit all such Houses & Families as he apprehends Entertains Inmates or Strangers.”13 That Love did so regularly is indicated by frequent clusters found in his records of strangers staying at the same location warned on the same day. For example, on a day in May 1772 and again in mid-July 1773, Love recorded back-to-back warnings for solo men who had come to town at different times and were now staying with the retailer Enoch Brown in his house on Boston Neck. The likelihood is that, rather than meeting the colodgers on the streets, Love went to Brown’s to interview and warn these men. Occasionally, Love was explicit: he wrote that he “found” widow Elizabeth Hardwick, who had come in from nearby Braintree, at her son-in-law’s house in Back Street.14
Love’s records offer few internal clues to indicate the hours of the day when he issued warnings. Twice he specified that the encounter occurred after dark. “I found” William Johnston “Looking for Lodging in the Night”; the warner probably led or directed the man to Daniel McKeen’s South End house, where he ended up lodging. On a Tuesday one March, Love recorded that a strolling couple, last from Scotland, “came to town this Evening” and promised him that they were “Gowing Eastward” on “the morrow morning.” In three cases, he remarked that it was morning when he found and warned a stranger drunk in the streets. Presumably, the great bulk of Love’s interviews with strangers occurred in daylight hours.15
We do know the frequency with which Love walked and warned, and the days of the week and seasons of the year when he was most active and successful. Over his years as warner, Love for the most part recorded only one or two warnings on a given day, indicating that he did not generally spend the whole day scouting for strangers. He typically found strangers to warn two to three days in a row, then skipped a day or two. Love warned slightly more groups on Thursdays than on the other weekdays, and slightly fewer on Saturdays. He generally observed the Sabbath by not issuing warnings on Sundays, but on seventeen occasions he made an exception—perhaps discovering a stranger while on the way to worship with his family at the centrally located First Church.16
The puritan founders of the colony disdained traditional European and Christian patterns of declaring no work for common laborers on feast, harvest, and saints’ days. As an adherent of the Congregational church, Love would have been aware of their insistence that men and women work on December 25 and not observe Christmas. Yet cultural practices in Massachusetts had changed in Love’s lifetime; by the 1760s New Englanders increasingly celebrated Christmas and refrained from labor. In his first year on the job, Love’s warning of two families on December 25 can be read as his honoring the old New England way. But ever after, he gave warnings a rest when that day came around, as he did on New Year’s Day except in 1772 and 1773. On the public days of fasting and thanksgiving proclaimed by the governor in ritual fashion each April and November, Love for the most part did not warn. In contrast, when civic or political events occasioned large gatherings, such as town meetings, provincial elections, Pope’s Day processions (November 5), or celebrations of the Stamp Act repeal, Love often took advantage of the large gatherings and street activity to warn several strangers.17
The busiest months of warning matched those when the temperatures were mildest and the harbor was filled with ships—May to September. Fifty-one percent of Love’s warnings fell in these months, while January and February engendered the lowest monthly totals. This seasonal pattern reflects the ebb and flow of labor in and out of the town rather than the warner’s hesitation to step out onto the winter streets wearing his heavy cloak.18
Inquiring into the emotional tenor of the exchanges between strangers and warner opens a series of questions. Were newcomers startled, annoyed, perplexed, or humiliated by the ritual? Consider that Love’s contemporaries would have heard the verb warn to mean one was put on notice, not that one had to leave imminently. Furthermore, sojourners to Boston who had grown up or lived in towns in Massachusetts, Connecticut, or New Hampshire were well acquainted with the warning practice, and they would have anticipated a warning by Boston officials if they appeared to be coming to live. British subjects were well-acquainted with the laws of settlement and were probably quick to grasp why Love needed to record their particulars. Many whom Love questioned revealed extraneous details about themselves—their trade, how long they had lived in their last place of residence, their exact route to Boston, their future plans. The great majority of migrants spoke truthfully and without evasion. Some probably engaged the warner and bystanders in lengthy conversation. For most, the warning ritual was a fairly benign and inevitable aspect of sojourning in Boston.
