The Transformation of the Law of Poverty in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts 636
DURING the middle decades of the eighteenth century, people in Massachusetts experienced poverty in a way that they had not known it before. The numbers of poor and dependent people increased sharply both in the countryside and in the seaport towns; transiency became more common as “strolling poor” people moved from town to town in search of work and poor relief; almshouses and workhouses appeared not only in the large seaports of Boston and Salem, but also in some towns in the countryside; and town officials and ministers alike warned of poverty as the economic and social costs of poor relief began to rise.
Three factors coincided to contribute to the rise of poverty in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts. First, sustained population growth, especially in the eastern farming towns, led to a decline of land relative to the population; the result was constricted economic opportunities, stratification, migration, and unemployment.
English in heritage but American in their social origins, the Massachusetts poor laws underwent a dramatic transformation in the eighteenth century.
Yet the law of poverty in eighteenth-century Massachusetts represented a tension between the material needs of the destitute and the needs of the larger society to control the costs of relief as well as the movements of the poor themselves. On the one side, compassion and humanitarianism demanded that the destitute receive at least a minimal level of subsistence; on the other, fears of “great disorder and idleness” and “great Public Expense” prompted the call for containment and control.
I.
The origins of the laws providing for public poor relief in colonial Massachusetts extend far back into the history of the colony’s early settlement. The seventeenth-century laws continued the English tradition of public poor relief, but reflected in their application a society with relatively little poverty. In 1639, the General Court provided that either the Court itself or any two of its members could resolve any dispute concerning relief for poor inhabitants.
While relatively simple in its language, the poor law of 1646 defined the categories of public poor relief in colonial Massachusetts. Moreover, the 1646 law provided for the dual authority of town officials and justices of the quarterly courts, a feature that would become even more important in the eighteenth century. The final cornerstone of the eighteenth-century poor laws was established with the passage of the 1659 poor law. That law, passed after years of discontent over the presence of “strangers,” required a three-month residency for entitlement to poor relief.
The relatively simple and straightforward poor laws of colonial Massachusetts gave way in the eighteenth century to more specific statutes regarding the recipients of poor relief, the powers of town officials under the laws, and the duty of care owed to the poor. Under the Second Charter of Massachusetts in 1692, poor relief laws provided that selectmen, overseers of the poor, and county courts of general sessions of the peace focus on three groups of paupers: the destitute, children, and the able but unemployed. Initially, the Provincial poor laws rarely provided for how town officials would care for paupers; the laws usually required only “care” or “effectual care.”
By the 1730’s and 1740’s abuses had crept into the poor relief system to such an extent that the General Court began to define more specifically the rights of the poor and the responsibilities of the selectmen and overseers of the poor. In a law passed in 1743 the preamble to the statute stated that “it has sometimes happened . . . that persons who are poor . . . have and may greatly suffer by reason of the neglect of overseers of the town . . . ,” either because of legal disputes over liability for relief or “supposition or pretence that condition and circumstances of such poor persons are not . . . necessitous . . .” To remedy these abuses the 1743 law provided more precise duties of overseers and selectmen towards the poor. They became subject to a forty-shilling fine if they denied relief to someone entitled to it; towns were required to tax themselves to provide adequate poor relief; and the justices of the courts of general sessions of the peace were empowered to resolve disputed residency cases as well as to collect taxes if the towns failed to do so.
Once the overseers of the poor or selectmen in the towns determined that a pauper needed and was entitled to assistance, they typically turned to local families to provide care. In both seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Massachusetts, the care of paupers generally remained with the family—the basic economic and social unit that could provide housing, food, clothing, education, and nursing in the event of illness.
Agreements between town officials and custodial families were remarkably uniform; the towns paid a fee, usually for a year’s duration, for a resident to provide food, housing, and clothing for a pauper. If the pauper was physically able, the agreement would stipulate that he or she would perform labor. Similarly, the town usually agreed to provide the costs of medical care. These contracts for custodial care usually lasted one year. At the end of the year paupers often found themselves placed in another family. Ezekiel Day of Wenham, for example, lived with seven different families between 1757 and 1764.
The duration of time in which paupers lived with custodial families indicates that those who cared for the poor did so from a variety of motives. Clearly, there was a financial benefit in taking in a pauper, for the annual supplements paid by the selectmen were welcome cash income for farm families. Becoming a custodial family meant that the family income could be augmented, not only by cash, but also by the casual labor some paupers could perform. Although paupers were often aged men and women, or young mothers with children, not all were bedridden. Richard Dodge, Jr., for example, a Wenham farmer, contracted with the Selectmen “to keep Elisabeth Senie and her youngest Child . . . for the Consideration of twenty shillings and what Labour She can do During the Sd Term.”
