How Welfare Worked in the Early United States: Five Microhistories by Gabriel J. Loiacono (review)

How Welfare Worked in the Early United States explores the lives of five people connected to the poor-relief system of early-republic Rhode Island. In clear, accessible prose, Loiacono assumes the posture of a fly on the wall in council meetings, along small-town sidewalks, and as working-class people interacted with agents of the local government. Using a truly remarkable, and remarkably comprehensive, set of town, county, and state records, he contextualizes the experiences of individuals within a Janus-faced apparatus that was designed to serve one half of the population of a town while expelling the other. In following the lives of William Larned (an overseer of the poor), Cuff Roberts (a free Black Revolutionary War veteran), "One-Eyed Sarah" (a home nurse), Lydia Bates (a laborer caught up in a bastardy case), and William Fales (a literate and ill poorhouse resident) as they intersected with the early American welfare system, Loiacono demonstrates how this system relied on an uneasy balance between the humanitarian desire to provide relief for the needy and the political–economic desire to keep taxes low for those who paid them. They were often merciful toward those with legal settlement, regularly providing real survival assistance in dire cases, and offering stopgap measure that prevented others from following that path. And they were exclusionary and tight-fisted with those who they deemed to be strangers, warning out people who lacked legal settlement in that community.

Loiacono argues, carefully amassing his evidence brick by brick, that agents of local government wielded an enormous amount of power in early American communities. This power stretched, effectively, from one's crib, to their wallet, to the sidewalk, to the bedroom, and the grave. While historians have generally tried to explain the structure and implementation of the poor-relief systems in early America as pursuits of either social control or economic control, Loiacono takes a both/and stance. He argues that the police power of the overseers of the poor, derived from the poor law, was marshaled through what was essentially social control, though this occurred largely in service of economic ends.

Unique to this study is the close look at the figures who moved within the orbit of the welfare system but whose roles were much murkier than those providing or receiving relief, such as the people who worked as a nineteenth-century version of home health-care workers, and "hired hands." While the "overseers, literally, oversaw this work," it was "paid women" who "did the work" (118). Loiacono reminds us of the fluidity of early American class status; that nearly all workers bobbed on a mercurial sea, riding waves of illness and national economic crises as best they could. There was very little distinction, on paper, between the socioeconomic status of many overseers and those who helped them carry out their work, and those who received poor relief.

The micro-historical nature of this study shows how the welfare system and local government functioned, as that function might have been perceived on the ground. William Larned, overseer of the poor for Providence, Rhode Island, served in this role for several decades, so long that he is in the position of recognizing the faces of people who were warned out and later returned. It is this provincial level of the story that is especially telling, then, when we see how this individual and others in similar roles used their positions and the structures in which they worked to warn out their neighbors. Larned and another Providence overseer, in 1806, used the poor laws to excommunicate dozens of Black people from Providence, leading to mass banishments that marked the experience of Black New Englanders in the period.

The construction and destruction of families and social networks is one interesting thread throughout the book. As Loiacono writes, "the poor laws prompted...