The Almshouse and Workhouse

1 John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity” in Winthrop Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society [hereafter cited as MHS], (Boston: 1929–47), 2:282.

2 Ibid., 295. See the discussion of the interplay of clerical and lay authority and the realistic expectations of the first generation of Massachusetts clergy in Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), 138–75: Timothy H. Breen and Stephen Foster, “The Puritans Greatest Achievement: A Study in Social Cohesion in 17^th Century Massachusetts,” Journal of American History, 60 (1973); 5–22. The Colonial Laws of Massachusetts, Reprinted from the Edition of 1672, With the Supplements through 1686 (Boston, 1887), esp. 37, 44.

3 On the Tudor origins of early seventeenth-century American poor relief, see Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988), especially 113–37. See also the superb bibliographical material in Slack, From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999). On the transfer and adaption of English law to the American colonies see the brief but comprehensive treatment in Peter Charles Hoffer, Law and People in Colonial America (Baltimore, 1992), especially Chapter 1. For a specific reference to Massachusetts, see David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts in the Seventeenth Century (Boston, 1981). Another treatment of this ongoing question can be found in Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630–1649 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1965), 51–67 and 202–40. The same author’s views on “adaptation” can be found in the reissue of some of his earlier work in Small Worlds, Large Questions: Explorations in Early American Social History, 1600–1850 (Charlottesville, Va., 1994), especially chapters 4 and 5. See also appendix I.

4 On the 1632 prison, see Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England (Boston, 1853–54) I, 100. What is clear from this literature, and from Massachusetts Bay Company statutes such as the 1641 Body of Liberties, is the sanctity of civil authority in relation to the religious ends of Puritan settlement. See also Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston, 159–60. The Massachusetts settlement was not a “theocracy” as we think of that term, but a well-ordered civic enterprise.

5 When Josiah Quincy Jr. recommended a major reform of Boston’s poor relief system in 1821, he based his attack on what he saw as misguided public policy compounded by the manipulation of the system by “contented” recipients of poor relief. On the issue of what he called the “abuse of public charities” he quotes approvingly from an English report that “establishes the principle . . . that the existence of any permanent fund for the support of the poor, the appropriation of any revenue . . . has, upon the whole, a direct tendency to increase their numbers [in a way that is] directly productive of paupers.” Josiah Quincy Jr., Report of the Committee on the Pauper Laws of this Commonwealth [Boston, 1821], 6; hereafter cited as Quincy Report. See also Quincy’s Municipal History of the town and city of Boston . . . 1630–1830 (Boston, 1852), 24–38, 47–53, 170–75. This great review of Quincy’s career masquerading as history contains 41 pages on the first 192 years of Boston’s history, and 401 pages on Quincy’s revolutionary role in its history between 1822 and 1830. A very good study of Quincy’s role in the popular politics of the early nineteenth-century is Matthew H. Crocker, The Magic of the Many: Josiah Quincy and the Rise of Mass Politics in Boston, 1800–1830 (Boston, 1999), especially pages 132–48. Robert A. McCaughey, Josiah Quincy, 1772–1864: The Last Federalist (Cambridge, Mass., 1974) is not only a useful personal portrait of Quincy but a very astute political biography and its chapters on Quincy’s role as mayor are balanced and insightful.

Quincy’s caveats in some way anticipate the entire debate on poor relief in the nineteenth and especially the twentieth centuries. The massive public attacks on poverty in the twentieth century, beginning with the Progressives’ reforms but most notably in the New Deal and Great Society programs, have served mostly to confirm poverty’s permanence and the constant opposition to taxes for poor relief. John Kenneth Galbraith succinctly notes the reasons why the majority in postindustrial America can tolerate permanent classes of poor in The Culture of Contentment (Boston, 1993), 13. The best treatment of poverty and poor relief in the twentieth century is James T. Patterson, America’s Struggle against Poverty, 1900–1994, 3d ed., (Cambridge, Mass., 1994). A very accessible review of the subject for the nineteenth century is Robert H. Bremner, From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the United States (New York, 1965). There is no comparable book-length survey of poverty and public relief for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Of the article literature see especially Billy G. Smith, “Poverty and Economic Marginality in Eighteenth Century America,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 132 (1988); 85–115. Smith has some very useful observations and analyses on some of the issues and material dealt with in this introduction.

6 Geoffrey Taylor, The Problem of Poverty, 1660–1834 (London, 1969), 3.

7 The Gregory King tables are reprinted in a great number of modern studies, but see the full essay in Gregory King, Naturall and Political Observations, upon the State and Condition of England, [1696], ed. G. Barnett (Baltimore, 1936). There is a useful comment on the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century context of this debate, with special significance for colonial America, in Stephen E. Wiberley Jr., “Four Cities: Public Poor Relief in Urban America, 1700–1775” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1975), 57–60, 220–21. This thesis deserves to be more widely known for its treatment of the Overseers of the Poor in the cities it covers.

8 Paul Slack, The English Poor Law, 1531–1782 (London, 1990), 9–10, and Slack, Policy and Poverty, 113ff. Allen, In English Ways, passim; The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of Massachusetts, I: 64–68; Colonial Laws of Massachusetts, passim.

9 Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty (London, 1984), 3–31. The quote is from 24–25. Slack, From Reformation to Improvement, pp. 5–28, 150ff, makes a strong case for the steady secularization of charity in England after the seventeenth century. See also Slack, English Poor Law, 35–58; and Allen, In English Ways.

10 See Colonial Laws of Massachusetts, 66 (1633 and 1668) for idleness, and pp. 44, 123 (1639) for “poor.” The 1639 law (p. 44) states: “It is ordered by this Court and Authoritie therof; that any Shire court, or any two magistrates out of court shall have power to determin all differences about lawfull setling, and providing for poor persons: and shall have power to dispose of all unstled persons into such towns as they shall judge to be most fit for the maintainance, imployment of such persons and families for the ease of the countrie.” The 1639 act was included in The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts, 1648 edition (reprint; Cambridge, Mass., 1929). See also Josiah Benton, Warning Out in New England, 1656–1817 (Boston, 1911). On Rhode Island, see Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625–1742 (1938; reprint London, 1971), 80–81. On English law see Slack, Poverty and Policy, chapter 4; Jutte, Poverty and Deviance, 120–24; and D. M. Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth: England under the Later Tudors, 1547–1603 (New York, 1983), 123–29. I am grateful to Professor William Rorabaugh of the University of Washington for his comments on the Elizabethan Statutes and their influence on American colonial apprenticeship and servitude. See also Lawrence William Towner, “A Good Master Well Served: A Social History of Servitude in Massachusetts, 1620–1750” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern, 1955), chapters 1–3, and appendices.

11 Reports of the Record Commissioners for the City of Boston, 39 volumes (Boston, 1876–1909), (hereafter cited as Boston Records) 7:206, for March 9, 1690/1: “The 4 ouerseers together with the Town Treasurer are desired and apoynted a Committee to drawe up & present unto the Generall Court such proposalls as they shall aprehend needfull for the orderinge and improving of them, to imploy and set the poore a worke.” See also Robert Seybolt, The Town Officials of Colonial Boston, 1634–1775 (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), 81.

12 Manuscript records of the Overseers of the Poor, 1733–1925, 14 boxes, microfilmed, indexed, and dated, MHS, Boston (hereafter Overseers). The entire manuscript collection has been catalogued, with a very good commentary on content, as “Boston Overseers of the Poor Records, 1733–1925: Guide to the Manuscript Collection” (Massachusetts Historical Society, 27 September 1988; hereafter cited as “Guide”). Most of the eighteenth-century manuscripts are in boxes 1 and 9 (microfilms 1 and 8). While these records are known to scholars and have been consulted, the only full treatment of them so far is Wiberley, 160–97. Wiberley has produced suberb analyses from part of the Boston Overseers collection, up to 1775, and is the only scholar so far to have examined the eighteenth-century manuscripts extensively. Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), and Smith, “Poverty and Economic Marginality” both refer to the Wiberley dissertation.

