“The man is a mason to traid and verry poor”; “she Apears to be a verry Helpless Womon“; “they say they lost all they had”; “he is a young man . . . in distress”: these traveling folk were among those whom Robert Love flagged as begging, sick, destitute, drunk, dressed in rags, physically disabled, mentally disturbed, old, idling, strolling, thieving, lodging out of doors, or lacking a place of abode. Such strangers made up nearly one-fifth of all parties warned by Love. Most were not locals; they had often traveled from afar by foot. Except for the strollers, men arriving alone predominated. Some came to Boston seeking immediate relief. Others, despite a lame hand or a recent shipwreck experience, found lodging and work, avoiding dependence on the province poor rolls. Still others moved quickly out of town.1
Examining Love’s descriptions gives us a rough portrait of the neediest of Boston’s sojourners. Four types of distressed persons emerge. In one group were those unambiguously displaying neediness: they were begging, their clothes betrayed impoverishment, or they could not afford lodging. A second group made their hardship known by either requesting relief from town officials, such as passage home, or obtaining a stay in the almshouse. Sometimes acting as broker between the needy stranger and the selectmen, Love became well acquainted with the inmates and rhythms of the alms-house. A third traveling type manifested signs such as mental illness, physical handicaps, sickness, and old age that could entail an inability to earn a living and lead to destitution. Fourth, the warner commented on those whom many in his society saw as the immoral poor: drunkards, strollers, idlers, and disreputable types in trouble with the law. Analyzing the stories these diverse strangers told and the life histories that can be generated for some, this chapter illuminates the range of tribulations that could propel any member of the lower-middling sort or working poor into homelessness or a roving, property-less existence in the British Atlantic.2
Begging was an unmistakable signal of need. It was also illegal in colonial Massachusetts. Knowing the law, beggars mostly eschewed boldness, pragmatically engaging in less obtrusive mendicancy as long as they could get away with it. One strategy was to broadcast the reason for one’s plight. Mary Miller told Love that two months earlier she had been “burnt out” of her dwelling in a village on the Hudson River. A young man claimed that “the Owner of the Land where he Lived [at the eastward] Drove him from the place” he had occupied. Another tactic was to reassure the warner that one was passing quickly through town. Love wrote of William and Margaret Robinson: “beging Strolers . . . are Gowing Eastward and promies to sett out the morrow morning.” Yet some felt entitled to ask for alms. One elderly, almost naked vagrant declared “he Would Bege in Spite of anyBody.”3
Despite the official condemnation of begging, subtly different categories of beggars were present in colonial North American cities. Solo men were observed “beg[g]ing money,” “beg[g]ing for healp,” and begging “his Bread.” That an adult, in Love’s terms, might be “a complete beggar [and] not able to get his bread” implies that others were understood to be begging seasonally, for only part of their income, or as a temporary strategy when in dire straits. Some were identified as permanent beggars whose activity was fairly continuous and practiced beyond Boston. Abial Wood is “Lame in his Legs with Sores . . . and is Beging from Every Boady he meets,” wrote the warner. Peter Barker, a frail man of seventy-three, was observed “Beging from Door to Door.” Love knew that John Davis was hardly alone in going “aboute the Country Beging.” Elderly William Harris had come by land from Pottsgrove, Pennsylvania, “begging all the way.”4 The warner expressed surprise when he came across a young or “stout” man pleading on the streets for alms or “all in rags.”5
People brazen or desperate enough to try begging in Boston’s streets and alleys tended to come from farther afield than the bulk of warned sojourners. The seven reporting that they had been soldiers, whether in the country or the regular service, were all last from a distant town—in Connecticut, the middle colonies, or Quebec. Among solo beggars, only one-quarter had come last from a Massachusetts town, while one-third told Love that they hailed from greater New England. These findings indicate that adults who relied on begging circulated through a fairly large region including the major towns. Patrick Bonner, for example, who was “almost blind,” came at least twice to Boston from different towns in New Hampshire. On the first occasion, he was begging and offering passersby “a Small Brife [brief]” or piece of paper that chronicled his misfortunes in a bid for charity. William Simpson, an elderly man with “no Setled place of Aboad,” circulated between towns in Connecticut and Boston, collecting three warnings from Love.6
