Nearly everyone who earned a warning from Robert Love was a British subject. Unlike New York and Philadelphia, New England at midcentury experienced very little direct emigration from England or Europe. And yet Love’s records uncover a remarkable array of travelers, arriving on foot and horseback, by farm cart and wagon, and aboard the coasting vessels that carried on the region’s provisioning trade. The eldest of Love’s strangers claimed to be eighty-four years old; the youngest was about ten weeks old—an abandoned “man child” receiving care in the almshouse. Family groups as large as twelve encountered the warner; more numerous were youths and adults who appeared to be on their own. Some strangers were present because of the singular political and military events of the 1760s and 1770s. Other types had been coming to sojourn in Boston for decades.1
Colonial Boston has presented historians with a quandary. Why would so many people circulating within British America bother to go there? Struggling with population drain and a stagnating economy, Boston had been eclipsed as the most populous colonial city by more dynamic ports on the mid-Atlantic coast. Love’s warnings unscramble the puzzle, elucidating the many ways that the town beckoned.
Sojourner is the most suitable term for Love’s strangers. They were people on the move for a wide range of purposes with diverse fates ahead of them. Some we can think of as travelers—they stayed in town briefly, soon returning from whence they came or moving on with a destination in mind. A small set were classic migrants—those who intended to settle in Boston. The greatest number were sojourning in town for a few months or years. Among the sojourners, Boston attracted two sorts also on the move in early modern England. Unmarried youths and other adults with secure footholds in a region often moved short distances to cities for training or work; they have been described as “betterment” sojourners. “Subsistence” migrants, those with little property and “impelled by pressures of survival and economic necessity,” tended to journey longer distances, trying their luck in various urban places.2
The image persists among social historians that the roads leading to Boston during “the generation before the Revolution” were crowded with the second sort: “destitute and unemployed persons” who failed to find jobs in the economically hard-hit seaport.3 Love would beg to disagree. He described only 19 percent of parties warned as down-and-out. He wrote down the particular attributes of neediness of these unfortunates, calling them variously poor, sick, begging, disabled, dressed in rags, disordered in mind, idle, and strolling. The warner’s remarks are, of course, not a perfect index of profound neediness: some of those he termed disabled were employable, and some strangers were surely in distress unbeknownst to him. Those he labeled needy fit the profile of subsistence sojourners: two-thirds of them came from outside the province, a much larger percentage than in the overall population of warned. Beyond illuminating what it meant to be in the lowest of circumstances in pre-revolutionary Boston, Love’s observations strongly imply that the majority of newcomers were not drifting, destitute travelers, but purposeful ones.4
Another clue that betterment sojourners outnumbered subsistence ones is that the greater New England region, including the eastern Canadian provinces, provided three-quarters of warned incomers to Boston. Massachusetts was the source of half of Love’s strangers, and the surrounding New England colonies together with the Canadian provinces supplied an additional 24 percent. In this, Boston was like English provincial cities, which drew most intensely from the nearby villages and smaller country towns. The largest contingent—nearly five hundred parties—reported that they were last from other towns in Boston’s county, Suffolk Thus, they had come the shortest distances. No wonder that Roxbury, just outside of the gate on the Boston Neck, contributed more “strangers” than any other province town. The seventy-four solos and thirty-three families in this stream had the best vantage point for gathering information by word of mouth about advantageous employment, rental, and marriage prospects in Boston (Figures 6 and 7).5
Midcoast Maine and Canada’s maritime regions, notably Nova Scotia, were as closely tied to the Massachusetts capital as nearby counties such as Plymouth and Essex. In the forty years prior to 1765, the English population of these coastal “down east” regions had shot up, with many of the new settlers emigrating from long-settled towns in the eastern part of Massachusetts. Vast tracts in Maine were owned by Boston’s wealthiest merchant and gentry families, who mobilized kinsmen, retainers, and eager tenants to improve the land. Because the Penobscot region provided the great bulk of Boston’s enormous firewood needs, sloops plied the down east waters constantly except in winter. Nova Scotia was similarly an important part of Boston’s economic hinterland or catch basin, given residents’ extensive mercantile and familial ties to the Bay province. Love’s warnings reflect the density of voluntary human traffic between Boston and these coastal nodes, as fisherfolk, servant youths, and families relocated or opted to sojourn in Boston after living part or all of their lives in Casco Bay, Halifax, or Annapolis Royal.6
FIGURE 6. Locations warned strangers were “last from.” This figure includes all parties warned by Love except ninety-seven, for whom the information is missing or illegible.