13 Boston Records 1:15–19; 11:104, 114; 15:274–76; 20:198–200. Samuel Whitwell, “Overseer of the Poor Account Book, 1769–1791,” MHS, (hereafter Whitwell, “Account Book”) indicates some three hundred ward disbursements a year. His own disbursements were over fifty in some years; see Wiberley, 167. Boston’s wards are illustrated very well in Page’s 1777 map, which is published in Lester J. Cappon, ed., Atlas of Early American History: The Revolutionary Era, 1760–1790 (Princeton, N.J., 1976). Under the direction of the tough-minded town treasurer of the 1750s, David Jeffries, the terms were greatly clarified for charging the Town of Boston for the care of its poor by others. For example, a pro forma of the 1750s looked liked the following: “Whereas Mr A.B. of C has received into his House D.E. a poore Wooman belonging to the Town of Boston, We the Subscribers Overseers of the Poor of sd Town hereby oblige oure selves . . . at all Times to save Harmless the sd Town of Woburn from any charge that may aris by sd D.E. being their, and will receive her again at any time when desired by sd A.B.” (Overseers, box 1, folder 2).

Where split dates appear in the manuscripts they have been retained throughout the transcription record and the commentary. Bostonians customarily followed English practice, and until 1752 the Anglo-American calendar year ended on March 25. Thus a date between January 1 and March 24 would be given either as 1735/36 (Old Style) or 1736 (New Style). After 1752, the Old Style calendar year was abandoned and the Anglo-American year, which was then eleven days longer than the rest of Europe, was fixed at 365 days with the year starting on January 1.

14 Most of the 39 volumes of the Boston Records contain indexed examples of this relationship. Volume 12 records a great many examples of the close relations between the Town Meeting and the Overseers. The Selectmen’s minutes in volumes 11, 17, and 21 are indexed for Overseers matters. See also appendix 1 of this collection.

15 See, for example, Boston Records, 20:198–201.

16 On population figures, see Lemuel Shattuck, Report to the Committee of the City Council Appointed to Obtain the Census of Boston for the year 1845 (Boston, 1846), 2–6. On the Almshouse and Workhouse populations see Boston Records, 15:369. The figures used here are averages drawn from Overseers, boxes 1, 9, 13, and from the Whitwell “Account Book” for 1770 and 1771.

17 The thesis that voluntary private charity is a postrevolutionary phenomenon is argued with considerable effectiveness in Conrad Wright, The Transformation of Charity in Postrevolutionary New England (Boston, 1992). “Pauperism” in the mid-nineteenth century is discussed by the significant contemporaneous researches of Lemuel Shattuck, 100–112. Shattuck’s figures support Wright’s thesis that a substantial amount of poor relief in the first half of the nineteenth century was private. There was not necessarily a major change in attitudes toward the poor, or in the simple traditional dual distinction between the worthy and unworthy poor. More of the poor were treated “indoors,” in institutions, even though more of the poor were subject to private and increasingly evangelical relief. On that development see Sheila Anne Culbert, “Sturdy Beggars and the Worthy Poor: Poverty in Massachusetts, 1750–1820” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1985). In a way that both complements and advances the chronology of Wiberley, this study is by far the most comprehensive treatment of the subject of public poor relief in Massachusetts in this period and concludes that definitions of the various kinds of poor relief recipients, and the laws that governed the process, were constant over the course of the century after 1750. Culbert’s broader social context means that she deals in less depth with Boston than does Wiberley, but she fashions a very useful rural-urban comparison. Her extended time frame allows her to discuss, in her chapter 4, the context of the Quincy Report, which should be read in addition to Thomas O’Connor, “To be Poor and Homeless in Olde Boston,” paper read at the New England and the Early Republic Conference, Boston, May 18, 1990. McCaughey, Josiah Quincy, Chapter 7 has useful comments on the contemporary perceptions of the specter of rapidly rising pauperism in Massachusetts in the 1820s. It is well documented by now that the 1790s was a crucial decade in the urban transformation of Boston that culminated in the 1822 city charter. The decade was marked by serious social issues that resulted from an economic boom. That boom put great pressure on Boston’s infrastructure. See Jacqueline Barbara Carr, “A Change ‘As Remarkable As the Revolution’: Boston’s demographics, 1780–1800,” NEQ 73 (2000) 583–602, and the references to Boston in Carole Shammas, “The Space Problem in United States Cities,” WMQ 57 (2000): 505–42.

18 Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: 81; Boston Records 7: 157–58; on Keayne’s charitable motives see Bernard Bailyn, “The Apologia of Robert Keayne,” WMQ, 7 (1950): 568–87.

19 Boston Records 1:78. Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston, 202–40. Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, 74–75. On the way that the poor were cared for out of doors in the seventeenth century, see Charles Richard Lee, “This Poor People’: Poverty, Relief, and Correction in Massachusetts, 1620–1715” (Ph.D. diss., SUNY Buffalo, 1978). Lee traces the evolution away from redemptive charity and casual poor relief to a more institutional approach, with less rehabilitative expectation. His chapter 7 is instructive. Wiberley, 67–68, has some succinct comments on the term “poorhouse” in the eighteenth-century. On Bridewell, see Boston Records 8:174–75. The Bridewell was included in Bonner’s 1722 map of “The Town of Boston.” The term “Bridewell” was a generic term for freestanding prisons (gaols) and survived in usage in some parts of the English-speaking world into the nineteenth-century. The original Bridewell had been a building for training Tudor apprentices that evolved into a house of correction and was named for the district in London where it was located. The quotes are from Annie Thwing, The Crooked and Narrow Streets of Boston, 1630–1822 (Boston, 1920), 222–3.

20 Robert Jutte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, England, 1994), 100–104. Stuart Woolf, The Poor in Western Europe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London, 1986), 17–28. On the diversity of English population in relation to geography and poor relief see Slack, English Poor Law.

21 Edward M. Cook Jr., The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth-Century New England (Baltimore, 1976). Two important studies are relevant here: Wiberley’s unpublished dissertation, and Jon Christian Teaford, The Municipal Revolution in America: Origins of Modern Urban Government, 1650–1825 (Chicago, 1975). See also the essays in Bruce Daniels, ed., Town and County: Essays on the Structure of Local Government in the American Colonies (Middletown, Conn., 1978).

22 Colonial Laws of Massachusetts, 37. The Overseers Guide . . . (Brookfield, Mass., 1815), 1–33, offers a comprehensive review of settlement criteria from 1639 to 1795. See also appendix 2.

23 In what might be called the post-Perry Miller revision, historians continue to debate both the substance and the relevance of the Winthrop experiment and its alleged debt to or distinction from Calvinism and the English Puritan experience. Compare, for example, Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), with Miller’s major works Errand into the Wilderness, From Colony to Province, and Orthodoxy in Massachusetts. The value of social history in interpreting the founders’ purposes and legacies is argued with conviction by Rutman in Small Worlds, xii–xiii and passim. For a recent discussion of the issue see Mark A. Peterson, “From Founding Fathers to Old-Boy Networks: The Declension of Perry Miller’s Puritans,” Reviews in American History 23 (1995): 13–19. For a sometimes refreshing alternative to the Miller school and its derivatives see the sociological E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (New Brunswick, N.J., 1996, originally published in 1979).

24 There is little evidence of boards of Overseers being constituted elsewhere in Massachusetts prior to the middle of the eighteenth century. Thereafter, Overseers appeared in the larger towns of the state, and in towns adjacent to Boston such as Charlestown, Roxbury, and Dorchester; see Culbert, “Sturdy Beggars,” chapters 3 and 4. See also Louis J. Piccarello, “Social Structure and Public Welfare Policy in Danvers, Massachusetts, 1750–1850,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 118 (1982): 248–63. On the 1704 act see The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of Massachusetts 1:538–39.

25 Meanwhile, in the vast majority of Massachusetts towns, the supervision of the idle poor and other “deviants” would continue to be done by the constables on the advice of the Selectmen, and by the latter themselves; see Culbert, “Sturdy Beggars,” chapter 3. Even into the 1820s most Massachusetts towns were without freestanding “poorhouses.” In addition to Culbert see David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston, 1971), 31, and Quincy Report.

