Robert Love's Warnings by Cornelia H. Dayton

My admiration for what the authors have done in Robert Love's Warnings grew with each chapter. It reshapes our conceptions and makes us ask new questions about Boston, New England, and early America in general. This marvelous book deepens and broadens historians' knowledge in significant ways.

Robert Love's Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston is an insightful examination of the New England practice of warning and offers a rich social history of mid-eighteenth-century Boston.ĭayton and Salinger, two very distinguished historians, challenge much of the conventional scholarly understanding. The extent and depth of research found in Dayton and Salinger's book is impressive and the work itself engaging.

With a fresh interpretation of the role that warning played in Boston's civic structure and street life, Robert Love's Warnings reveals the complex legal, social, and political landscape of New England in the decade before the Revolution. Through these documents, Dayton and Salinger reconstruct the biographies of travelers, exploring why so many people were on the move throughout the British Atlantic and why they came to Boston. Appointed warner at age sixty-eight owing to his unusual capacity for remembering faces, Love kept meticulous records of the sojourners he spoke to, including where they lodged and whether they were lame, ragged, drunk, impudent, homeless, or begging. Warning thus functioned as a registration system, encouraging the flow of labor and protecting town coffers.īetween 17, Robert Love warned four thousand itinerants, including youthful migrant workers, demobilized British soldiers, recently exiled Acadians, and women following the redcoats who occupied Boston in 1768. If they became needy, their relief was paid for by the province treasurer. Warned youths and adults could reside, work, marry, or buy a house in the city. This declaration meant not that newcomers literally had to leave, but that they could not claim legal settlement or rely on town poor relief. Salinger follow one otherwise obscure town clerk, Robert Love, as he walked through Boston's streets to tell sojourners, 'in His Majesty's Name,' that they were warned to depart the town in fourteen days.

Robert Love's Warnings animates this nearly forgotten aspect of colonial life, richly detailing the moral and legal basis of the practice and the religious and humanistic vision of those who enforced it. In colonial America, the system of 'warning out' was distinctive to New England, a way for a community to regulate those to whom it would extend welfare.

Robert Love's Warnings by Cornelia H. Dayton