Base map derived from Esri Data and Maps, 2012.
FIGURE 7. Warned strangers “last from” a Massachusetts location. The numbers refer to parties warned, not individuals.
Base map derived from Esri Data and Maps, 2012.
Sojourners came directly to Boston from the rapidly growing cities of New York and Philadelphia and other American sites outside the northeast, but in such modest numbers that they made up scarcely one-fifth of the warned. Only 5 percent of incomers to Boston captured in Love’s logbooks arrived from England, Scotland, Ireland, Europe, or Africa. Without a doubt, New England flunked the test as a magnet for long-distance migration.7 But Love’s narrative notes about sojourners indicate that relying solely on the raw figures exaggerates New England’s insularity. Although Boston was not their first destination in the New World, Scots, Englishmen, and Protestant Irish did circulate through its streets.8 Owen Kelley and his wife and son had been headed to New York from Ireland when they were “cast away near Carolina”; later they turned up in lodgings in Boston’s South End to tell Love their story. Three “Dutch” men (meaning German in heritage) had probably been born or resident in colonies that drew Germans in large numbers.9 Others had crossed national and imperial boundaries to enter British territory. Of Charles and Christine Jamison and their son, Love wrote: “They are very poor and are begging; they came from Lisbon in Portugal to Philadelphia and from there to this place.” Some from distant lands had resources and know-how about getting along with English colonists, while others were truly down-and-out. Josey (José) Desilver was a “portigee,” last from Roxbury and lodging in Boston with a deacon. In contrast, Anthony Serron was an East Indian with no money or lodging. Serron’s efforts to beg were hampered by what seemed to the warner to be a “stupifide” state. Peter Peterson was less adrift but had no local connections: he had most recently been in Stockbridge in the western part of the colony and explained that he was “prusin By nasion . . . [and] Wants to folow Labrouring Business in this town.”10
The mix of accents and nationalities on Boston’s streets was affected by the proximity of colonial territories that had until recently been governed by France. “Franch” people (as Love wrote and perhaps pronounced the adjective) were not uncommon. Their relaxed reception in Love’s day contrasts with wartime periods earlier in the eighteenth century, when French men entering the town had been quarantined as enemy foreigners. Like many of the Britons and European-born strangers in Love’s records, a goodly number of the French did not enter from territory once encompassed by New France. Rather, they had been living and circulating in the British colonies.11
In responding to Love’s query about where they were “last from,” travelers provided information that must be interpreted carefully.12 Especially for Massachusetts-born incomers, the place they named was often their place of legal settlement. At other times, it merely specified where he or she had most recently lived, worked, or visited.13 Love might signal this by writing “last from Roxbury but properly belongs to Medfield.” Longer entries revealed the many moves that some made in order to maintain subsistence. Polly Nichols was “last from Roxbury,” having moved from Braintree to there, and from York in England to Braintree. She “was Born in Old York which is her proper place.” Such notations, resembling an English settlement examination, were important because if the warned newcomer stayed in Boston and needed relief, the selectmen would have a jump start on determining the person’s “proper” place of settlement and thus who should pay.14
Both betterment and subsistence sojourners were often solo travelers, not journeying with kin. Among Love’s strangers, a strikingly high proportion came as solos—74 percent. Earlier in the century, when smaller numbers were warned annually and when Boston was formally offering town inhabitancy to men with desirable skills, families had predominated. By the 1760s, not only were more youths from yeoman New England families traveling short distances on their own, but also, in the wake of the Seven Years War, displaced veterans and other wide-ranging subsistence seekers sent the numbers and proportions of solo male travelers to all-time highs. Of the parties Love warned, 47 percent were solo boys and men and 27 percent were solo girls and women.15
Thinking of these people on the move as “solos” carries hazards. Most solo travelers arriving from New England locations were firmly connected to kin, community, and work networks in the region and should not be imagined as “alone” in social terms. Moreover, being accounted as traveling alone by Love did not mean one was unmarried. Love sometimes explained that a woman arriving by herself was coming to join her husband. In most cases, only by pursuing biographical research can we ascertain a traveler’s marital status. The manner in which a stranger traveled to Boston is often obscured by counting strangers as solo. A fifteen-year-old girl or boy might well have been accompanied by a parent, older sibling, or acquaintance with short-term business in the city.16