Yet warning had its ominous side. As legal authorities of the time put it, once a newcomer heard the words “I warn you to depart,” he or she was considered to be “under warning” while remaining in Boston. The great bulk of warned strangers were welcome to stay. For them, the process registered their presence, allowed them to enter the town’s workforce, and insulated local taxpayers from future charge. Boston officials pursued removal warrants against only thirty solo travelers or families between 1765 and 1775—the decade during which about three thousand parties were warned. As with other regional hubs, Boston needed a continual influx of laborers. Moreover, physical removals were time consuming, labor intensive, and expensive (given that most removed persons could not pay the costs). Boston acted in parallel with other towns in keeping them to a minimum.19
Love did not personally escort the unwelcome strangers out of town, but he was sometimes asked by the selectmen to arrange removals. To do so, he presented a petition on behalf of the selectmen to a Boston justice of the peace, claiming that, as in the case of pregnant Lydia Gammons, “although She has been Warned According to law for more than fourteen days past to depart,” she had refused to do so. If all was in order, the justice would grant the requested warrant, ordering any constable to apprehend the named party, and—at their own charge, if able to pay—carry them to the Massachusetts town where they were believed to have settlement, to be delivered there to the selectmen or overseers.20
Removal orders omitted the reasons for expulsions, but the types and profiles of those removed suggest what prompted such dramatic action. Few solo men were the subject of such orders. If he was able-bodied, a male newcomer’s usefulness as a laborer apparently protected him from removal. If deemed a common beggar, stroller, or vagabond, he could be “taken up” by any petty official such as a night watchman and carried before a justice of the peace, convicted of a misdemeanor, and committed to a short stint of labor at the workhouse. As was the case elsewhere under British settlement law, the costly procedure of removing “strangers” was reserved for certain types of families and solo women. Studies of English parishes have shown that recently married couples with young children were the demographic group most likely to need public support. In Boston, most of the fifteen families removed appear to have been impoverished, young parents with children under age ten. In two cases, there were aggravating causes: the warned strangers, both Irishmen, who had been arrested for burglary a few months after their arrival in town, jailed, and convicted as felons.21
Women might be removed if they behaved in an outrageous and disorderly manner. Lucy Pernam, a black resident of Newburyport, was warned at least once and removed twice. She provoked authorities by episodically becoming intoxicated and threatening to burn down the town. Others merited removal if they were notorious for bearing children out of wedlock. Katherine Green, an Indian last from Stoughton, provoked Love’s ire with her promiscuous behavior with men of color; he did not wait for a removal warrant. “Come to town yesterday [a Sunday] Between meetings I then Charged her to Gett out of town Early on Munday morning[.] Was all Night in a Lighter Boat with 4 Negor Men[.] Att 9 [I] found her and Carried her Over the Neck.” Nearly all of those carried out had come in from Massachusetts towns and were returned to the town where they were believed to have inhabitancy. In the mid-eighteenth century at least, officials rarely if ever invoked the legal process of removal for the large numbers of sojourners arriving from outside the province.22
Cognizant that strangers’ warning histories could help determine which fund would be charged for a pauper, Love at times noted whether a stranger had been warned in a previous place of residence. Moses McIntosh had lived in several Massachusetts towns before arriving in Boston in late 1770, but because he had “been Warned in his Majestys Name out of them all,” he was admitted to the Boston almshouse on the province account. Daniel Tombs and his wife and child had been “warned out from” Roxbury, their last abode, so Love had to dig deeper: “the[y] Orig[in]lay Belonged to Hopkintown and [were] Born their.” In contrast, free black Elizabeth Chase “properly belongs to Roxberry,” proclaimed Love, because “she lived [there, prior to the 1767 law] 1 year and a half without being warned out of town.”23
A small subset of Boston’s newcomers courted eviction by greeting Love defiantly. These resisters “refused to tell” where they had come from or where they lodged and sometimes even to give their names. Love encountered Robert Gray on a January day; the man had arrived eight weeks earlier from Scotland: “he says He Lodges Neer Mr. Cooper’s Meetinghouse But He Refuses to tell the people[’s] Names.” The warner added an unusual, judgmental aside: “the Man Apears to Be a Bad man.” Most contrary of all was Samuel Fosdick, “a Verry Old man & Verry poor & Verry Cross[;] he would Not tell where he Lodged in town But said he Would Live in town and NoBody Should hinder him he had places anofe [enough] to lodge att.” While refusing to give Love a name or past place of residence might be read as a survival strategy or as a sign of mental illness, it likely just as often reflected the traveler’s adoption of an irascible public persona in the face of poverty, disability, social alienation, and kinlessness.24
