Robert Love warned strangers during extraordinary times. Throughout the British Atlantic, people’s lives were changed in the fulcrum of post-Seven Years War reverberations and mounting political protest. Bostonians gained the reputation as the most troublesome of colonial complainants. In summer 1765, townspeople poured into the streets to protest the impending imposition of the Stamp Act. The following May, joyful celebrations accompanied the measure’s repeal. Local activists, such as the Sons of Liberty, geared up again when Parliament passed the objectionable Townshend duties and custom officials cracked down on Boston merchants. Town meetings at Faneuil Hall were packed as never before. Merchants who defied the town’s orders to cease importing British manufactured goods might be “warned” and threatened with physical removal by vigilantes. To imperial officials, by summer 1768 the Massachusetts capital appeared so frighteningly close to insurrection that they sent four regiments to act as police. On October 1, hundreds of British redcoats disembarked on Long Wharf, and, for the next seventeen months, Boston was an occupied town. Tensions between the military and the citizenry exploded in March 1770 at the event that came to be known as the Boston Massacre—five men were shot dead by the redcoats. As a result, British troops were hastily removed from the city and housed on a harbor island, thereby reducing some of the friction. However, Bostonians continued to take to the streets to express their grievances with imperial policy—up to and beyond Love’s death in April 1774.
At first glance, Love’s warning activity seems far removed from the political dramas roiling the port town. He used the same formula for entries about strangers over and over. He chose not to punctuate his logs with announcements of the crowd actions, the bonfires, the frightening house assaults, or the dumping of tea. Yet the repercussions of the Seven Years War and the turmoil over parliamentary policies affected how Love did his job and whom he met. As they do our understanding of landlords, middling sojourners, and travelers in need who populated Boston in these years, Love’s observations expand our understanding of the imperial crises that afflicted the town before residents could even imagine an independence movement. Love’s encounters with those who were on the move because of imperial policy generated what are sometimes the only surviving traces of these individuals’ presence in Boston and the shape of their North American journeying. Disabled veterans down on their luck, exiled Acadians determined to return to French communities, women and children left behind by occupying troops, and soldiers jailed for firing into the crowd at the massacre deserve to be included in the stories we tell about pre-revolutionary Boston.
During the Seven Years War, sixty thousand redcoats had been shipped from the British Isles and imperial outposts to fight the French and their Indian allies in the campaigns that led France to cede Canada and much of the North American interior. They were joined by thousands of provincial soldiers, a disproportionate number of which were young New England men from middling families drawn to enlist by anti-Catholic fervor and the monetary rewards. At the end of the fighting, most British-born regulars found it nearly impossible to return home, because they rarely qualified for military transport. The army’s policy was to encourage veterans to remain in the colonies. Consequently, regimental veterans tramped from place to place seeking part-time employment, often in vain. While their stories and fates have largely been lost, Love’s records allow us to glimpse their perambulations and their yearnings for homeland, work, and security. In contrast, provincial veterans are barely visible in the warning records. They were less involved than the redcoats in direct combat and experienced far less dislocation.1
Of the eighty-three men whom Love identified as veterans, most came to Boston alone. Half were described as injured, impoverished, seeking aid, or in some sort of trouble, such as having head wounds or being in jail. Surely more of the warned strangers had enlisted and served in the recent war; but if the newcomer was not in low circumstances, that biographical detail often went unrecorded. When strangers were asked to account for themselves, previous military service helped to explain disability and neediness.2
Soldiers demobilized from “His Majesty’s Service” must have been unmistakable, walking the Boston streets in their scarlet coats. They often confirmed their status by presenting various papers. Discharge documents named the regiment in which they had last served and proved they were not deserters. A few of the wanderers possessed additional documents, such as character references from colonial patrons or handmade “briefs” explaining their plight. More than half of the fifty-odd disbanded regimentals whom Love warned were in bad shape. Six were begging, eleven were seriously or permanently injured, two were mentally disturbed, three were chronic drunkards, and at least five ended up in Boston’s almshouse, workhouse, or jail. Two complained that “Nobody will Lodge” them. Others had sufficient resources or charisma to have secured accommodations temporarily, but only one, Peter Jackson, reported that he had found steady employment, working for the past seven months with “Mr. Jasper a Cutter in Fore St.”3