26 Overseers, box 1, folders 1–3, and box 8, folder 3. For an example of earlier concerns about transiency see Boston Records 7:241, Town Meeting minutes for March 11, 1700. The record is instructive. It states: “Upon the Consideration of the great Charges this Town is at Yearly, from the Growing Numbr of Poore Amonge us & the great Number Come in amonge ous wch has been Occasioned by the Eastern warr wth the Indians, and other poor and vild persons yt has Come in amonge us from Other Towns, Our Town being so Populous and they shifting from place to place, so long before they be Descouered that the law makes them Inhabitants. Now these things do presage great Poverty to be hastening upon this Town if some sutable methods be not timely Taken to prevent the same. Upon Consideration of the things for mentioned, It was Voted that there be 500ld [500 pounds] raised upon the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston, To be Layed out and improved by the Overseers of the poor & such others wch shall by the Town be added to them, as a stock to be imployed for the procuring materials and Tools, To Sett and keep the poor people and Ill persons at work as the Law Directs.”

27 Love, Robert, Received, by order of the selectmen of Boston, Jan. 25, 1765 . . . MHS. Benton, Warning Out, chapter 1. Acts and Resolves, I, 64–68. See also Lawrence Towner, “The Indentures of Boston’s Poor Apprentices, 1734–1805,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications (1956–63): 417–68.

28 Compare, for example, the style of entry in Overseers, box 1, folders 1–3, and in box 9, folders, 1–2 and 4, and box 13, folder 1. For an example of one Overseer’s trained hand see Whitwell, “Account Book.” I am assuming that Whitwell made his own entries, but his ledgers may in fact have been compiled by a clerk-scrivener. On the way Boston’s merchant or legal class learned their handwriting techniques, see “William Palfrey’s Legal and Financial Papers,” Houghton Library Manuscripts, Harvard University.

29 Town charges tended to stay a bit longer than province or state charges. There does not appear to be a significant change in the average or typical duration of residence between the 1760s and the 1790s. While some 60 percent of the sample were gone from the Almshouse within a year that still leaves large numbers of long-term indoor poor relief recipients. See Overseers, box 1, folder 3 and box 8, folder 3. See also Wiberley, 33, for a sample and chart of lengths of stays prior to 1775. The L shape of the building was likely a result of the 1742 addition, which stipulated a “Brick Building . . . Ninety feet long and the same Wedth of the Old House.” See Boston Records, 12:281.

30 Wiberley, chapter 2, attempts to compare the regimen of the Almshouse with the Workhouse. Boston Records, vol. 12, passim, contains specific references to the separate functions.

31 Seybolt, Town Officials; Wiberley, Chapter 6. Overseers, box 1, folder 2. Whitwell “Account Book,” passim. See the accounts in Overseers, box 1, folder 1.

32 Whitwell, “Account Book,” contains no annotation but is a superb example of the personal involvement of an Overseer in day-to-day transactions with the poor “out of doors.” See also Wiberley, 160–67, for a discussion of the Overseers’ status and conduct.

33 The Overseers’ own manuscript records are in the hands of the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS), but vast external references to the Overseers can be found in the published Provincial Acts and Resolves, the Records of the House of Representatives, the unpublished “Boston Town Papers,” at the Boston Public Library Rare Books and Manuscripts and scattered among the manuscripts in the Massachusetts Archives. The multiple volumes of the Boston Records print the Town Meeting and Selectmen’s minutes and deliberations for the entire colonial, revolutionary and federal period. There are dozens of entries on the Overseers in each volume. These are mostly direct references such as reports by the Overseers to the Selectmen or the Town Meeting, but there are many incidental entries too. The Boston Records volumes are a mine of valuable material on all aspects of Boston’s history before the 1820s and are clearly indexed. For the Overseers see “Poor,” “Paupers,” “Almshouse,” “Workhouse,” “Overseers of the Poor,” or “Poor, Overseers of.” Much of the original eighteenth-century records of the Overseers themselves have been lost, as the “Guide” indicates. In fact, in the monumental Justin Winsor, editor, Memorial History of Boston, 4 volumes (Boston, 1881) there are occasional references to Overseers records that apparently no longer exist.

34 Boston Records. See especially the entries in Overseers, box 1, folders 1–4. The exception to the comment here about an absence of a serious consideration of the Overseers as historically important actors is Wiberley, and to a lesser extent, Culbert, “Sturdy Beggars.” But these two studies are unpublished. Otherwise, there is now an extensive and excellent recent historiography on poverty and social structure in eighteenth-century Boston that has grown out of the “new social history” and “New Left” or “Neoprogressive” theories of a generation ago. The subject and approaches may be gauged by reference to the following samples from the 1965–89 period: James Henretta, “Economic Development and Social Structure in Colonial Boston,” WMQ 22 (1965): 75–92; Alan Kulikoff “The Progress of Inequality in Revolutionary Boston,” WMQ 28 (1971): 375–412; Gary B. Nash, “Urban Wealth and Poverty in Pre-Revolutionary America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History (hereafter cited as JIH) 6 (1975–76): 547–76; “The Failure of Female Factory Labor in Colonial Boston,” Labor History 20 (1979): 165–88, and The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979); G. B. Warden, “Inequality and Instability in Eighteenth-Century Boston, A Reappraisal,” JIH, 6 (1976): 585–620; and Eric G. Nellis, “Misreading the Signs: Industrial Imitation, Poverty, and The Social Order in Colonial Boston,” NEQ, 59 (1986): 486–507, and “The Working Poor of Pre-Revolutionary Boston,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts, 17 (1989): 137–59. Smith, “Poverty and Economic Marginality” summarizes the general theme of these studies, which is, that America was becoming more economically stratified and inegalitarian in the second half of the eighteenth century. Warden’s article is an attempt to soften the general gloom of these theses, but there can be no doubt that the need for poor relief increased in America’s port cities after mid century. Any study of the evolution of poor relief in the eighteenth century must first address the questions raised in that literature. It may well be that the wheel of historiography has revolved to the flip side of poverty, which is wealth and capitalism. For example, James Henretta has incorporated his 1965 study into his recent book The Origins of American Capitalism, Collected Essays (Boston, 1991).

35 Lee, “This Poor People,” and Culbert, “Sturdy Beggars,” make this quite clear for their respective time periods.

36 In 1690 there were 7,000 residents of Boston and 50,000 in all of Massachusetts. In 1770, the ratio was 15,520 to 235,000. Thus Boston’s percentage of the province’s population fell from about 14 percent to 7 percent. Boston’s prerevolutionary population peaked at about 17,000 in the early 1740s, then declined and leveled out at about 15,500. It did not recover to its 1740 levels until the 1780s. See Shattuck, 2–6; E. B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York, 1932); J. H. Benton, “Early Census Making in Massachusetts, 1643–1765: With a reproduction of the lost census of 1765,” Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, 2d ser., 4:136–39. While there was some “urban” growth outside Boston, in towns such as Salem, Marblehead, Ipswich, Newburyport, and Gloucester, Boston remained the only fully developed “urban” society in the period. See the extended discussion of “the typology of towns” in Cook, Fathers of the Towns, chapter 7. For rural Massachusetts see Bettye Hobbs Pruitt, “Self Sufficiency and the Agricultural Economy of Eighteenth Century Massachusetts,” WMQ 41 (1984): 333–64. The best source for town populations is Jacob Felt, “Statistics of Population in Massachusetts,” Collections of the American Statistical Association, 1 (1847): 148–57.

37 See Felt, 148–57 and Nash, Urban Crucible, 102–28, 312–38.

38 Nellis, “Misreading the Signs.”

39 On the number of churches in Boston see Boston Records 1:6.

40 Whitwell, “Account Book.” On the 1772 act see, “An Act for incorporating the Overseers,” Overseers, box 13, folder 1. On voluntary charity and the background to prerevolutionary philanthropy in Boston see Peter R. Virgadamo, “Colonial Charity and the National Character: Boston, 1630–1775” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 1982). I am grateful to him for the use of two unpublished essays of his: “‘To Give Alms and Do Justice’: Charles Chauncy and Early American Philanthropy,” and “Sermons and Alms: Boston’s Quarterly Charity Lecture, 1720–1776.” I agree with Dr. Virgadamo that Chauncy can be seen as philanthropic so long as the recipients of alms were not the chronic poor or the idle poor. On the rather short list of private charities see Winsor, IV:658.

