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

Chapter 2. The Warner

chapter 2  The Warner What are we to make of an early New England immigrant from Ireland who got into trouble as a young man for threatening to break open a man’s head and yet by his late seventies earned public praise for the ‘‘tender Affection’’ residing in his breast? The trajectory of Robert Love was not unlike that of many peripatetic men in the British Atlantic world whose episodes of youthful rabble-rousing gave way to orderly household governance . As an Ulster Scot with some useful social connections, Love secured a modest foothold in the colonies. If in his early years he felt like an outsider , by the end of his life, having proved himself of great value to the local authorities, he had garnered respect if not genteel status. Tracking Love and his immediate family members through his forty-odd years as a Bostonian provides an object lesson in the patchwork way in which lower-middling sorts in colonial port towns earned their livelihoods. Comparing Love’s social profile to those of other warners illuminates why he took on the perambulating mission at age sixty-eight and why he fulfilled it with such tenacity. All indications are that Love was born in County Antrim, Ireland, in 1696 or 1697. The most important clue is that his brother, Richie, with whom he was closely associated as a young adult, was born there. Richie Love immigrated to Boston as a young man sometime before November 1719. In that month, he made a very good marriage—to Copia Bridge, the daughter of a recently deceased minister of Boston’s First Church. Copia’s father had been educated at Oxford, received an honorary masters of arts from Harvard College in 1712, and was counted among the intellectual elite of the Bay Colony. Richie’s younger brother, Robert, arrived in Boston with a ready network of kin and allies to help him get established.1 The Warner 23 More is documented about the transatlantic journey of Rachel Blair, the woman who would become Robert Love’s wife. The daughter of David Blair of Ireland, she crossed the Atlantic in 1718 with two siblings, Elizabeth and James. Five days after their August 17 arrival in Boston, the selectmen issued an order that the newly disembarked passengers be warned—thus, informing them they would not become legal inhabitants by mere residency. The young Blairs joined extended family in Boston, including their cousin William Blair, a prominent merchant, his wife, Mary, and son William. If her family reassured her that the warning had no real sting for propertied newcomers , perhaps Rachel was not alarmed at the verbal command ‘‘to depart the town in fourteen days.’’ But she surely was able to recall her encounter with the practice when, years later, her husband became the man in charge of issuing such warnings.2 Robert Love and Rachel Blair were part of a major wave of immigration from Ireland to the North American colonies. Approximately four thousand persons left for New England between 1714 and 1720; the largest number traveled in the same year as Blair—1718. And almost all who left the northern province of Ulster were Scottish in heritage, their parents or grandparents having moved from Scotland to Ireland under favorable settlement conditions offered by the English. Known in this era as Presbyterians , these settlers were Protestants with Calvinist leanings—and thus their theological and world views aligned with those New England puritans. One factor pushing Scots to leave the counties of Antrim or Londonderry in the early eighteenth century was the desire to escape from almost a century of warfare; another was an economic climate that combined high rents and prices with low wages. Many of the new arrivals from Ulster disembarked in Boston but then moved to frontier lands in New Hampshire and the District of Maine, serving as buffer between Indians allied with the enemy French and the settled portions of southeastern New England. Robert Love was one such emigrant.3 The first we know of Robert Love on the western side of the Atlantic is his arrival on November 14, 1720, in a frontier area of coastal Maine, then referred to as ‘‘the eastward’’ part of Massachusetts Bay Colony.4 Called upon to testify in a land dispute a few years later, Love recalled arriving at ‘‘Rowsick in Kennebeck River.’’ He had landed by sloop in the rudimentary settlement of Georgetown on Arrowsic Island, located at the mouth of...