Although most beggars were colony outsiders, some province residents ventured to Boston to try their hand at asking for alms on the streets. Jonathan Whittemore from Malden appeared before Love on a spring day in 1766, all in rags. His was a somewhat sad life. Although he grew up in solid circumstances on the family farm, married at age thirty, and had eight children, Jonathan had never held a trade or been able to support his family sufficiently. Age sixty-one, with children aged five to fifteen, he told Love on the day he crossed Boston Neck that “he Come to town one purpose to beg.” Love likely ordered him to refrain from open mendicancy or move quickly out of town. Whittemore was soon back in his place of settlement, Needham. After his wife died in 1771, the elderly Jonathan spent the last fourteen years on the town poor roll, boarded out to various families.7
William Bowen presented a similar portrait of an “old Man” at loose ends, but it was his shabby clothes not an attempt to beg that gave away his neediness. A former schoolmaster whose charges had habitually played tricks on him and who was fated to die in poverty, Bowen was one of eighty-five persons whose torn garb or paucity of clothing was remarked on by Love.8 Ninety percent of these unkempt strangers were solo men on the move. Love’s usual adjectives for them were “ragged” and “poorly clothed,” but he was not shy about using the adjective “naked.” As with other Anglo-American writers, he used it to indicate “almost Nacked for want of Close [Clothes],” as he explained in a particularly fulsome entry. Thus, the person who was “almost naked” may have displayed many tears in his stockings or shirt or lacked the conventional outer garments that people of middling and better sorts wore according to the season.9
Given that clothing was one of the most important clues to a stranger’s material wealth and prospects, it loomed large in the warner’s criteria for assessing if newcomers were “of low circumstances” and inclined to end up on poor relief. Lacking the proper clothing for one’s station or trade indicated the absence of female kin, hired help, or friends who could assist with mending. Thus, it was not surprising that Davison Johnston, who had no money with him and “No Certain place of aboade,” was “prety shabbey in his Clothing.”10
Love ratcheted up his language from “poorly clothed” or “pretty poorly dressed” to very ragged (and variants indicating extremity) in two-thirds of the warnings that referred to clothing. These travelers bore overt marks of destitution and were barely surviving. The young man Thomas Willard, very poorly dressed, “Wanted to know if the town would help him” as he had been continuously sick with fever and ague. Mary Chilman arrived “quite Destitut” from Halifax and was forced to lodge out of doors; Love noted another sign of her poverty—she was “bare footed.” Thirteen of the ragged and almost naked were begging. Most of these probably shared the plight of Edmund Toye: having trudged in from Marshfield in Plymouth County on a cold day in early November, “he lodged in a pesture [pasture]” his first night in town, “being so poorly Clothed Nobody would Lodge him.”11
Like Toye, some of the rootless folks whom Love encountered on their first days in town were forced to lodge out of doors or in barns. Peter Highnots, a baker by trade, had made his way to Boston on a recent circuitous voyage: from London to South Carolina to Marblehead and by land to Boston. On one of his first two nights there, noted Love, he “lodged in the Street.” Love recorded his discovery of nine other men and two women who did the same; most had come in between May and October and had been in town only a few days.12
Bostonians at times refused to take in ragged wanderers, who were often also ill, fearing infestation, put off by intolerable smells, and aware that they might never be paid. Silas Giles, “almost Naked,” had been in town one week before he met Love; he had lodged in the streets the whole time “Excepting one Night he Lodged in the Widow Elisabath Ervin[’]s att the head of the Long Warfe.” For the eight nights since his arrival from New York in May, Moses Shipsces, who had lost a limb, had the dropsy, and was bereft of money, was “obliged to Lye in the Streett.” An eighteenth-century story that resonates even more closely with the modern category of homeless urban dwellers was that of William Ferrell. Warned by Love on a day in late July 1768, he insisted that he had been in town since the previous September; for eleven months, he “lodged abroad in the streets.” Ferrell had once worked as a barber; Love observed that he was “verry poor,” ragged, and lice ridden (“Lousey”).13