41 Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, 391–94.

42 Boston Records, 15:369.

43 Ibid.

44 For an example of the link between the Overseers’ policies and the authority of the church see Charles Chauncy, The Idle Poor Secluded from the Bread of Charity by the Christian Law: A Sermon Preached in Boston before the Society (Boston, 1752).

45 Wiberley, 88–109; Nash, Urban Crucible, 188–90; Culbert, “Sturdy Beggars,” 125–26, 153n; the rules of the Workhouse are in Boston Records, 12: 235–41, and are reprinted from the manuscripts of the Overseers in appendix 4. Boston Records 1:78 locates the Almshouse and Workhouse sites. The term “scum” was used by Governor Bernard. See Overseers, Box 12, folder 1. Even if there were some racial, class, gender and age segregation, the inmates were treated as a group and were close enough to each other, that the term “mingling” is appropriate. The Almshouse census of 1756 indicates strict gender separation of single persons in the room assignments.

46 Rules of Incorporation for the Society for Encouraging Industry and Employing the Poor (Boston, 1754 ed.), 2–12; Nellis, “Misreading the Signs”; Nash, “Female Labor” and Urban Crucible, 190ff.; Wiberley, 100–9.

47 “Rules and orders for the management of the Workhouse,” May 28, 1735, Overseers, box 13, folder 1; the quote is from an exchange between Governor Bernard and the Overseers in manuscript form in Overseers, box 12, folder 1. On examples of the prison population and conditions in the middle of the eighteenth century see miscellaneous bound manuscripts for 1734, 1740, 1742, and 1752, MHS. The linen manufactory building was used for a time to quarter British troops in 1768. It failed to attract a permanent textile producer and was sold by the state in 1784 to the Massachusetts Bank. It was later converted to residences in 1792 and pulled down in 1806. See the Ezekiel Price Papers in the MHS.

48 Lee, “This Poor People,” chapter 3, and Culbert, “Sturdy Beggars,” chapter 1, have some very thoughtful views on this.

49 Boston Records 15:235, 16:144.

50 See Cotton Mather, Bonifacius: An Essay upon the Good (Boston, 1710; reprint, ed. David Levin, Cambridge, Mass., 1966), 57–59, 74, 110, 121, and 132–37 for “reforming societies.” On Samuel Sewall see Milton H. Thomas, ed., The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729 (2 volumes, New York, 1973 edition), and Seybolt, Town Officials, 100, 105 for Sewall’s Overseers service. See also Foster, Long Argument, 284.

51 Wiberley, 217–19. On Chauncy and Cooper see Nellis, “Misreading the Signs,” 492–93. On the rest of the cream of Boston’s merchant class who joined Hancock in his efforts to put the poor to work see Rules of Incorporation. For the subscribers to the 1735 fund for the workhouse see Boston Records 12:180–83.

52 “Warning Book from January 1745 to 1770,” Overseers, box 1, folder 1. Lawrence Towner, “The Indentures of Boston’s Poor Apprentices, 1734–1805,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts Transactions, 42 (1956–63): 417–68. Along with Wiberley’s dissertation and a 1958 MA thesis noted by Towner, this is the most detailed use of eighteenth-century overseers records to date. It should be noted that the indentures that were authorized by the Overseers were not retained by them but were kept as town records. The original Indentures have been preserved and are in six volumes in the Boston Public Library Rare Books and Manuscripts. According to Towner these manuscripts were microfilmed, likely in the late 1950s or early 1960s, by the Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia. See Towner, 434. Many of the indentured children went from their homes to the Almshouse and thence to service; see Overseers, box 9, folder 1. Age and education were among the important determinants in the occupational fate of children. W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America (New York, 1986), Preface, Prologue, and chapter 1.

53 Overseers, box 9, folders 1–4. Towner, 430. The pro forma used by the Overseers to bind out children to formal indentures is worth quoting: “We the Subscribers of the Town of [blank] do hereby recommend Mr. [blank] as a person of sober life & conversation & in good Circumstances & further Certify that both he & his wife are suitable persons to be intrusted with the education of any Child which may be bound to them as an apprentice.”

54 Overseers, box 1, folder 1–2. There is a need for a more specific study of women as paupers and as the major focus of institutionalized poor relief. Gary Nash in “Female Labor” and Urban Crucible, esp. 189–96, has offered some guidance for the pursuit of a full study of preindustrial female poverty. But evidence is hard to come by and can be misleading. For example, Wiberley, 94–95, cautions against reading too much from limited sources and notes a four-to-one female-male ratio in the Workhouse. Nash accepts Wiberley’s ratios without asking why the three-to-two ratio in the Almshouse was not transferred approximately to the Workhouse ratios. Were men more difficult to keep inside? Were women in the Almshouse more difficult to release into the town than were men, and more likely to be sent from the Almshouse to the Workhouse?

55 Ibid.

56 Whitwell “Account Book,” suggests that at certain times widows made up 25 percent of the Ward 10 outdoor relief recipients. The 1200 figure comes from Boston Records, 15:369.

57 Boston Records 1:11–13; Shattuck, 142–44. A very good history of smallpox in colonial Boston is Ola Elizabeth Winslow, A Destroying Angel: The Conquest of Smallpox in Colonial Boston (Boston, 1974). See also the scores of references in Boston Records, passim, for a sense of the constant presence and threat of smallpox.

58 Miscellaneous bound manuscripts for July 24, 1752, MHS. See also Ezekiel Price Papers, sheets 299ff., MHS, and Massachusetts Archives 59:566ff, for examples of the range of contact the Overseers had with the various public and private affairs of Boston.

59 Overseers, box 9, folder 4. “State” charges rose in relation to “town” charges for the poor after the mid-1780s, from about 40 percent to 60 percent of the total who were identified. On African-Americans see Overseers, box 9, folders 1–4, and box 11, folder 1, and the Almshouse Admissions charts in this introduction. See also Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and Race in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998), 240–41 and Emily Blanck, “Seventeen Eighty Three: The Turning Point in the Law of Slavery in Massachusetts,” NEQ 75 (2002), 24–51.

60 Culbert, “Sturdy Beggars”; O’Connor, “To be Poor”; Shattuck, 106–13; Benton, Warning Out, 40–62. Benton, 63, claims that as strict as were the settlement laws of Massachusetts, the Connecticut laws were even more “carefully guarded.”

61 Nash, “Urban Wealth.”

62 A good example of the language that was repeated over and over in any comment on either the decline of trade or the increase of the numbers of poor can be found in appendix 3, which is taken from Acts and Resolves 2:757. For the volume of repetitions of these laments see Boston Records, vols. 7–14, indexes, under “Trade” and “Poor.”

63 Douglas Lamar Jones, “The Strolling Poor: Transiency in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” Journal of Social History 5 (1975): 28–54, suggests that not only Boston but also rural Massachusetts was being overrun by numbers of wandering beggars who were being shunted from town to town. While his case is overstated, Jones is right to identify what was a growing problem for local authorities, especially after midcentury. The problem, as always, was greater in Boston than in rural Massachusetts.

64 Wright, Transformation of Charity, and Culbert, “Sturdy Beggars.

65 The quotes are from Quincy Report, 4. See McCaughey, Josiah Quincy, 119–20 for an elaboration of Quincy’s view of the “vicious poor” and other hopeless categories of pauperism, and on the model of the House of Industry.

66 In fact, in 1794 the Overseers were once again, as in 1772, made a corporation under legal definition that included civic authority and private philanthropic organization. See Overseers, box 13. After 1823 they became mostly concerned with private sources of charity and by the 1840s were responsible only for private charity. See Shattuck, 106.

