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Introduction:

The World of People on the Margin

IN THE AUTUMN of 1784, a poor, unmarried woman named Phebe Perkins gave birth to a baby in the home of the Cary Clarke family in Hopkinton, Rhode Island. Perkins was not a relative, neighbor, or friend of the Clarkes; rather, the Clarkes had agreed to be her caretakers during this difficult period of her life. They sent someone to fetch the doctor when the delivery went awry; they nursed Perkins and her baby through the first weeks after childbirth; they provided food and drink for Perkins; they provided linens for the baby; they mended and washed the new mother’s clothing; they burned extra firewood to keep them warm. For providing these necessities, the Clarkes were reimbursed directly out of the Hopkinton town treasury and indirectly out of the pockets of every taxpayer in the town.¹

In eighteenth-century America, no centralized system of welfare existed to rescue people like Phebe Perkins: no Social Security or Medicaid or unemployment insurance or old age pensions in any form. No colony or state created and maintained a safety net for those unable to support themselves; instead, each local government administered “poor relief” to its own inhabitants. In rural communities, the caretaker system—sometimes termed “outdoor relief”—predominated; in more populous commercial centers such as Boston, Newport, Philadelphia, and Charleston, almshouses and poorhouses were constructed so that needy people could be grouped together in an institutional setting under the management of an overseer.

Whatever the form of poor relief, its funding originated with local taxpayers. In New England, freeholders met regularly in town meeting to levy taxes on themselves in order to resupply the “exhausted” town treasury. More often than not, the cause of the treasury’s exhaustion was the high cost of poor relief, and voters frequently shied away from raising taxes, preferring to charge town leaders with cutting expenses. This was particularly true in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Rhode Islanders paid the price of waging the Revolutionary War in the form of extra taxes levied by town, state, and Continental Congress. At a time when many of the middling sort could visualize themselves falling into ruin from three thick layers of taxation, they were not inclined to be generous with those already in poverty.

New England town leaders, annually elected by their fellow townsmen to govern the affairs of the town, were thus simultaneously administrators of poor relief and guardians of the town treasury. They exercised a dual responsibility: to care for the poor and to answer for the amount spent on them. Officials sought to resolve this tension by carefully distinguishing between those legally entitled to poor relief and those not legally entitled, and by sending away the latter. Settlement laws in every colony provided that all those needing poor relief would receive it—but only in their towns of legal settlement. If poor people moved elsewhere in search of work or a more congenial community, they would have to return to their hometowns for help. Phebe Perkins, for example, had been living in Richmond, Rhode Island, when she became pregnant; before her baby was born, Richmond officials sent her to Hopkinton, which they judged to be her hometown and therefore responsible for her care.

This was the “warning-out” system, by which town authorities sent away from their towns those people who had no legal claim on the town treasury. Town officials spent considerable time and money identifying and sending away such people, but the results were considered worth the effort. Through warning out, towns avoided the greater costs of supporting frail, ill, or injured people over the long term; they also avoided setting a precedent of providing care for those not entitled to it. Consequently, New England authorities vigorously employed warning out in the eighteenth century.²

Between 1750 and 1800, Rhode Island officials interrogated thousands of people who were likely candidates for warning out, and over nine hundred of these legal examinations were written down in town records. After a careful scrutiny of each examination, I selected forty to present in this book as narratives that flesh out the bare-bones stories preserved in the record. Each narrative represents the whole body of testimonies in some way, and was chosen because its detail allows twenty-first-century readers to enter the world of the eighteenth-century unwelcome poor.

Although these testimonies were recorded in Rhode Island town books, they are representative of a process that occurred throughout Anglo-America in the eighteenth century. Authorities interrogated and removed “paupers” everywhere in England and in the English colonies, but most especially in New England, where some system of warning out was in place in every locality. The Rhode Island records, however, are unique in their illuminating detail, and they provide much more information than names of transients, which often is the extent of warning-out records elsewhere.³ In the Rhode Island examinations, warned-out people left a small history of their lives: where they had been born; where they had lived; what work they had done; the names of parents, masters, spouses; the number and ages of children. The life stories thus revealed are widely representative of the circumstances of poor people throughout southern New England. About half of the transients questioned in Rhode Island actually came from hometowns in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and a few more distant regions; they had migrated to Rhode Island, sometimes quite deliberately, in search of jobs, land, family, or community. The difficulties that galvanized people into leaving their hometowns were not Rhode Island problems but regional problems; the economic and social upheaval that transients describe was common to much of New England and in fact to much of Anglo-America in the eighteenth century.⁴

There is much we can learn from these brief histories of unfortunate people caught up in the system of warning out. At the most immediate and literal level, the examinations tell us how the poor lived in eighteenth-century New England and throughout early America. The rarity of such short biographies lends great significance to this collection, for seldom do we hear the voices of the poor and the unwelcome so clearly and directly over the span of intervening centuries. The great majority of studies of poor people in early America have focused on statistical data, lacking the necessary personal documentation that allows human faces to emerge.⁵ The warning-out testimonies give us just such human faces, make the poor our informants, and counterbalance the narratives of the elite and privileged who have been the dominant voices from this crucial period in American history. The warning-out testimonies are not rags-to-riches success stories, like the well-known life of Benjamin Franklin, who started his career as a runaway apprentice but ended up an internationally known scientist, diplomat, and author. The very necessity for official interrogation meant that these people had failed to prosper in their adopted homes. Thus their tales of trouble prompt us to redraw the picture of New England and by implication all the colonies and states in their founding years, this time including the less fortunate, the despised, and the unwelcome.

At a deeper and more contextual level, these testimonies also illuminate the conflict between the poor and the prosperous. Warned-out people were ordered to appear before town leaders because they had chosen to live where others—property owners—now (suddenly) did not want them. Their appearance before local magistrates was permeated with tension and frustration. On one side of the council table sat people who, in the eye of the law, truly belonged to the community: well-to-do leaders charged with maintaining order, trying to keep track of the many poor and troublesome people living under their jurisdiction, protecting the peace and property of the taxpaying inhabitants who elected them to office. On the other side of the table stood people who, in the eye of the law, did not belong, however deep their attachments in the community: unpropertied people with few advocates, few advantages, and few prospects, struggling to maintain a place in the towns where they lived. The examinations disclose these antagonistic purposes and expose the gulf that separated unwelcome Americans from those of power and status in their communities.

