Late in the morning of Wednesday, July 9, 1766, Robert Love pushed his chair back from his mahogany desk; tucked notepaper, quill, and inkwell into the pouch attached to his belt; and stuck his head outside to assess when the approaching thunderstorm might arrive. Deciding to delay no longer, he put on his hat; alerted his wife, Rachel, that he was heading out on his rounds; and stepped out of his house into the shadow of the Hollis Street Church.

For the past eighteen months, Love had walked the streets of Boston a few days each week to warn strangers....

The job Robert Love performed had no name. He was one of several Boston residents appointed in the mid-1760s to walk the town’s streets and “wharves to warn Strangers out.” Despite the fact that such minor officers had been in place for thirty years in the province’s largest ports, New Englanders never created a title for them. We will simply call them warners. Each warning presumed that the newcomer did not have legal inhabitancy in Boston and gave notice that the town was not liable to relieve the stranger should he or she become indigent. Warners thus enacted a legal...

When Robert Love walked out of Faneuil Hall on January 25, 1765, he discarded the veil that hides so many ordinary colonial Boston residents from sight. A few minutes earlier, the gentlemen selectmen at their weekly meeting had placed “Mr. Love”—as the minutes would always refer to him—within the ranks of minor officialdom and hence the written records of the town. The setting was the selectmen’s chamber on the imposing building’s second floor—a room to which Love would frequently report over the next ten years. To get there, he would bypass the market stalls on the first...

What are we to make of an early New England immigrant from Ireland who got into trouble as a young man for threatening to break open a man’s head and yet by his late seventies earned public praise for the “tender Affection” residing in his breast? The trajectory of Robert Love was not unlike that of many peripatetic men in the British Atlantic world whose episodes of youthful rabble-rousing gave way to orderly household governance. As an Ulster Scot with some useful social connections, Love secured a modest foothold in the colonies. If in his early years he felt like...

Robert Love’s searches for strangers grew out of early modern European debates over how best to organize public charity and govern cities. The Massachusetts solution drew largely on seventeenth-century English settlement law and parish experimentation. But Bay Colony officials did not simply copy English procedures. In adapting humanist and Reformation goals to New World conditions, they innovated, elevating an obscure legal writ to serve as the lynchpin of a welfare regime that was arguably more effective than many others.

All British colonial cities contended with influxes of laboring people, disabled seamen, and distressed travelers. Aghast at rising poor relief costs,...

No memoirist recounted how it felt to be accosted and verbally warned to depart. Diaries, letters, and travel accounts contain no descriptive scenes of warnings. Despite their formulaic character, Love’s notes divulge quite a lot about the warning encounter. They reveal the warner’s rhythms of walking and warning, including the gaps of time between when newcomers arrived and when Love found them. They allow us to partially overhear the conversations he held with strangers, and to perceive the reactions of the warned. Most answered Love’s questions in a straightforward manner, but

some were cantankerous and set him on edge. Others...

Nearly everyone who earned a warning from Robert Love was a British subject. Unlike New York and Philadelphia, New England at midcentury experienced very little direct emigration from England or Europe. And yet Love’s records uncover a remarkable array of travelers, arriving on foot and horseback, by farm cart and wagon, and aboard the coasting vessels that carried on the region’s provisioning trade. The eldest of Love’s strangers claimed to be eighty-four years old; the youngest was about ten weeks old—an abandoned “man child” receiving care in the almshouse. Family groups as large as twelve encountered the warner; more...

Imagine an enterprising young man, disembarking on the seven-hundred-yard-long wharf that dominated the inner harbor. Stiff from his passage from Halifax, he decided to perambulate the entire town before seeking lodgings.

The Long Wharf, lined on one side with imposing warehouses, led straight to the political and commercial heart of the town. As our traveler walked west along King and then Queen Streets, he could gawk at the brick mansions of some of the town’s wealthiest residents, count the shop signs for a dozen barbers and peruke makers, and take in the steepled structures of the Town House and the...

In his warnings, Robert Love created a prose map that plotted the many kinds of lodgings found by newcomers. Rebecca Anderson and her two children were living in a chamber of John Bartlett’s; Thomas Frasier’s shop was hired as living quarters by a shoemaker and his wife, fresh from London; Anthony St. John was working for and living with the baker John Lucas. Bartlett, Frasier, and Lucas were among many hundreds of Boston residents identified by Love as landlords who took in “strangers.” The roster of their names and locations exposes not only the town’s social hierarchy but also the...

Susannah Hall came into Boston at age seventeen from her natal town of Newton, the eldest child of Josiah and Abigail Hall. She had been in town three weeks before Love warned her. He found her living, most likely as a servant, in the household of wealthy South Ender Robert Pierpoint, who was not her kinsman. Susannah’s father was a weaver and settled landowner who served in minor town offices. Upon his death in 1786, his estate was valued at £395 in land, livestock, and movables, placing him firmly in the middling ranks of colonial society. Susannah remained in Boston...

“The man is a mason to traid and verry poor”; “she Apears to be a verry Helpless Womon”; “they say they lost all they had”; “he is a young man. . . in distress”: these traveling folk were among those whom Robert Love flagged as begging, sick, destitute, drunk, dressed in rags, physically disabled, mentally disturbed, old, idling, strolling, thieving, lodging out of doors, or lacking a place of abode. Such strangers made up nearly one-fifth of all parties warned by Love. Most were not locals; they had often traveled from afar by foot. Except for the strollers, men arriving...

Robert Love warned strangers during extraordinary times. Throughout the British Atlantic, people’s lives were changed in the fulcrum of post–Seven Years War reverberations and mounting political protest. Bostonians gained the reputation as the most troublesome of colonial complainants. In summer 1765, townspeople poured into the streets to protest the impending imposition of the Stamp Act. The following May, joyful celebrations accompanied the measure’s repeal. Local activists, such as the Sons of Liberty, geared up again when Parliament passed the objectionable Townshend duties and custom officials cracked down on Boston merchants. Town meetings at Faneuil Hall were packed as never...

After the revolution, efforts to warn newcomers slackened in towns across Massachusetts even though high birth rates, increased overseas immigration, and much mobility among the native-born contributed to rising populations. Town officials no longer paid searchers to register strangers; they found other ways to differentiate between town and state poor. Residents might be examined as to where they had settlement when they paid their property taxes or when they asked for admission to the almshouse. A June 1789 statute, however, reinstated warning. In the previous twenty-two years, free persons had been able to gain settlement in a town only by...