Women’s and men’s movement streams as solo travelers were distinctive. Slightly more girls and women than solo males entered Boston from Massachusetts locations overall and from Halifax in maritime Canada. This suggests the existence of a strong demand for female workers, probably in service positions for which we have little direct documentation in the form of indentures or work contracts. The warning records for 1765–73 show that Boston was annually absorbing on average seventy-eight solo females, and most of them young and unmarried.17 Indeed, from the two closest towns, Roxbury and Dorchester, women made up 60 percent of all incomers who arrived on their own.18 The pattern seen here, of females equaling or outnumbering males in entering towns from the nearby countryside, echoes that of many early modern English towns. In an urban setting, women could find domestic service posts or earn a living by huckstering, retailing drams, or doing washing. If not boarding with their employer, laboring-class women often shared lodgings or chores in cooperative “housefuls.” Relatively cheap houses and rooms to hire made this possible.19
As everywhere in the early modern Western world, the greater the distance traveled, the fewer women making a journey without any kin or not in the company of husbands. While constituting up to half the solo stream from the province’s towns, girls and women were only one-fifth of those who came in from the rest of greater New England and 10 percent of those from outside the region. Love noted only eleven girls or women came “alone” on shipboard to Boston from overseas; three had a husband or uncle serving in the British army in the Americas, and another came as a servant to customs commissioner Henry Hulton. Indeed, just over 90 percent of the solo female travelers into Boston came from the New England-Canada region. Traveling from afar greatly increased the likelihood that a solo woman would appear to be in distress or to have chosen a vagrant’s life. One-third of the fifty-six solo women incoming from outside the greater New England region were in some sort of need. In contrast, 6 percent of solo females “last from” a Massachusetts town were so described. This is testimony that youthful women’s circulation within the province was betterment migration rather than born of desperation.20
Love warned solo male youths and adult men at an average rate of 123 per year. One-third arrived from a location outside of New England and Canada. Signs of poverty or distress almost equally affected those boys and men traveling from afar as solo males “last from” a Massachusetts location. Nearly one in three, compared to one in ten for female parties, appeared to be in trouble or soon ended up in the almshouse or workhouse. Thus, the public face of impoverishment and physical disability in the mid-eighteenth century was more male than female.21
Most of the solo men and male youths were able-bodied and arrived expecting to work. Love reported occupations for 144 white men, including fifteen shoemakers, twelve barbers, nine peddlers, eight servants, seven bakers, seven laborers, seven tailors, and six each of carpenters and masons. Sometimes he indicated the flexibility of men’s training and work, as in the case of Michael Amblert (“he is a baker to traid and a WistedComber”). Of course, many more interviewed by him had a trade, and others were coming to Boston for artisanal training, but their occupations went unrecorded. Strangers’ landlords occasionally provide clues to their trades. For example, barber Theodore Dehone, who attracted clients to his shop on King Street, lodged solo male strangers on five occasions, and it is probable that all of them worked for him.22
Family groups or household clusters made up slightly less than a third of the parties warned. They were far less likely to show signs of neediness than solo male travelers and were slightly less prone to have come from afar. Among the many types of traveling households, spouse pairs and spouses with children predominated. But Love also ran into adult women with offspring, families or adults accompanied by servants and others not kin, and sibling pairs. The average number of offspring accompanying parental pairs was 2.5. Since historians calculate that on average white, married couples in colonial New England had 7.5 children, with 5.3 children surviving to the age of twenty-one, the size of traveling households indicates that many of these parents were young. A few, however, told Love that they had with them only some of their minor children, having placed others elsewhere.23 Sometimes, parents were on the move with a grown child and her offspring. Abraham and Ann Rhodes, last from nearby Milton, arrived with “his” daughter Mary March and her child Alice; Love explained that March’s “Husband is Gon and Left her.” Intergenerational groups like this one and other blended families or stepfamilies caught the warner’s attention because if the province later extended relief to the children, Love’s notes might allow them to identify paternity and trace the deceased father’s last place of settlement.24