67 Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum, 25, 30–42, is right to emphasize that in the eighteenth century the fixed “institution” was a “minor theme” in Boston’s “pragmatic” approach to poor relief. His point that both the Almshouse and the Workhouse were modeled on the principles of family organization, in contrast to the post-Jacksonian denaturing of the “asylum” generally, is valid. But Rothman perhaps misses the most compelling legacy of the Overseers, that the office itself became an institution that would serve as the first formalized agency of poor relief in Massachusetts. The essay by Katherine Lloyd and Cindy Burgoyne, “The Evolution of a Transatlantic Debate on Penal Reform, 1780–1830” in Hugh Cunningham and Joanna Innes, editors, Charity, Philanthropy, and Reform from the 1690s to 1850 (New York, 1998) is a welcome note on the transatlantic nature of early nineteenth-century theories of reform.

68 The best place to see a Boston example of this is in the Quincy Report and Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum. Conrad Wright in The Transformation of Charity has useful things to say about the rise in private charities in the early republic.

69 Quincy Report, 5–7; see also O’Connor, “To Be Poor.” Crocker, The Magic of the Many, is now the fullest study of the issue, while McCaughey, Josiah Quincy, Chapters 6 and 7, offers a brisk and informative analysis of the great civic “revolution” of 1822. Still the best study of the nineteenth-century development of the “institution” is Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum. Rothman’s claim that the sequestering and correction of “deviants” became a tenet of public welfare in the nineteenth century is sound, but his reading of the eighteenth-century institutional treatment of the poor is not always accurate, in the case of Boston at least. For example, his remark that “the colonial community typically cared for its dependents without disrupting their lives” is not as appropriate to Boston as to rural Massachusetts. The latter, though, is closer to the “typical” social environment of the time. A very exotic treatment of almshouse history is Charles Lawrence, comp., History of the Philadelphia Almshouse and Hospitals from the Beginning of the Eighteenth to the Ending of the Nineteenth Centuries (Philadelphia, 1905). There is no comparable review of Boston’s almshouse. A recent and useful study of poor relief in Mexico City in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries reveals a sharp cultural difference in the ways the Massachusetts authorities viewed the treatment of poverty compared to a Catholic New World society. See the early chapters in Sylvia Marina Arrom, Containing the Poor: The Mexico City Poorhouse, 1774–1871 (Durham, N.C., 2000).

70 Although Quincy is seen by a variety of historians as a conservative Federalist and as anti-republican, his autocracy was scarcely the paternalism of his eighteenth-century civic predecessors. See Baltzell, Puritan Boston, 200–201; McCaughey, Josiah Quincy, Chapter 7. McCaughey notes Quincy’s links with the earlier “Puritan–Federalist” culture and class but also acknowledges the end of “Boston’s . . . deferential pattern of politics.” By 1820 the Boston Town meeting had 8,000 eligible voters. Quincy may have believed in his rights to deferential authority but he was obliged to appeal to a broad and assertive electorate. See Vernon Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, Volume Two: Romantic Revolution in America, 1800–1860 (New York, 1954. First published in 1927), 267–287, for characteristically dismissive comments on Quincy and his class, “The Passing of the Tie-Wig School.” Parrington makes the mistake of seeing Quincy and his ilk being marginalized by popular democracy, when, in fact, Quincy adapted rather well to the new forces in politics and thought.

71 The genre of quantitative history, which appeared in earnest in early American historiography in the 1960s, has produced a huge corpus of titles. There is no single methodological text, or even a comprehensive summary available, but the collected essays in Henretta, The Origins of American Capitalism, and Rutman, Small Worlds, have useful examples of the approach as does Smith, “Poverty and Economic Marginality.” For an early and very useful example and overview see Jesse Lemisch, “The American Revolution Seen from the Bottom Up” in Barton J. Bernstein, ed., Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (New York, 1967), 3–45.

72 Thomas, ed., The Diary of Samuel Sewall, passim. Ezekiel Price, a long-serving Selectman with a long record of collaboration with the Overseers and an advocate of private and public make-work schemes, has little to say in his extensive papers (MHS) about the Overseers and the Almshouse. Sewall does make passing reference to the Overseers in his diary, as does William Tudor, another early eighteenth century Overseer, but these references are not at all revealing. See Wiberley, 225.

73 Whitwell “Account Book.” It is unlikely that Whitwell was the only Overseer to keep such a ledger, and the absence of any other is unusual in a society that routinely preserved and passed on personal papers. None of the persons listed in Whitwell’s January 1771 accounts were on his July 1774 list and only four of the July 1774 recipients were getting relief in January 1775. It is not surprising that the number of those on relief doubled between July and January. In the summer months, Whitwell gave out cash, but in the winter most of the relief was in the form of firewood. Males dominate the lists, likely as heads of households. In July 1774 Whitwell made 29 disbursements in total and 15 of those went to three males, John Hobbs, Hugh Smith, and Jonathan Maker, who appear five times each. These are clearly “pensioned” poor relief recipients who might otherwise have been in the Almshouse.

74 For examples of extrapolation from sparse commentary see the imaginative job of reconstruction in Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fisherman: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1850 (Charlottesville, V.A., 1994), and Winifred Rothenberg, From Market Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (Chicago, 1992).

75 Cook, Fathers of the Towns, is the most recent (as long ago as 1976) and comprehensive study we have of town officials in eighteenth-century Massachusetts. But while Cook talks about poor relief, he does not mention the Overseers as important officeholders, and “Overseers” does not appear in his index. Perhaps the omission is reasonable in that the bulk of his study mostly concerns towns outside Boston, but his interests in the Boston civic “fathers” might have made more of the important status that the Overseers enjoyed. Conrad Wright, Transformation of Charity, has some comment on the Overseers, but his study is mostly outside the subject of public poor relief. Josiah Quincy Jr., in his 1852 polemic A Municipal History of . . . Boston discusses the Overseers with more contempt than scholarly detachment. Historians’ priorities shift over time, of course, but a recent and very useful set of essays on class in early America does not specify topics for the analysis of the public institutional manifestations of inequality. See Carla Pestana and Sharon Salinger, eds., Inequality in Early America (Hanover, N.H., 1999).

76 Culbert, “Sturdy Beggars,” deals with them only insofar as her study touches on Boston. Her focus is more legal than social. Nash, Urban Crucible and “Urban Wealth and Poverty,” and Kulikoff, “Progress of Inequality,” acknowledge the importance of the Overseers but cast them too easily in minor clerical roles. Smith, “Poverty and Economic Marginality,” has much to say about the administration of public poor relief but he sets the Overseers somewhat in the background because his focus is on the poor themselves and not the class relationships between the keepers and the kept.

77 Clifford K. Shipton (and John L. Sibley), Biographical Sketches of Those Who Attended Harvard College (Boston, 1873–) (hereafter cited as Sibley’s Harvard Graduates), 16:303–8.

78 See Acts and Resolves, 1:538–39, 654–55; 2:242, 756–58; and appendix 1 of this collection. The Town Meeting was subject to the legislative oversight of the General Court, and while it exercised a de facto form of municipal sovereignty at times, it could not pass laws that did not conform to the presumptive sovereignty of the General Court. Most of the laws and amendments affecting local poor relief were in fact colonial, provincial, and ultimately state acts at least down to 1822 in the case of Boston. See also T. Metcalf, ed., The General Laws of Massachusetts from the Adoption of the Constitution to February, 1822 (Boston, 1823).

79 On death rates generally, see Daniel Scott Smith, “The Demographic History of Colonial New England,” Journal of Economic History 32 (1972): 165–83. For an example of Almshouse rates see the Admissions chart for 1758 to 1774 in this introduction.

80 The personal interventions of Selectmen and Overseers were crucial to the process of poor relief, and those public officials took their responsibilities seriously, of course, but according to Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 11:314, Royall Tyler padded his figures so as to appear more industrious than he was. Shipton quotes an anonymous critic: “So sure as any person in his [Tyler’s] brethern’s ward was to be committed to the w----k h----se, he would by some means or other, hear of it before they could . . . commit them; and by this means he committed a great many more than they . . . and this he got trumpeted about, that he has done more than all of them.” Shipton quotes Ebenezer Parkman that “the paupers complained about him, but since they could not vote this did him no harm.” Tyler appears, then, not to have been popular with either his colleagues or the poor; nevertheless, he is the only Overseer, of the few who are mentioned in Shipton, whose hard work and long service are seen as self-serving and not altruistic.