In the face of resistance, Love could be very persistent. One April day, he came across a transient man who “Would Not tell his Name and Was Very Angrey.” The indefatigable warner shadowed the man around town or hung about where the stranger loitered. “After Wa[i]ting upon him” the great part of the day, wrote Love, he finally “told me his Name” (Michael Vane) and “I Warned him.”25
The locution “I warned” was a telling deviation from Love’s routine wording, which followed the formula, “warned him in His Majesty’s Name.” The phrase crept into Love’s writing exclusively on occasions when the stranger he encountered was resistant, begging, or seemed dangerous. We can hear the warner’s agitation in this rather choppy entry: “Davison Johnston Last from providanc Come to town this Day he Says he has No Certain place of aboade he is prety shabby in his Clothing he Says he has no money I Warned him.” Love likely lapsed into the first-person unconsciously. It signaled his heightened emotions when coming face-to-face with the most unkempt and unruly of the town’s incomers, those whose behavior suggested they could become extra burdensome. Strangers who hollered and screamed in the night or who begged openly and defiantly clearly rattled Love. Inserting himself into the warning declaration by writing “I warned him” suggests his need to differentiate and distance himself from the person being warned. The “I” may also reflect Love’s sense of himself as a pious Congregationalist obligated to enforce moral codes whenever possible. In inscribing himself as active agent in these cases, the warner was in essence wagging his finger and evoking his office and ability to inform the selectmen of immoral behavior.26
Indeed, in order to deliver a moral judgment of the person in front of him, Love occasionally wrote himself into the narrative section of his entry. Love encountered Anna Caterina Boma “in the streets.” He had doubts that she was truly a peddler; rather, she “pretends to be a pedler.” Furthermore, her word was not to be trusted: “she Said first She came from New London But Afterwards She Said She Belonged to New york.” Love’s coda: “I belive She is as bad a woman as can be.” On another occasion, Love wrote without further explanation: “he is a man I Do not Like Verry Well.” And of Archibald Conaway, who “Would Not tell his Business But said he had Something to Advertis”; “I Do not Like the Looks of the man.”27
One gets the sense that Love, as a fastidious record keeper, was offended when he found himself thwarted in collecting information. Because of drunkenness, impudence, or mental disability, strangers sometimes gave “very slender” or “poor” accounts of themselves, preventing Love from writing down where they had a place of settlement, where they were last from, or why they had come to Boston. Love may have placed his hands on some of these defiant street people, gripping their arms or giving them a shake to wake them out of drunken stupors. “A Kind of Crasey man” whom Love came across in August 1770 “Would Give no Acco’t of himself where he Belonged But Disaired [desired] I Would Let him Goo.” The wording suggests that the stranger perceived that Love was holding him, either physically or metaphorically.28
Strollers would have been especially worrisome to town and province officials. Because these men and women had “no settled place of abode” (in other words, no regular domicile and no traceable town of legal settlement), the province would have to pay if they became utterly disabled. Love had a favorite adjective for the male strollers. Jonathan Lawrence, “a tinker to traid” with “No Cartain place of aboad” but who originally “Belongs to Scotland” is “what me [may] be Called a Stroling Impidant Man.” Former British army soldier William Filch made it a “Business of Beging from house to house” and was not just impudent but “verry Bould.” John Ewing, who had come in from Lyme in the neighboring colony of Connecticut, was, according to the warner, “a Lying Drinking man and verry Impident[;] he Says he Values Noboady.” Love’s desire to extract accurate information appears to have been sabotaged by these recalcitrant, rude strangers, resulting in unpleasant encounters that were fraught with friction.29
