God Is in the Details

In the late 1760s, Robert Love tirelessly walked the streets and alleys of Boston, looking for strangers. When he found them, he closely inquired into their personal circumstances. Depending on their answers and his own assessment of their situation, Love might then order them, in the name of his Majesty, to “depart this Town in . . . fourteen Days or [to] give security to the satisfaction of the Selectmen” (p. 7). Love was Boston’s official “warner” (there was no term for his occupation at the time), a position he held for nine years. He began his tenure in January 1765 at the ripe old age of 68, dying in office in April 1774. Love’s job, “warning out,” is the subject of this engaging study, an example of legal, social, and cultural history at its finest. The book employs a convincing fine-grained analysis that yields deep insights, engaging stories, and telling numbers, all anchored firmly in a specific place, yet projected onto the panorama of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world.

Warning out has been little studied and much misunderstood, though it occurred throughout colonial New England and occasionally outside of it. The classic about the practice, Josiah Henry Benton’s Warning Out in New England, was published in 1911; the sole recent monograph, Ruth Herndon’s Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margins in Early New England (2001), deals with Rhode Island, a colony that used warning very differently from the rest of New England. Robert Love’s Warnings, then, updates and redefines our understandings of this crucial aspect of the early U.S. welfare system. Engagingly written and well organized, the book will satisfy historians, students, and an interested public alike.

At the heart of this study are the warning records of Robert Love. The life story of the obscure Love and his family, told in rich detail in the first chapters, mirrors that of many of the people he warned. A mobile Ulster Scot, Love migrated to New England in his youth. Like many of those he would later warn, Love lived a life of mobility trying his hand at different professions, among them tailoring and petty retailing. In his nine-plus years as warner, the indefatigable Love recorded over 2,400 warnings, yielding the names of over 4,000 men, women and children. Using “record linkage”—that is, exhaustive research in extant primary and secondary sources of every conceivable kind—the authors spin Love’s terse entries into revealing vignettes of poor and (lower) middling New Englanders. Besides redefining our understanding of warning and its connection to poor relief, the book provides readers with a rare up-close view of the life strategies of ordinary people as well as the daily workings of pre-Revolutionary Boston’s social and economic structures.

The authors argue convincingly that warning in Massachusetts was neither a manifestation of New England’s legendary tightfistedness nor a xenophobic response to outsiders. Rather, as they explain in a chapter devoted to legal history, it was a system of “fiscal reckoning,” based on English notions of legal residency and Massachusetts’ innovative and expansive two-tiered poor-relief system: local and provincial. The English principle of legal inhabitance, adopted in the colonies as well, provided people with, the authors emphasize, “a lifetime claim to poor relief” (p. 8). For this reason, people could have legal residency in only one place at a time. Yet Massachusetts’ leaders decided in the late seventeenth century that the expense of providing relief to colonists (made homeless in wars with Indians and France) should be shared province-wide. Over time, the fund evolved into a system in which colonists paid local taxes to take care of their own legal residents and, as well, taxes to the province to provide reimbursement for relief of deserving non-residents. Boston, as the largest town and a magnet for newcomers, received a disproportionate share of the provincial funds. To make...