The Warning-Out System

New England town officials did not invent warning out. The English colonies inherited it, along with the rest of English law. Various pieces of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century parliamentary legislation, referred to collectively as the Poor Law, codified and regularized the various means of poor relief that had sprung up in the sixteenth century after the dissolution of the manors, monasteries, and guilds that formerly had given aid to the needy. The Poor Law placed the responsibility for poor relief directly on local governments, and one particular provision, the 1662 Settlement Law, stipulated how local officials should determine who came under their jurisdiction and how they should remove poor people to their home parishes. Such legislation grew naturally from the official ideal of a static society rooted in the land: where community ties overlapped with kinship ties, and where everyone had a place and knew that place. By sending needy people back to their hometowns, the law put the poor “in their place” and prevented any one locality from becoming a magnet for those seeking relief.⁶

Rhode Island magistrates adapted English poor law to their own particular case, concentrating on the distinctions between “inhabitants” and “transients.” “Transient” conveyed very different meanings in the eighteenth century than it does today. Then, it referred neither to travelers nor to homeless vagrants. Instead, it specifically identified persons who had been living in a town but had not become legal “inhabitants” in that town. In the eighteenth century, there were four principal ways to acquire an official settlement in a Rhode Island town: by being born there; by serving out an apprenticeship or other servitude to a master who lived there; by purchasing a freehold; or (for women) by marrying a man who belonged there. A default provision, granting legal settlement to persons who lived continuously in a town for one year without being ordered out, created an alternative way for poor people to become inhabitants, but local officials blocked this pathway by issuing yearly citations that kept transients “under warning” without actually forcing them out, thus effectively preventing long-term residents from ever claiming the rights and privileges associated with belonging to a town.⁷

Transients remained in residence only by the permission of town leaders, and they were perpetually at risk of being sent away. Many of them would have ended their transient status, if only they could. But these people were of the poorer sort; their labor brought them little beyond the necessities of life. Many had moved in search of work, rather than resort to receiving poor relief in their home communities. To purchase enough real estate to become legally settled inhabitants was beyond their means. Thus, those warned out might have worked and worshiped peaceably in a town for months, years, or even decades; they might have raised children and buried spouses there; they might have made fast friends among their neighbors and become a familiar sight to all. To no avail. None of this could change their status as legal transients, and so in every year, in every season, warned-out men, women, and children packed up their belongings, however meager, and left behind the place they had tried to make their home.

Town officials had to have plausible reasons for picking out certain people from the general population of transients who lived in every town. In most cases, officials were responding to reports made by “respectable” (land-owning) inhabitants who were neighbors or employers of transients. These “complaints” often referred to apparent suffering and need in the transient family. When the Tiverton councilmen learned that Nathaniel Manchester and his wife were “in a suffering condition” and “in great need,” they ordered the couple removed “directly out of this town.” When sailor Primus Thompson (Chapter 4) slipped on an icy wharf and broke his thigh, rendering himself unable to work, Jamestown officials had him removed to Westerly. Twenty-four-year-old Nancy Newport, who had moved to Glocester to work as a spinner, was returned to Scituate when she was “visited with sickness” and could no longer labor enough to pay for her own upkeep.⁸

Other times the complaint referred to the transients’ behavior, which “respectable” people found objectionable. It might have been something as minor as trespassing on someone else’s property or keeping a dog that irritated the neighbors. It might have been something as serious as operating an illegal tavern or a bawdy house. Mary Worsley was ordered out of Glocester because of her “unruly tongue” and “no good behavior.” Olive Goddard and her two children were removed from Providence to Newport when officials received a credible report that she was “a lewd woman.” Benjamin Austin and his family were ordered removed from East Greenwich to Warwick because they kept “such a disorderly house that they are general disturbers of the neighbors.” Jonathan Bliven and Pardon Green were warned out of Hopkinton because several inhabitants had complained that the pair were “unwholesome persons and of bad character, being apt to break the peace.” Samuel Eldred, his wife, and his four children were considered “unwholesome” and “people of bad morals” who were known to “make great disturbance in the neighbourhood where they live.” Thus, even if transients had jobs and every prospect of maintaining themselves economically, they might still be vulnerable to complaints about their behavior—complaints that could easily escalate into a warning out.⁹

When a poor family came to official attention by means of a complaint, town leaders summoned the household head and questioned him or her during a council meeting. The interrogation had two purposes: to determine whether a transient family should be warned out and to determine where the family should be sent. After hearing and discussing the information provided by the transient person, the six councilmen made a judgment: the family might be permitted to remain for a limited time or might be warned out of the community.

This sorting and sending away of transients served as the first step in the administration of poor relief, a culling out of those not entitled to town support, so as to limit the expense to taxpayers. Those who were entitled found poor relief a severe charity, and it is not surprising that many of the poorer sort preferred to move away in search of work and run the risk of being warned out of another place, rather than “throw themselves upon the town.” Poor-relief recipients lost their privacy and family coherence and came under the close supervision of town officials. Councilmen and overseers of the poor directed where and how the poor would live: in an individual household under a town-approved caretaker, or in a poorhouse or workhouse (if the town had constructed one), where they would live cheek by jowl with other down-and-outs under the dictatorial rule of an overseer whose main objective was to minimize the public cost of poor relief. Wherever they lived, their labor was coopted by officials who determined where, when, and how much they would work toward their own and their family’s support. Their children were, in most cases, taken from them and bound out until adulthood in indentured servitude under circumstances dictated by town officials, not by the children’s parents. This was not an enviable life, and transient status might well be preferable. Thomas Strait, for example, explained to his hometown councilmen that he had moved away in search of work; moving back home would constitute a “great disadvantage,” as he was now in “good employ and in a fair way to live” as a transient in West Greenwich.¹⁰