The disbanded regimentals came to Boston from afar. Twenty-two trekked from the major ports of New York and Philadelphia; seven came by ship from Nova Scotia. Others named Crown Point, Detroit, or Fort Stanwix on the Mohawk River as their most recent quarters. Several told Love that, like William Sherwood, who had “been a soldier at Gen. Wolfe’s fight at Quebec” and had “a family in Old England,” they had “no particular place of abode” on the continent. This last phrase summarized the plight of many demobilized Britons.4
Some ex-regimentals had circulated in North America without surcease. Richard Wiggins first encountered the warner in February 1766. Discharged from the Seventeenth Regiment of Foot two years earlier, he had most recently been living in Prince William County, Virginia. This first trip to Boston Wiggins made with his wife, Patience, and son John. Sometime in the following months, the family left town. In summer 1767, Richard returned alone, this time from New Jersey. Because of his war wounds, Richard explained to Love, he was “not able to get his bread.” On the very next day, Wiggins was admitted to the almshouse, where he stayed three weeks. The keeper recorded his age as twenty-five. This young man, having temporarily settled his family in northern New Jersey, may have returned to Boston because he knew he could receive medical care on the province account.5
Many veterans were much older than Wiggins and had served in several regiments. Henry Toull had been “a solder in his Magistys Servis 32 years[,] Last under General Munkton.” Thomas Boyfield “is now an old man [who] . . . pretends to work at the bookbinders business”; he had been “in Braddocks fight” in 1755. Forty-year-old Anthony Coffin somehow managed to make his way to Boston even though at the siege of Quebec he had “Been fros [froze] in both his feet and [had] part of One Cutt off.” William Duffy was fated to wander from town to town in New England, perhaps picking up seasonal labor. Love first encountered the veteran of the fifteenth regiment in April 1766, lodging at retailer and mariner Thomas Cunningham’s in the North End. Two years later, Duffy returned, this time from Newport and in the company of his wife, Sarah. If Duffy fantasized of taking Sarah back to Britain, he dreamed in vain. He died in New England, impoverished, buried in an unmarked grave. In late summer 1773, Sarah reappeared, having come on foot from Providence: “she is a begger.” Physically, these former soldiers must have looked to Bostonians like the surviving members of the Fifteenth Foot did to a major-general who reviewed them on their 1768 return to England: most were old, “very low,” and unsteady on their feet.6
Only rarely do we witness veterans managing to secure passage home. One officer achieved his goal by capturing the attention of Boston’s town fathers: in 1772 they supplied Captain John Ramsey, “an unfortunate Man who had been a Prisoner at the Havannah with sundry necessaries for his passage to Liverpool.” Some of the veterans passing through Boston had suffered permanently crippling injuries and imagined—fruitlessly—that they might earn the army designation “genuine invalid,” which came with a recommendation for a Royal Hospital of Chelsea pension and overseas passage on a military vessel. But few ever met the criteria.7
Not bearing visible marks of disability, William Collier was extraordinarily persistent in attempting to procure passage through military dispensation. Warned three times by Love over a six-year period, Collier had traveled from various distant spots, armed on each occasion with a different strategy. At his first appearance in 1765, he had walked or hitched rides from Casco Bay to Boston. He explained that he had “been a Soldier in the 15 Ragement under Genrall ElmHurest [Amherst] [and] . . . is Gowing to new york to Genrall Gage to Gett a pasage of him for England.” Collier was destined for disappointment. He continued to trudge the colonial roads. Back in Boston two years later, he had come “all the way by land” from South Carolina. The third time Love met up with him was in 1771, when British troops were occupying Boston and military transports were anchored in the harbor. Collier had come the longest distance yet—from East Florida—hoping “to go home in a Man of War.”8
