Читать книгу Unwelcome Americans - Ruth Wallis Herndon - Страница 12
Оглавление1. Birth, Infancy, and Childhood
THE NARRATIVES in this chapter focus on the experience of children caught up in the warning-out process at any time between childbirth and adulthood, defined legally in Rhode Island as eighteen for girls and twenty-one for boys. A majority of warned-out adults had such underage children with them; other removals involved unmarried transient women about to give birth to a child; still others involved children on their own, separated from their parents. Children figure prominently in the warning-out records.
The large number of children is not surprising, since sexually active women of childbearing age had babies quite regularly—about every two years—in an era before reliable birth control. Typically, married women bore six or eight live children, so that childbirth was a regular and expected part of the female life course in the 1700s. Many children did not live to adulthood, however, because of inadequate nutrition, illness, and accidents; infants were particularly vulnerable to “overlaying”—being smothered or squashed during sleep when rolled upon by the mother or another family member. Somewhere between 20 and 35 percent of children died before age ten, the rates varying with race and class.
The average transient household, which had one or two adults and between two and three children, was somewhat smaller than the mean household size of 6.2 persons in the general Rhode Island population, as measured by the 1782 census. This smaller family size does not necessarily signify a lower fertility rate. Rather, it reflects the young age (averaging 28) of transient women, many of whom would bear more children. And it reflects the poverty of these transient families, which put children at even greater risk through exposure and starvation, the result of inadequate clothing, inferior housing, and insufficient food. Poverty also frequently necessitated a separation of parents and children, so that the family size reported by transients did not always represent the real number of children born to the parents. Hometown officials customarily intervened in families in obvious financial distress, removing the children and binding them out as indentured servants in more prosperous households; many poor parents avoided this action by voluntarily “placing” their children with better-off kin or neighbors, while they pursued employment elsewhere. Phillis Wanton (Chapter 3) had only her four-year-old daughter with her when she was warned out of Providence in 1800; her ten-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter were bound out elsewhere.
Officials rarely gave special consideration to transient families with children. Pregnant women were sent away on the eve of childbirth; parents were removed with newborn babies in their arms; and sometimes children were sent in one direction and parents in another. Such actions were prompted in part by Rhode Island settlement law, which until 1798 left ambiguous the status of transient children. For most of the eighteenth century, a person’s primary settlement was “the place of his birth” until some other circumstance—purchase of land, completion of indentured servitude, marriage—created a new settlement. Until 1798, the law presumed that children would be born in the same place their parents had been, and there were no special provisions for children born away from their parents’ hometowns. In 1798, however, the bureaucratic problems created by babies being born to transient women finally nudged legislators into revising the law so that legitimate children took their fathers’ settlement, illegitimate children took their mothers’ settlement, and no children could claim settlement in their place of birth unless one parent already had a settlement there.1
Since removing pregnant women was necessary to keep their children from gaining settlement by birth, officials must have kept a sharp eye on the profiles presented by transient women of childbearing age. This vigilance sometimes thwarted unmarried women who had left their hometowns in order to have “bastard” children elsewhere among relatives or friends. “Bastard” indicated that the child had no legal rights to the name or property of the father, who refused to provide either present support or future inheritance. Rhode Island law required town officials to make stringent efforts to discover the father and to hold that man responsible for the costs of raising his child.2 While officials often relied on the midwife to discover the name of the father while the mother was in labor, they themselves sometimes investigated by questioning her during an official council meeting. They posed such questions as “Who is the father of the child you are now pregnant with?” and “At what time was it when [he] had the carnal knowledge of your body?” and “Hath any other person except [him] had the carnal knowledge of your body?” When the woman named a man who could offer no satisfactory “proof to the contrary,” the council—and subsequently the community—judged him to be the “putative” or “reputed” father.
If an unmarried, pregnant, transient woman did not produce a settlement certificate whereby her hometown took full financial responsibility for her and her unborn child, or if relatives did not post bond or otherwise promise to keep the town “indemnified” from all costs of maintenance and later removal (if necessary) of the mother and child, such a woman was very likely to be forcibly returned to her hometown just weeks before childbirth. This was the fate of Phebe Perkins (this chapter). Officials sometimes did not realize a woman’s condition in time; Coventry officials’ removal of Lydia Aylworth, for example, was stymied because “before there could be an officer had to remove the said Lydia, she was brought to bed with a bastard child.”3 In such cases, officials proceeded to remove the mother and new baby soon after birth, hoping to limit public expenses and belatedly establish the town’s rejection of the woman as a legal inhabitant. In such a manner, Martha Hathaway and her newborn (this chapter) were sent away from East Greenwich.