Local and colony/state laws required new residents like Thomas Strait to register with town authorities, but just as often officials learned of a transient’s presence through an overseer’s report or some other complaint. Sometimes this information concerned people who were genuine newcomers to the community, as in the case of Nathan Pierce, a “delerious” transient man whom the West Greenwich officials described as “unknown of to us.” But other times, the transient had actually lived for many years in the community, and officials were galvanized to action only when need became desperate or when neighbor trouble developed. Sometimes officials were unaware or had forgotten that a long-time resident was in fact legally a transient; in these cases, in a flurry of activity, councilmen scrambled to examine the transient, discover the responsible town, and remove the person or family. Elderly widow Abigail Carr (Chapter 5) had lived and worked in Providence for thirty years before town officials thought to question her settlement status; when she became needy, they gave her one month to leave Providence for her “hometown” of South Kingstown, where her former master had freed her from slavery some forty years before. Seventy-year-old Ezra Aldrich had lived in Cumberland so long that he could remember when the town was first incorporated more than fifty years earlier, but the Cumberland councilmen claimed he had never actually obtained a legal settlement in their town; they removed him to Smithfield when he fell into need, sending him to a place where his long-dead father had once owned real estate. Transients caught unprepared in situations like this lost their homes and connections in addition to falling into poverty, and the councilmen’s actions revealed the particularly pernicious aspects of the warning-out system.¹¹

Transients sometimes complicated the process further by failing to leave when ordered out. Some genuinely needed assistance in moving because of illness or accident, like seaman Dan Jack, who fell sick while in Providence and was unable to get himself back to North Carolina, where his wife and children lived; the overseer of the poor arranged for Jack to be taken on board a ship and paid for his voyage to North Carolina. Others dallied because they were reluctant to leave a job or community, or because they wanted to spite town officials. In every locality, the town sergeant and his constables were sent from time to time to transport ailing or foot-dragging transients to their towns of legal settlement, where they were delivered into the care of local officials. If that hometown was far distant, the town sergeant took the family only as far as the adjoining town, beginning a relay system whereby the transients were passed from one town to another in a straight line back to their town of legal settlement. The journey could take weeks. In July 1785, John Skyrme, a blind man, was transported from Eastchester, New York, back to his hometown of Providence. On his twenty-one-day journey he was transferred twenty-four times from one pair of official hands to another, as each constable delivered him to the door of the constable in the adjoining town.¹²

The actual removal of a transient was accomplished by the town sergeant or one of his constables, whose sustained contact with those being warned out gave him a very personal view of the whole process. The sergeant or constable physically confronted the unwelcome transients with a written document, signed and sealed by local authorities. If necessary, he prodded the transients into action by threat of force, as did Tiverton town sergeant Benjamin Sawdy, who was paid for “driving Amos Lewis out of the town.” The sergeant or constable made arrangements for transportation and lodging along the way in those cases where the transients could not manage for themselves. Cumberland constable Asa Carpenter presented the councilmen with an account for “aide, horse, carriage and removing” Mehitable Burt Dedeo and her children to North Providence; his charges included “keeping said woman and children one night at Isaac Arnold’s.” Providence sergeant Gideon Young had the task of removing the four young Townsend children (Chapter 1) to Newport after their parents abandoned them; his charges included £1 10s. for “my trouble & expences with the nurse and children.” When Exeter sergeant Isaac Wilcox removed Hannah Townsend and her child to Newport, his costs included paying an assistant for “carrying the child,” paying the ferryman “for carrying us over” the water to Newport, and paying a hosteler in Newport “for horsekeeping”; upon his return to Exeter, he immediately undertook the task of removing William Reese and family to South Kingstown, using “oxen and cart & horse & myself & hand.” These were clearly laborious, slow, and tedious journeys for all concerned.¹³

The journey ended at the door of the overseer of the poor in the transient’s hometown. Overseers of the poor were obligated to take in transients who arrived in the care of a town sergeant or constable armed with an official warrant, and they boarded and lodged the transients until other arrangements were made.

Arriving back in their hometown was not always the end of the warning-out process for either transients or town authorities. Transients sometimes thwarted officials by returning to the towns from which they had been warned out, prompting exasperated councilmen to send them away again after fining them or having them whipped by the town sergeant. Jonathan Hayden, removed from Cumberland in 1764, “made his escape” from official hands in Wrentham, Massachusetts, en route to his hometown of Braintree, and returned to Cumberland, where he continued to live in such a way that he appeared likely to “bring himself to ruin and others also with whom he keeps company.” Cumberland officials ordered him removed once again, promising “corporal punishment” if he persisted in returning. Nathaniel Bowdish (Chapter 3) similarly aggravated the Charlestown councilmen by returning repeatedly, even after several public whippings, and he further defied their authority when he “did damn this council & say that he would stay in this town if they whipt him again.” While the councilmen wanted to see the last of this man who had “frighted & abused some of the inhabitants of this town, by behaving himself in a disorderly manner,” they had no recourse beyond another whipping and removal. When Bowdish was spotted “lurking about this town” two weeks later, stymied officials could do nothing more than order the sergeant (once again) to find and whip him. Warning out could become a complicated and vexatious process both for town leaders and for warned-out people.¹⁴

The system of warning out described here had its own peculiar language and conventions, which varied from colony to colony. Studies of the Vermont and Massachusetts records, for example, suggest that actual removals of transients occurred much less frequently there than in Rhode Island. In Vermont and Massachusetts, “warning out” did not mean actual removal, but only a simple notification of the transient that he or she was not eligible for poor relief within the community. Rhode Island officials employed different language for those preliminary steps. A “citation” summoned a transient to appear at town council meeting to be questioned about his or her legal settlement; then officials formally “rejected” the transient as a legal inhabitant, divesting the town of responsibility for his or her welfare. When a “warning-out order” was issued, it followed those two first steps, and it meant serious action, not simply a bureaucratic procedure. First came the preparation of an official warrant, then a town constable at the door, and then a forced departure. It is this Rhode Island meaning of the term “warning out” as removal that is employed in this book.¹⁵