81 It is difficult to know from the entries in the Boston Records whether there was a formal nomination procedure. But there are very few cases of a “chosen” Overseer turning down the post (“refused”). It is my belief that most of the Overseers who served first volunteered their names to the Town Meeting.

82 Wiberley, 163; Overseers, box 1, folder 1; Massachusetts Archives 132:92–147 (Boston lists). The entire province valuation for 1771 has been edited and published by Bettye Hobbs Pruitt as The Massachusetts Tax Valuation List of 1771 (Boston, 1978). Wiberley’s list of names is arranged alphabetically: Samuel Abbot, John Barrett, Melatiah Bourne, John Bradford, Benjamin Dolbeare, Joseph Gardner, John Gore, William Greenleaf, Nathaniel Greenwood, John Hill, John Leverett, Jonathan Mason, Andrew Oliver, Samuel Partridge, William Phillips, James Pitts, Edward Proctor, Joseph Sherburn, Isaac Smith, Ebenezer Storer, John White, William White, William Whitwell, Jonathan Williams.

On the distribution of wealth and the estimating of decentiles, see Henretta, “Economic Development.” To compare tax data, say, from the 1771 valuation, with any body of officials, see Seybolt, Town Officials, and compare with W. H. Whitmore, ed., Massachusetts Civil List for the Colonial and Provincial Periods, 1630–1774 (Albany, N.Y., 1870). At least 15 of the pre-1776 Overseers were Harvard graduates, including Thomas Hubbard, a tireless supervisor of the Workhouse who was later Treasurer of Harvard, as well as Andrew Oliver, Samuel Sewall and William Hutchinson, a distant relative of Thomas Hutchinson. The great Boston Treasurer David Jeffries was a 1732 graduate. See Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, passim.

83 See John W. Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the American Revolution (Boston, 1986), appendix. Tyler lists over four hundred merchants who were involved in various ways with the Revolution in Boston. Thirty-one of his merchants were or had been or would be Overseers, and all of them who were alive in 1776 were patriots. On the 1775 refugees and the 1777 Vose reference, see Overseers, box 9, folder 3. The comments on Daniel Oliver are from Thomas Prince, The Faithful Servant Approv’d At Death (Boston, 1732), 32, quoted by Wiberley, 185–86, who does not acknowledge the fact that Prince was a beneficiary of Oliver’s will. Still, even if Prince’s remarks are consistent with a memorial oration by a favored friend, and even if they do hint at paternalism, Oliver’s many years as an Overseer in old age is a measure of a genuine commitment to the welfare of the lower classes. On the Olivers as a Boston “dynasty” see Annie Haven Thwing, Inhabitants and Estates of the Town of Boston, 1630–1800 (CD ROM, New England Historic Genealogical Society and MHS, Boston, 2001).

84 Whitwell’s weekly outlays amounted to about twenty shillings in busy periods to several individual recipients, see Whitwell “Account Book.”

85 Boston Records 20:198–99. Phyllis Whitman Hunter, Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World: Massachusetts Merchants, 1670–1780 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001), endnote on page 204, sets this ritual in a very imaginative context, by suggesting that all of Boston’s merchants used civic “duty” as a measure of their class identity.

86 Overseers, box 1, folder 1; Seybolt, Town Officials. There has long been a false assumption about when the Overseers’ office was established by law. Towner and O’Connor, “To be Poor,” cite the date as 1735, over forty years after the first Overseers were appointed under the new laws of the new Massachusetts Charter.

87 Even in 1735 wards were not new to Boston. Militia wards had existed from 1713.

88 Seybolt, Town Officials, 111. Phyllis Hunter, Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World, Chapter 4, 129–30, has some very sensible things to say about the self-conscious gentility, style, and civic duty exhibited by senior town officials. As noted, these were mostly merchants, and Hunter supposes that by serving the community in public office, and by demonstrating care for the needy, Boston’s merchant class filled out their roles as respectable citizens of the Empire. There would be a redefinition of civic responsibility in the Republic, as the truncated role of the Overseers after 1823 shows.

89 David Jeffries resigned as Town Treasurer in March 1782 when the Boston treasury finally went empty. Soldiers patrolled the streets, and public security and public welfare was left largely to voluntary acts and contributions. Sibley’s Harvard Graduates 9:177–79 also notes sympathetically that Jeffries was owed “some hundreds of pounds” by the town when he left his office, “overcome by the problem” of civic insolvency. Jeffries’s own extensive papers are at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Shipton makes the wry observation that the “treasurership of Deacon Jeffries still haunts the City of Boston, for his notes, repudiated in the settlement after his resignation, are occasionally presented for payment.”

90 Seybolt, Town Officials; Overseers, box 9, folders 3–4.

91 Royall Tyler’s “self aggrandizement” (Sibley’s Harvard Graduates) is a conspicuous exception but an exception nonetheless. By “conservative” is meant an insistence on separate facilities for different classes of need or “deviance.”

92 See Thwing, Inhabitants and Estates, Seybolt, Town Officials and Whitmore, Massachustts Civil List.

93 Rothenberg, From Market Places, 1–55, contains the best new analysis of that phenomenon and offers a rich historiographical summary of the issue.

94 The stated general economic and demographic crises that appear in the Boston Records, vols. 12–20, and later in the sheer volume of transients seeking relief (Overseers, box 9, folder 3) attest to the need for more oversight. Wiberley, 76–78, makes the interesting observation that a new “breed” of Overseers began serving in the 1760s. He implies that they were tougher on paupers and more discriminating in fiscal terms. Perhaps, but they also appear to have been more committed to the welfare of the needy as their numbers increased and their conditions deteriorated. On Philadelphia see Wiberley, chapter 6 and Smith, “Poverty and Economic Marginality.” Smith notes committees with titles such as “the Guardians of the Poor.” Gary Nash, First City and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia, 2002), 70, mentions a “Committee to Alleviate the Miseries of the Poor.” Nash also notes that the Philadelphia almshouse built in the 1760s was the largest building in America at the time. It was aptly named the “Bettering House” and unlike Boston’s Almshouse was intended to combine the functions of alms and corrective work for the idle poor. On the differences in the public administrative culture of eighteenth-century American ports the older secondary literature is still useful. See, for example, Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness (1938) and Cities in Revolt (1955); Sam Bass Warner Jr., The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of its Growth (Philadelphia, 1968); G. B. Warden, Boston, 1687–1776; Nash, The Urban Crucible: Wiberley finds structural differences in his four sample cities, but similar class identities among the overseers. See also Robert E. Cray Jr., Paupers and Poor Relief in New York City and its Rural Environs (Philadelphia, 1988); Simon P. Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 2003).

95 For Proctor, see Overseers, box 9, folder 3. Samuel Whitwell spent sixty-nine pounds on fifty-nine persons in 1769. The cost of providing indoor relief to the stream of inmates that Proctor sent in would have been three to four times that. See Wiberley, 76, 142, 178, for estimates of costs. In some years the Almshouse accommodated more out-of-town admissions than local ones. See Overseers, box 9, folder 4.

96 Quincy, A Municipal History, 34–38, 47–53; Quincy Report, passim.

97 Scattered financial data can be found in the Boston Records. See also Wiberley’s estimates.

98 Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 9:177. Whitwell, “Account Book.” The Overseers resorted to threat during the acute crisis of 1780–83. In 1781 they informed the Town Meeting that “unless they are furnished with some [money] they must open the Almshouse Doors to let the Poor out.” Boston Records, 26:189, 205. See also Boston Records 26:242, which quotes the Overseers as reporting that “the Poor in the Almshouse . . . have been without Bread ever since Last Tuesday, untill Saturday when only two hundred [weight] of hard Bread was procured for them . . . and nothing but Water for them to drink.”

