Town Born: The Political Economy of New England from Its Founding to the Revolution

EIGHT: Orphans

chapter eight Orphans What a privilege to parents it is, to be able to employ their children at home, and thus keep them around them. Asa Sheldon, 1862 The prescriptive literature read in colonial Massachusetts demanded a well-ordered patriarchal household. Yet this normative ideal, coupled with Puritans’ reforming zeal, often justified the intrusive intervention of public authorities into the family. Many town selectmen took the patriarchal ideal so seriously that they removed children from fathers who failed to discipline, educate, or employ them properly. Indeed, far from forming a society that required children to live with their parents, New Englanders adopted many policies that propelled the scattering of young children among households. Early modern English households had often sent their children out to service at age fourteen, but thousands of children in colonial New England left home much earlier, often during infancy, and seldom returned. By creating a supervised labor market for children, the fathers of the towns facilitated the movement of thousands of children from their homes of birth at early ages without arousing protest, or even much visible notice. The towns were patriarchal insofar as they were led by successful men, but many families in the town were often not so; by choice, coercion, and death they rarely retained all their living children very long.1 John Winthrop, John White, and other New England leaders did not base their Christian humanistic society on the illusion of staffing a majority 238 town people of households with nearly immortal male Calvinist potentates. Devotees and witnesses of the impact of mankind’s fall from grace into original sin, Puritan leaders anticipated widespread parental inadequacy.2 For Yankee fathers, retaining their children was more an earned privilege than a right, and was often deemed a ruinous or inconvenient policy. In short, the conventional depiction of the relationship between fathers, labor, children, and land in early Massachusetts needs revision. Disapproved and Distancing Parents In each Massachusetts town, male inhabitants voted for selectmen who were given the power to regulate the labor market, including the labor within households. Given the need not only to produce goods but also to inculcate industriousness, selectmen tolerated no idle children, especially when the household had nothing productive for them to do. With the permission of one or two judges, selectmen moved children from households they deemed unproductive to households that had enough resources to employ them— that is, from lower-class to middling and elite households. For example, in Boston in 1672, a special meeting that included the governor, deputy governor , and town selectmen demanded that more than ten families ‘‘dispose of their several children (herein nominated or mentioned) abroad for servants, to serve by indentures for some term of years, according to their age and capacities; which if they refuse or neglect to do, the magistrates and selectmen will take their said children from them, and place them with such masters as they shall provide.’’ Eleven girls and three boys, some as young as ten years of age, were removed from these families, most of them headed by males. The policy was of long standing, though it was usually applied one family at a time.3 In many years, explicit orders were unnecessary to accomplish this policy. The movements of children were achieved through advice and pressure. As Boston grew larger, regulation increased. In 1707, the town instituted an annual family visiting day on which selectmen, overseers of the poor, and judges inspected households one by one ‘‘in order to prevent and redress disorders.’’ These visits menaced the poor. In January 1715, the Boston records noted, ‘‘the justices and selectmen do now agree to visit the families in the several parts of this town . . . to inspect disorderly persons, new-comers, and the circumstances of the poor and education of their children.’’ Twenty- Orphans 239 four inspectors and eight wards (watchmen) manned the sweep and child press. The annual event lasted well into the 1740s, and was responsible for the movement of hundreds of ‘‘idle’’ children from their parental households into employment.4 Other towns followed similar policies, forcing the movement of children at early ages from the unproductive households of their birth parents to productive households of kin and strangers. Poor households, which required relief or only an abatement of taxes, were visited by selectmen and stripped of excess children. In 1670, the Watertown selectmen explained these policies, noting in regard to the household...