Most veterans of the provincial regiments, if they sojourned in Boston in the postwar years, found little reason to mention their military service when warned. Given that roughly one-third of white Massachusetts men who were able-bodied and under thirty enlisted for at least one Seven Years War campaign, surely more provincial veterans were present among Love’s warned strangers than his count of fourteen implies. Their low visibility can be explained by the circumstances of their service. Soldiers were well remunerated, receiving about twice as much as a redcoat private earned. Furthermore, they were paid in cash—a rare situation for workers in the colonies. Multiple enlistments, traveling to a neighboring colony that offered higher bounties, and getting paid to be a substitute for a higher-class man who had been drafted: all of these were ways to milk the system. A hardy provincial could amass quite a sum, given that single enlistments were short, lasting the duration of a single campaign, from six to eight months, and that fighting lasted in North America from 1754 to 1760. Provincial soldiers found themselves primarily responsible for garrison, fatigue, and support duties. British officers had so little faith in their reliability in the field that the fighting was mostly relegated to the redcoats. Thus, provincial enlistees who survived the disease environment in the army camps could look back on their military service as having given them an economic boost.9
Past provincial service was more likely to be elicited by Love when the male stranger was suffering from poverty or disability. Two who had served in Massachusetts regiments were begging. One forty-three-year-old veteran from the New Jersey service needed care at the almshouse (where he died a month later). Three other former provincials were “poorly clothed.” Robert Rickes, one of the veterans reduced to begging, told Love that he had served in Captain Samuel Knowles’s company in Colonel Thomas Doty’s Massachusetts regiment in 1758. Love encountered him eight years later, newly arrived from Philadelphia, an “Old man” and “Lame of an Arme.” How Rickes sustained his injury is unclear, but he had experienced privation, as had many provincials, during his service. A Massachusetts minister who observed Doty’s men in one of their encampments in 1758 wrote in his journal: “My heart was grieved to find the men so greatly fatigued, and nothing comfortable to take. No sutler [small trader who sold foodstuffs when rations were short], no doctor, no chaplain.” Most of the Bay Colony’s youths who served and survived had achieved yeoman status by their forties. Rickes, in contrast, resorted to a tramping circuit similar to that of the many demobilized Britons who found themselves without a place of abode in North America.10
At the start of the Seven Years War, the British ordered the twelve thousand French-speaking, Catholic residents of Nova Scotia to leave their homes in the land they called L’Acadie. They were deported immediately or branded as traitors and hunted down. The expulsion, carried out with brutal thoroughness, was justified by declaring the French rebels and their land and livestock forfeit—even though they had pledged neutrality and had lived peaceably next to English neighbors. What British leaders wanted was the territory cleared of subjects they perceived as disloyal, clannish, and unwilling to contribute to the imperial economy. Acadians lost nearly all their possessions and the security that came from forging French communities based on farmland they had made astonishingly productive with ingenious levees. They and their historians termed the expulsion le grand dérangement—the great upheaval.11
Starting in August 1755, in a logistical feat cloaked in secret planning and falsity, the British commanders, aided by New England officers, soldiers, and sailors, rounded up nearly seven thousand Acadian men, women, and children. They loaded them onto transport ships outfitted below decks like the slavers that bore human cargo from Africa. They then pillaged and burned homesteads to ensure against their return. This first phase of the removal campaign was complete by mid-December. Britain’s plan was to distribute the Acadians among its colonies as internees, in order to prevent them from taking up arms and joining the French. While exiles were deposited as far away as Georgia, Massachusetts received the largest number. Roughly eleven hundred—distraught, in poor health, desperately seeking family members from whom they had been separated—became the responsibility of the Bay province for a decade starting in 1756.12
Love’s often lengthy entries on Acadian families narrate their decade of forced exile in reverse chronological order. On April 30, 1766, he walked the length of Boston Neck and warned four large families staying in the same rented house. All had arrived by foot or wagon five days earlier; another related family of ten joined them two months later.13 Although Love mangled the names—Charles Belliveau became Charls Bileybon, Claude Dugas became Cloth Digar—and failed to describe the thirty-three newcomers as “Franch,” the strangers were unmistakably Acadians. For them, Boston was a temporary way station. Having spent the previous years in interior Massachusetts towns to which they were assigned, they fervently hoped that the port would serve as the embarkation point for the sea voyage northward, their return from exile.14