Those without money for lodging might try to persuade the town and provincial authorities to pay for their overseas passage home to the British Isles or to subsidize their journey by land to a distant North American destination. Love encountered wool comber John Taylor on the day he arrived from Philadelphia in autumn 1767, noting: “he wants a passage to England if the Overseers of the Poor Would pay for itt.” The town fathers appear not to have taken up Taylor’s cause, but they did assist others when convinced that helping the stranger reach his or her desired destination would save the town and province from recurrent expense. Mary McCarthy arrived in Boston from Quebec in summer 1770, eight months pregnant, seeking her husband in vain. On the day Love warned her, she was admitted into the almshouse on the province account, where she soon gave birth to a daughter. Her stay in the house ended after seven weeks, when she applied for and was granted a sum of six dollars to assist her and her infant’s “return to Canada by Land.”14
A remarkable number of strangers who were in no condition to move on found refuge in the town’s sizable almshouse—the largest in the region. The almshouse was located just west of the town center, on the east edge of the town common, in a complex of public buildings that included the even larger workhouse edifice, a small bridewell, and the public granary. Built of stone and brick, with segments dating from 1686 and 1742, the two-story almshouse had a long, narrow footprint. No illustrations or blueprints survive, but other records tell us there were thirty-three “apartments” (sleeping chambers) besides the requisite refectory and lodging space for the keeper and his family. Designed to house 130 to 160 persons comfortably, the inmate population hit a pre-revolutionary high of 260 during the winters of the mid-1760s. This meant eight persons per room—often, a large family lodged with two single women—and many in each bed, as was standard eighteenth-century practice.15
Despite the crowded conditions, the almshouse meant food, shelter, and medical care. For many poor folk, it served as a maternity hospital and the only place where one could receive treatment for broken limbs, gonorrhea, or mania. Given the province’s welcoming policy, it is not surprising that some strangers came to Boston “to get in to” the almshouse. Anthony McNeil believed that a stay would enable him to recover from his pleurisy; he was arriving from Newport, Rhode Island, and was very poor. McNeil evidently never entered the house, but two lame men who hoped to “be Cured” there were admitted a day or two after being warned, with Love doubtless alerting the selectmen and overseers, whose say-so secured almshouse admission.16
Love witnessed some of the dramas unfolding within the almshouse walls because he visited the building every few months. He issued verbal warnings from there on at least forty-five occasions. Love’s first known foray to “the house” (as the overseers termed the almshouse) in search of strangers was in his third month on the job. In late March 1765, he delivered a warning there to forty-year-old Richard Leader, who had “been in the armey.” Leader had arrived the previous December from Cape Breton, initially lodging with a shoemaker in the South End. But sickness forced him to stop working and seek relief. On March 20, the day before Love found and warned the veteran, he was admitted to the almshouse. Six months later, Leader left the house; he then disappears from Massachusetts records.17
On his visits, we can imagine Love first passing through the gate in the tall fence that surrounded the almshouse building, and then stepping into the narrow house to seek out the keeper, Samuel Proctor. Proctor, or Proctor’s wife, Hannah, who served as cokeeper and matron, could direct him to “stranger” inmates who had not yet received the town’s warning. Love would have sought out the individual or family group in their chamber; perhaps he sat down while he asked them his standard set of questions. To David Dolbeare and his family, Love added a twist to his usual words and revealed his typical spelling and pronunciation for the institution. He verbally warned them “to Depart this town or Allamshouse” in fourteen days.18