Long after their mother’s pregnancy and childbirth, children drew official eyes to transient families. Sometimes youngsters’ boisterous or “disorderly” behavior irritated neighbors and provoked complaints of juvenile mischief. In Providence, for example, fourteen-year-old Rufus Potter caused such a disturbance at one point that the councilmen gave the boy’s transient parents a choice of binding out their son as an indentured servant or leaving town under a warning-out order.4 But more often illness, hunger, and lack of clothing—which could rarely be concealed in the crowded lodgings most transients could afford—prompted neighbors to complain to officials. In such manner, attention was drawn to six-year-old Susannah Guinea (this chapter), prompting officials to remove her, thus separating her from her parents.
Perhaps the most poignant stories are those involving children who lacked the protection and support of parents. Recently born Jerusha Townsend and her three older sisters (this chapter) were abandoned by their parents, and six-year-old Kate Jones (this chapter) was left an orphan when her parents died. Town records provide glimpses of many other sad tales in such brief entries as “three black children found in distress on Poppesquash [Creek] in December last.” Some older children appeared to be wandering about on their own, such as Hannah Hall, “a girl of about or not far from ten years of age,” who showed up at a house in Westerly one day, prompting the family to ask the council for “directions” on what to do with her. Perhaps she had run away from her parents or her master; perhaps she had been abandoned and was seeking aid.5
Ultimately, the task of removing these abandoned, orphaned, or runaway children fell to the town sergeant or his constables. When young children were involved, officials usually hired a nurse or an extra hand, testimony to the difficulties of transporting children. The business of warning out seems particularly harsh when it involved parentless children, who were thus completely in the hands of strangers on an unwelcome journey. Once back in their hometowns, these children would almost certainly be bound out as indentured servants, which at least ended their trauma of being passed from hand to hand until someone made them a permanent part of a household.
Indentured servitude was the most common strategy authorities used to ensure that poverty-stricken, orphaned, and abandoned children received the “necessities of life” and practical training for adulthood. Such training was the essence of education in the eighteenth-century meaning of the term—before public schools were mandatory and when only the privileged few received formal training in anything beyond basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. A master who would stand in the role of parents and see that a child learned essential husbandry or housewifery skills and the three Rs was a valuable man to the town officials.
In return, the master received the benefit of the child’s labor until he or she became an adult, an important consideration for households in need of an extra pair of hands. Most children were not protected from hard work in the eighteenth century; on the contrary, they were considered important contributors to the economic well-being of their households. Childhood was a time when young humans learned the skills by which they would gain a living in the world. By the time they were five or six, most boys and girls assisted adults in gender-segregated tasks they would later undertake as serious labor. By the time they reached adolescence (twelve or fourteen years of age), children were “apprentice adults,” expected to labor nearly as hard as adults, although they were not considered capable of full adult work until they were in their later teens. Thus taking on a young child as a bound servant was often a sound investment, for with proper training and good maintenance, the dependent child might well develop into one who contributed fully to the household. When John and Isabel Brown (this chapter) were bound out, their master had to pay the town $10, because he was gaining a considerable advantage by having rights to years of the children’s labor.
The narratives in this section should be read with an understanding that transient children suffered not only fragile health and poverty in their birth families, but also the rigors and griefs of physical relocation and incorporation into new households. Both physically and psychologically, children were the most vulnerable of transients, and their removals illustrate the harshest aspects of warning out.
Phebe Perkins
Phebe Perkins’s story illustrates particularly well the vulnerability of pregnant transient women. As long as she was able to work, town officials let her be; there is no evidence that she was ever questioned as a transient in any Rhode Island town before 1784. But when she became pregnant she was no longer welcome in the place where she had been living for two years. When she was most in need of support, she was sent away to her supposed home, and her removal ignited a lawsuit between two towns because neither wanted to shoulder financial responsibility for her.
Phebe Perkins was born in Newport in 1760, and when she was very young, she was “bound an apprentice” to Westerly householder Abraham Burden. While the contract was still in force, Burden “carried her” to the home of Stephen Perry in neighboring Charlestown. Perkins later said she knew of “no contract between said Burden and said Perry concerning her living with said Perry,” but she clearly “saw her indentures at Perry’s,” so it seems likely that Burden transferred her contract to Perry in some fashion. Burden’s circumstances may have changed so that he no longer needed a servant, or perhaps he or someone in his family took a dislike to Phebe Perkins and wanted her out of the household.
While Perkins was part of his household, Stephen Perry moved from Charlestown to Hopkinton, so that when his servant completed her indenture on her birthday in 1778, she became an inhabitant of Hopkinton. She was now free to make her own living, such as it would be in the precarious wartime and postwar economy. Apparently trained as an agricultural laborer, she began to migrate from farm to farm in the border region of Rhode Island and Connecticut, going where work was available and staying for as long as it lasted. She picked produce such as greens and strawberries and probably also performed general farm and household labor, helping with the grain harvest, butchering hogs and salting meat, spinning thread, making candles, washing clothes. Among her stints of work were three weeks at “one Avery’s in Connecticut,” two weeks at Thomas Sweet’s farm in Hopkinton, and an autumn and winter at Amos Collins’s place in Stonington, Connecticut.