At times, Love wondered if his leg was being pulled or if the stranger had been deliberately deceptive. Polly Smith “says she Come to town yesterd[ay]: But I have heard She has Been in town Before” behaving promiscuously. Love sometimes wondered if he could trust those who claimed to have been castaways or captured by the Indians and held for years. He may have doubted that the stranger who called himself Abraham Colden was truly “the Natrell [natural, meaning illegitimate] son” of the governor of New York. Surely Edmund Mott, “a very poor man and very poorly clothed,” was hallucinating when he boasted that “he Can Live Without Eating.” A lack of worldly knowledge tripped up one fifteen-year-old who presented himself as Nicholas Hebier, born in Landersang in the German lands. He made the mistake of reporting that he had been “3 years in France in Paris from which place he says he Come by Land” to Boston. Love concluded: “I Take him to be a Runaway servant.”30
Sometimes Love was able to unmask the deceiver. Aliases were a tool that marginal working people and traffickers in petty crime might adopt to evade detection. Love spotted the strategy being used by several women. In October 1767, he warned a woman a second time in seven months, identifying her as Mary Thompson and explaining that previously she had given him “the Name of Mary White Which Was a fals Name.” Love’s three warnings of Nancy Shays show that she had been circulating through towns in the Boston area: Cambridge, Charlestown, Westborough. After arriving in Boston in the fall of 1771, Shays was sentenced to a spell of labor in the workhouse for some unspecified misbehavior, and then given shelter at the almshouse. A year later, she returned to town, finding lodgings with a succession of residents. On their third encounter, Love reported that “She Calls herself Now by a falls Name Nancy Dasson.” Her choice of alias was a defiant pun that would have been transparent to Love, given that Nancy Dawson was a famous English hornpipe and jig dancer of the 1750s and 1760s, appearing at London’s Covent Garden and other stages. A ballad written in her honor to a Scottish fiddle tune boasted: “Of all the girls in our town / The black, the fair, the red, the brown,/That dance and prance it up and down, / There’s none like Nancy Dawson.”31
When presented with a mystery, Love could turn himself into an energetic investigator, stretching his researches over several days. In August 1768, he warned one mentally disturbed woman whose name he never learned even though he “Asked her several times while she Was aboute in the town.” In May 1772, Love had perhaps his most extensive experience playing detective after he visited the almshouse and discovered a male infant who had recently been taken in. Love learned that the “man Child” had been found abandoned on Boston Neck. Somehow the warner was able to track down “the Womon that Nursed the Child about 8 or 9 Weeks . . . whose Name is Mary Hodley” at her lodgings in New Boston. She told him that “their Was a man,” John Twing of Cambridge, a blacksmith, who paid “her for Nursing said Child” and then carried “it away with him”—before it was found abandoned. With this information, the town of Boston had someone to pursue for the cost of the child’s upkeep. Love also had been able to discover that the infant was “Never Babtised therfor” he could give it “No name.”32
The case of the abandoned infant reminds us that Love surely relied on the audience present at any warning scene to give him information. At warnings, it was not only the stranger who answered questions, but also landlords, employers, relatives, and bystanders. Mistress Candace, in Middle Street, had recently taken in her brother William Haley, formerly a Boston resident who had “Been Gon 30 years.” “She Wants to h[ave] him taken Care of By the Gentlemen Selectmen of Boston,” wrote Love. A three-way conversation unfolded when Betsy Mumford, “a girl,” received her warning. Benjamin Clark, the brazier and merchant, was present, and in front of Love he told Betsy that “She behaved verry Loosly” when she had previously lived in Boston with the leather dresser John McFadden. Mumford’s response to their grilling was to refuse to tell where she was currently lodging. Infrequently, Love encountered a Frenchman or Dutchman who could not speak English. Latinate place names, the use of mime, and some rudimentary knowledge of French may have allowed Love to fill in some of the blanks on these strangers, but bystanders may have provided translation help. In the case of Frenchman John Gosey, who had arrived in a small sloop from Cape Breton, Love wrote: “the man Could not Speak English he talks of Gowing to England.”33
Unnamed observers helped Love to profile strangers of dubious reputation. “I am told,” Love wrote about Charles Lee, who had come to Boston three months earlier, that “he is a man of No Business But Idles his time away.” Similarly, Joseph Smithers, a maker of leather breeches lodging at a victualler’s in Wing’s Lane, “has been taken Notis by many to be Idling Abou[t] the Warfes in town.” On finding Azubah Mason “with a Number of Boys Making Game of her,” Love reported that “She Semed to all the people to Be Quite Crasey or Light headed.”34 Such entries make clear that Love, as warner and investigator, often queried many people in the process of warning a stranger. The encounter was a public one, and the extraordinarily detailed information contained in Love’s recorded warnings reflected the individual and collective insights of many Bostonians.
