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>> 91 4 Was the Warning of Strangers Unique to Colonial New England? Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger Warning of Strangers in Colonial New England Our story begins with the wintry day in 1765 on which an obscure Bostonian, Robert Love, entered the ranks of minor officialdom. The setting was the Selectmen’s Chamber on the second floor of Faneuil Hall. At the age of sixty-five, Love was sworn in to a part-time position that had no name. He would be remunerated for the activity that New Englanders called warning strangers (thus, we refer below to Love and other “warners”). The town clerk read aloud Love’s formal orders: “You [are] to make enquiry after all Strangers, and other Persons who shall hereafter come into the Town and reside here that are not Inhabitants, and all such of them as you shall apprehend are in low Circumstances you are immediately to warn to depart this Town in (14) fourteen Days, or [to] give security to the satisfaction of the Selectmen.” For the next nine years, Robert Love, a trader in ribbons and horsehair and a retailer (with his wife) of small drams from their rented house, would search the streets, tenements, and taverns of the peninsular town and among its roughly 16,000 residents, warning more than 4,000 individuals. Love was so good at identifying newcomers that four years into his service , the town dismissed the two other men appointed to the same task, retaining and salarying Love at £40 per year.1 What was this warning practice, considered by many scholars to have been peculiar to New England towns? In terms of modern law categories , the practice would map onto a mélange of municipal, administrative , immigration, and welfare law. Early moderns would have 92 > 93 The leatherbound logbook of Robert Love covering the first twenty months of his service as warner had been resting in its cherry-red clamshell box in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society since 1840. Yet historians interested in warning out had not known of its existence . Instead, they used the Warning Book covering the years 1745 to 1770 that survives in the records of the Boston overseers of the poor. This folio ledger contains an alphabetical listing of warned strangers in the elegant hand of longtime town clerk William Cooper. He compiled the data from the warrants that warners returned to him, arranging the essential information into columns. The ledger allows counting of persons warned out and mapping where they were last from, but not much more.7 Of the sixteen or so men who had been appointed to warn strangers in Boston since the 1690s, Robert Love stands out as a conscientious record keeper. Whereas almost all of his predecessors wrote down minimal information (household head’s name and place last from), Love noted where and with whom newcomers were lodging in Boston, the method by which they had come to town (by sea, land, or wagon), and, in some cases, additional particulars (“a goldsmith” by trade, “Clothed in rags,” “she is an Indin Womon,” “he Wants a pasage to England”). Equally important, in contrast to the town clerk’s resort to a cursory accounting of families (“Steel[,] Henry[,] Wife & 2 Children”), Love recorded the name of every spouse, child, and other person arriving in Boston as member of a kin group. The warner’s thoroughness is further demonstrated by his copying his logbook entries verbatim onto the warrants that he was required to submit to court.8 They survive in the Suffolk Files collection at the Massachusetts State Archives, permitting us access (given that Love’s logbooks for 1768–74 have not surfaced) to extraordinary details on those warned over nine years and two months.9 Our findings challenge the conventional portrait of warning in New England as a harsh, exclusionary measure reflecting Puritans’ aversion to “others” and their desire for homogeneity.10 Four features of the system flatly contradict the notion that warning entailed exclusion and the denial of charity. First, newcomers were not barred or removed from the town by the warning itself. During Love’s years as a warner, only thirty physical removals by warrant occurred out of the 2,400-plus parties warned.11 Second, warning did not mean that one was excluded 94 > 95 a unique dual-accounting system. Warning “strangers” was the mechanism by which the cost of aiding those in need—whose settlement was elsewhere—was shifted from Boston’s...

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