If Phebe Perkins could write, she did not show it by signing her examination. Whatever her literacy skills, they did not figure prominently in her work. She calculated time in agricultural terms rather than by calendar months, recalling that she stayed at Benjamin Wilbur’s house “till the spring following when people began to pick greens for sauce,” and that she lived at Thomas Sweet’s house “till strawberries began to be ripe.” Her economic security lay in the strength of her back and hands; she had no family connections or social influence to carry her through hard times.
In 1782 she finally found long-term employment in Richmond, in the household of Edward Perry, who was probably related to her former master, Stephen Perry. Edward Perry was one of the richest men in Richmond, and he served in the most important town offices during the revolutionary era, as town councilman, treasurer, tax assessor, and deputy to the General Assembly. During the years that Phebe Perkins labored in his household, Perry was repeatedly elected town council president and was arguably the most powerful and influential man in the town. Perkins seemed to have found an excellent position, with as much security as an unskilled transient laborer could expect to find in that region and in that time.
In 1784, after more than two years of working in Perry’s household, Phebe Perkins became pregnant. The father of her child is not identified, either in her examination or in other town records pertaining to her. Perhaps she refused to name the man when she was questioned by authorities; she may have been shielding a person of means and status who refused to take responsibility for his child. Perhaps she did name him, but he was dead or long disappeared into the anonymity of seasonal transience. That he was not mentioned suggests that the council concluded there was no way to hold the father responsible for the maintenance of the child.
The complaint about Perkins’s pregnancy very likely originated in the household of Edward Perry, who now dealt with her both as her employer and as the chief official of the town where she lived. Although he was a man of substantial wealth and position, he did not shield her from the consequences of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy; the councilmen, led by Perry, ordered her to be removed from the town. Perhaps Perry felt betrayed by Perkins’s sexual activity; perhaps he wanted to distance himself from her as much as possible, to prevent or quiet any rumor that he might be the father of her child. Apparently her pregnancy and removal did not affect his status, for he continued to be elected president of the town council for five years afterward. But for Phebe Perkins the withdrawal of Perry’s protection resulted in her dislocation from a place of steady employment within an elite household to exile among strangers and meager support as “the poor of the town” elsewhere.
The Richmond council first sent Perkins to Newport, her birthplace, but when officials there rejected her and sent her back, Richmond focused on Hopkinton, where she had been a bound servant. In October 1784 the Richmond sergeant delivered her to the door of Edward Wells, Hopkinton overseer of the poor, who had to work fast, for Perkins was nearing the time of delivery. Wells arranged for her to be boarded at the home of Cary Clarke, whose spouse may have been a midwife. There Perkins gave birth. Some kind of “sickness” associated with childbirth—complicated delivery or postpartum infection—necessitated a visit from townsman Ross Coon in his capacity as doctor (he was also tax collector) to bleed her and give her “strong drops.” She was ill for considerably longer than the usual two-week “lying-in” period, and there is no mention of the child, which suggests that she or he did not survive, a not uncommon fate in eighteenth-century America.
In January, after twelve weeks of being tended in Cary Clarke’s household, Perkins was well enough to be moved to yet another household, where she was expected to labor toward her own support. There, on 19 January 1785, the Hopkinton council convened to decide what to do with this impoverished and dislocated new mother who had cost Hopkinton a good deal of money. She had arrived in town in a nearly destitute state, and the necessities of life involved paying the cobbler to repair her shoes as well as paying caretakers to feed, warm, and doctor her and her baby, if it survived. In three months’ time, the Hopkinton treasury dispensed more than £8 on her care, a staggering sum for a town whose entire poor-relief expenses for 1784—as revealed in the town council and town meeting records—had totaled £22.6
The Hopkinton councilmen decided to sue Richmond for sending away Perkins. They questioned whether Perkins had any claim to poor relief in Hopkinton, since her former master had moved away some years before and Perkins herself had not lived in Hopkinton for some time. A judge might conclude that Richmond was responsible for her, since she had been living in that town for more than two years prior to the birth of her baby.
Phebe Perkins disappears from the Hopkinton town records at this point, and other documents that might reveal the rest of her story have been destroyed by theft (Richmond town records) and flood (county court records). But the existing pieces of information illuminate the extreme vulnerability of pregnant women who were poor and transient. Without the security and support of a familiar home at one of the most dangerous moments of their lives, mother and child were thrown among strangers by the warning-out and removal process. Both Phebe Perkins and her baby were “unwelcome Americans.”