Love’s skill as warner entailed not just finding strangers and getting them to talk but also making decisions about potentially chargeable people whom he need not warn. Besides newcomers of high status and obvious wealth, two groups appear to have been passed over. New Englanders who visited Boston in familiar patterns, lingering briefly, did not merit warning. These included adults called to the sickbeds or deathbeds of close relatives; captains of coasting vessels based in nearby ports who unloaded supplies on Boston’s wharves; the country folk who sold their products and foodstuffs at the weekly town market; and middling residents of the region who made purposeful shopping trips to the city for themselves and neighbors. Love made the bet that these visitors were leaving quickly. If they lingered, he would find and warn them.35
The seamen who shipped out of Boston harbor did not receive warnings. On his rounds, Love would have easily identified them by their wide, baggy red breeches made of rough nap and smeared with tar, their distinctive jackets and Monmouth caps, and their tattoos and tanned skin. Their speech too betrayed them, since it was full of “technical terms, unusual syntax, distinctive pronunciation, and a generous portion of swearing and cursing.” Love treated most sailors as exempt from warning for several reasons. Not only did mariners based temporarily in a port sleep on shipboard, but the commander of their ship was legally responsible for them. New England shipmasters recruited largely from their hometowns or nearby coastal towns. Thus, when sailors disembarked in Boston at the end of their contracts, they were either already in their hometown or were heading out of town. Love must have warned a few who left their maritime employment for work and lodgings on Boston’s waterfront, but he made no comment on their seafaring pasts. For Boston officials, the familiar collective of ordinary seamen did not threaten to add measurably to poor relief outlays.36
In becoming the best searcher-for-strangers that Boston had ever seen, Love did not walk the town unaided. He gleaned information about where to look and whom to look for from several types of informants. Landlords, including the owners of taverns that offered lodging, were frequent founts of information. The Boston-based ship captains who made regular runs to other ports were probably inured to Love’s pestering them about their passengers. In these pre-stagecoach days, the only regular public transport conveying travelers to and from Boston by land was Mr. Dixey Brown’s “Providence Wagon.” Brown’s single stop in Boston was at the Sign of the White Horse in the South End, where the travelers usually stayed for their first night. Love often intercepted new arrivals there either on their first or second day in town.37
Some of Love’s most important contacts included men who served the town in various official capacities. Foremost on this list were his immediate employers, the selectmen. Given that the warner attended most of their meetings on Wednesdays, he got wind of landlords giving notice that they had taken in a noninhabitant and of selectmen authorizing almshouse admissions for distressed strangers. In a handful of cases, Love followed up with a warning delivered anywhere from a day to a month later. Just as often, however, Love’s warning came first and was followed by the landlord’s notification or the selectmen’s action. For example, Love warned Mary More on May 5, 1770, and six days later her landlord, Mr. John Kneeland, appeared before the selectmen to declare that he had taken her in twelve days earlier.38 Or take Love’s September 1765 warning of a man last from Jamaica with sores on his feet who “Wants to Gett in” to the alms-house: on the very next day, the selectmen ordered that the lame stranger be received into the house.39 On the same day in May 1768 on which Love warned a family of four, recently arrived by ship from Lyme, Connecticut, and lodging with a man on King Street, the warner attended the selectmen’s meeting to inform that these strangers were “poor Indigent Persons.” Immediately sending for the owner of the sloop that had transported the family to Boston, the selectmen were pleased with the captain’s pledge “that he would carry” them “back again to Connecticut or in case of failure that he will answer for all damages.”40 Although Love and the selectmen clearly traded information about strangers and their circumstances, it is a testament to Love’s efficiency that he rarely had to be told or tipped off in order to warn. More often, it was his act of warning that brought—or had the potential to bring—town leaders’ gaze on the plight of newcomers.