Patterns of Warning Out

Officials warned out people in every season, but they were slightly more likely to send away transients in the coldest months (see Appendix Figure A1, p. 203). In the winter, when jobs and health were at hazard for the poorer sort, transients were more apt to come to official notice. Authorities tried to get transients out of town before deep winter set in and their need for support became urgent. Consequently, the favorite month for warn-outs was December, when the agricultural cycle was complete and field laborers, desired in every other season, were no longer needed. When John Hall of West Greenwich brought a transient woman into town in June, “to work for him this season,” he asked authorities for permission to keep her there “until the 25th day of December” and promised that he would then “see that she departs the town.” In another December, when “the season of the year is now fast approaching when the necessaries of life will be and are now in great demand and difficult to be obtained,” several Providence inhabitants asked their councilmen to identify transients who were likely to “be a tax on the good and industrious citizens” and remove them from the town “without delay.”¹⁶

This seasonal variation is most marked for male household heads warned out of agrarian towns (Appendix Figure A2, p. 204). There, winter weather brought a cessation of agricultural activity, along with higher food prices and the need for increased shelter, clothing, and heat. In addition, pulmonary diseases flared up in small, smoky cabins, while dietary deficiencies led to a variety of health problems; men who supported their families by hiring themselves out to farmers were unable to secure a living from the end of the harvest to the beginning of the spring planting. Seasonal variations were much less distinct for transients warned out of commercial towns and for women warned out everywhere, but overall, midsummer was the time of fewest removals. Transient families were less likely to be in need in the summer, when jobs were plentiful and food cheapest, when firewood and heavy clothing were least needed, and when resourceful people could live off the land. Then, transient parents could more easily feed and clothe their children and thus avoid the sharp eyes of watchful neighbors.

Just as warning out fluctuated over the seasons, so it also fluctuated over the fifty-year period from 1750 to 1800 (Appendix Figure A3, p. 204). The number of warn-out orders fell sharply at the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War (1756) and the Revolutionary War (1776). Officials, distracted by more urgent problems, temporarily ignored the needy and troublesome transients within their borders; at the same time, employment opportunities increased and some of those needy people disappeared. Some poor men found a temporary livelihood as soldiers and sailors; others, both men and women, found work by following the army and supporting the troops; still others found work in farms and shops that needed extra hands as their owners took advantage of increased demand for food and clothing. They left the towns where they had been living on the edge of destitution to pursue wartime opportunities.

Warning out resumed rapidly after the outbreak of war and peaked during the mid-1780s, evidence of the economic depression that settled on New England in the wake of the Revolutionary War. But numbers alone do not tell the whole story. In most Rhode Island towns, the population grew rapidly after the war, and if transient removals are measured as a percentage of the population, a different pattern emerges. The percentage of warn-outs remained reasonably steady through 1775, fell to an all-time low during the war, jumped to an unprecedented high in 1784, and then rapidly diminished to its lowest peacetime levels in the late 1790s (Appendix Figure A4, p. 205). Thus after 1784 a decreasing proportion of people were actually being sent out of town.

There are several ways to interpret this decline in the 1780s and 1790s. First, town officials may have changed the subjective criteria for warning out transients after 1784. As the population of Rhode Island towns boomed and more absolute numbers of people came under their jurisdiction, councilmen and overseers of the poor may have developed a greater tolerance for “troublesome” behavior. They may also have redefined the physical condition they termed “likely to become chargeable,” with the result that some transients were less likely to be targeted for removal.

If, on the other hand, town officials’ criteria for warning out remained steady over the period, then a declining percentage of transient people was actually prompting complaints about need or trouble. This may have been in part because poor people were able to find work more easily as the postwar economy improved or because they eluded official gaze by mingling in with the growing population of the town. It may also signify that some poor people were leaving Rhode Island, heading elsewhere in search of better land or more reliable work.

While the pattern of warning out may not prove a straightforward indicator of changing economic conditions throughout the revolutionary era, its undeniable peak (by any measure) in the mid-178os underscores the deleterious effect of the postwar depression on poor people, as it plunged an extraordinary number into such dire circumstances that authorities were prompted to order them back to their hometowns. The many difficulties laboring people faced in eking out a living were magnified in those years.

Many workers were left jobless or reduced to hopelessly meager wages by cycles in the economy. In the downturn of the mid-1780s, merchants and ship captains scrambled to reestablish credit and overseas trade connections; artisans who had supplied the army with munitions, equipment, and clothing searched for new customers; former privateers, seamen, soldiers, and their families were set adrift on land; farmers struggled to find markets for their products. High taxes, rapid inflation of paper money, and a scarcity of hard money pinched inhabitants of farm and shop alike, leading to numerous personal tax delinquencies as well as entire towns defaulting on their share of taxes levied by the state legislature. A steady western migration began, taking potential employers of the poor from Rhode Island to central New York and other places, where men and women put their money and energy into more extensive or productive tracts of land.¹⁷

Other laboring people struggled with long-standing structural problems in a society based on racism and sexism. Many Native Americans, African Americans, and white women were consistently disadvantaged in the job market because they entered it with fewer marketable skills, fewer patronage and credit connections, and less capital to establish themselves. Setting an independent course after years of dependency proved an enormous challenge for those trained only for work that carried little market value. Such laborers had few possibilities of supporting themselves, much less advancing their economic position. All too often, former servants and slaves, widows, and wives of long-absent mariners found their meager wages would not stretch to cover the necessities of rent, food, clothing, and firewood. Women were also made vulnerable by childbearing, which temporarily halted a woman’s ability to work and simultaneously created a greater need for her wages; young children figured prominently in the testimonies of transient women, and unmarried women in particular were often cast into poverty by the birth of a baby.

Struggling transient laborers were often children of poor people, born into families trapped in poverty and all too likely to carry forward this legacy of privation. Unlike some born into wealthy families, they did not prosper in the pre-industrial market economy; instead, they were kept at the bottom by the social and economic structure of eighteenth-century New England society. Others became poor through misfortune—disease, accident, natural disaster, or destructive behavior. While Providence’s catastrophic epidemics of yellow fever were still a decade off in the mid-1780s, periodic outbreaks of smallpox and other “fevers” took their toll, depriving families of economically productive members. So did bitter weather, which left laborers with frozen fingers and toes, broken bones from falls, and respiratory ailments from exposure. Fires and floods destroyed what little property some poor people had, while others were victims of theft or of a family member who drank and gambled away the household’s meager earnings.