Anthony Hathaway
Anthony Hathaway’s mother, Martha Hathaway, was an unmarried woman who gave birth to at least four or five illegitimate children, of whom he was one. His first rocky years read like a soap opera or a bad fairy tale: born a “bastard”; as a newborn, transported to another town; as a toddler, abandoned by his mother and taken in by poor-relief caretakers; as a three-year-old, bound out as an indentured servant. This was poverty and transience showing their harshest aspects.
Martha Hathaway was born in 1763 in Warwick, Rhode Island, where her father owned real estate and had a legal settlement, but he sold his property and moved his family to Coventry when Martha was “fifteen years of age or thereabouts.” When she was twenty years old, she left Coventry, apparently in order to have a baby—one of Anthony’s older siblings—who was born in Providence in June 1783.
Following this birth, Hathaway had “a severe fit of sickness with the fever,” probably an infection following the trauma of childbirth. Her illness was so great that when the Providence officials learned of her presence they arranged for her to be tended in their town for the time being rather than moved back to her hometown right away. The family of Nathaniel Jenckes provided room, board, and general nursing care for her from mid-June to early August; two additional persons were paid “to watch with her” each night from 22 June to 13 July, when she was most seriously ill; and her sister Mary was brought from East Greenwich by horse and chaise, at the expense of the town, to tend Martha personally. Finally, on 6 August, Hathaway was well enough to attend council meeting and be questioned by the Providence authorities, who ordered her removed to Warwick, her hometown. She did not wait around for the town sergeant to remove her; she “went away” voluntarily three days later.
The next summer, Hathaway turned up in East Greenwich, probably to be near her sister; there she was questioned by the councilmen in June 1784. She represented herself as a “widow” and she had not one but two little girls with her whom she claimed as “daughters.” Perhaps she already had one child before she went to Providence in 1783. At any rate, she was sent away from East Greenwich and back to Warwick, along with the two little girls. From later events, it seems likely that East Greenwich wanted her out because she was pregnant once again.
By January 1786, Martha Hathaway had returned to East Greenwich and was once again questioned by authorities. The first two daughters were no longer with her; perhaps they were being raised by relatives or masters elsewhere. This time she had a one-year-old daughter, born in 1784 after she had been removed from East Greenwich, and a new baby boy, Anthony, “a male bastard child born of the body of Martha Hathaway,” whose birth in East Greenwich had focused council attention on Martha. Once again, the East Greenwich town council ordered her removed to Warwick. Legally, only Martha belonged to Warwick, where she was born and where her father had once owned land. Her son Anthony belonged to East Greenwich, where he had been born, but Warwick officials agreed to receive the baby along with his mother, because he was still “a nurse child,” whom they considered “a natural appendage upon the said Martha.” It was exactly this sort of situation that prompted lawmakers to change the settlement law in 1798; had Anthony Hathaway been born in 1799, he would have been an inhabitant of Warwick, because his mother belonged there.
For nearly two years, Martha and Anthony Hathaway lived together in Warwick. Then, in April 1788, Martha Hathaway “did voluntarily depart from the said Anthony.” Abandoned by his mother, the two-year-old was cared for by townspeople who would later be repaid out of the town’s poor-relief budget. Five months later, when the little boy was nearing the age of three, the Warwick town council resolved to send him to East Greenwich, his legal home; from the official perspective, there was no reason to keep the boy in Warwick after his mother left. Anthony Hathaway was transported to East Greenwich and put into the care of one of the overseers of the poor there.
A month after arriving in East Greenwich, three-year-old Anthony Hathaway was bound out as an indentured servant to Capt. Sylvester Sweet, a wealthy, influential, and multiskilled man whose expertise extended to “bonesetting” surgery. He and his family also made something of a business out of providing room and board for people, and such a household undoubtedly could care for a toddler, train him to useful service, and put him profitably to work in due time. Fifteen years earlier, Sweet had taken an indenture of a small “Negro” child, Simon Talbury, who by 1788 must have been nearing the end of his servitude. It may have been Talbury’s imminent departure that prompted Sweet to take on another youngster to be trained to take up Talbury’s tasks.
Martha Hathaway produced at least one more “bastard child”—her fifth—in the summer of 1790. Daughter Mahala’s birth prompted voters, mindful of high taxes that paid for the maintenance of such children, to complain that officials had done little to track down “the putative father” in order to extract some “support and maintenance,” and these irritated taxpayers directed the overseer of the poor to take whatever “legal measures” were necessary to obtain “a bond or securities” from the putative father. There is no indication that the man responsible was ever identified or persuaded to support his daughter, and Mahala Hathaway was bound out as an indentured servant when she was twenty months old. Her master, Thomas Arnold of Warwick, received a special “premium” of £7 10s. for taking on so young a child, who would not be able to labor productively for some while yet. Siblings Anthony and Mahala Hathaway barely knew their mother, apparently never knew their father(s), and probably did not know each other. They were raised in different households and claimed by different towns. Transience, poverty, and bastardy made a grim combination for children.
