The job Robert Love performed had no name. He was one of several Boston residents appointed in the mid-1760s to walk the town’s streets and wharves “to warn Strangers out.” Despite the fact that such minor officers had been in place for thirty years in the province’s largest ports, New Englanders never created a title for them. We will simply call them warners. Each warning presumed that the newcomer did not have legal inhabitancy in Boston and gave notice that the town was not liable to relieve the stranger should he or she become indigent. Warners thus enacted a legal gesture designed to safeguard the town’s treasury. This ritualized use of warning was distinctive to the New England colonies, although it grew out of English settlement and poor laws. To fulfill his trust, Love knew that what mattered legally were both the verbal pronouncement, you are “Warned in his Majestys Name to Depart this town of Boston in 14 Days,” and the subsequent writing of the stranger’s name in town and court records.1
We are able to follow Love as he perambulated Boston because of the remarkable scope and detail of his written warnings, consisting of slightly over twenty-four hundred separate entries naming some four thousand men, women, and children. The showpiece of Love’s archive is his earliest personal logbook, which survives in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Figures 1 and 2). Its entries stretch from January 1765, when he took up the office, to August 1766, when he had filled the pages. In his pocket-size journal, sixty-eight-year-old Love inscribed 426 entries, each dedicated to a person traveling alone or a family group, naming 688 persons in all. Even though subsequent logbooks are not known to be extant, a nearly complete set of Love’s warnings up to his death in April 1774 can be reconstructed. Love copied out his logbooks word for word on the warning warrants he received each month from the town clerk and then submitted to the county court. Thus we can follow Love as he walked the streets of Boston for his full nine years and three months of service, a period that coincided with the peak of warnings-out in colonial New England.2
FIGURE 1. Robert Love’s surviving record book, 1765–66.
Image courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Love stood out among other warners for the obsessiveness with which he tackled his task. In his first two years, in which he shared the post with two others, Love was responsible for nearly two-thirds of the people warned in Boston.3 His success led to his being appointed the town’s sole warner in 1768. Unlike his colleagues, who recorded minimal information about strangers, Love noted the name of every child or member of a family group, their method of travel (by land or sea), their lodgings in Boston, and, in some cases, additional particulars (“a baker” by trade, “Clothed in rags,” “wants to go to Halifax”). The details allow us to trace people moving across borders as well as profile Boston’s landlords, both rich and poor. We are also brought much closer to the encounter between the warner, the newcomer, and bystanders because we can detect the questions Love asked and the ways in which Bostonians aided him. Woven into Love’s warning records are the dislocating effects of war and the heightened political tensions that gripped Boston from the Stamp Act protests of 1765, to the town’s occupation by British troops beginning in 1768, to the Tea Party in December 1773. Simply put, Love’s records permit us to appreciate the varieties of people on the move, the reasons Boston absorbed them, and the disruptions wrought by imperial policies.
FIGURE 2. Flyleaf, Love’s 1765–66 record book.
Image courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
This study updates Josiah Henry Benton’s classic overview of how warning worked in the various New England colonies and how the practice varied from town to town. Our focus is on Boston and Massachusetts, the province that originated the warning system used throughout New England. Only Rhode Island adopted different procedures. Whereas Benton passed quickly over warning’s European origins, we investigate its roots in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century plans for alleviating poverty and organizing municipal government more effectively. Understanding the ideological origins of warning illuminates why Massachusetts and its neighbors continued the arduous process of registering strangers long into the eighteenth century. We underscore a crucial aspect that many historians have missed: warning was the hinge in a distinctive, two-tiered welfare system in which the province’s taxpayers paid for the relief of needy strangers. These recipients of aid were called strangers not because they were unknown to local residents but because they had legal settlement outside of Massachusetts and thus were not entitled to local poor relief. Love’s job was to interview recent arrivals to determine whether they had settlement in Boston, and, if not, to warn them. If in the future they needed shelter or medical assistance in Boston’s almshouse, the overseers of the poor searched for their names in the warning ledgers and then admitted them on what was called the province poor account. The province treasurer covered their expenses. Warning thus shifted the cost of aiding the unsettled poor from the town to the province.4
The link with the province poor account refutes older characterizations of warning as a manifestation of New Englanders’ stinginess and aversion to outsiders. By itself, warning barred no one from staying in town, finding employment, buying a house, or marrying. The practice did put newcomers on notice, however. On the rare occasions when authorities decided to physically cast persons out, they followed warning with a removal warrant. Rather than a gesture meant to exclude, warning facilitated the province’s policy of making available a larger pool of welfare funds for Britons and non-Britons, native born and stranger, than existed elsewhere in the empire. Rather than gatekeeping, warning encouraged the movement of people and laborers across town borders. In the legal jargon of the day, it rendered the strangers “harmless” to the town, protecting local taxpayers from the burden of strangers who became indigent. Warning allowed employers and landlords to hire and lodge workers without worrying that their welcoming of newcomers imposed a financial risk on the town.5
Because warning created long lists of newcomers, it may be tempting to view it as a prototype for modern, bureaucratic surveillance systems. Yet there is little evidence that authorities used it as a means of social control. During its heyday, warning was not used to monitor religious and political iconoclasts. Nor did warnings mostly indicate transiency by singling out the landless and rootless. Among the thousands warned, sons and daughters of the propertied middling sort were far more numerous than people with no foothold in the region. These sojourners understood warning not as a stigma or threat, but as part of the bureaucratic management of the province’s dual set of poor accounts.6
This book, as an extended interpretation of Love’s warning records, seeks to illuminate our picture of who was marked as a stranger in the years following the Seven Years War, who was moving across town and colony borders, and why. One of our major goals has been to capture how sojourners’ stays in Boston fit into their life experiences. We have generated biographical sketches for hundreds of ordinary and marginal people. Boston officials, like their counterparts in other towns, warned not just those in immediate need of poor relief but also those who might need help in the future. In an era with no savings accounts or health insurance, people’s need for a stay in the almshouse might be only an injury or illness away. Love’s observations shed new light on the beggars, strollers, and homeless of eighteenth-century North America and the mobile middling sort.7
Love’s own biography was more like those he warned than the other Bostonians who served as warners. He neither held other town offices nor accumulated great wealth. Were it not for his extraordinary records, Love would have escaped notice. He was chosen as warner, we can surmise, because he had two rare gifts: an unusually adept visual memory for human faces and a tenacity for record keeping. While these traits did not lead to fame and fortune, they turned Robert Love into one of the most thorough chroniclers of people on the move in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