The eighty-nine mothers traveling with one or more offspring remind us that the recent war had widowed many New England women, especially young women. Love called only ten of these mothers widows, but surely more than that number had lost their husbands. At least thirteen of these travelers were presently married; according to Love, their husbands had preceded them to Boston. Elizabeth Fillis came into town with daughters Nancy and Phoebe; their destination was the house near the windmill on Boston Neck that Elizabeth’s husband had lived in since June. Sarah Berry, in contrast, had come to Boston with a daughter because she “had left her husband” (due to his abuse?) in Roxbury; Sarah was now in the bridewell for some undisclosed disorderliness. A few other women were on their own because their husbands had absconded. We might expect more of these female-headed parties to have been in bad straits; yet the percentage of them identified as needy nearly matched the percentage of solo women travelers similarly described.25
Love’s lack of formal education, his phonetic spelling, and his Ulster Scots background help explain the idiosyncratic written markers he used for people of color. He described just under 5 percent of the warned as “Negor,” “malato,” or “Indin.”26 Educated Bostonians, such as town clerk William Cooper, used more standard orthography for these descriptors. Love’s negative associations with Indians and blacks show occasionally in his entries, particularly in his insinuations that certain Indian and black women were promiscuous and thus disorderly. But most of the 104 entries convey information about the newcomers without moral judgment. Strikingly, Love described few blacks and Indians as ragged, poor, disabled, or needy in some other way. It appears that to counteract the prejudices and ill will harbored by many whites, people of color dressed and conducted themselves on the road and in Boston to avoid undue scrutiny. Furthermore, Love accorded these New Englanders a measure of respect by recording first names and surnames for all but a half dozen. When meeting Boston’s warner, these men and women had the freedom to identify themselves quite differently from owners and employers who regularly denied them surnames or names they chose for themselves.27
Nearly all of the folks labeled nonwhite arrived solo.28 A very high proportion came from a New England location (85 percent), with almost two-thirds reporting they were last from a Massachusetts town. Constantly vulnerable to kidnapping and wrongful enslavement, free people of color in the late colonial period did not venture far from communities in which their character and life histories were known. Nor was Boston yet a magnet for indigenous or African-descended travelers from colonies to the south. On the other hand, the 1760s and 1770s witnessed an untold number of enslaved New Englanders freeing themselves by walking away from their human owners or negotiating the end of their coerced labor. Many came to the region’s largest town in search of work and fellowship with the eight-hundred-odd black and Indian residents whose domiciles could be found in all wards. Indian women and men often moved between two worlds—to and fro to towns where they could pick up jobs, pay debts, or sell baskets, and to native enclaves in the woods where community life and celebrations could take place free from white scrutiny. The English concept of settlement in a fixed place clashed with Algonquian patterns of movement, which were seasonal and clan based. Increasingly cast as a wandering people, their journeys reflected survival strategies that remained incomprehensible to colonists.29
African-descended persons on the road, but not Indians, were often questioned about their legal status. Love assumed that Indian persons were free, despite the frequency of natives’ enslavement or forced indenture following from seventeenth-century military defeats, debt, and poverty. Only in the case of nine-year-old James Mohawk did the warner explain that a Boston man had “Bought” the boy’s “time till he is 30 years old.”30 Of the sixty-eight solos or household heads whom he described as of African heritage, Love labeled thirty-six free and seven enslaved. Rather than using the word slave, which white New Englanders tended to avoid, he resorted to a vocabulary of ownership: “she properly belongs to Mr. Seth Barnes.” Enslaved persons’ situations were in flux in the Bay province during the three decades before the 1780 state constitution was interpreted as abolishing slavery. Some found that they could pass as free by leaving owners and moving a few towns away. Slave owners often deemed pursuit not worth the expense. Others formerly enslaved who had reached advanced age were fending for themselves because masters had released them without formal manumission papers or financial support. Love sometimes chose phrasing that reflected the uncertain climate: the stranger “says” she or he is free. In other cases, his narration marked the stranger’s status as ambiguous: Mingo Otis, a “very Old” man, had been in town two months and “Gowes about sawing Wood[;] his Late master’s” name was Mr. Isaac Otis of Scituate.31