Other officials with whom Love interacted had duties that required them, like him, to walk the streets of Boston and record their observations. Each of the twelve wealthy men who served as overseers of the poor was assigned to a ward—a neighborhood they were instructed to “walk” at least monthly in order to inspect the poor and decide on the distribution of outdoor relief in the form of firewood and other vital provisions. The gentlemen overseers typically lived in their ward and walked it often, becoming intimately acquainted with its denizens and turnover in its population. Love would have been acquainted with individual overseers not least because they frequently attended selectmen’s meetings. Furthermore, we can assume that overseers quickly got word to Love when persistent beggars haunted the streets of their ward or strangers of low circumstances moved into a tenement.41
The constables who managed the night watch were a second important source of information for Love. Here was yet another set of petty officials who recorded in writing the results of their human encounters on their walking rounds. Unlike Love, who was free to perambulate Boston as he wished, watchmen were required to follow particular routes. The men of the South Watch, for example, were to walk “To Deacon Eliots Corner, to Hills Still house to the Bull wharf up Summer Street to the Old South meeting house.” The South Watch was one of four zones, each with a watch house and a designated constable in charge. Starting in 1761, the selectmen had ordered each constable of the watch to “keep a fair Journal of your doings every Night, how you find the state of the Town, and who of the Watchmen are on duty, and Report to the SelectMen every Wednesday.” Their lists of disorderly nighttime miscreants rarely overlapped with those warned, but this does not mean that they did not pass on tips to Love about newcomers they found sleeping on the docks or in alleys or barns but had no need to write up.42 Love netted at least one stranger, and probably many more, in this way. In May 1768, “Mr Walas the Constable” “Brought to me” Peter Murray, who “has been a Soldeir att the Havanah”; he was “Drunk.”43
As a mode of governance, the twinned rituals of perambulating and writing prized in eighteenth-century Boston—carried out by night constables, gentlemen overseers, and warners—occupied a middle landscape between the gatekeeping and wall walking of medieval cities and the overlapping systems of personal identification central to the modern bureaucratic state. To ask the middling householders who served as head night watchmen to keep journals was to rely on the high literacy rates of colonial New England. Writing undergirds modern governance, permitting codification of subjects in order to scrutinize them, collect obligations, and deliver services and rights. During Love’s tenure, the technology of Boston’s partial registration system was embodied in non-elite men’s feet, voices, logbooks, and quills.44
At the end of each month, Robert Love sat down at his desk to fulfill his duty to report his findings. This entailed considerable copying. All in all, the warner wrote his warnings in four discrete places. First were Love’s rough notes, which no longer survive. Second were his entries in his leather-bound journals. These books he purchased at some expense from a local printer; the town did not supply them nor did they claim them as public records. Love called these logs his “books.” They were arranged chronologically, not alphabetically, and he would read back through them if he had a dim remembrance of having previously warned (say, a year or two earlier) a stranger he had recently encountered.45 Third, with a thoroughness unrivalled by his counterparts in the job, the warner copied his logbook entries, with all the details, onto the monthly warrant that William Cooper, the town clerk, had issued to him.46 And finally, our doughty scribbler copied the month’s warnings, again word for word, onto a double sheet that would be sent to the overseers of the poor.47
Soon after making these careful copies, perhaps choosing an evening when the selectmen were to meet, Love placed the folded warrant in his leather pouch, donned his wig and cloak, and strode out of his house, heading northward on Orange Street. His destination was roughly fifteen minutes away—William Cooper’s desk in the selectmen’s chamber in Faneuil Hall. In his genteel hand, Cooper would copy the most relevant information from Love’s logbook entries (names of the members of the party, where from, when arrived) into the alphabetized town warnings ledger. In the years 1765–68, when three men were warning strangers, Cooper must have checked his ledgers to ensure he was not entering a duplicate.48
Finally, it was Love’s duty to deliver the completed warrant into the hands of the clerk of the court of general sessions. Having completed copying the names of those he warned onto the warrant, Love always finished off his return by writing the date and an official declaration: “I have Warned all of the Above Named persons to Depart the town of Boston in fourteen Days or Give Security . . . p[e]r Robert Love.” Before he could deliver the warrant, the warner often had to wait until the sessions court met. Once again, he walked from his lodgings in the South End to the center of town, this time to the courthouse. Gaining entrance to the building, he dutifully delivered his warrant to the court clerk, who dated it, marked it as Love’s “return,” and filed it.49 Thus did the many souls who encountered Love in the port town’s streets and lodging places officially become nonsettled residents of Boston.