The strangers on the move who sought the house’s shelter included youthful, solo travelers who had run into trouble, distressed mothers and fathers traveling with small children, and pregnant women who had no family in New England to support them during childbirth and several weeks of lying-in. Most took advantage of the house’s accommodations only once, but others had repeat residencies. On average, their stays lasted four months; occasionally they topped two years. George Gutteridge, age thirty-five, who, Love wrote, “Has Been in the Armey and is sikley,” was admitted in June 1767 “till he Recovers his Health,” which turned out to be only one week. John Fitzgerald arrived in Boston from Newfoundland sick, was admitted to the almshouse, and died there one month later, at age twenty-one. Lame youth Edward Davis, admitted at age twenty, remained for two and a half years.19
Disabilities such as mental distress, blindness, and deafness, might mean that a stranger needed charity or succor in the almshouse, but that was not always the case. Then as now, an individual’s experience of mental and psychological affliction could wax and wane. When Love warned twenty-nine-year-old Joseph Norcross one June, the warner did not sense anything amiss. Norcross had come to town to live in his brother-in-law’s large family. By the following winter, however, the Boston selectmen became aware that Norcross was “distracted” (the preferred regional idiom for mental illness); they sent Love to negotiate for the stranger’s return to his natal town. Norcross’s relatives explained that the man suffered from a disorder that was much worse in winter than summer and that he was already under guardianship as a “non compos” person who could not be trusted to engage rationally in buying and selling. He would return to his hometown of Weston and live out his life there, unmarried.20
Love’s sense of the range of mental disorders and intellectual deficits that could befall a person emerges in his phrasings. Besides deploying the adjectives of “crazy” and “distracted,” Love wrote that a person might appear stupefied, “underwitted,” or “a Lit[t]le out of his head.” When strangers acted “Verry Od[d]e,” Bostonians were put in the position of puzzling out their condition. Love was on guard for men faking distraction in order to win sympathetic treatment or alms. Anthony Ferdinando, a “portygee,” “pretends to be Disstracted.” Prince Sturgis, the scion of a wealthy mercantile family with roots in Cape Cod and Boston, “Either is or pretends to be Crasey.” In the case of the “verry troubelsome” workhouse resident John Dwyer, Love left the assessment to the keeper, Joseph Lasenby. After three weeks, Lasenby concluded that although the man “pretends to be out of his head att times . . . he is Not.” Within a few months, the town fathers arranged for Dwyer, a recent immigrant from Ireland, to be removed to his last place of residence, Portsmouth, New Hampshire.21
Love expressed less doubt in the cases of those who gave voice to their hallucinations or set the townspeople on edge by screaming through the streets at night. At the almshouse, Love listened to George Carroll, a Briton lucid enough at times to remember that he had been born on the Isle of Jersey. But on the day Love warned him, Carroll was “posse[sse]d with [Vi]asions that the Divel is Coming to Carry him aWay and Says he Sees fir[e]s Burning.” Boston boys entertained themselves by crowding around and following some of the distracted strangers, all the while verbally testing and teasing them, a scene which at times created “a Grate noise.” James Dunbar ran “aboute the Streets Calling himselfe a Liberty Man” in July 1770, but the locals knew better. John Barber, who had served in the army, was “holowing and Screeming About the Streets and Swe[a]ring,” and, like several mentally disturbed strangers, refused or was unable to tell Love where he lodged or when he came to town.22
In the context of Boston’s street life, the public face of madness was masculine. Only four of the thirty-two strangers identified by Love with descriptors akin to “crazy” and “underwitted” were women. Most were men who appeared adrift, unanchored by home or kin network. These displaced outsiders included Anthony Serron, a “Stupefide” beggar whom Love called “an Indian to Nasion” (meaning East Indian), and several Britons, most notably a man claiming he had been “an Ofiser under Genrall Gage and [was] Brock [broke] by him.” The preponderance of men among “distracted” strangers reflected both the greater mobility men enjoyed in contrast to women and the tendency of Anglo-American culture to represent madness as masculine.23