The skewed sex ratios of New England’s black and Indian populations (more black men than women, more Indian women than men) were reflected in Love’s encounters. This was most striking with respect to Indians on the move: Love warned twenty-eight women arriving solo and only six solo males. The region’s Indian male population had diminished dramatically. Epidemics took both sexes; in addition, men suffered heavy mortality as enlistees in provincial campaigns against the French. Enclaves such as Natick had in the recent past contained over one hundred Indians; by the mid-1760s only a few dozen Indians resided there, with women outnumbering men by three to two. Thus, Indian women went to port towns seeking both employment opportunities and potential mates. Marriages between native women and black men were on the rise. In Boston, which housed the largest cluster of African-descended people in the region, black males outnumbered females by 1.68:1, according to a 1765 population count; in some smaller eastern towns, the male-female ratio among blacks was as high as 2:1. No wonder Love warned slightly more solo black males than females.32
Most of the warned can be pegged as middling and lower sorts. But Love, despite his instructions to warn only those of low circumstances, warned a few who were positioned near the top of eighteenth-century social ranks. Whispers of future bankruptcy or concern over each household’s dependents may have prompted him to give notice to a titled gentlewoman and a Harvard-educated cleric. Sarah Walter Hesilrige had grown up as the minister’s daughter in west Roxbury among the most elite and highly educated families. She had married Robert, the son of Sir Arthur Hesilrige, baronet, whose English Civil War–era ancestor had been an “active parliamentarian and friend of Oliver Cromwell” and a possessor of land grants in New England. Sir Robert succeeded to the baronetcy on his father’s death in 1763 but did not inherit a share of familial land, perhaps because he lived most of his adult life in the colonies. It is not clear why he was not with his wife in 1766. Love’s entry shows that in April of that year, Lady Hesilrige moved into a rented house on Long Lane with her two daughters and Sepro, an enslaved woman. She continued to reside in the Boston-Roxbury area until her death in 1775 at age thirty-nine. Surprisingly, Love styled her “Mrs” (for Mistress) rather than “Madam” or “Lady,” the highest honorifics for women and to which arguably she was entitled.33
Love’s warning of the forty-three-year-old cleric John Carnes and his nine dependents is more understandable. Upon graduating from Harvard College in 1742, Carnes, the son of a Boston pewterer, lacked family links to the ministerial elite except through his wife, Mary Lewis. Classmates and observers described him as “silly,” of small talent, and burdened by “displeasing” manners. After two short pastorates in country towns characterized by unhappy parishioners and inadequate compensation, Carnes evidently decided that the ministry was not for him. In spring 1765, he moved his large family and a servant maid from Rehoboth (the site of his final pastorate) to Dedham, a town near Boston. There they rented a house and, in the routine manner of newcomers, received warning. Fifteen months later, the lapsed parson brought his household to Boston and rented a South End house, expecting to carry on the owner’s previous practice of retailing liquor. The Boston selectmen initially denied Carnes’s license application. They relented two years later, as Carnes was by then an established grocer and dry goods retailer. In 1776, the former cleric moved his family to Lynn, and Carnes’s topsy-turvy life in these, his final, decades vindicated Love’s warning. Though the former cleric saw his children marry well and was even chosen as a justice of the peace and delegate to the state legislature, he suffered financial reverses and died in poverty.34
Betterment sojourners, strolling couples seeking alms, African New Englanders shedding slave status, and the occasional high-ranking householder who might tumble in rank: these categories do not encompass three groups on the move owing to imperial policies and conflicts specific to the middle of the century. Acadian families encountered Love in Boston in 1766 not because they were voluntary sojourners in New England, but because they were finally released from a decade of internal exile and misery in interior Massachusetts towns. Eleven years earlier, the British government and army had forcibly expelled these French farmers from Nova Scotia. Similarly, the warning records enhance our knowledge about Boston under military occupation by British troops from 1768 to 1770. The warner focused not on the soldiers but on their dependents—wives, sweethearts, and children—and the often desperate conditions faced by military families on the move. Finally, even though military engagements in the Seven Years War had ended in the Americas in 1760, demobilized regimental soldiers circulated for years among the major port towns looking for work and often for passage home to old England.