Since the signing of the Treaty of Paris three years earlier, interned “neutrals” had harbored high hopes that they would be allowed to become free agents again. As one set of petitioning Acadians put it, “We have always understood that in time of Peace . . . the prison doors are open to Prisoners.” Why was the provincial government detaining them? After all, it meant ongoing expenses to provide shelter, fuel, and food for “this people,” who, as Governor Bernard put it, “was by the exigencies of War rather than any fault of their own . . . removed from a State of ease and affluence and brought into poverty and dependence.”15
According to the governor and general court, humanitarian and political issues were at stake. If the Acadians were allowed to sail to French Hispaniola, as many of them intended, they would “run into certain destruction” due to “the bad climate” and “the want of subsistence” there. On the other hand, if the way could be cleared for the exiles to go to the other location they requested, Canada, they could then “become a fresh accession of wealth and strength to the British Empire in America.” The impasse was resolved when James Murray, Canada’s military governor, issued a proclamation welcoming Acadians to Quebec and offering them land, on the condition that male household heads take the oath of allegiance to the British Crown before entering. The Acadian strangers warned in Boston in spring 1766 agreed to the oath. In coming months, they would join the mass exodus of their countrymen from Massachusetts. Mostly by ship but sometimes by foot, they went to live in settlements along the St. Lawrence or on the North Shore of what is now New Brunswick.16
Love’s notes contain clues as to how Acadians shaped the conditions of exile in important ways. Prior to coordinating their move to Boston, the five families dwelling on the Neck had resided in three adjacent towns in Worcester County—Sturbridge, Charlton, and Dudley. There, although they lived a half day’s walk apart from one another and were supposed to procure passports to leave their assigned towns, they had clearly managed regular visits and communication. Furthermore, Love wrote that in Boston they were hiring a house from Gideon Gardiner (who, in turn, rented it from the town). Even though they had endured years of internment and difficulty, not all of the French were poverty stricken and dependent on welfare. Some had managed to secure seasonal and short-term employment, saving part of their wages. Trauma for these displaced persons stemmed as much from family separations and the inability to confess to a priest (though they gathered for lay-led worship) as from economic deprivation.17
One survival strategy adopted by some Acadians was the use of Anglicized names when dealing with English colonists. Many of them spoke some English as a result of their successful commercial relationships with Britons and New Englanders prior to expulsion. Thus, Love’s rendering of Marie as Mary and LeBlanc as White was not necessarily a reflection of stubborn ethnocentricism. More likely, he wrote down these names phonetically and according to how strangers accounted for themselves.18
Love’s interviews underscored the key roles played by local grandees in Acadians’ experiences. The families of Claude Dugas and “Joseph White” had “lived Nine years under the Care of” Colonel Moses Marcy of Sturbridge, the most prominent man in Sturbridge. Serving for over three decades as moderator of the town meeting, Squire Marcy was a delegate to the General Court and the town’s first justice of the peace. Similarly, the families of Joseph Doucet and Charles Belliveau had lived in Charlton “att” Colonel Thomas Cheney’s. In New England’s social landscape, Cheney and Marcy were powerful gentry, with extensive landholdings, visibility in office holding, and accessibility as creditors and patrons. These men were unusual in having the ability to employ (or broker employment for) Acadians—the men furrowing, planting, haying, plowing, and sawing wood, and the women spinning, weaving, and making clothes. The squires also controlled a variety of housing stock that could accommodate large families.19
The families pausing temporarily in Boston Neck in spring 1766 must have considered themselves fortunate when they thought of the hundreds who had perished from English aggression in L’Acadie or from disease, deprivation, melancholy, and old age while in exile. These household heads along with many of their kin were safely in Quebec by 1767. The men, at least, were long-lived. Claude Dugas and François LeBlanc died at St. Jacques de L’Achigan at ages eighty-five and seventy-eight, respectively. Joseph Doucet died at eighty-four in Trois-Rivières; and Joseph LeBlanc survived to the grand age of one hundred, dying in 1818 in St.-Joseph de Carleton.20
Love’s surviving writings give us little sense about whether he attended civic celebrations or participated in impromptu crowd actions. Yet we can infer that this redoubtable public servant witnessed much of the political theater of the day. And of course, as a perambulator intensely attuned to the rhythms of the city, the warner kept himself informed about protests, troop movements, funeral processions, and anything else that might affect foot traffic. In March 1765—when a northeaster brought heavy snow, “the big[g]est Sea in the Harbor that our Oldest men [did] ever see,” and extensive damages to the wharves—Love did not warn for two days. When the largest funeral procession “ever known in America” stretched across a third of the town on the last day in February 1770—four hundred schoolboys in pairs preceded the bier and thirty chaises followed it—Love refrained from warning. Love may have been paying his respects to the deceased, eleven-year-old Christopher Seider, shot by an irate merchant who was defending his house from a crowd attempting to terrorize him into halting his importation of British goods.21