The number of strangers for whom Love noted some sort of physical disability was twice as large as those he perceived to be mentally disturbed. Of sixty-seven in the general category, twelve had lost eyesight, totally or partially; three fit the label “a Deefe man”; one was a shoemaker who happened also to be a dwarf. The adjective lame covered a wide range of handicaps. A stranger might be “lame in” the right shoulder; lame “in his back”; lame in a hand, arm, or leg; or suffering from “the Liprose[leprosy] in his Theye or Knee.” Three of the sighted were described as using crutches or needing help to walk. Some of these traveling folks would recover full mobility, while others were permanently disabled. Some had survived amputations, severe frostbite, or tragic accidents, such as the black man Cascobay, whom Love described as lame “of both his hands,” having lost all of his fingers. James Jackson, found drunk in the street one early August morning, had come to Boston by land from South Carolina; Love wrote, he “has Lost one of his Arms and one of his Eys.” As with mental afflictions, physical disability was markedly male. Only two so described were women: one was “Lame of one hand,” and the other had lost an eye.24
Even though disabled, some men had trades and were seeking work in Boston. Having impaired hearing or a damaged arm did not preclude labor. Benjamin Gabril, “a Dean [Dane] to nasion” and lame in both hands, told Love that he had “Helped to tend taveren” at his previous place of lodging in Boston with Deacon Daniel Jones. One deaf man was “young . . . but verry poor” and “a taylor to traid” who had “been in the pencelvaney servis in the beginning of the Last Ware.” Jacob Hendrick, who had come from Newport three months earlier, “is a Lame man and Goes Aboute the town a pedling of Small things such as Butons & Garters.” A handful of the lame were “under” a doctor’s care when Love encountered them or were seeking an almshouse stay. John McGrath, as a mariner or fisherman who had “Sailed 2 voydg’s out of Marblehead,” hoped to emerge from the almshouse ready to ship out again.25
Three individuals with disabilities whose lives can be traced display characteristics similar to those of many of the able-bodied men who sojourned in Boston and hailed from eastern Massachusetts towns: they were fairly young, belonged to propertied yeoman families, and did not come to town to settle. Timothy Maddin was twenty-four when Love questioned him in May 1766. His father and namesake, a laborer, had died nine years earlier, and the lad had chosen a “gentleman” from his hometown of Uxbridge (west of Boston) as his guardian. According to Love, Maddin was “Almost Blind and is Obliged to be Lead from House to House.” Because the warning occurred on Maddin’s day of arrival, we do not learn where he found lodging, whether he came to visit kin or consult a physician, or how long he stayed in town. And while we do not know who his escort was, we can conclude that Maddin was not asking for alms from house to house, as Love would have been sure to note such worrisome behavior. By November 1768, and probably long before, Maddin was back in his natal town: in that month, he married Abigail Kibbey. They had two children born in Uxbridge in the next few years, and by the time of the 1790 census, he and his family had done what many in the older, settled parts of southern New England did after the Revolution—he joined his half brother Michael in moving to a frontier settlement farther west in Berkshire County.26
Love’s records tell us something of what it meant to be ill or plagued by an old war injury. Those whom Love described as “sickly” or “in a poor State of Health” might have “the fever & Eggo [Ague],” be “verry Bad of a Cansere upon” the nose, or be so “ill of the Rumatisam” that one was “not able to help” oneself. Three of the sick were already in the almshouse, and five more would enter soon after being warned. Mariner Lawrence Cooper, a native of Scotland, disembarked from a ship quite ill, was cared for by his landlord for fifteen weeks (at the province charge), and then admitted to the almshouse, still sick. He died there seven weeks later, age twenty-five. Forty-year-old James Miller looked lame and “Not Well in health” to Love; he died seven days later at the almshouse. Others sweated out their infirmities in their lodgings or paid for a physician’s ministrations. Visitors George King (“verry ill of a Grate Cold”) and Peter Vallance (“sikly and under the docters hands”) probably recovered, reckoned with their Boston landlords, and moved on to other locations.27
