The Poor and the Boundaries of Obligation
WE KNOW THE TRIALS of Robert Keayne as intimately as we do because he himself could not stop thinking about them. Fourteen years after his conviction, a wealthy man once more, Keayne began a will whose writing was ultimately to consume five obsessive months and occupy 158 pages in the county court records. Over and over the details of his transactions Keayne went, repeating and refuting the charges of those who had cried out against him, defending his trade practices as nothing other than what was common “in every shop and warehouse.” Had offering gold buttons at the price he asked amounted to “such a heinous sin”? Or marking up the cost of a bridle as steeply as he had? Had following the customs of the trade warranted the “deep and sharp censure that was laid upon me”? “Out of the grief and trouble of my heart” he defended his acts, still rankling at the shame his townsfolk had imposed on him.1
Now at the end of his life, not out of a guilty conscience but to show that the clamor against him had never been warranted, he gave away a munificent bundle of public bequests. Out of an estate he valued at 4,000 pounds, he willed 300 pounds for the erection of a new town house for Boston where the courts and ministers might meet, a library might be housed, the town’s supply of arms might be stored, a new water conduit might be run, and where country folk bringing goods to sell might rest and store their stock against the weather. He willed another 10 pounds to improve the equipment of the artillery company. He provided for his widow and family. And finally he willed the income from 100 pounds to be spent on the Boston poor: for assistance to the poor of his church, for the education of the ablest and most “hopeful” of the town’s poor children, and the provisioning of a town granary where a common stock might be stored against emergencies and where the “poorer sort” might purchase grain at cost during times of need. He had not made significant charitable gifts before, he admitted. But he would now, and the poor of Boston would receive a significant fraction of it.2
The poor do not occupy a prominent place in most popular histories of America. They live on the margins of the stories of success and enterprise we like to tell about American society and culture. But they were not the least invisible in their time. Traces of the life struggles of the poor run all through the early New England town records. “A Model of Christian Charity” announced their presence in its very first sentence. If rules for lending gave the Model its propulsive force, Winthrop left no doubt that the poor, the needy, and those in distress held a special claim on a community dedicated to the godly life. “Curse” he who “shutteth his ears from hearing the cry of the poor,” reads the Model. “If thy brother be in want and thou canst help him, thou needst not make doubt what thou shouldst do; if thou lovest God thou must help him.”
The mission to America, as it took shape in Winthrop’s mind in early 1630, would not only require a passage from self-love to an ethic of social affection. It would not only call into question accustomed rules of commerce. Their voyage would force them to confront a still deeper knot of social ethics: what the fortunate owed to those who struggled to construct their lives under the burdens of poverty.
That the world had too many poor, early modern Puritans were certain. They “swarmed” over England. “Why do we meet so many wandering ghosts in shape of men?” Winthrop himself wrote on the eve of his decision to cast in his lot with the Massachusetts Bay Company venture. Why “so many spectacles of misery in all our streets, our houses full of victuals and our entries of hunger-starved Christians?”3 Those who emigrated to New England were eager to leave behind the roving beggars of the English countryside and the squalor of London’s streets and alleys—portents, as they interpreted the signs, of God’s coming fury. They saw no true charity in the medieval Christian church’s sanctification of holy alms and barefoot friars. A coin dropped in a beggar’s hand was a wasted gesture, not an act of piety.
Still, they could not abandon the poor in their moral imaginations. The telltale mark of Puritan policy was the poor’s “improvement.” Their temptation to idleness needed to be scrubbed out of them. Their beggary needed to be curbed. Their inner self-discipline needed to be radically strengthened. To this end, the poor in the “godly cities” whose administration Puritans and Puritan sympathizers began to control in early seventeenth-century England formed the objects of some of the most ambitious programs of social discipline and management to be found in the early modern world. In Puritan strongholds like Dorchester and Norwich, poor vagabond children were swept into the cities’ new municipal workhouses; beggary was banned; vagrant men without work or means were whipped out of town. Overseers of the poor went house to house to assess the needs and moral conditions of poor families. In some notable instances those who accepted parish or public relief were “badged” with initials sewn in their clothing so that their status would be visible to all.4
But hand in hand with tighter regimes of social discipline, Puritan reformers simultaneously embraced broader and more systematic obligations of public support. The mandate of the Elizabethan Poor Laws of 1597 and 1601 that each English town and parish support its resident poor through public tax funds came only slowly into practice. By 1660, thirty years after the Winthrop fleet’s sailing, only a third of all English parishes are estimated to have regularly raised taxes for relief of the poor.5 But in the permeation of the idea of a public responsibility toward the poor, the “godly cities” of early seventeenth-century England took the lead. Workhouses and schools were established to shelter as well as to discipline the poor. Public granaries distributed food stocks at cost to the poor in times of dearth. In slack times the well-to-do were urged to grant interest-free loans to poor artisans who could not afford to purchase stock to employ themselves.