The great elm that became known as the Liberty Tree was a short stroll along one long block of Orange Street from the Loves’ rented quarters on Hollis Street. It is hard to imagine that Love was not present at some of the great rallies held there. The Stamp Act protest of Wednesday August 14, 1765, launched a decade of street theater of homespun ingenuity. That morning, artisans across the town are said to have laid down their tools and joined the growing throng under the tree’s boughs, marveling at two effigies that had been strung up the night before and defending them from being cut down.22 Did Love weave in and out of such crowds, asking after strangers? Elaborately staged entertainments may have held his rapt attention. Each year on November 5, Pope’s Day, the Liberty Tree was one site where a twenty-foot wagon stopped to display “very droll” effigies of the hated Catholic leader and other monstrous and diverting characters, such as the devil and “Friends of. . . arbitrary Power.” Boys “clad in frocks and trousers well covered with tar and feathers . . . danced about the pope, . . . and frequently climbed up and kissed the devil.” During this all-day extravaganza in 1766, Love warned “A Labouring Man,” Michael Forman, who had arrived the day before by ship from New York. Perhaps the warner came across him in “Liberty Hall,” the wide intersection under the elms where thousands could congregate.23
For decades, Bostonians and people throughout the colonies had celebrated great days in their monarch’s life: the king’s birthday, his spouse’s birthday, his ascension and coronation. In addition, once the political scene was transformed by popular protest against parliamentary and ministerial policies, many town residents contributed their energies to annually commemorating the mid-March day on which the Stamp Act was repealed, the town’s fondly remembered August 14 protest against the act, and, later, the Boston Massacre. Of the holidays honoring the royal family, George III’s natal day, June 4, was the grandest, enjoyed by those of all social ranks. In the morning, at least three outfits of colonial troops paraded on King Street or on the Common. They fired volleys and performed exercises, and in some years, the town militiamen engaged in a “mock fight” to exhibit their preparedness. On the more political days of celebration, colored banners streamed from tree and housetops and masts in the harbor, and nightfall brought out the crowds to admire the wondrous illumination of Faneuil Hall, the largest taverns, and the Liberty Tree—accomplished by the placing of lanterns in each window or on each branch. Love was often out and about the town on these festive occasions, identifying strangers among the hundreds or thousands on the streets.24
During the winter and summer months bracketing the massacre, Boston’s activists kept steady pressure on merchants who either brazenly or surreptitiously imported goods from England. On at least two occasions, protesters appropriated the ritual of warning strangers to pressure obnoxious importers to leave town. These actions were not undertaken by Love; he was too punctilious about his job to indulge in the extralegal use of warning. The episodes tell us that the language of the twinned writs of warning and removal proved useful to public-spirited locals indignant over some strangers’ perceived greed and failure to stand with the community against oppressive parliamentary and Crown policies.25
In the first episode, the shop owned by three Scottish brothers named McMaster was visited on Friday evening on June 1 by a crowd of “hundreds of Men and Boys.” The crowd’s leader “commanded” the importers “in a Magisterial tone . . . To keep their House and stores shut and to depart the Province with all their . . . property, at, or before 6 O’Clock on Monday. . . or else to expect the consequence.” The crowd did not reappear the following week to enforce their will; rumors were swirling that the McMasters had proposed shutting their shop. But they never took that step, and they told friends privately that they were not willing to leave. After two weeks had elapsed, on Monday afternoon a crowd forced down the shop door, seized the one brother who was present—twenty-nine-year-old Patrick—and carted him through town. Made to ride next to a pile of feathers and barrel of hot tar, McMaster was in the end spared that particular treatment. By eight in the evening, the ritual of humiliation ended in an extralegal act of banishment. Taken the two and a half miles through town and across Boston Neck to the Roxbury line, the men escorting McMaster “made a lane through which they obliged him to pass, while they spit in his face.” As part of this final coup de grace, John Ballard, a Bostonian well known to the McMasters as the manager of the Boston wharf they used, coerced the thoroughly frightened Scot to take an oath that he and his brothers would never return to Boston “on pain of death.” McMaster fled to Castle William and from thenceforth used Portsmouth, New Hampshire, as his mercantile base.26