Indeed, a persistent arena of tension between town officials and paupers was over the failure of family members to care for their poor relatives. Under the 1692 poor law and its successors a pauper was entitled to poor relief by a town “unless the relations of such poor, impotent person in the line or degree of father or grandfather, mother or grandmother, children or grandchildren be of sufficient ability to provide relief.”
But with town officials trying to minimize poor relief costs and some family members shirking their responsibilities, some of the poor were truly unwanted and neglected. It was often up to the sessions courts to resolve any disputes among these groups. Mary Stephens of Marblehead, for example, plaintively asked the Essex County Sessions Court to “give orders for me to have support. Either from my sons or from the town of Marblehead . . . ,” since neither wanted to support her.
As the sessions courts became more involved in the administration and enforcement of the poor laws in the eighteenth century, their role as mediator among competing groups (selectmen, paupers, and their families) became more important. A detailed record of the conflicts among these participants in the legal system occurred in the case of Sarah Moor in 1765.
Sarah’s early years and family origins are uncertain. Except for her birth in Rowley in 1743 and her baptism in Newbury, she rarely appears in the public records of Essex County. Her parents probably migrated to Rowley early in the eighteenth century. When Sarah moved to Newbury, she was legally warned out and probably returned to Rowley. There she met Amos Jewett, Jr., a member of a prominent Rowley family. Six months after the birth of the twins, Amos married Ann Noyes and settled in Rowley. Sarah’s pregnancy and subsequent illegitimate births were not unusual for mid-eighteenth-century Massachusetts; pre-marital pregnancies had increased sharply, and contributed to the rising poor costs.
The Rowley Selectmen officially interjected themselves into the affairs of Sarah Moor in 1767, when Amos Jewett, Jr., went to debtors’ prison because he could not keep up his child support payments. Amos appealed to the Selectmen for financial assistance, and they agreed to give security for his support payments. In return, Amos turned his property over to the town for an indemnity. The Selectmen were eager to keep Amos out of prison because the town would have to absorb the costs of raising Sarah’s children. Still, since Amos could not keep up with the payments, the Selectmen petitioned the sessions court to release Amos from his weekly payments and to permit them to bind out the twins, who were now two years of age.
For her part, Sarah proved to be a resourceful protector of her children. She resisted the Selectmen’s informal attempts to persuade her to bind out her children, and once in court, became an articulate and forceful defender of her rights. In a written document to the sessions court Sarah argued that it was not customary to permit local officials to take illegitimate children away from their mothers when they had a good home.
The case of Sarah Moor, though fascinating for its rich detail, also symbolizes the growing tension between welfare and control. By accepting Sarah’s argument that the Rowley Selectmen had overstepped their authority under the poor laws, the Essex County Sessions Court placed boundaries on the discretionary power of town officials. Of course, not all town officials lacked compassion or acted incorrectly; one cannot weigh acts of compassion against those of control. But the law of poverty in the eighteenth century did begin to recognize that abuses did occur, and that the moral force of the community, through the sessions courts, sought to uphold both standards of fairness and appropriate custodial care.
II.
The alternative to custodial family care—formal institutionalization—emerged as a distinct and important part of the social welfare system in eighteenth-century Massachusetts. Large-scale almshouses and workhouses flourished primarily in Boston and Salem in the eighteenth century, but the problems of poverty forced some country towns to build or to consider building almshouses. The result was intense interest in institutional forms of care for paupers during the middle decades of the eighteenth century.
In the countryside small-scale poorhouses were occasionally built in order to provide housing and employment for the poor. Usually a dwelling house was converted into an almshouse, but new houses were built as well. Northampton, for example, voted to build a poor-house in 1705, while Ipswich actually built one in 1719.
Following this early interest in almshouses, concern over the poor led to more extensive debate over the feasibility of poorhouses in the 1740’s and the 1760’s. Braintree residents debated the merits of building or renting a house “for the Entertaining or Imploying such poor persons as the Town are obliged to take care of” in 1740, but took no action at that time. In 1747 the town agreed to build a house for the poor which was approximately the same size as the one built in Ipswich in 1719. But two months later the town rejected the poor-house concept, returning to the custodial family practice.