A wide array of public attitudes—compassion, respect, or disdain—might be expressed in eighteenth-century Boston toward men and women “stricken in years,” as the dictionaries of the day put it. Unfortunately, Love’s emotional reactions to elderly travelers are opaque to us. He rarely expressed nervousness, disgust, or disdain in noting the seventy parties he called old. Mostly he used the characterization in conjunction with other adjectives of neediness such as poor, begging, disabled, idle, dressed in rags, forced to lodge outdoors.28 His descriptions shed light on what age range counted as old for colonial New Englanders. Writings of the period contain vague or contradictory statements. Age seventy (the biblical three-score-and-ten) was most often named as the likely end point of a long life. As one Connecticut man put it on reaching seventy, “I may now call myself on Probation.” On the few occasions when we can match an individual’s approximate age with Love’s label “old,” the strangers were in their early and midseventies. “Very old” is a moniker that Love seems to have reserved for those in their late seventies and above. James Bailey came last from “the round pond near Pemaquid” and lived in Boston in a house of the widow Gees near the Charlestown ferry: “he is a verry old man aged 84 years.” Even considering that New England settlers were among the healthiest and longest-living of early modern European populations, it is remarkable to witness the mobility of older folks like Bailey, and the brothers Phillip and Jonathan Hodgkins, aged eighty-four and sixty-seven, who traveled from Cape Ann to stay in Boston with a kinswoman.29
Like many the warner described as old, most of the seventy-five strangers whom Love called drunk, strolling, idle, or “bad” struggled with untreated illnesses and injuries, chronic underemployment, and poverty. Onlookers, however, were less sympathetic to those they saw as voluntarily embracing a life of sloth and moral dissolution. The behavior of these down-and-out folk placed them in danger of criminal prosecution. Massachusetts statutes, echoing those of Britain and her other American colonies, inveighed against idlers and prescribed fines or whippings for convicted miscreants. However, by the early 1700s prosecutorial interest in bringing these sorts of charges to the county courts had waned. Night constables or concerned citizens might haul strollers and common tipplers before a justice of the peace to receive summary discipline, but more often than not they were allowed to go on their way.30
Drinking ale or spirits to excess was not unusual behavior in a society in which most of the beverages consumed were fermented or contained alcohol. What drew the attention of authorities was disruptive, public drunkenness manifested by men and women of the laboring classes. In contrast, “gentlemen” of the “better sort” typically courted no official chastisement when they persuaded tavern keepers to keep the “Wine and Arack Punch” coming while making “Merry Drinkg Toasts Singing roareing &c. untill Morning,” far past the appointed hour when no liquor was to be served. The two dozen white adults whom Love somewhat scornfully described as drunk or as notorious drinkers appear to have hailed from the laboring class. They had often wandered far from their original homes. John Stanton, a drunken, quarrelsome soldier, had most recently been stationed in Detroit. Nine more were from outside greater New England. Two were carpenters and four had been soldiers. Nearly all were brought to Love’s attention on their first or second day in town; only one man had been in Boston as long as three weeks. None were likely to have stayed put in Boston.31
In Love’s catalog of tippling sinners, one could be a plain “drinking man” or “a verey Drinking man.” Love sometimes discovered the extreme imbibers incoherent and raging in the town’s streets. Among these was William Flin who at “about 9 or 10 a Clock in the morning had a Number of Boys with him [in Milk Street] and he Cursing and Swering at them.” James Cammock was also bedeviled by youths: “the Boys [were] Draging him about the Streets.” Love spun some lighthearted tales of drunkards—he caught Andrew Cahail “acting verry foolishly”—and some sad ones. Before making it to Boston, the justifiably forlorn John Murphy, whom the warner found “Drunk in the Street,” had sailed from Liverpool and been castaway off the Connecticut coast.32