One month later, warning out was explicitly invoked when unofficial enforcers of nonimportation harassed the McMasters’ fellow Scot, James Selkrig, commanding him to depart. The incident is not well documented; we know of it because of a pathetic letter of complaint the victim sent to the selectmen. Throughout his nine-year career in Boston as an importer, Selkrig tried in various ways to make himself pleasing to the townsfolk. In August 1769, he and his brother had agreed to stop importing, after initially refusing to do so. But by July 1770, his actions had attracted the attention of vigilante enforcers of nonimportation. Selkrig claimed that despite his conformity “with Every Demand Diserd of me by The Tread[Trade],” he was attacked “at the Town Dock and Ordred to Leave this place in 48 hours.” The merchant asserted that this attempt “to Warne me out of the place” was without cause and, furthermore, an affront to humanity as his “only Daughter was then at the point of Death.” As far as we know, he was not physically forced out by a spitting crowd. However, it appears that he wised up and voluntarily departed to live in Scotland until the spring of 1771, when he was back managing his store at No. 16 on the town dock. Not surprisingly, he and his family were among the loyalists who evacuated Boston with the British military in March 1776.27
Two artists created dramatic visual depictions of the opening scene of Boston’s occupation. An engraving by Paul Revere offers an aerial view of the town from the harbor. In the foreground are seen the “ships of war landing their troops” and the soldiers of the fourteenth and twenty-ninth regiments forming and beginning to march “in insolent parade” down the Long Wharf into the heart of Boston, “Drums beating, Fifes playing and Colours flying.” Christian Remick, an obscure Massachusetts mariner and watercolorist, chose a different approach. He planted himself near the end of Long Wharf and painted the very tip of the wharf surrounded by three-masted British ships and smaller transports, all against a panoramic background of the harbor islands (Figure 10). Remick’s “perspective view” captures the moment when hundreds of redcoats were about to disembark and tackle their mission of preventing Bostonians from fomenting insurrection that would spread to other colonies. To most town residents, the presence of soldiers and officers in their scarlet regimental coats spelled a menace—a threat both to their persons and to their system of self-governance.28
On a practical level, Boston was ill-equipped to house the approximately twelve hundred men in the regiments. Their number was equivalent to nearly half the town’s existing population of adult white men. Town leaders argued that the troops should live at Castle William, the garrison on a harbor island, since it was technically situated within the port town and would thus fulfill the spirit of the Quartering Act. Lieutenant Colonel William Dalrymple, the officer in command, was not persuaded. He ordered the Twenty-Ninth Foot to camp on the Commons, and he asked the province to ready the Manufactory House to accommodate the fourteenth. The tenants in this large, province-owned structure refused to leave. After a two-day standoff between soldiers blockading the building and a vocal but peaceable mob, the effort to quarter troops there was abandoned. In the end, the army leased several large warehouses and stores to use as barracks, while individual officers found their own lodgings nearby.29
Both Revere and Remick left out of their detailed illustrations the families that accompanied the British soldiers. While we cannot know the exact number of the “women and children of the regiment” and other dependents accompanying or following the soldiers to Boston, they must have numbered in the hundreds. Some of the regiments had come to North America from Ireland. Because many marriages had occurred there, regiments paid for the transport of far more than the typical allotment of six women per company. Other wives, sweethearts, and children arrived from Halifax. Regimental paymasters expended over £1,200 in housing the dependents, mostly in the South End. Love’s warnings capture some forty of these military families. Not only does he provide names and partial life stories for women who otherwise would remain anonymous, he details the living arrangements of some soldiers who played key roles in the Boston Massacre.30
FIGURE 10. Pictured here, the Long Wharf with British soldiers preparing to alight. The artist, Cape Cod-born Christian Remick, and his wife were warned by Robert Love on July 15, 1768, after their return to New England from Liverpool, England. Detail, “Perspective View of Boston Harbor.”