Kate Jones
When town councilmen wanted to discover the circumstances of a transient child without parents, they rarely asked the youngster directly. Instead, they gathered information from family members and neighbors such as those who cared for young Kate Jones after her parents died. Officials also consulted their counterparts in other towns, if there was any question about the child’s legal settlement, so that the correct hometown took financial responsibility. Such an exchange of information created a discernible paper trail about Kate.
Kate Jones was the second child of Nathaniel Jones, “a free Negro man” of Johnston, and Eunice Phenix, “with whom he lived,” at times in Providence and at other times in Johnston. Nabby, Kate’s older sister, was born in Providence in 1779; Kate was born in Johnston in 1780. Their parents never married according to Anglo-American legal convention, but white officials recognized them as mates and so recognized Nabby and Kate as orphans when Jones and Phenix died.
On 4 January 1781 Nathaniel Jones had enlisted in the Rhode Island Regiment for the town of Johnston, tempted by the lucrative bounty the voters offered: one hundred silver dollars, almost a year’s wages for an unskilled laboring man. In 1781, such payments were the only way reluctant men could be persuaded to join the Continental Army, for popular enthusiasm had waned as soldiers returned from their tours of duty and reported the deprivations and inconveniences they had experienced in this war that dragged on past all expectations. When Jones went off to join the army, he left his $100 bounty money with Benjamin Waterman of Johnston, “in case he should not return.” The money was to be used “for this child,” his baby daughter Kate.
“Nat” Jones did not return to Johnston. He died almost exactly a year after he enlisted, on 9 January 1782. Eunice Phenix subsequently moved from Johnston to Providence, where she raised her two daughters with the help of her sister, Margaret Abbee, and other friends. Prime Brown’s household became the place that Kate knew as home. If Phenix knew about the bounty money that Jones had left for Kate, there is no evidence that she obtained access to it or used it in any way to support her daughter.
Then, early in 1786, Eunice Phenix died, leaving both girls as full orphans at the ages of five (Kate) and six (Nabby). The children continued to be cared for by members of Prime Brown’s family, but someone advised the Providence council of the children’s “destitute” state and their father’s earlier provision of money for Kate. Nabby, born in Providence, came under the jurisdiction of the Providence officials, but Kate had been born in Johnston and was thus an inhabitant of that town. When Providence officials first learned of the situation, they assumed both girls “belonged” to Johnston, and they ordered the clerk to write to the Johnston council, “requesting” them “to provide for the children as inhabitants of said town of Johnston.”
Apparently, the Johnston officials set them straight and advised them that only Kate had a hometown in Johnston. Official procedure moved slowly, and it was not until the spring of 1787 that Providence officials wrote once again to the Johnston officials, proposing that both Kate and Nabby remain in Providence and that “Mr. Waterman” send the money “in his hands” (Kate’s inheritance) to support her there. The Providence councilmen had “procured” a “place” for Nabby, probably by placing her with a master, but they could not do the same for Kate, who was not under their jurisdiction. Still, they wanted Kate to be cared for “in the best and cheapest manner” in Providence.
The Johnston officials did not agree to this arrangement, so in June 1787 the Providence councilmen prepared to remove Kate to Johnston. They first verified her hometown by questioning her aunt, Margaret Abbee, who testified that Eunice Phenix had “left a young child by the name of Kate Jones, now about seven years old,” that Kate had been “born in the town of Johnston,” and that Phenix herself “was never married.” Two months later, the council issued a warrant to remove Kate, but for some reason the warrant was not put into effect for another eighteen months. Finally, on 11 February 1789, sergeant Henry Bowen delivered Kate to one of the Johnston overseers of the poor. Kate would have been close to nine years old when she was actually moved from the place that had been her home. In Johnston, very likely, she was bound out as an indentured servant.
There is no evidence of what Benjamin Waterman did with Nathaniel Jones’s $100 legacy for his daughter Kate or what Job Waterman (perhaps a kinsman of Benjamin) did with the 24 shillings (about $4) in back pay he had collected posthumously on Jones’s behalf. The money may have been held by town officials until Kate came of age and then given to her; it may have been spent by town officials to cover costs associated with her care while a transient in Providence or to secure an apprenticeship contract in Johnston so that there was little left for her later; or it may have been fraudulently appropriated by other parties, so that Kate herself never benefited from it. Her story highlights the legal vulnerability of poor parents and their children, who had to trust those with greater wealth, influence, and knowledge of the law to protect their interests. Such a substantial inheritance could have enabled Kate to purchase a piece of property or otherwise secure a modicum of independence—if, and only if, the Watermans and town authorities had made sure she received it.