This concentration of miseries had little to do with immigration, before the Revolutionary War or after. Over the entire period, only a tiny fraction (3.4%) of warned-out transients were foreign-born; the vast majority were native-born New Englanders, not new arrivals from the British Isles or elsewhere. This evidence indicates that by the latter part of the eighteenth century, transience and poverty were homegrown—not imported—problems. New England was not a place of opportunity for all; many born and raised there struggled to survive.

Faced with the upsurge in the number of the poor in the mid-1780s, town officials began to experiment with institutions as a way of caring for the needy within their jurisdictions, both inhabitants and transients. The decline in warning out in the 1780s and 1790s probably in part reflected this new strategy, since almshouses and workhouses sprang up in most Rhode Island towns during this period. Poor farms, asylums, and reformatories followed in the early nineteenth century.¹⁸ Town officials began to send needy and troublesome transient people to these institutions rather than remove them to their places of legal settlement. Later in the nineteenth century, many “paupers” and “lunaticks” were placed under the care of a central state welfare authority, reducing even further the numbers of transient people over whom town officials had jurisdiction. While the settlement laws stayed in place until 1942 and unsettled people could, technically, be removed by officials from one place to another during that time, the actual practice of warning out trailed off in the nineteenth century. Never again were town leaders swamped, as they were in the 1780s and 1790s, by the business of interviewing and removing transient people in need.¹⁹

Nowhere did officials work harder to control transiency in the 1780s than in Providence. The great majority of surviving examinations come from Providence town records, reflecting not only the meticulous record-keeping habits of the town clerks but also the wave of people moving to the area during the latter part of the eighteenth century. Between 1750 and 1800, Providence officials warned out 682 people, five times the number for any other Rhode Island town; thus Providence’s six councilmen were five times as busy at this task as any of the other six-man councils throughout the state. In fact, the influx of people overwhelmed the system in the 1780s and 1790s. Unable to collect information about transients in an orderly fashion before trouble arose, officials scrambled to keep abreast of the complaints against transients. The determined councilmen convened special meetings just to examine groups of ten, fifteen, or more transients—a lengthy process that could fill most of the day. While transients were a presence in every town, they were an administrative problem in Providence.

Providence was Rhode Island’s great attraction in the late eighteenth century. It boasted an expanding mercantile economy, a rising upper class, and a promising market for crafts and trades. It rapidly outstripped Newport, formerly Rhode Island’s largest town, in the years following the Revolutionary War. At the beginning of the conflict, British bombardment of Newport damaged wharves and warehouses and drove away many residents (including merchants), bringing about a cessation of normal business. Then, for three years, occupying British troops imposed martial law, choked off trade, stripped incoming ships, and plundered surrounding farms. After the war, it was to Providence—not Newport—that job seekers flocked, and they came from a considerable distance to try their fortune. Well over half (57.5%) of the transients warned out of Providence originated in towns at least twenty miles away. Some had walked the roads, some had begged rides from amiable carters, and some had worked their way on ships. They had come from New London, southern Rhode Island, western Massachusetts, Boston, Cape Cod, and many more distant locations, including Europe. No other Rhode Island town drew people over that kind of distance in this era of slow and deliberate travel; in towns outside Providence, the majority of transients (64.2%) were from neighboring towns and had come less than ten miles.²⁰

The People Warned Out

Some of those who moved in search of better opportunities prospered; others did not. In late eighteenth-century New England, the latter had no legal claim to relief in their new communities.²¹ Town leaders went to considerable trouble and expense to ascertain the unfortunate person’s hometown and to send him or her back to it. When these officials issued a warning-out order, they directed the warrant to one individual: the person they examined. But that individual usually represented an entire family or household, and that family also suffered the judgment of the town council. Warned-out people lived in families or households; they were seldom unattached individuals living on their own. While the warning-out documents focused on heads of households, in reality those households included children, wives, sisters, mothers, other kin, and occasionally even servants. The most conservative estimate adds two or three people to each individual named in the record. Local officials may have talked with only one individual, but their decisions redirected the lives of entire families.²²

Some of these transient families looked very much like the most respectable of their legally settled neighbors. Mothers and fathers laboring for a subsistence, raising well-behaved children, living for years in the same neighborhood—this seemed to fit the ideal Euro-American pattern of independent, nuclear families. And indeed families headed by white males constituted the largest group of transients, 42.1 percent of the whole. But if transients proportionally represented the dominantly white and patriarchally organized society in which they lived, the figure should be much higher. In fact, women and people of color figured in the transient population far out of proportion to their numbers in the general population.

The prevalence of women was perhaps the most striking characteristic of transient families. Fully two-thirds of the adult transients were female. Many of these women were wives who are hidden in the official record because only their husbands were questioned by officials following the usual patriarchal order of things. But men headed only half the households (50.4%). Women without husbands headed the other half (49.6%): to conduct those interviews, officials had to treat these widowed, separated, abandoned, and never-married women as heads of their own families. Both as household heads and as wives, women dominated the ranks of adult transients.²³

The women in the transient population were considerably younger than the men (see Appendix Table A1, p. 206). The male heads of household presented a more typical family pattern: men in their thirties and forties, with wives and children. But the female heads of household were more often in their twenties, with small children in tow. One-third of the women were quite young—between sixteen and twenty-one—but they answered for themselves before town leaders, who apparently regarded them as fully adult, at least for the purposes of examination and warning out.

Because of this strong female presence, fewer than half (46%) of the warned-out households conformed to English patriarchal structure; instead, in the majority of cases, separated spouses, single mothers, widows, and unmarried couples managed their own households and attempted to support their dependents with their own labor. From the official perspective, these transient wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers were not in their proper place, detached as they were from settled, patriarchal households. While these women constitute a skewed sample of the female population at large, their dominance in the transient population is a logical consequence of English settlement law. Only unpropertied people could be warned out—people who had not purchased a freehold in the community—and both law and custom discouraged the ownership of real estate by women in the New England colonies. Thus, the great majority of women were dependent on men for their settlement status. By virtue of birth, they claimed their father’s settlement; by virtue of labor, they claimed their master’s settlement; by virtue of marriage, they claimed their husband’s settlement. Certainly some women made themselves transient by leaving their home communities, but more had transient status foisted upon them by fathers, masters, and husbands who did not maintain a livelihood for their households, who abandoned their families in places far from home, or who released their servants to fend for themselves. Separated from their home communities, women became transients. Separated from their husbands, fathers, and masters, they could seldom gain settlement anywhere else.