Image courtesy of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, www.AmericanAncestors.org.
Because the military was supposed to take fiscal responsibility for women and children “of the regiment” while the troops were stationed in Boston, Love did not issue warnings until regiments had been sent elsewhere. His investigations into spouses or families who appeared to be abandoned by male household heads and regimental authorities came in four waves, starting in summer 1769.31
The first set of warnings highlights the plight of dependent women left behind and the worries of municipal officials that some were women of loose morals. The warner found three soldiers’ wives lodging in a North End; two were married to grenadiers: “th[e]y Belong to Capt. Henery powers Company” in the sixty-fourth, now “Gon to Halifax.” All three women would eventually follow their husbands to Nova Scotia before returning together to Boston in 1771, when they were warned a second time by Love. Other women were cut off from their connection to a regiment when soldiers deserted. Hannah Mills—or someone standing nearby when Love warned her in summer 1769—explained that when her husband had been ordered to Halifax, he “Left her Behind Because She Was a Bad Women.” Love found Dorothy Williams living with a midshipman. Her husband had deserted her and his regiment in 1769. Soon, Williams sought almshouse admission for herself and a child, who may have been a newborn. The child’s fate is unknown; Williams left the house a few weeks later in the company of another soldier’s wife. The almshouse provided her shelter again during the next two winters. In the fall of 1772, now identified as a “spinster” “of Boston,” she appeared before the Sessions court and was convicted of lascivious conduct. The evidence confirmed that on a late August day she had received “into her Bed, one Joseph Mesial & did permit” him “Lewdly & indecently to be & remain with her Naked in Bed &c.” Fined twenty shillings, Williams remained in Boston’s jail for a few months until she could pay up. In the end, the county paid her trial and jail costs, as it often did with petty miscreants who were impoverished.32
In the next wave, from late April to mid-May 1770, Love warned sixteen parties linked to members of the twenty-ninth regiment. Ten of the women had children with them, for a total of thirty-two persons warned. The late winter and early spring weeks preceding the warnings were the tensest of the occupation. On market days (Thursdays), when no school was held, hundreds of boys joined crowds of adults who gathered outside the shop doors of merchants pegged as violators of the agreement not to import manufactured goods from England. The collective action included the booing and hissing of anyone patronizing the stores and the prominent placement of signs painted with a pointing finger and the word “IMPORTER.” By night, shop windows were smeared with dirt and mud. An incident at John Gray’s ropewalks in the South End on March 2 set the stage for the Boston Massacre. On that Friday morning, Patrick Walker, a private looking to pick up day labor to supplement his army pay, found himself trading escalating insults with some of the workers at this large manufactory. His honor at stake, Walker fetched other soldiers from nearby barracks, and fighting with club and sticks broke out in the ropeyards. Eventually, the soldiers were pushed back to their quarters; by evening, calm prevailed in the neighborhood. But all weekend, rumors swirled that many townspeople were looking forward to “fighting it out with the soldiers on Monday” evening. Indeed, what occurred that evening on King Street as a result of confused and frightened sentries firing into a crowd (leaving five dead and six wounded) was the event that finally persuaded British military leadership that British troops should no longer be housed on peninsular Boston. Within two and a half months, all would be withdrawn to Castle William.33
Walker was one of three soldiers with featured roles in the Boston Massacre or its lead-up who earned a warning. Not only did these strangers have dependents living in town, but they may have been sought out by Love or his employers because they had proved especially obnoxious to townspeople. Love’s warning of Walker’s wife, Mary, which occurred two months after the ropewalks incident, tells us that at the time they had no children with them and that she had found lodging with three other soldiers’ wives in a house in a prominent Bostonian’s yard a few blocks west of her husband’s would-be workplace.34