Susannah Guinea
Present-day readers are often startled by the seemingly unregretful way in which authorities sometimes separated children and parents during the warning-out process. Such separations were the result of the vagaries of settlement law, which until 1798 mandated that a child born in a Rhode Island town was an inhabitant of that town by the “birthplace” rule, regardless of the parents’ legal settlement(s) elsewhere. This penalized poor parents who moved around and had children in places other than their own birthplaces; when each member of the family was sent “home,” separation was the result. This was the case with Susannah Guinea, who at age four was separated from her mother and her father when the family was sent out of Providence. Susannah’s parents, Titus Guinea and Binah Pearce, appeared to be longtime mates, but they never married according to Anglo-American law, and so Pearce had never acquired Guinea’s settlement by virtue of marriage. Each member of this little family had a different hometown: Titus Guinea in Ipswich, Massachusetts, Binah Pearce in Providence, and Susannah Guinea in North Providence.
Titus Guinea, “a Negro man” who had been “born in Guinea” about the year 1728, was enslaved there as a young man of twenty-one or twenty-two; he was “brought as a slave to this country,” first to Newport and then to Boston in 1751. He “was sold to Abijah Wheeler of Ipswich,” a master with whom he lived “about 3 years.” His next master was “one Daniel Giddings” of Boston, “with whom he lived about 4 or 5 months.” Then he “was sold to Ebenezer Hoskin of Cape Ann” and lived with him “about 2 years & an half.” Finally he “was sold to Theophilus Pickering of Ipswich,” for whom he labored “about 11 years.” During this time Guinea “bought his time of his said master,” purchasing his freedom through labor. But before the deal was completed, Pickering died, leaving Guinea to his brother Thomas Pickering of Salem. In what seems to have been a deliberate strategy to honor the bargain between slave and former master, Thomas Pickering “sold” Guinea—or perhaps sold whatever of Guinea’s time remained under the agreement—to Joseph Russ, who released him (“let me go at large”). Russ also “gave bond to indemnify the town of said Ipswich from any charge they may be at on my account.” In 1769, when he was about forty years old, Titus Guinea became a free man.
Guinea moved to Providence, an international port where a healthy man of color might find employment in the warehouses or on the wharves. He became a significant member of the community of free people of color there, establishing an independent household and meriting an entry in the 1782 census as “Titus, A Negro,” with three other “Negroes” in his household.
While in Providence, Guinea formed a relationship with Binah Pearce, who was apparently a white or part-white woman. He also learned how to write, and very likely to read as well, for he signed his 1770 examination in a spidery and perfectly legible hand: “Titus Guinea.” In 1784, the two had a little girl, Susannah, whom officials described as “Negro or mulatto,” suggesting Pearce was not full “Negro,” unlike the African-born Guinea.
In 1788, these three people came to the attention of Providence officials. Perhaps Titus Guinea, who had been in Providence “about nineteen years” and was now “about 60 years of age,” was no longer able to earn enough to keep himself and his family sheltered, warm, and well fed. But since council attention was focused on Susannah, it may have been she who roused their concern. In mid-March, after questioning both her father and her mother, the Providence officials ruled that Susannah “belonged” to North Providence, where she was born and where she should be sent “immediately.” Indeed, the very same day, a warrant was prepared for the removal of this “Negro or mulatto bastard child in the fifth year of her age” (meaning four years old). Two weeks later, in late March 1788, town sergeant Henry Bowen “delivered” Susannah into the hands of Eleazar Jencks, an overseer of the poor for North Providence. Soon after that, she would almost certainly have been bound out as an indentured servant.
For nineteen months after Susannah was taken away, Titus Guinea and Binah Pearce continued to live in Providence. Perhaps they saw Susannah regularly, since the two towns were adjacent to each other. But in October 1789 the town council ordered Guinea—now ailing and “likely to become chargeable”—removed to his supposed hometown of Ipswich, Massachusetts, where his last master had pledged to take financial responsibility for him. After more than two decades of living, working, and being part of a community in Providence, Susannah’s father was sent out of range of regular visits to his daughter. As for Binah Pearce, she continued to live in Providence, where she formed a new attachment, perhaps because Titus Guinea had died. In 1791 she gave birth to a baby she named Samuel, “a mulatto boy, an illegitimate son,” brother to Susannah. His fate suggests what probably happened to Susannah: in 1797, the Providence town council bound out six-year-old Samuel Pearce as an indentured servant to Samuel Budlong of Warwick, who promised to teach the lad “reading, writing, and cyphering as far as the rule of three.” Writing and cyphering were not usually taught to children of color, and their inclusion in Samuel’s contracts suggests that Binah Pearce—or, more likely, the putative father—commanded some respect from officials.
Figure 1. Susannah Guinea’s father Titus lived as a slave in Massachusetts until 1769. Soon after gaining his freedom, he moved to Providence, where town authorities questioned him on 6 October 1770. Guinea left this signature on his testimony. Source: PTP 2:38, neg. no. RHi (x3) 9396. Courtesy of the Rhode Island Historical Society.