In addition, women were particularly vulnerable to being warned out because of their childbearing potential. The impending birth of a baby frequently galvanized officials to send away a poor woman who was unaccompanied by a man. Every town council wanted to avoid the immediate costs of caring for a birthing and recovering mother and her infant and also the long-term costs of raising an illegitimate child born within their jurisdiction. As soon as observant neighbors passed along information that a transient woman was “big with a bastard child,” councilmen acted quickly to remove her to her place of legal settlement. In 1771, for example, the Providence councilmen ordered Sarah Arnold to be removed to Smithfield because she “is like to be chargeable if not timely removed, she the said Sarah being pregnant.” When the Middletown councilmen learned that a pregnant woman had recently arrived in town in 1785, they tasked one of their own number to go question the newcomer directly, “and if he finds that she doth not belong to the town that he immediately grant an order to remove her out of the town.” When the pregnant woman was the daughter of a transient, the councilmen often warned out the entire family, as happened with William Greenman, whose daughter Martha’s pregnancy precipitated the removal of the whole household from Jamestown, Rhode Island, to Swansea, Massachusetts. Because leaders often learned of a woman’s pregnancy belatedly, these removals sometimes occurred on the very eve of childbirth, and occasionally a removal was abruptly halted when a woman went into labor. One Cumberland town constable, for example, “attempted” to remove Mary Johnston, but his efforts were “prevented by her lying-in.”²⁴

Transient women often formed communities of support, bound together in some measure by their vulnerability to official interference. In 1757, three transient seafaring wives—Mrs. Tower, Mrs. Meachins, and Mrs. Manning—were examined together by the Providence councilmen; in their husbands’ absence, they had formed their own household with their eleven children. In 1782 transient Margaret Bowler was renting “the old gaol house” in Providence and had as tenants a number of other transient women. In 1799 transient Jenny Rose was supporting herself and her two children, while her husband was at sea, by domestic service and by taking in boarders. Such living arrangements stand out against the back-drop of the “official” representation of New England as a region of families organized along patriarchal lines.²⁵

As might be expected, given the heavy proportion of women in the transient population, transient households often included children. Nearly half of the women and well over half of the men questioned by officials in the fourteen study towns had minor children with them, at least 900 children living in about 340 households. The very presence of these many children often spurred town leaders to action. Children who were ill, hungry, or lacked adequate clothing often prompted neighbors to report the family to town officials, thus launching the warning-out process. This was particularly true when a woman appeared to be supporting children without assistance from a man. When Hannah Staples of Cumberland reported to the town council that she had taken into her house a widowed mother with three children, whom she described as in “low and indigent circumstances,” the councilmen ordered Staples to post bond or the family would be removed to their legal home in New York.²⁶

People of color were also a significant presence among transients (Appendix Figure A5, p. 205). Over the entire fifty years, about one-fifth (21.9%) of transient heads of household were identified as “Indian,” “mustee,” “mulatto,” “Negro,” “black,” or “of color.” This was not a steady percentage over the period. People of color constituted about 10 percent of transients until the mid-1780s, when an increase in manumissions resulted in a growing population of free blacks faced with very limited job opportunities. From the mid-1780s on, people of color made up a much larger percentage of the transient population, peaking at 40 percent and more during the 1790s. These percentages do not mesh with contemporary counts of black and Indian people in the general population, which find people of color to be a declining presence in Rhode Island’s population, falling from around 12 percent of the population in 1755 to about 5 percent in 1800.²⁷

The much higher percentage of people of color suggests that poverty and transience were increasingly their fate, and that, at a time when the overall percentage of transients being warned out was declining (Appendix Figure A4), people of color were especially unwelcome. It also suggests that record keepers were increasingly careful to identify transient people by race in the 1780s and 1790s, when growing numbers of newly freed people were drifting loose from their moorings on the farms and in the households of the elites. The above-mentioned communities of transient women in Providence—the three sea wives, Bowler, and Rose—illustrate this heightened race sensitivity. In 1757, the three sea wives were not identified by race, though they were almost certainly white women, as indicated by the clerk’s use of “Mrs.” before their names. In 1757 few transients—white, black, or Indian—were identified by race. But in 1782 Margaret Fairchild was identified as a “Negro woman” and various of her tenants were identified as “Negro,” “black,” and “mulatto” women. Jenny Rose and her boarders were identified as “black” in 1800.

The majority of these nonwhite transients, like Bowler and Rose, ended up in Providence, part of the emerging community of color there. In the wake of the Revolution, newly freed slaves (and some runaways) throughout the northern states migrated purposefully from their places of servitude to the seaboard cities where men could find work on the docks and on the ships, where women could find jobs in the households of the well-to-do, and where people of color could live in relative peace. A shadow lay over this community, however: the complicated settlement status of people who had once been chattel property. The one sure place they “belonged” was in the towns of their former masters—the one sure place most of them did not want to be. They lived as free people, but also as transients vulnerable to warning out.²⁸

“Vulnerable” is very much the operative word here, since white officials began to target people of color for removal in the 1780s and 1790s. While the statistical profile of warned-out people tells this story indirectly, some towns expressed their race anxiety directly by authorizing group “roundups” of people of color. In 1780, for example, the councilmen of East Greenwich ordered “all the Indians, mulattoes & Negros that does not belong to this Town to depart the same immediately,” and in 1786 the Tiverton councilmen ruled that all transient “black people” leave within one month or face being put into the workhouse and forced to labor. Providence councilmen implied that a similar group warn-out was in the works when they ordered that a “list” be compiled of “all transient white people in poor circumstances, as also of the blacks of all descriptions whatever dwelling in this Town.” In these cases, officials apparently did not follow the usual procedure of individually questioning transients and then personally ordering them out. Instead, the constable or sergeant confronted and ordered out one transient after another, using a blank warrant on which he could add names as he saw people who fit the general description in the council’s warrant. Thus, warning out proved a useful way to control the presence and movement of people of color; it enabled officials to draw a circle around those who “belonged” to the community in such a way that people of color fell outside.²⁹