Women who displayed public drunkenness risked losing all respectability. Love’s attitude about two solo female travelers echoed that of a midcentury Virginian who noted that for a woman to be drunk on the street was “a Condition, which of all others, least becomes the Sex.” On a July day in 1770, Katherine Genin [Jennings?] arrived in Boston and ran into the disapproving warner, who recorded that “She is an Old woman & verry Grate Lier and was in Drink and Wanted Moor.” Did Love call her a liar because she was spinning tall tales, because he had encountered her previously telling untruths, because she denied being intoxicated, or because people around her called her by this epithet? Genin, like others whom Love encountered “in Licker,” was not prosecuted or physically removed from town as a punishment.33
On the streets of Boston, women were prominent among those perceived to be strollers. The descriptor had two valences for Love. Some fit the primary early modern meaning of the verb—to roam from place to place without a settled habitation. Mary Kelton had been in town a few days when Love spoke with her; he described her as “a poor Stroling Woman[;] She says she Belongs No Whare.” However, when a woman was strolling within the confines of Boston, Love used the term to suggest loose sexual behavior or prostitution. By the time she was warned in May 1769, Mary Smelledge had been in town three months and was living at the cooper Mr. Salt’s. However, Love discovered her “at the house of Mr _________ Lamson upon Boston Neck in a strolling way and seen with the soldiers.” Love was probably similarly imputing illicit sexual activities to Polly Barber when he commented that she had arrived in Boston ten months earlier “and has been Stroling Ever Since.”34
Strolling did not necessarily mean that an adult avoided legitimate work. A tinker or a peddler might be labeled a stroller. Love identified William Wilson and James Cife as strollers. Wilson reported he was “a mason to traid,” and Cife told Love that he wanted “Imploy.” Claims to respectable occupations might ring hollow, however, because Massachusetts shared in a culture in which strollers were associated with crime and likened to the vagabonds and rogues condemned in statutes. Even though “Stroling man” Thomas Hardin told Love that he was a baker to trade and had worked at various times in the past with “2 or 3 Backers in town,” Love was suspicious of this tale because Hardin “Could not tell the Names of any of them.” Besides, Hardin was “very” impudent with Love, as were three other strollers (one man and two women).35
Love distinguished idle and idling persons from strollers. “Idle” indicated that a man had no trade and was loitering without discernible purpose. Twelve of the sixteen idle, solo male travelers spotted by Love were last from a New England location. Whereas a newcomer from farther away might have been spared Love’s scorn for “Idling Aboute the town,” for a New England man to appear in town with “No Business” was accounted a sin. George Stoning, “an Idle man and very Rag[g]ed in his Clothing,” was in his mid-thirties when he appeared before Love in May 1766. Probably unknown to the warner was that in his hometown of Salem, Stoning had served in the local militia and volunteered in the Crown Point expedition of 1755. Stoning signed legal documents in an unusual fashion—with a sideways figure-eight. There is no evidence that he ever practiced a trade, married, or took charge of family affairs. Presumably, chronic pain or disability was what left him “Verry much Indisposed, in Body,” as he explained in a letter to a judge at age twenty-one. Love missed the backstory not only in Stoning’s case but also in that of Indian Sarah Waterman, the only woman to earn the idle label. Waterman was arriving in Boston “to Go to Servis”—thus she had a work goal and perhaps even a particular employer in view. Revealing the damaging stereotypes that Euro-American onlookers often applied to women of color, Love’s notation that “She Seems to be an Idle Womon” contrasted with his omission of such a comment for any of the white women who were looking for domestic work.36
A final group in the warner’s catalog of the immoral poor consisted of those he knew to be thieves, fornicators, or “bad” men and women. John Covey, who had stolen “a Brass Cetle in Charlestown and Sold it [in] Boston,” was one of eight people Love visited and warned in the town’s jail next to the courthouse on Queen Street. Ann Maxfield was there “upon Suspision of being Concerned in Steeling Money.” Some pilferers had already been punished at the pillory and yet kept returning to town. Boston was surely a prime spot for fencing stolen goods. Love knew that James Griffen was “a Noted Thife in this town,” and he piled on the pejoratives when describing Mary King: “She has But one Eye,” she is “a stroling Woman,” and “She has the Name of a Bad Womon and a thief.”37
