Robert Love's Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston

Introduction

Introduction  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 2 Introduction Figure 1. Robert Love’s surviving record book, 1765–66. Image courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 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 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 Figure 2. Flyleaf, Love’s 1765–66 record book. Image courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 4 Introduction 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. 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...