99 Boston Records, 15:245–46.

100 Overseers, box 1, folder 2. A summary of the total poor relief expenditures claimed by the Overseers for the 30 years up to 1768 is offered here with some confidence in light of the complete financial statements in Overseers, box 1, folder 2. A caution is advised on the percentage assigned to outdoor relief. I have used Stephen Wiberley’s estimates, but like my own, which are about the same, they are subject to some guesswork. See Wiberley, 76.

The huge increase in expenditures in 1742 is an aberration. In 1741 the Town Meeting agreed to expand the size of the Almshouse. It was completed in 1742 and the costs of the expansion were charged to the town treasury along with the normal poor relief budget. As much as three thousand pounds of the 1742 expenditure is therefore construction cost. The percentage of outdoor relief expenses did not drop, as they appear to in the chart, because those expenses were factored into the gross amount for the year. My estimate of the outdoor expense percentage is 45 to 48 percent for 1742. See Overseers, box 1, folder 2, for June 2, 1742. See also Boston Records 12:281; 15:292. As for the numerical fluctuations, and in particular the 1746 to 1747 and 1749 to 1750 amounts, it should be noted that between 1730 and 1750 the value of Massachusetts currency, “Old Tenor,” was eroded steadily to about one-third its sterling value. Not only do the figures look high, there is little consistency in their relation to other economic values. The return to a silver-based currency by the General Court in 1750 (Acts and Resolves, 3:430–41) led to “twenty-five years of . . . stability in the course of exchange [against sterling] in Massachusetts. Par was set . . . at 133.33 [‘lawful money’ to sterling].” The conversion rate of lawful money to Old Tenor was initially set at 1:7.5. See John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America: A Handbook (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978), 133, 141.

Only a few random separate figures survive for Workhouse expenses. They are clearly only partial expenditures and are for direct out-of-pocket expenses by Overseers specifically for the Workhouse. Figures are given for every year up to 1753 and for only four times after that. The largest number of separate accounts, including payments to tradesmen, suppliers, the Overseers themselves, and the keeper, is twenty-six, compared to over one hundred annually for the Almshouse. In most years only a handful of claims appear. The most consistent charge is for the keeper, usually Joseph Lasenby, who served for more than twenty years after 1751.

Given the exchange values between Old Tenor and lawful money, the aggregate sums for the 1740s and 1750s are very close. It is not likely that these figures were duplicated by the Overseers in their general annual charges to the Town Treasurer. These accounts were found with the manuscript version of the “Rules of the Workhouse” (Overseers, box 13, folder 1) that are transcribed in appendix 4.

101 Whitwell “Account Book” indicates that he had only 19 full time “pensioners” (that is, recipients of a monthly support stipend) between 1768 and 1775. Wiberley, 141–42, estimates that only 39 claimants received full and continuous (month-to-month) pensions outside the Almshouse between 1750 and 1775.

102 Boston Records, 15:369.

103 Whitwell “Account Book.”

104 Ibid.

105 See appendix 1. Towner, 424, notes that those paying taxes did not have to give up their children, even if the Overseers wanted to bind them out.

106 Boston Indentures, 6 vols., Boston Public Library, 1:n. p.

107 Boston Indentures; Towner, “Table of Indentures.”

108 Boston Indentures, 6:97.

109 As noted the original manuscript contracts (indentures) are in the Rare Books and Manuscripts division of the Boston Public Library. When Towner used them they were in the possession of the Boston City Clerk. The lists that have survived in the Overseers collection are in Overseers, box 9, folder 1.

110 Towner, “Table of Indentures.”

111 This assumption is based largely on the 1756 Almshouse census where children without parents are shown to be lodged with other adults.

112 Overseers Guide, 26–29; General Laws of Massachusetts From the Adoption of the Constitution to February 1822 (Boston, 1875); Benton, Warning Out, chapters 2, 3, 7; Culbert, “Sturdy Beggars,” chapter 3.

113 Ibid.; Benton, Warning Out, 52.

114 Boston Records 20:130, 139. The Sweetser mentioned here, or more likely his son, became an Overseer of the Poor in 1776. See also Robert Love, “Received by Order of the selectmen,” MHS.

115 Love, “Received by Order.”

116 Overseers, box 1, folder 2. Those warned were given precise instructions on how they were to leave. A note in the Boston Town Papers manuscripts in the Boston Public Library, 7:73, shows that 205 persons were warned to depart “by land” and 67 “by water” between January 29 and September 1, 1765.

117 Overseers, box 1, folders 3–4. There are references throughout the Boston Records and the Boston Town Papers to the care that the Overseers provided to sick transients. The extensive minutes held by the Boston Public Library Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection identify many cases of this kind of care. See Boston Overseers of the Poor Vote Book, 1788–1809 (catalog number Ms q. Bos. W1, and a second volume for 1809–1820, catalog number Ms. q. Am 2322). There is no record of how these Overseers documents, and many others at the Boston Public Library, were separated from the main collection now at the MHS.

118 See Nash, “Urban Wealth and Poverty,” and Jones, “The Strolling Poor.” See also Boston Records, 20: passim.

119 See Ruth Wallis Herndon, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (Philadelphia, 2001). This is a welcome study of warning out and of New England transiency in general, and is much more analytical than Benton’s older study. But its emphasis on case studies and its use of New England in the title, when it is concerned exclusively with eighteenth-century Rhode Island, limits its application to the Boston Overseers Warning Out Lists.

120 Overseers, box 1, folders 3, 4; box 9, folder 4. My counts differ slightly from those in Wiberley, 47, and Alan Kulikoff, “The Progress of Inequality,” 400, but the differences do not affect the similar frequencies of warnings that we find. (The surnames beginning with A and part of B are missing from the 1771–3 lists). The counts here are approximate and were done by hand from the manuscripts.

Table 1. 1745–1770

Table 2. 1771–73 (part of the record is missing)

Table 3. 1791–92 (two full years)

121 Ibid., and under the 1739 act, a person not warned out within three months of arrival could legally claim residence in the town.

122 It appears that before the bonus system was introduced the job of warning out was ill defined; the responsibility was with the Selectmen. (Boston Records 15:50.)

123 Overseers, box 9, folder 4.

124 As for indoor relief, there is no question that at least 5,000 persons were admitted into the Almshouse in this period, some of them several times; see Overseers, boxes 1 and 9, passim. The estimates for outdoor relief are based on projections made on the basis of Overseers’ claims on the town treasury (Overseers, box 1, folder 2), and estimates of numbers of outdoor relief constituents for all Overseers drawn from Whitwell “Account Book.” Whitwell alone, as one of twelve Overseers, assisted about 250 different people in the 1770s.

125 The figures for the numbers of people getting outdoor relief are quite speculative. They are extrapolated from the hundreds of names entered in the only surviving list of outdoor poor, Samuel Whitwell’s, matched with his submitted costs, and then applied in a rough per capita estimate to the known costs of outdoor relief for all twelve Overseers in certain years. Nash, “Urban Wealth and Poverty,” 463, makes a somewhat higher estimate of recipients than I do. Wiberley, 166ff., suggests the same kind of frequency for outdoor relief as does Nash.

126 On Fowles, see Overseers, box 9, folder 4. After 1795 the Almshouse entries contain more personalized information on inmates, and regular censuses begin to appear in the records by 1810. The insane and sick are specifically identified in the later documents. See “Guide.”

127 Alms comes from the Greek eleos (“pity”). The term eleemosynary (“charitable”) is from the same root. In fact, the appearance of the word alms in the English Middle Ages gives the word a deep root in the history of Anglo-American poor relief. But it was a much wider concept, as Robert Jutte, Poverty and Deviance, has noted in his references to European poor relief. A very sound review of the English tradition, and a very useful chronology is in Slack, English Poor Law.

128 See Overseers, box 9, folder 6. As noted, the early nineteenth-century Almshouse lists are more detailed than the earlier records and include much more data on inmates’ ages, residence status, medical condition and so on.