The most notable of the English Puritan urban strongholds in this regard was Dorchester where, in the wake of a disastrous town fire in 1613, a civic revival swept through the town. A new hospital was constructed where poor children could be catechized and set to work; a municipal fuel house was established to sell fuel below cost to the poor; prices of basic goods were regulated in times of shortage; special collections were solicited for the support of both the local poor and distant causes. To help finance this outburst of civic provision, the city established a municipal brew house whose ale profits were plowed back into the town’s poor relief efforts. In addition, Dorchester’s leading preacher, John White, boasted that the town had doubled its poor law tax levies.6
If this combination of ambitious institution building, poor relief taxation, and heavy-handed moral reform seems to our modern temperaments a mash-up of contradictory impulses, it did not seem so to its architects. To rid these English “cities on a hill” of Sabbath breaking, begging, and swearing, to pipe them with better water supplies, to inspect their households, to provide public support for their poor, and set the idle and abandoned to work: all this was of a piece. The “voracious appetites” of these godly civic reformers, as historian Paul Slack termed it, embraced a full-scale assault on traditional, hard-drinking, riotous popular culture as the quid pro quo for more systematic, sustained support of the needy poor.7
All these enterprises were ultimately fragile. During the Puritan Revolution, a newly established London Corporation for the Poor undertook a systematic survey of the city’s needy, built a string of new workhouses for poor children and youth, and provided employment to up to a thousand adults, many in their own homes, only to see their effort to eradicate traditional poverty collapse in the strains of civil war.8 And yet, its fragility and harshness notwithstanding, the moral impulse behind this early modern welfare state should not be dismissed out of hand.
English Puritan reformers made a central place for the poor—in all their need and unruliness—within the bounds of their moral imagination. Dorchester’s John White himself reminded Winthrop of the point in a letter in which White chided New Englanders for failing to provide for a public storehouse from which “needful” goods could be reasonably purchased and, instead, letting shop-keeping grow so quickly among them. “The good which ought to be respected is Bonum publicum not Privatum Commodum.… I would fain know what the General [i.e., the common good of all] shall gain by making half a dozen rich by pinching more than so many thousands.”9
With their unusually young population, New Englanders did not immediately face the questions of poverty that “A Model of Christian Charity” posed in the abstract and that absorbed their “godly” counterparts in England. The issue barely comes up in the early records of the colony’s General Court. In 1640, the General Court granted thirty bushels of corn to Thomas Buckmaster, “being in distress.” In 1646, it exempted “such as are poor, by sickness, lameness, or other infirmity” from colony-wide taxation. The same year, the General Court remitted the fines levied on five Hingham men provided they could prove to an impartial observer that they were poor.10
At the local level, however, where responsibility for the poor soon descended, the record of activity is much denser. Though the English Poor Laws did not formally apply in the Massachusetts Bay colony until the 1690s, New England’s emigrants brought with them from the colony’s beginning the principle of local responsibility to care for those in distress. The towns’ forms of assistance varied. Elaborate poor relief regimes on the scale of London or Dorchester involved capital expenses far too great for early New England towns. Even almshouses were rare until the eighteenth century. Instead, New England towns chose simpler forms of relief. Abatement of taxes for poorer town residents was a common practice. Destitute families might be granted permission to cut wood from the town’s common lands. At other times towns authorized direct grants of grain or firewood or called for voluntary contributions to help relieve a family in distress.11 In 1653 the town of Dorchester, Massachusetts, paid Goodman Mosely 12 shillings for attending to “old Bartholmy” at his time of sickness. In 1679 the town distributed a bequest specifically designated to assist the town’s poor among its sixteen neediest families.12
Families played a central role in these matters. Poverty meant both the breakup of poor families and the public use of other families as a means of relief. Parents who bore more children than the town’s selectmen thought they could afford were an object of particularly assiduous scrutiny. Their newborn children were regularly apprenticed out to other families, the town paying the expenses for the first few years until the child could become an economic asset to its surrogate family. In the cases of deepest need, the town put the care of its impoverished in the hands of another household to board and feed in return for a set rate of payments from the town’s treasury.