Transients were people accustomed to hard work. Between one-third and one-half of the household heads had been either slaves or indentured servants in the past (Appendix Table A1). As free people, transients worked at jobs not far removed from bound service—the most grueling and least well-paying jobs. In Providence, nearly one-quarter (23.9%) of warned-out families named seafaring as their occupation, another 8 percent named general unskilled labor, which Mark Noble (Chapter 3) described as “chopping wood, butchering, etc.” The two trades best represented by transient families in Providence were shoemaking (11.4%) and blacksmithing (8.0%). In agrarian communities outside Providence, the occupation of transients is rarely mentioned, though most probably participated in such unskilled agricultural jobs as mowing hay and cleaning flax.

When transients arrived in a town where they found work, they stayed. These family units were not usually vagrant or homeless in the present-day meaning of those terms, although a small fraction of truly footloose people counted in the transient population. Instead, most transient families showed a certain determination to settle; on average, they had lived in the town at least four years before being warned out (Appendix Table A1). Women of color were particularly rooted, having been in place an average of more than seven years. In most cases, then, when councilmen warned out a family, they displaced persons who had a great deal to lose by removal: jobs, neighbors, connections, a sense of place.

The majority of these poor working people were illiterate, unable to sign the written transcriptions of the information they had provided orally to the town councilmen in the course of the transient examination. Not equally so, however: women were considerably less literate than men and people of color less literate than whites. Fewer than one-third of white women and only 6 percent of women of color could sign their names; but two-thirds of white men and 21 percent of men of color could sign. While the concept of republican motherhood expanded educational opportunities for the middling and wealthy sorts, diminishing the differences between women’s and men’s access to the written word, poor women still lived in a world of sharply gendered difference. For the most part, transients were people who lived by the spoken, not the written, word. They told their stories fluently and easily, from all appearances, and could remember details of their early lives some decades later. To have their histories put down in writing—and to put their names or their marks on the paper—was something out of the ordinary.³⁰

Taken collectively, the records of warning out provide the above profile of the transient poor, highlighting their hard labor both in raising children and in making a livelihood, their lack of literacy and opportunity, their acquaintance with bondage and oppression, their economic and social vulnerability, their gendered and racialized differences in opportunity. Taken individually, the transient examinations allow us to see the lives and life courses of unprivileged people. They provide a sense of the range of options available to poor, unpropertied people in a society that valued fixity of place and ownership of real estate. The realities of most of these lives are both grim and compelling.

Most immediately evident in the transient examinations is the conditional and discriminatory nature of poor relief, despite the apparently nondiscriminatory poor laws that recognized every inhabitant’s right to be “relieved and supported” at the direction of local officials.³¹ In fact, town leaders were reluctant to dispense poor relief, and they were insistent in their demands that potential recipients demonstrate conclusively that they “belonged” to the community in a legal sense. In practice, some people were more likely to be cared for than others. I have argued elsewhere that women, and women of color in particular, were less likely than men to receive training in marketable skills as children and thus less likely as adults to support themselves and their sons and daughters and more likely to fall into need; conversely, women, and women of color in particular, were less likely than men to receive direct assistance from the community. Since poor relief was not a sure safety net (and meager charity in any case), economically vulnerable women and men resorted to transiency in order to find jobs to maintain their households.³²

The voices in these histories reveal the personal consequences of a transient life. Husbands lived separately from wives and children separately from parents in order that each might secure the necessities of life. Many transient parents put their children “to service” with more prosperous householders while they themselves worked in another location. Sometimes these service arrangements were regularized by indentures, sometimes not. Phillis Merritt Wanton (Chapter 3) spoke for many transient women and men when she told the Providence town council that her ten-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter were “both bound out in the town of Foster”; she had her four-year-old daughter with her while she labored in domestic service in Providence. Inevitably, in such situations, allegiances shifted and family members lost track of each other. Hannah Clements told a familiar tale when she reported that “it is six years last March since she hath lived with her husband, and that she hath had nothing from him in that time towards her subsistence.” These records take us inside the lives of the eighteenth-century poor and show us the effects of transience in human relationships as well as in the material circumstances of those who lived on the margin.³³

The Narratives

The forty narratives in the heart of this book put a human face on poverty. They reveal how individual poor people grew up, formed families, supported themselves, suffered misfortune, grew old, and died. These are stories permeated with disappointment, grief, desperation, and real tragedy, but also with courage, loyalty, determination, resourcefulness, and wit. The lives of these unwelcome Americans arouse both pity and admiration.

The best method to present these narratives is a classic historian’s dilemma. What language should we use to tell the story of people who left us no words of their own? Neither the original town documents nor these present-day reconstructions capture exact words. But even a complete transcript of the dialogue between a transient and town officials could not reveal the social context of such a conversation—the tones and volume of voices, the interruptions and silences, the glances and facial expressions, the gestures and postures. Try as we might, we can never truly hear these transients tell their own tales. We are inevitably left with someone else’s version of their stories.

There are compelling reasons for not presenting transient examinations in their “raw” state. First, in no sense were the examinations intentional, voluntary autobiographies produced by the transients. The information contained in them was coerced, extracted from people who had little control over the interrogation. They are the result of people being forced to remember (or invent) their lives when confronted by the power of the state, when the “wrong” answer might result in disaster for themselves and their families. In another setting, these people doubtless would have told very different stories.

Second, the examinations recorded in the town books are wreathed in cumbersome legal phraseology that apparently satisfied officials’ need to abide by procedure and obtain a document that could be used in court of law. This formulaic language, in some cases, constitutes more than half of the recorded examination, thus overwhelming and obscuring the very human story that had been told to the councilmen during that interrogation.