129 Quincy Report.

130 Overseers, box 1, folder 4; box 9, folders 1–4. As noted, as their numbers rose in the Almshouse, the number of African Americans in the Boston population fell, as did the ratio to whites. See Shattuck, 5, and Felt, “Statistics,” 208–14. Carr, “A Change,” 598–601, does not discuss the upsurge in Almshouse admissions for African Americans in her study of demographic change. See the interesting comment in J. Melish, Disowning Slavery: 240–41.

131 The entry for a province or state charge was accompanied by the names of two Selectmen and one Overseer. For town charges, only the Overseer’s name was entered, because only the Overseer’s authority was required for Bostonians’ admissions.

132 Culbert, 90–92.

133 For the original Almshouse see Boston Records 1:78 and 7:174 and passim. For the 1742 addition, see Boston Records 12:281, 15:292. While there is no final declaration in the record that this proposed addition was completed there is enough circumstantial evidence in the Boston Records and in the Overseers financial records to indicate that a leg of the ‘L’ was added then. The history of Boston’s late eighteenth-century alternative “workhouses” is dealt with in detail by Nash, Urban Crucible, 190–96; Nellis, “Misreading the Signs”; and Wiberley, 97–109.

134 Wiberley, 33, finds 249 deaths. I cannot find the reason for the discrepancy in our counts.

135 The 1742 census figures may in fact be conservative. See the census and comments in Boston Records, 15:369–70 and in Shattuck, 3. On most of the population estimates see Shattuck, 5, 26, 46. There may be no more variable sets of numbers for Boston than those that are used for its pre-1790 population. See the figures in Nash, “Urban Wealth and Poverty,” for example. Shattuck, who combed all the old censuses, is reliable, but he sometimes omits the “colored” from his tabulations. Alfred Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston, 1999), Part II, chapter 4, has some very useful points to make about the substantive changes in Boston’s population during and after the revolution. See also Carr, “A Change.”

136 Culbert, “Sturdy Beggars,” 82–117, 160ff. The Quincy Report of 1821 both reflects reforms underway and calls for more radical reforms.

137 Perhaps it is better to think of Almshouse “punishments” in terms of restricted privileges for bad behavior. Inmates could be sent to the Workhouse for breaches of the conduct rules. There is no allowance that I can find for corporal punishment. Discipline was maintained, in part, by the threat of expulsion to the Workhouse. See Overseers, box 9, passim.

138 Walter Muir Whitehill, A Topographical History of Boston, 2d ed. [Boston, 1968], 64; Boston Records 31:399–400; Harold and James Kirker, Bulfinch’s Boston, 1787–1817 (New York, 1964), 97. The site was in the West End in 1800, but that area is now considered to be part of the North End. In 1800 the old North End was in general decline as new buildings in “Bulfinch’s Boston” eclipsed the quality of the town’s older architecture, and when the commercial, governmental and prime residential areas were redefined. See Bulfinch’s Boston, 11–13, and the maps on the inside of the front and back covers, and Young, The Shoemaker, II:126–27, for examples. Bulfinch had been a long-serving Selectman in Boston and according to Kirker and Kirker his involvement in the 1799–1801 Almshouse resulted from an abiding interest in the poor. This seems to be a bit of a stretch, because Bulfinch took any civic architectural job that he could. The Kirkers also conflate the roles of the Selectmen and the Overseers.

139 The Almshouse manuscript census of 1756 appeared in the most unexpected of places, in volume 1 of the Indentures collection in the Boston Public Library (the collection was formerly at Boston City Hall), stuck to the back of page 1. The only other reference I have seen to the document is in Nash, “Urban Wealth and Poverty,” 559. Nash counted 148 people in the house, while I can find as few as 121 and as many as 141, depending on how I decipher the clerk’s notations. The clerk states that 133 was the total.

140 “Samuel Proctor Account,” MHS Miscellaneous Bound Manuscripts, September 1, 1765.

141 Ibid.

142 Towner, 428–29.

143 The 1789 quote is from Boston Overseers of the Poor Vote Book, 1788–1809, Boston Public Library. For the 1740s see Overseers, box 1, folder 2. See also J. B. Blake, Public Health in the Town of Boston, 1630–1822 (Cambridge, Mass., 1959).

144 For frequencies see Overseers, box 9, folders 1–4. The examples here are from the 1760s.

145 Quoted in Kirker and Kirker, Bulfinch’s Boston, 97.

146 Wiberley, 149.

147 “Bill of Fare, Boston Almshouse, 1819,” MHS (not part of the Overseers Records).

148 Boston Records, Volume 26, contains some references to wartime victualing.

149 For frequencies see Overseers, box 1, folders 1–4.

150 Boston Records, 35:351–54. On the 1760s, see Overseers, box 9, folders 1, 2, 3.

151 The quote is from T. Pemberton, “A Topographical and Historical Description of Boston, 1794,” in MHS Collections 3:251–52.

152 Boston Records, 31:239.

153 Boston Records, 1:78; 12:159–60.

154 By the 1790s the absence of sleeping space in the Workhouse was clearly adding to the space problems in the Almshouse.

155 Boston Records, 12:273.

156 Boston Records, 15:4, 6, 33, will serve as examples. Once again it is regretted that there are no surviving records of Overseers’ meetings minutes until the 1790s, and those are not part of the Overseers collection at MHS. For the 1790s there are numerous sets of minutes of Overseers meetings at the Boston Public Library (Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts, see catalog number Ms.q. Bos w1). These manuscripts contain a regular accounting of budgets for burials, medical care, repairs to the buildings, salaries of keepers, clerks, watchmen and the various indoor and outdoor expenses of poor relief. But for the rest of the period under review, and in regard to the transcribed documents in this volume, details have to be gleaned from the published Selectmen’s and Town Meeting minutes in the Boston Records.

157 The original list of subscribers is in Boston Records, 12:180–83.

158 Boston Records, 14:150.

159 The linen manufacturing scheme of the 1750s and 1760s is the most ambitious attempt to implement the model. As with all similar schemes in colonial America, it failed. See Nellis, “Misreading the Signs.”

160 Overseers, box 9, folders 1 and 4.

161 Boston Records, 12:273 for 1741; Overseers, box 13, folder 2, for the 1790s.

162 Overseers, box 13, folder 2.

163 Ibid.

164 Ibid. The deaths appear to have been among the elderly, for the most part. What is not known is the number who went into the Almshouse deliberately to spend their last days there.

165 Overseers, Box 13, folder 2.

166 Boston Records 35:351–4.

167 Rothman, Discovery, passim; Quincy Report; and the dense polemic The Overseers of the Poor . . . to their Constituents (Boston, 1832), 32 pages. Copy at MHS. The quotes are from Boston Records, 35:351–54.

168 Overseers, box 9, folder 1.

169 Ibid.

170 Carr, “A Change,” and Young, The Shoemaker, Part I, for the depopulation and repopulation of Boston.

171 Overseers, box 9, folder 3. The thirty-two who were evacuated were reported to have “gone over on the ferry,” but which ferry is not clear.

172 Overseers, box 9, folder 1.

173 Shattuck, 142–44; Winslow, A Destroying Angel.

174 Boston Records, passim (indexed) can be consulted for many examples of this.

175 Winslow, A Destroying Angel and Overseers, box 9, folder 3.

176 Boston Records 20:246, 261.

177 Overseers, box, 9, folder 4; Towner.

178 Overseers, box, 9, folder 4.

179 Chauncy, The Idle Poor, and Cooper, A Sermon Preached in Boston.

180 Shattuck, passim, refers to a blind asylum, house of industry, house of correction, state jail, house of reformation (for wayward children), and a lunatic hospital. There appears to be no mention of a separate facility for unmarried mothers or pregnant girls.

181 Overseers, box 9, folder 2.

182 Ibid; Thwing, Inhabitants and Estates, is a useful starting point for a review of family associations.

183 Overseers, box 11, folder 2.

184 In a clear demonstration of that change, Lemuel Shattuck’s magisterial Report of 1846, as humane as it and its author were, is a celebration of a statistical determinism. It offers no homage, not even a sentimental one, to eighteenth-century public welfare ideas or practices.