The total amount spent in all these ways is not easy to measure. By one estimate, Boston in the late 1640s spent only a little over 5 percent of its total budget on poor relief, not counting tax abatements. But as New England’s population aged, the cost of maintaining the towns’ poor increased. A sharply higher estimate for Watertown in 1661 put poor relief expenses at 20–30 percent of the town’s budget. By 1700 Boston was spending perhaps a quarter of its budget on poor relief.13 With rising expenditures, pressures for cost controls increased. Watertown in 1727 publicly solicited bids from householders offering to take in poor children at lowest cost to the town, an early instance of the pauper “auctions” that became notorious in New England in the early nineteenth century.14 But grudging as it often was, public, tax-supported responsibility for the poor was a fixture of New England town life.
None of these measures of relief made the life of the poor easy. We can see this poignantly in the case of Dorchester, Massachusetts, where an unusually complete record of the town meetings survives for the 1660s and 1670s. Certain figures cycled through them, persons whom their neighbors certainly knew well. Robert Stiles showed up in the town records first in 1671 to answer for the idleness of himself and his wife and to be publicly shamed for not having “improved their time to the advantage of their family.” And yet, two years later the town granted Stiles 20 shillings of corn “for his present relief” and, not long afterward, another pound for the same ends. In 1673, the town ordered Stiles to “dispose” of one of his children, although it is not clear that he did so. In 1678 Stiles was in trouble once more for failing to improve his time and ordered again “to look out for a place for one of his children at least,” or else the selectmen would do it, as they finally did three years later.15 Frances Bale, ordered to dispose of two of his children whom the selectmen judged he could not afford, demurred because his wife was not willing to do so. The “selectmen persuaded him to persuade his wife to it.”16 Still, men like Stiles and Bale could not simply be brushed aside. Both were among the recipients of the bequest for the poor the Dorchester selectmen received in 1679.17 Joseph Birch was admonished for failing to come to church and, on another occasion, put in the stocks for egregious drunkenness, but he was nonetheless granted the town’s liberty to cut trees in the common woods or swamps to “make coals for his calling.”18
Frances Bacon’s was a harder case. “Being destitute of a habitation,” she threw herself and her young child on the town’s charity in 1674. In response, the Dorchester selectmen ordered that a list be drawn up of families that might take her and her child into their households in return for the town’s payment of 3 shillings a week, plus a little more for bedding and clothing. For the next eight years at least, Frances Bacon was passed from one family to another. Thomas Modesley took her for a while, Nicholas Clap for a five-week stretch, Captain Foster for two weeks. William Sumner “tabled” her for a time. In 1676 her child was apprenticed to James Foster, who promised support and employment until the child reached age twenty-one. In the meantime expenses for “keeping Frances,” sometimes for six weeks, more often for two, dot the town’s accounts record. The last mention of her name in the town meeting records that survive was a payment to Daniel Preston of 13 shillings “for killing a wolf and for francis.”19
No one would call this generous. Impossible as it is to enter Frances’s thoughts across this wide an expanse of time, it would be hard to imagine that her mind was settled, or even grateful. But she found herself wrapped in a deeply stubborn sense of charity nonetheless. An unmarried mother, without relations or friends to take her in but with settlement rights in the town, the townspeople did not slough her off. Like Robert Stiles, she was one of their poor. Her distress—however grudgingly relieved—was their public responsibility. The Dorchester townsfolk certainly did not love Frances Bacon, as Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” might seem to have required. But the Model’s injunctions to relieve those in need found in her case, nonetheless, real, practical traction.