Third—and perhaps most important—the examinations were heavily mediated by the clerks who selected which spoken words to write down in ink on paper; no transient wrote down her or his own story independently. The amount of detail in the examinations reflects not the richness or thinness of transients’ lives but rather the editorial decisions of the gate-keeping clerks, quintessential local leaders whose wealth, education, social connections, and continuous reelection to office for decades put them in a position of great power in their communities. Their marginal notations, their cross-outs and additions, and their general editing of the record shaped the testimonies of transients in significant ways. Phebe Perkins’s testimony, for example, never was written into the official record of the Hopkinton town council meeting at which she was questioned; her story remains only in the clerk’s draft notes of the meeting, which—fortunately—have been preserved.

To counteract these problems, I have fleshed out each transient examination with other information and rendered the whole narrative in present-day language, using direct quotations from the eighteenth-century documents where particular words and phrases are especially illuminating. My goal has been to reconstruct these transient people’s lives as fully as possible and to make their tales as accessible as possible to twenty-first-century readers. Those interested in reading examinations and supporting documentary evidence in the original format and language will find this material for six narratives reproduced in the Appendix.

Selecting which people’s stories to include and which to exclude was one of the most challenging aspects of this study. The amount of documentary evidence was a key criterion, and I winnowed the field to fewer than one hundred narratives by excluding those transients for whom I had no substantial data beyond the examination. Then I had to choose between similar stories. For example, I hesitated for a time over whether to include Briton Saltonstall or Bristol Rhodes, both black disabled Revolutionary War veterans about whom I had good information. But when I discovered Bristol Rhodes’s obituaries and found myself deeply moved by the impression he made on those around him, my decision was made. In the end, my judgments rested intuitively on which stories seemed the most compelling, and it may be that my choices reflect the combined storytelling gifts of transient and clerk two centuries ago. Some of them told a very good story, and they have inspired me to do likewise.

To construct each narrative, I corroborated and extended the information in the examination with other archival material. Few transients appear in vital records (which note the births, marriages, and deaths of white, settled, propertied, and “respectable” inhabitants), and few appear in eighteenth-century census records (which counted households clearly recognized as such by town officials). The paper trail for transients leads instead into town council and town meeting minutes and into the Providence Town Papers, which contain letters, petitions, tax records, and receipts related to eighteenth-century town business. Petitions to the Rhode Island General Assembly and official state correspondence provided more details about some transients, and Revolutionary War archives proved a fruitful source of information about some dozen transients who were veterans or widows of veterans. Finally, a few transients turned up in newspaper advertisements, either because they had run away and were “wanted” or because they had placed an ad for their own purposes.

Despite extensive detective work, the stories presented here often lack a beginning and an ending. We do not know in every case what trouble led to the examination or what happened to the warned-out family after removal. The existing records provide only bits and pieces of information that do not always add up to a satisfying whole. Still, these narratives bring us closer than ever before to the lived experience of poor and unwelcome people who left no records for themselves and who had no opportunity to tell us their stories in their own way.

The following forty stories represent, as much as possible, the transient poor as profiled in this introduction. The majority were warned out after 1780, reflecting the upsurge in numbers in the last two decades of the century. About half of these transients came from outside Rhode Island. About half were women, half were men. Sixteen of the forty examinants were described as nonwhite. Most of the men were living with spouses; most of the women were not. About half the households included young children. Most told of working as unskilled laborers, with about a third reporting a history of slavery or bound servitude. Most could not sign their names. In one way, the narratives diverge from the typical profile: Providence-based stories dominate the narratives. This is because the Providence records are considerably richer than those of outlying towns, and more corroborating details could be discovered for the transients questioned there. But however many appeared in Providence, none of them came from Providence, and their stories reveal the hardships of life in communities throughout New England.

The narratives are organized to carry the reader through the life course of poor, transient people. Each story spotlights a key moment in an individual’s life, and these moments are arranged so as to unfold the human experience from birth to death. Phebe Perkins leads off the narratives because her story tells more than any other about the circumstances into which many poor people were born. Similarly, Bristol Rhodes closes the narratives because his story tells more than any other about the physical frailties that ended many poor people’s lives. In between are stories that illuminate moments of childhood, family life, and work life, and also stories that highlight crisis moments, when misfortune of one kind or another redirected the course of transients’ lives.

These transient examinations provide much insight into issues of race and gender, and I considered organizing the narratives accordingly. With so many people of color represented among the transient poor, for example, why not shape whole chapters around the distinctive experiences of Indian, white, and black people? But eighteenth-century racial labels were the judgments of white officials, not self-designations by transients, and I did not want to carry forward the town fathers’ racial classifications. Further, to cluster stories on the basis of race or sex would ultimately obscure the common ground of life experiences shared by all transients. In the end, I chose the birth-to-death organization because it best illuminated that common ground and because it allowed me, within each individual narrative, to emphasize relevant issues of race, class, and gender.

Chapter 1 shows how the impending birth of a child often prompted a warning out and describes how infants and children were affected by transiency. Chapter 2 opens up the world of personal relations among transients, showing how people living on the margin grouped themselves in families and households and related to each other as mates, kin, friends and neighbors. Chapter 3 shows the range of labor skills possessed by transient people and illuminates the economic situations that underlay transiency. Chapter 4 focuses on the personal misfortunes, community problems, and deliberate choices that brought transient people to a point of crisis and warning out. Chapter 5 gathers together stories that illuminate the end of life for poor transient people and shows how families, households, and communities viewed their responsibilities to the elderly. In a concluding chapter, I draw together elements of these forty transients’ lives into one whole, sketching out the “typical” life course of poor, unwelcome people.

The stories presented in this volume tell of a world of hardship and conflict that contrasts dramatically with the harmonious, prosperous vision of early New England that is often lodged in our historic imaginations. By hearing these very real and agonized tales from an otherwise idealized place and time, we can better understand the complexity and severity of eighteenth-century American life. It is easy to overlook and marginalize the poor and the unwelcome in our reconstructions of the past, because their voices are so often muted in existing documents. Here they are not, and these narratives enable us to restore unwelcome Americans more fully to their place in early New England and all early America.