Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston. By Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) 257 pp. $34.95 cloth and e-book

Abstract

Robert Love’s Warnings examines the operation of the poor law in Boston. The city’s selectmen hired “warners,” such as Love, to search for newcomers and warn them to leave. Strangers could stay and seek employment, but if they needed relief, the colony would have to pay for it. The book provides biographical sketches of those people whom Love warned. Love, who searched Boston’s streets for transients and recent arrivals, left detailed accounts of strangers’ names, birthplaces, last habitation, occupation, Boston residence, and the number of people in their party by age and sex. The biographical sketches are based on Love’s records and its nominal linkage to other sources that uncover the lives of those warned.The book sustains George Ravenstein’s “Laws of Migration,” as revised by twentieth-century demographers. Just as in late nineteenth-century England, most of the migrants in Dayton and Salinger’s research had moved a short distance, in this case relocating to Boston; nearly all of them came from New England. Boston received more migrants than any other New England town, but most of them left soon after arrival, usually for the countryside—a common final destination in the early modern world.A number of them came in search of opportunities in domestic service, desperately in need of wages sufficient to feed and clothe themselves and their families. The authors argue, however, that Boston’s migrants were primarily from the middling sort—yeoman farmers and artisans. Their classification of only one-fifth of those whom Love warned as poor challenges earlier historians’ insistence that nearly all of those warned were poor. But the story is more complicated. The book presents enough compelling data to challenge its own conclusions. Boston migrants certainly included a substantial number of the middling sort. But this group probably did not constitute four-fifths of the strangers entering the town. Love includes travelers (both poor and middling) who came to Boston by sea or by land, planning to leave immediately for elsewhere. But he excludes two groups traditionally considered poor—sailors, a constant and large portion of Boston’s population, who fell under the jurisdiction of a ship’s captain, and British occupying soldiers, who were the responsibility of their officers.The operation of the Massachusetts Poor Law compounds these problems. Love probably identified nearly all of the absolutely destitute strangers in Boston. After all, the selectmen wanted him to locate those most likely to need public assistance. But many of the others that he warned were probably among the working poor—young female domestic servants, wage laborers, or journeymen artisans down on their luck—a group that the authors combine with the middling sort.Boston’s population never reached 20,000 before the American Revolution. Yet it attracted thousands of strangers during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Even during the severe recession following the Seven Years’ War, migrants continued to arrive. As New England’s largest town and entrepôt, Boston played a vital role in New England’s economy, attracting apprentices and domestic servants, as well as those without visible means of support. The turnover was great. Those who came for only a few months or years, expecting to return to their home villages or move to a growing frontier, were replaced by a steady stream of new migrants.Robert Love’s Warnings adds much to early American history, the history of American and global poverty, and the study of law and public welfare. Its thick description of the lives of poor people and of struggling workers humanizes a mostly unknown part of the colonial population and sheds some light on how the early United States dealt with the problems of internal migration and immigration.