Beyond each town’s borders, however, the rules of obligation changed abruptly. To cross from one town to another was to traverse a massive ethical and legal boundary. In law and practice, the corollary of each New England town’s responsibility for its poor was its release from responsibility for any of the poor who belonged elsewhere. Fear that this line might be violated by an invasion of outsiders who might end up throwing themselves on the town’s poor relief expenses was a fierce preoccupation of New England town life. Towns required permission for newcomers to settle in their midst. Those who did not attend to that formality could expect to receive legal notice that they would be ineligible for any relief or legal “settlement” rights from the town. “Warning out” notices, these were called, often followed by orders of outright expulsion. Persons without a trade, laborers on temporary employment, poorer folk generally, and pregnant women about to bear a child whose birth in the town might give it settlement rights were particularly acute objects of towns’ suspicion. They were not only “strangers” to the town but objects of potentially heavy burden on the town’s tax rate.
Warning out notices regularly punctuated the Dorchester, Massachusetts, town records. In 1670 the selectmen warned Henry Merrifield, whose married daughter had been living with him for about a week, that he must either get a notice from her own town that it had assumed full responsibility for her, or send her away. When the Merrifield family ultimately demurred, stating “that she was their daughter and [they] could not turn her out of door this winter time,” the town ordered him to do so anyway. In another case, when Mercy Chubb, being pregnant, left her husband to move back in with her birth family, “contrary to good order and hazarding of a charge upon the town,” as the record put it, she was ordered be gone within six or eight days.20 Like the charity of other New England towns, Dorchester’s sense of its “own” and its poor relief responsibilities stopped abruptly at its village edge.
In eighteenth-century Rhode Island, as Ruth Herndon has shown, expulsion of strangers who might be a charge on the towns’ poor rates was even more systemic and harrowingly thorough. Neighbors who sensed a family’s need or illness typically filed the complaint that triggered warning out orders. Visible signs of strangerhood had the same effect. Blacks, Indians, and mulattoes were far more likely to be warned out in early eighteenth-century Rhode Island than persons of European descent. More women than men were warned out, particularly women who might give birth to a child within the town’s limits. In one case a whole family was removed because one of its daughters had become visibly pregnant. In another, the town officials were in the very act of removal when the woman they had seized fell into labor.21
The rule of responsibility only for the poor relief of those legally “settled” in the town was an English import. Still, the practice of locally limited responsibility was carried out in colonial New England with particular intensity. The towns shouldered their local obligations seriously but kept the horizons of responsibility strictly limited. They practiced a public charity that was, at one and the same time, intrusive, strong-willed, exacting, and fiercely bounded.
By the end of the eighteenth century, as labor mobility increased and town populations grew, new poor relief practices arose that exaggerated these earlier tensions. Boarding out the poor to neighboring families became a less and less adequate means of relief in the region’s larger towns. Workhouses on the English model began to supplant family-based support. There, New England poor reformers hoped, by living within the structured discipline of an institution and laboring regularly at a repetitive task—spinning, weaving, or, more typically, picking strands from castoff rope for reuse as oakum caulking—those unable to support themselves could be more efficiently housed, more gainfully employed, and, in theory, morally remade.22
Boston had built a municipal workhouse by 1738. By the 1780s it formed part of a cluster of welfare institutions on the edge of the built-up city: a municipal almshouse for the infirm and elderly poor, a bridewell for the punishment of minor criminals, a municipal granary where the poor could purchase grain below the prices that storekeepers asked, and the workhouse. Isolation, discipline, and habit-instilling labor were the reciprocal obligations Boston’s poor now gave in return for public support.23
The cruelties that were to overcome the poorhouses by the nineteenth century have been abundantly documented. But it is too easy to read the movement from boarding-out to institutionalization as simply a callous abandonment of the principles of charity that Winthrop had tried so hard to lay out. The idea of making over the character of the poor on more disciplined, work-capable lines, however flawed in practice, was not a small moral ideal.
