Robert Love's Warnings by Cornelia H. Dayton

Dayton of the University of Connecticut about the book she wrote with fellow historian Sharon V. Dayton and Salinger present the legal basis of the warning system and the moral, religious and humanistic motives of those who enforced it. We perambulate with him around Boston's streets on the eve of the Revolution. Robert Love's Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) is the first book about this forgotten aspect of colonial Massachusetts life since 1911. 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.In early America, the practice of 'warning out' was unique to New England, a way for the community to regulate those who might fall into poverty and need assistance from the town or province. 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. Between 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. Warning thus functioned as a registration system, encouraging the flow of labor and protecting town coffers. 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