Susannah’s removal from her mother at age four was not an unusually early separation for children of poor parents. Eighteenth-century law and officialdom did not assume that a young child belonged with its mother, and councilmen sometimes concluded that even a nursing child should not stay with an “improper” mother. Of some 700 children placed in apprenticeship indentures by Rhode Island town officials during the latter part of the eighteenth century, over 40 percent were under the age of six at the time of binding.7 Once a child was no longer a “nursling” child like Anthony Hathaway, officials assumed he or she would profit from being moved to a more “respectable” household, where material needs could be better met and more “suitable” training begun. Susannah Guinea’s story underscores the fragility of poor, transient families, prone to being dismantled by watchful authorities armed with settlement law.
Jerusha Townsend
Abandoned children were perhaps the most pitiable of young transients, suffering the double blows of parental desertion and then their own displacement. When parents left their children behind, neighbors usually took over essential care until town authorities made more formal arrangements by binding out the children as indentured servants. But if the children belonged to a different town, then local officials lacked the authority to bind them out; instead, they sent the children, in care of a town sergeant and hired hand or nurse, to the town where they had a legal settlement. This is what happened to Jerusha Townsend and her sisters when their parents abandoned them.
William Townsend was a goldsmith, trained in one of the most elite crafts in early America, making his living by fashioning jewelry, decorative housewares, and carriage fittings for well-to-do customers. He lived and worked in Newport, where a concentration of merchants, ship captains, and professionals maintained households that required such articles. Then in 1774, Townsend, his wife Jerusha, and their three little daughters—six-year-old Lydia and her younger sisters Anna and Abigail—“removed” to Providence, which rivaled Newport as a locus of wealth and power in the colony. Townsend apparently found business in Providence, and there Jerusha had a fourth baby, another little girl, who was named after her mother.
Then, in August 1775, William and Jerusha Townsend “departed” Providence and “left their said children without anything to support them.” The four little girls were apparently cared for by neighbors until the council issued a warrant for the removal of the four children to their hometown of Newport. It is not clear why the council concluded that Jerusha, “recently born” in Providence, was nevertheless an inhabitant of Newport like her older sisters, but the Newport authorities did not dispute the judgment. Constable Gideon Young hired a “nurse” to help him with the task of removal, “conveyed” the children to Newport, and delivered them to the home of John Pittman, overseer of the poor of Newport. Young’s charge for “my trouble and expenses with the nurse and children” was greater than the cost of renting “the horse and chaise” for the trip; the total bill of £5 5s. made for a very costly removal. It must have been a trying time, with four young, confused, and helpless children being taken by strangers on an unwelcome journey.
There is no evidence of the Townsend parents’ fate or that of the daughters as a family unit. In 1775 and 1776 it would have been difficult for separated children and parents to find each other in Newport. Tensions between New England townspeople and English authorities were high, and the British warship Rose patrolled Narragansett Bay, trying to discourage Americans from smuggling goods and otherwise evading customs laws; several towns were bombarded by gunfire when they refused to provision the troops aboard the ship. In December 1776 a major British invasion force sailed into Narragansett Bay and headquartered itself at Newport. A majority of the townspeople fled and sought refuge inland. The four Townsend daughters had probably been folded into the households of relatives in Newport by this time and would have fled the town with their new families as part of the general exodus, perhaps going back to Providence, which became the magnet for Newport refugees during the war years.
Jerusha Townsend definitely did make her way back to Providence. She reappeared there in the 1790s as a young woman and “resided for some time” in the household of James Arnold, a man of wealth and status in the community who had been elected town treasurer of Providence every year since 1771. He may have been a kinsman, or perhaps an employer. But Jerusha did not prosper and came to the attention of the town council in 1796, when she fell so low as to require poor relief and seemed “likely to become further chargeable to this town.”
The council questioned Jerusha Townsend, now twenty-one years old, but she “appear[ed] unable to render a satisfactory and intelligible account of herself,” perhaps because she was distraught or confused by the confrontation. The councilmen instead consulted James Arnold, who reminded them of Jerusha’s history as an abandoned child twenty years before. The council then issued a warrant for her to be taken back to Newport, where she still had a legal settlement by virtue of her father’s former status. Within five days the young woman had been delivered to Henry Peckham, overseer of the poor in Newport.
Jerusha Townsend returned to Providence one more time. She was there in the late summer of 1797, when a yellow fever epidemic swept through the town, killing scores of inhabitants who were too poor to leave and seek sanctuary in a more healthful environment. The last mention of her name in the records is a poignant listing of her having died of the “infection” on 3 September 1797.