In Philadelphia, the new civic vision of poor relief had its most ambitious trial. There, in 1766, the city’s Quaker merchants persuaded the legislature to take management of the city’s poor away from its public overseers and place it under their own elite direction. A nonprofit association would set the city’s poor tax rate and direct the use of its proceeds. To that end, the newly formed contributors’ corporation undertook to build and staff the largest and most carefully administered Almshouse and House of Employment that the colonies had seen. Inmates were sorted out by gender, race, and estimates of their moral ability and set to a steady regime of work, reflection, and religious instruction, all with the hope of making new persons of them. The “Bettering House,” it was dubbed, in reflection of the scope of the Quaker merchants’ ambition. If its managers had had their way, they would have cut off every other form of public poor support in the city to funnel the poor through its door and reformatory influences. That project ultimately proved too large and too costly for them to manage. By 1788 the merchants had given the task of poor relief management back to the city, but not before they had built at the city’s edge the largest and one of the most architecturally impressive buildings in English North America. Wealthy Philadelphians visited the Bettering House’s gardens; travelers took note of it in their diaries.24
Boston’s elite did not act on quite the same scale. But when the property around the city’s charitable institutions began rapidly to gentrify in the 1790s, the city government undertook the construction of a new and larger institution at a more distant unbuilt edge of the city. For its design they commissioned the young Charles Bulfinch, already New England’s most celebrated architect. With the Massachusetts and Connecticut State Houses, churches, banks, and elegant Boston town houses to his credit, Bulfinch was a master of Federal-era elegance. When it was completed in 1801, his New Almshouse dwarfed every other building in the city. Three stories high and 270 feet long, its commanding feature was a dramatically tall central pavilion, its windows outlined in marble and topped by a broad marble pediment. High brick walls and a large ornamented gate encircled the Almshouse grounds. As in the case of Philadelphia’s Bettering House, this was public charity made not only efficient but visible, proud, and monumental.25
The mixed messages in these new expressions of civic charity cannot be unspooled along any single thread. They isolated the poor behind their new institutional walls. They extracted the recipients of public poor relief from the temptations of the city but also from the bonds of family. They set them at the city’s margins. In hopes of cutting the mounting costs of more promiscuous forms of relief, they imposed far stricter regimes of moral and physical discipline than the poor in colonial America had ever experienced before. They hoped for far more moral reformation than had been expected before. But they also broadcast—with whatever mixture of vanity and self-importance—the public and moral benevolence of their builders. The same structures that stored the poor away celebrated the obligations of rich and poor, each to the other.
Had Winthrop’s concept of charity been broader? Did a sense of boundaries not run through his own text as well? Winthrop never specified that only those in good moral and religious standing deserved the love and sacrifice of others. Until “there be no poor with thee,” he wrote, the obligations of charity persisted. But the Model’s stress on care for one’s “brethren” in distress, on the need to do good to all but “especially to the household of faith,” suggests an implicit sense of limits. Winthrop wrote the Model with those in mind who intended to sail for New England and whose financial sacrifice that enterprise required. The ethical community in his imagination was essentially homogenous. The diversity of opinions that so quickly erupted in New England caught him by alarm. That a population in need might emerge outside the fold of church membership he most likely did not anticipate. The “we” of his “we shall be as a city upon a hill” was partial, not universal. His “we” was not, in any meaning of the term, “America.” Winthrop’s community of the godly was both intense and, in a literal sense, parochial.
The “we” that emerged in social and political practice in early New England was, in some ways, broader than the “we” of Winthrop’s text. It reached out to the poor without regard to their full membership in the church. It gave, however harshly or begrudgingly, to backsliders and the reprobate as well as to the pious. It secularized the imperative of charity and made the welfare of the poor a legal, civic, tax-supported obligation. Like the monumental almshouses on Boston’s and Philadelphia’s outer edges, the practice of early New England charity kept the poor at a distance. But it had not yet given way before the full-scale economization of economic life and contempt for the indigent that would sweep through the nation in the nineteenth century.
Nor had John Winthrop’s Model itself made its peace with market individualism. Winthrop’s “we” was fervent: “We must love brotherly without dissimulation. We must love one another with a pure heart fervently.… We must not look only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren.” If Winthrop’s sense of the social whole did not stretch as far as we might like, the Model’s economic message was clear: market price and ordinary market relations would not suffice for a moral community. The kernel of “charity,” as he turned it over in his mind in 1630, lay precisely in that lesson.
But no text remains stable. When after centuries of neglect “A Model of Christian Charity” was plucked out of Winthrop’s context to be reimagined as something quite different—as a founding document for the nation itself—the moral question Winthrop had placed at the core of his text would no longer be the part of the Model that mattered.