Hundreds of people entered Boston every year in the pre-revolutionary decade to sojourn or settle. Historians have been skeptical that the city could have absorbed so many, especially during the postwar depression of the 1760s. Even before the Seven Years War, the city’s economy had stalled; many native artisans, discouraged about prospects for drumming up enough trade, left for opportunities elsewhere. However, even in this climate, Boston beckoned to middling folk and the working poor.35
Boston’s economic trough had lasted for two decades, in contrast with the growth occurring in the large mid-Atlantic port towns. Whereas Boston had once led “in shipbuilding, the leather trades, meat-packing, hatmaking, the axe and hardware manufacture, cheap export furniture,” and chaise making, “only the furniture and carriage business remained profitable.” While New York built a thousand houses in ten years to accommodate newcomers and Philadelphia witnessed an even bigger building boom, perhaps twenty residential structures went up each year in Boston. Dozens of rental units might stand vacant. Bostonians’ confidence in the stability of their mercantile firms was shaken when a cascade of prominent traders went bankrupt in 1765. Not only were British lenders calling in overseas debts, but the war’s end also meant that New Englanders were no longer called on to supply boots, bread, and rum for thousands of troops and sailors. As a consequence, many artisans, laborers, and dockworkers were out of jobs or plunged into underemployment.36
To compound matters, the West Indian trade, an important sector of Boston’s economy, was hard hit when Parliament’s new Sugar Act took effect in 1764. The act effectively ended the lucrative molasses smuggling long engaged in by Boston merchants. This development “convulsed” the economic prospects of shipowners, sea captains, and sailors active in the trade, along with associated tradespeople such as coopers, rope makers, and blacksmiths. The center of town was still struggling to recover from the devastating fire of 1760 that had consumed hundreds of structures. In these years, too, Bostonians bore a larger tax burden than residents of other major seaports. This was due partly to the structure of the province’s tax system and partly to Boston’s rising annual expenditures for the town poor. All these developments took their toll on the port city’s residents. The median personal wealth left at their death by Boston craftsmen in various trades was significantly lower than that of their New York and Philadelphia counterparts.37
Boston also stood apart from the other port cities because of its imbalanced sex ratio. Most of the so-called surplus women were widows. Indeed, historian Alfred F. Young believes that Boston earned the title of the widow capital of the British Atlantic world. Relative to mid-Atlantic and southern colonies, Massachusetts contributed soldiers disproportionately, following the long sequence of colonial wars. Since women’s means of earning were dramatically more constrained than white men’s, many of the town’s widows required some form of poor relief and many of the town’s eight thousand children experienced not just fatherlessness but poverty.38
Boston’s place as the largest urban center and seaport in the northernmost sector of British America helps explain continuing in-migration. Towns such as Newport, Hartford, Portsmouth, Montreal, and Halifax were considerably smaller in population. Scale alone created opportunities—more potential customers, patrons, and allies; more work possibilities; denser networks of information; more chances to book ship passage. The ever-widening stratification of wealth in colonial society and the fashion of emulating European aristocracy meant that urban gentry demanded and could pay for servants, retainers, and skilled craftsmen. The high turnover in population, endemic to urban centers in England as well, meant that there was a continual need for infusion of journeymen, laundresses, and dockworkers to replace those who had left.39 Simply put, the movement of men, women, youths, and children in and out of Boston was a dynamic inherent to the relationships between commercial urban centers and their hinterlands. Boston was like Nottingham, Leeds, and London in drawing “unskilled young people” who “served as the infantry of town life, . . . working as tapsters in inns, servants in household and shops, doing dirty jobs like sweeping chimneys and cleaning latrines.” Indeed, “without such an influx towns would not have been able to function effectively.”40
