Robert Love's Warnings
eBook - ePub

Robert Love's Warnings

Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston

  1. 272 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Robert Love's Warnings

Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston

About this book

In colonial America, the system of "warning out" was distinctive to New England, a way for a community to regulate those to whom it would extend welfare. Robert Love's Warnings animates this nearly forgotten aspect of colonial life, richly detailing the moral and legal basis of the practice and the religious and humanistic vision of those who enforced it.Historians Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger follow one otherwise obscure town clerk, Robert Love, as he walked through Boston's streets to tell sojourners, "in His Majesty's Name, " that they were warned to depart the town in fourteen days. This declaration meant not that newcomers literally had to leave, but that they could not claim legal settlement or rely on town poor relief. Warned youths and adults could reside, work, marry, or buy a house in the city. If they became needy, their relief was paid for by the province treasurer. Warning thus functioned as a registration system, encouraging the flow of labor and protecting town coffers.Between 1765 and 1774, Robert Love warned four thousand itinerants, including youthful migrant workers, demobilized British soldiers, recently exiled Acadians, and women following the redcoats who occupied Boston in 1768. Appointed warner at age sixty-eight owing to his unusual capacity for remembering faces, Love kept meticulous records of the sojourners he spoke to, including where they lodged and whether they were lame, ragged, drunk, impudent, homeless, or begging. Through these documents, Dayton and Salinger reconstruct the biographies of travelers, exploring why so many people were on the move throughout the British Atlantic and why they came to Boston. With a fresh interpretation of the role that warning played in Boston's civic structure and street life, Robert Love's Warnings reveals the complex legal, social, and political landscape of New England in the decade before the Revolution.

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Yes, you can access Robert Love's Warnings by Cornelia H. Dayton,Sharon V. Salinger in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Early American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Prologue. A Walking Day
  6. Introduction
  7. Chapter 1. Mr. Love’s Mission
  8. Chapter 2. The Warner
  9. Chapter 3. Origins
  10. Chapter 4. Walking and Warning
  11. Chapter 5. The Warned and Why They Came
  12. Interlude. A Sojourner’s Arrival
  13. Chapter 6. Lodgings
  14. Chapter 7. Sojourners of the Respectable Sort
  15. Chapter 8. Travelers in Distress
  16. Chapter 9. Warning in the Midst of Imperial Crises
  17. Epilogue
  18. Appendix A. Traveling Parties and Locations They Were “Last From”
  19. Appendix B. Sources for Robert Love’s Warning Records, by Date
  20. List of Abbreviations
  21. Notes
  22. Index
  23. Acknowledgments