By the 1760’s small farming towns like Wenham debated the merits of a poorhouse, while neighboring Manchester voted to hire a house for the poor in 1765. Ultimately, Manchester decided not to build a poorhouse, choosing instead to place the poor in custodial families “as in years past.” Northampton voted to hire a house for the poor in 1767, as well.
In Boston and Salem the demands of urban poverty prompted the use of almshouses, workhouses, outdoor relief through cash payments, and custodial families.
Both Boston and Salem had separate almshouses in the seventeenth century, but with the growing numbers and costs of the poor in the 1730’s and 1740’s, formal institutionalization of the workhouse became popular in each town. Boston led the way in 1735, when the General Court granted the town the right to organize a workhouse.
With the creation of public institutions of poor relief, overseers of the poor gained both new responsibilities towards paupers as well as new problems in the administration of social welfare. Given the large expenditures of town funds needed to build a workhouse, the Selectmen of Salem, for example, directed the Overseers “not to make any allowance this year to any Poor Persons that are out of [the] Work-House, saving in cases of [the] utmost necessity, [and] then but a small sum.”
Prescriptive rules governed the lives of paupers who lived in the workhouses of Boston and Salem.
The exact frequency with which these punishments were meted out is simply not clear. What the rules suggest, however, is that the townspeople, through their overseers of the poor, sought to do more than administer social welfare; they were determined to enforce institutionalized care. This combination of welfare with control in the workhouses may be seen vividly in the rules and experiences of the town of Springfield, which opened a workhouse in 1802. The Overseers of that town believed that they, too, had to coerce the paupers because of threatening behavior, drinking, and disobedience. Having decided that “punishment must be resorted to,” the Springfield Overseers erected stocks (“the punishment is infamous painful”) and a cell above the barn of the workhouse. The Overseers found that forty-eight hours “has generally been sufficient to create a dread of it.” Clearly, control was a conscious element involved in running a workhouse, given the dual functions of the house to reduce poor relief costs and effect moral reform.
Standing between the paupers and the overseers of the poor were the justices of the sessions courts, who attempted to enforce standards of fairness on the overseers as well as to insure that only legally entitled paupers received relief. A vivid example of the conflicting relationships that occasionally developed among town officials, paupers, and sessions justices occurred in Berkshire County in 1769. Barnet and Sarah Campbell, an aging couple who lived in Great Barrington, applied to the town for poor relief. Barnet had been a tailor, but because of old age, ill health, and poverty, he and his wife were unable to support themselves. Sarah Campbell, according to five matrons who examined her for the local physician, William Whiting, had “Sores, Bruises and other [female] Disorders not proper for us to mention . . . , [so] we judge her at present Extremely unfit for Labor.”
Barnet Campbell was unwilling to accept such treatment. Placement in the workhouse, to Barnet Campbell, was in itself inhumane treatment. He believed that “instead of that Kindness and tenderness which Old Age, and impaired health require and that provision and support which Human nature Demands, [he and his wife] have been treated with . . . Roughness, threatened with the workhouse, whips and chains . . . , and left without any support.” Instead of being able to rely on public poor relief, the Campbells survived on the charity of “a few good people.”
Campbell took his problem to the Berkshire County sessions court, where he petitioned the court to intervene in his behalf and to force the Overseers of Great Barrington to provide outdoor relief. To prove that he was not one of the idle poor, Campbell obtained the support of friends where he had lived for nearly twenty years in Albany County, New York. Twenty-three persons testified by deposition to his good moral character and his “Industrious and frugal manner.”
The justices of the sessions court agreed with Barnet Campbell and held that the Campbells did not belong in the Great Barrington workhouse.
But the Overseers were persistent. One day after the justices ordered the Overseers to provide outdoor relief for the Campbells, the Overseers again threatened to put Sarah and Barnet in the workhouse. Israel Dewey, one of the Overseers, informed the Campbells that the Overseers voted to take them into the workhouse, rejecting the advice of the justices. Moreover, Dewey said that the master of the workhouse waited for the Campbells with two pairs of iron fetters “If you can be found in Town Next Week.”
III.
Perhaps no area of the law of poverty in eighteenth-century Massachusetts was as important as the law of settlement. Since paupers qualified for social welfare primarily by establishing legal residency, the law of settlement gradually became an arena of conflict between town officials and transient paupers, mediated by the justices of the sessions courts. With the increased mobility of the people of Massachusetts during the eighteenth century, the law of settlement was at the very heart of the transformation of the law of poverty.