Five general motivations drew strangers to Boston. At times, of course, these overlapped. Securing work and acquiring training brought the greatest number. Many youth came because it was a critical hub in the regional labor market and because the dense interconnectedness of New England families provided them entrée to employment that unskilled strangers arriving from afar were less certain to secure.41 Some of the strangers who did not come to work told Love that they would be in town only as long as it took to find a conveyance to their desired destination. Boston represented for them the most convenient point of embarkation. Except in the winter, several ships a month might clear the harbor bound for the British Isles. Such departures were nil or rare from the region’s smaller ports.
Large urban ports served as havens and gathering spots for like-minded and closely related people. James Darby provides an example of intercolonial Quaker networks. Warned on the day he arrived from Philadelphia, the down-at-the-heels Darby indicated that that he was looking for work as a “smith” and planned “to Lodge att freind Samul pop[e’]s.” Seventy-six-year-old Pope, a blacksmith who owned a house and shop on Hollis Street near Love’s lodgings, was a member of the Boston Quaker Meeting. Members of the Pope clan often took in new arrivals, many of whom may have been Quakers.42 Cities were also frequently sites of family reunification, as family members moved together and apart and together again. Isaac Hammon came in autumn 1771 to live with his mother, Mary, who had been warned by Love four months earlier. Both had lived last in nearby Newton; Mary’s husband was presently working in Connecticut. Husbands joined wives, and vice versa; young children were escorted into town to become part of new stepfamilies; elderly parents came to live with a married son or daughter. Of course, a bustling urban entrepôt could also offer a place to hide, at least temporarily. Some of the Indian and black New Englanders warned by Love were eluding punitive masters and constrained existences in smaller towns. Confederates in burglary might bide their time in town until a warehouse or merchant’s house appeared unguarded.43
A small portion of the warned aimed to resettle in Boston even though its economy was not booming. The Reverend Mr. John Carnes, profiled above, is an example of a career migrant, if a somewhat odd one. He gave up his previous work as a parson to take advantage of urban conditions, where he had access to affordable rental lodgings and customers for a retail business. Others arrived with uncertain plans and ended up staying. Families with slim resources relocated to early modern cities because there all family members, no matter their age, could find more opportunities for casual employment than in smaller places.44
Finally, the capital was a draw for beggars and others in need. Cities were better locations to beg or seek alms than smaller towns. A strolling couple might evade detection more readily than in rural villages. Boston’s almshouse offered free medical care and food and housing that tided hundreds through difficult winters. Some ailing wanderers surely came to Boston because they knew that the province covered relief to all incomers in need.
The men, women, and children warned in Boston did not seek out the destination willy-nilly. As the largest urban hub in the region, Boston readily absorbed laborers, especially domestic servants and journeymen. This was the case both when economic growth was stagnant and when shipyard work and overseas commerce were picking up, as occurred in 1770.45 When we set Boston in the context of early modern English cities rather than measuring it narrowly against New York and Philadelphia, we see why many types of people flocked there and why they were welcome. Without Robert Love’s detailed notes, differentiating sojourners from settlers, youths from ancients, and native-born beggars from Britons seeking passage home would be all but impossible.