In the wake of the massacre, Love warned the spouses of two of the soldiers charged with shooting into the crowd. Both were grenadiers of the twenty-ninth—a unit comprised of especially tall men. James Hartigan had married in Boston (in an Anglican church) one year after his arrival; his bride was living in Boston at the time, but no evidence points to her origins. Love warned the woman at her lodgings on King Street, close by the scene of the fatal shootings.35 Edward Montgomery’s wife, Isabella, and their three children were living in rented house on a stretch of Ann Street near the Mill Creek. Isabella made herself notorious among townspeople by declaring from her doorway, on the evening the massacre occurred, that she hoped many of her neighbors would find “their arses . . . laid low by morning.” In writing out his warning of this soldier’s family, Love revealed his political allegiances. He explained that the private was “Now Under confinment in Our Goal for the murder of our People.” Love shared in the collective outrage over the loss of life in the Boston Massacre. Five months before the actual trial, the warner in effect offered his personal verdict, a harsher one than what was handed down. Defended by John Adams, Montgomery was found guilty of manslaughter but not murder. Within days, he departed Boston in a man-of-war to rejoin his regiment in New Jersey. The town clerk’s records indicate that the soldier had “left his wife and 3 children.”36
By 1771 and 1772, when most of the troops had departed the area, conditions for wives and children left behind tended to be desperate. Nell Puce and Peggy Carpenter were avoiding starvation by gathering dandelions on Fort Hill to sell; Love declared the two women to be “in a misarable Condison and allmost Nacked.” Polly Vane was living in a foul tenement in the South End. Eleanor Burrough, a soldier’s daughter, was “verry d[est]istute of Every thing.” The selectmen got no satisfaction from the British commander at Castle William when they wrote formally requesting that he either take in or pay support for several sets of wives and children who needed succor in the almshouse. The Bostonians’ attempt to educate him on “the Law of this Province” (“whoever is the Occasion of any Person being brought into this Town & does not acquaint ye Selectmen thereof becomes liable for the Charge of all such Persons if they shou’d be reduced to necessitous Circumstances”) fell on deaf ears.37
One of Love’s last warnings was delivered on March 25, 1774 to an impoverished Irishman. Although the date’s significance would not be apparent to Bostonians for a few weeks, it was when Parliament passed the first of the Coercive Acts, several of which singled out Boston and Massachusetts for special punishment. The draconian Boston Port Act was designed to shut down all oceangoing commerce by the port’s merchants until the East India Company received compensation for the tea dumped into Boston harbor the previous December. Other acts closed town meetings and enlarged the Crown’s power to control the province’s magistrates. These measures signaled to many New Englanders that the king himself was a tyrant and could no longer be counted on to protect his people. If Love had lived a few more days until news of the “cruel edict” (the Port Act) arrived, his people’s future would have looked very bleak indeed.38
The succession of ragtag strangers dislocated by imperial policies and warned by Love prefigured New Englanders’ trajectory toward resistance and revolution. The sight of war’s cast-offs—demobilized regimentals in their tattered scarlet coats and world-weary Acadians with their hard-won savings—did not dislodge colonists’ loyalties to king and country, but Britain’s wartime debts led to a string of taxation schemes that critics argued were threats to civil liberties. Two pivotal moments catalyzed the radicalization of many townspeople—the 1768–70 occupation and the implementation of the Coercive Acts. Love’s warnings of soldiers’ wives huddling in filthy rooms and scavenging for subsistence coincided with growing disillusionment with the benefits of empire. Yet at the same time that Sons of Liberty condemned parliamentary measures and the ministers who shaped Crown policy, they, like Love, clung to reverence for “His Majesty,” believing that the monarch was poorly informed and did not intend them harm. Coincidentally, it was after Love’s demise that Massachusetts residents cast their lot with open rebellion. During the summer and fall of 1774, the leaders of Boston and other towns constituted themselves “the sole effective government in the province” in defiance of royal authority. Thus, in the space of a decade, Massachusetts had transformed from one of the most enthusiastic colonial partners of the British Empire to “its most intractable opponent.”39