The workhouse, a large, narrow brick building next to the almshouse, was the site of twenty-one of Love’s warnings. Because almost none of its records survive, we know little of this institution besides that its inmates were vagrants, runaways, and minor miscreants serving short criminal sentences. Under the supervision of keeper Joseph Lasenby and his wife, they were put to tasks such as spinning and picking oakum from old rope in order to recycle it. Women were invariably a majority of the workhouse population of roughly thirty to fifty souls, and, indeed, Love warned slightly more women than men there. Magistrates favored ordering terms in the workhouse, which was also called the house of correction, for disciplining women they suspected of prostitution. Margaret Smith, a workhouse resident whom Love warned in 1773, was probably the Polly Smith he had encountered previously who had a reputation for behaving “so ill that thy Could note Keep her from men.”38
Christiana Isbister was well known to town officers as a woman of the lower sort who bore many children out of wedlock. Love warned her in late 1772 when she was lodging in the North End with a woman whose husband was in jail. Christiana, then in her mid-thirties, had recently arrived from the Kennebec River area, but she was no stranger to Boston, having been earlier counted a legal inhabitant. In 1763, Isbister, “spinster” of Boston, had administered the tiny estate left by her deceased brother William, a mariner, consisting of his seaman’s chest and a few articles of clothing. She signed the probate documents with a curly “Y.” During the 1760s, the town had paid for her upkeep and lying-in costs through five stays in the almshouse. While in the house, she bore at least four daughters, all of whom died. Just over a year before being warned, she had confessed in court for a second time to committing fornication in Boston, for which she received the punishment of ten stripes “on the naked back.”39
Love introduces us to many adults and families whose lives testify to the seasonality and uncertainties of employment in preindustrial economies and to the fact that “laboring people . . . commonly floated in and out of indigence.” Sickness, war wounds, shipwrecks, and house-consuming fires, combined with the absence of insurance and savings led many working people to seek poor relief at one or more points in their lives or turn to itinerancy and strolling. Fortunes could vary from season to season and year to year. Love might find a New Englander like Patrick Bonner begging one year and able to afford city lodgings the next. Bonner, like so many adults circulating over short or long distances in the British colonies, lived on a very thin fiscal margin.40
Some down-and-out strangers passed Love’s scrutiny as travelers who represented themselves honestly and deserved help. Others confirmed his suspicions that people who appeared to be pursuing legitimate, street-level work like peddling might be scamming the public or illegally begging. The ambiguities and multiple personas that were part of many poor folk’s survival strategies put Love on his guard. Yet for the most part he described the ragged persons he interviewed without adding words of moral censure. Since the warner’s role was not to write entertaining poems about street life or compile a census of all marginal and impoverished residents and visitors, his notes leave us wondering about possible parallels with much more richly documented London. Did Bostonians tolerate charwomen—souls who went to kitchen doors and persuaded the mistress or servants of the house to let them trade an afternoon’s work for a night’s lodging and some food? Were certain street corners manned by shoeblacks, street sweepers, and scavengers who jealously watched over their piece of urban turf? Despite Boston’s colonial reputation for suppressing immorality, a lieutenant of the twenty-third regiment visiting in 1755 claimed—doubtless hyperbolically—that there was “prehaps no town of its size cou’d turn out more whores than this cou’d,” thus evoking an underworld largely lost to us.41
While many everyday dramas remain hidden, the political theater of the streets drew many chroniclers. Boston’s peopling in the ten years before the Revolutionary War comes into sharper focus because Love shone a spotlight on distinct groups of incomers whose distress stemmed from imperial cataclysms.