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.
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