Susannah, James, John, and Isabel Brown
The four children of “troublesome” Roseanna Brown became the responsibility of Exeter, the town where they were born, when she was declared “not capable of taking care of herself’ or her offspring. The children had lived together with their mother up to that point, but they were separated from her and from each other when town authorities made new arrangements for their upbringing. Brown could visit her sons and daughters in their new households, but she no longer had practical custody of them.
Roseanna Brown, “a black woman” living in Exeter, was very “troublesome” to the overseers of the poor and had necessitated an outlay of poor-relief money from the town treasury. By June 1797, when the latest “complaint” about her was brought to the ears of the councilmen, she had four children—Susannah, James, John, and Isabel—but no husband present to take responsibility for them. After hearing the complaint, the Exeter council summoned and questioned Roseanna’s father, Prince Brown, who “inform[ed]” them “that the said Roseanna was born in South Kingstown.” The Exeter council promptly ordered a warrant for her removal, and within five days Roseanna Brown was delivered to one of the overseers of the poor for South Kingstown.
The South Kingstown council considered the situation, concluded that South Kingstown was not Roseanna Brown’s “proper place of settlement and residence,” and decided to “appeal from said order.” In their judgment, the Exeter officials had made a mistake because they had failed to question Brown directly, and when the South Kingstown officials followed that basic procedure they discovered that Roseanna Brown claimed to be married to an Exeter man:
Q: Was you ever married?
A: Yes, to Phillip Whitford, a black man belonging to Mr. Amos Whitford of Exeter.
Q: Who married you?
A: Elder Whitman.
Q: At what house was you married?
A: At a house in Coventry then improved by my father, Prince Brown, said house belonged to Robert Godfrey, as I supposed.
Q: Who was present when you was married?
A: Prince Brown, Adam Brown, James Brown, and Deborah Watson.
Q: How long since you was married?
A: I believe about eighteen or nineteen years.
Roseanna Brown Whitford, it seemed, belonged to Exeter after all, by virtue of having married a man of Exeter.
The case of South Kingstown v. Exeter was a washout; both parties appeared with “the best counsel” they could get, but the case was first continued (1797) and then dismissed the next spring (1798). Apparently the marriage between Roseanna Brown and Philip Whitford was not indisputably valid. The South Kingstown councilmen were forced to accept Roseanna Brown as their responsibility, and they issued her a certificate “acknowledging her as legally settled in this town” when she wanted to move back to Exeter in 1799.
Meanwhile, Exeter authorities were rearranging the lives of Roseanna Brown’s four children, Susannah, James, John, and Isabel. Roseanna Brown herself might be South Kingstown’s responsibility, but her children were Exeter’s, by virtue of having been born there. In October 1797, soon after Roseanna had been sent to South Kingstown, the councilmen bound out eleven-year-old Susannah Brown, “a black girl” and “daughter to Roseanna Brown,” as a servant to Leonard Ainsworth and his wife, who were obliged to teach the girl “to read” but not to educate her any further or teach her any particular work skills.
Three years later, in the summer of 1800, the Exeter council took action regarding the other three children. James Brown, “son to Roseanna Brown,” was put under the guardianship of Exeter townsman Job Wilcox; this action indicated that the boy had property of some kind—perhaps an inheritance left by a relative—that would come to him when he turned twenty-one. As guardian, Wilcox was responsible to see that James received the necessities of life, had a proper place to live, and was trained for adulthood.
A little later the same summer, John and Isabel Brown were both bound out as indentured servants to Stephen Allen of West Greenwich. Twelve-year-old John, “a black boy, son to Roseanna Brown,” had apparently exhibited a restless and independent spirit, for the terms of the indenture stated that the “the said Allen agrees to give said apprentice ten dollars and the interest thereon from the date of this council if said boy serves out his time, to be paid when said boy is 21 years old; if said boy runs away before he arrives to the age of twenty-one years old, then said boy is not to have neither money nor interest.” Six-year-old Isabel also was promised “ten dollars at the end of said term of time if said apprentice serves out said time.” Both children were to be taught “to read and write, if the schoolmaster thinks [them] capable of learning.” And both children were to be provided with “sufficient meat, drink and lodging, and comfortable wearing clothes for everyday wear and a decent suit of clothes at the end of said term of time.” The council clearly felt that Allen was getting a better deal than the children were, for they required that Allen pay the town “ten dollars in money for the privilege of having the two apprentices”; presumably that ten dollars would be used to pay any support costs the children had already incurred.
By the end of the summer of 1800, the four children of Roseanna Brown had been placed in three different households, under different living and working arrangements. Because Roseanna continued to live in Exeter, it seems likely that she maintained a relationship with them. Her intention of staying in Exeter seem clear; in July 1808 she renewed her certificate from the South Kingstown town council “acknowledging her to be legally settled in this town.” The law may have said she belonged to South Kingstown, but her livelihood and her children lay elsewhere.