From the very outset of colonization in the seventeenth century the English settlers of Massachusetts attempted to control the process of settlement in order to protect their Puritan ideals. Both the General Court and individual towns monitored the movement of newcomers. In 1637, the General Court ordered that no town or person could “receive any stranger . . . [with] intent to reside” in the colony more than three weeks except by permission of the Council or two magistrates.
As the populations of the towns became more settled, the townsmen of the Puritan villages began to monitor newcomers with a slightly different eye: they were alert to potential paupers. Cambridge, Salem, Braintree, and Topsfield all banished unwanted transients in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, though the number of people was small.
But as the numbers of transients increased dramatically in the eighteenth century, the law of settlement was transformed. In Essex County the number of transients approximately doubled every decade between the 1730’s and the 1760’s. On the western frontier of Massachusetts the number of transients increased over five times between the 1740’s and the 1760’s.
The basic form of the eighteenth-century settlement law may be traced, in part, to the seventeenth century. Under the poor law of 1659, the General Court for the first time required that a person was entitled to poor relief if he or his family had been a resident of the town for more than three months. The town could avoid relief only if its constable or one of its selectmen had given notice that the “poore person” was not welcome to remain. Additionally, the selectmen were required to notify the county court of their intention not to provide relief.
Between 1692 and 1701 the General Court continued to permit a legal residency to be established for purposes of poor relief if a person was not legally warned to leave a town within three months.
Commencing with the 1701 settlement law the General Court began to make inhabitancy more difficult to obtain. Apparently in response to the difficulties of identifying all strangers within three months, the General Court extended the residency requirement to twelve months in 1701, a standard that lasted until 1767.
The settlement laws applied not only to transients with legal residences in some town of Massachusetts; they also embraced foreign immigrants. For purposes of the settlement law an immigrant’s port of entry became his legal residence. To protect the seaports from excessive poor relief costs, however, the law provided that masters of ships provide the selectmen of seaports with lists of passengers, their estimated worth and possessions, and a bond for potential poor relief costs.
During the 1720’s and 1730’s, the General Court altered the settlement law by shifting the burden of identifying transients from the towns to the local inhabitants who provided them with food and shelter. Called “entertainment” laws, these statutes provided that transients could not remain in a town longer than twenty days without special permission from the selectmen.
Throughout the eighteenth century, the law of settlement in Massachusetts affirmed that migrants could gain legal residences only with the consent of the town. There could be no presumption of residence; payment of taxes, for example, did not entitle an individual to poor relief.
IV.
The chain of legal steps in the warning-out system began when the selectmen of a town ordered one of its constables to warn out a transient. For example, in 1766, the Selectmen of Newburyport directed Constable Francis Hodgkins “to warn and give Notice to the Several Persons hereafter named (who have lately come here to dwell and not being duly admitted Inhabitants) to depart and leave this Town immediately.”
12. Boston Selectmen to Constable, “Warning Out” dated 1 June 1765, Court of General Sessions of the Peace, Suffolk. Courtesy, Supreme Judicial Court.
13. Return dated 3 June 1765, on “Warning Out” dated 1 June 1765; Court of General Sessions of the Peace, Suffolk. Courtesy, Supreme Judicial Court.
Having warned the transients, constables reported back to the selectmen, attesting that a verbal warning had been given. The selectmen then sent the warrant of the warnings-out to be filed with the court of general sessions of the peace of the county. Acting primarily in an administrative capacity, the sessions courts entered the names of the transients warned and the respective towns into its records, retaining the warrants from the town selectmen on file. Yet the justices did not treat the warning-out process lightly. As the warning-out system began to be used more frequently in the early eighteenth century, the sessions justices examined the warrants to insure that the selectmen followed the intent of the settlement law. For example, the justices of the Essex County Sessions Court reviewed the warnings filed with the court in the 1720’s and 1730’s with extreme care, often rejecting warnings because they were not filed according to the law.
In general, the selectmen, the constables, and the justices developed the warnings-out process into a fairly routine system during the eighteenth century. The critical factor, aside from accurate information by the selectmen, was for the warrant of warnings to reach the sessions court within the prescribed twelve months. Some towns either advertently or inadvertently circumvented the letter of the law and warned out transients up to twenty months after the date they entered town. Similarly, justices occasionally overlooked this delay and accepted the warrants. More typically, selectmen brought their warnings to the courts with efficiency and reasonable speed. In both Essex and Hampshire Counties selectmen delivered almost ninety-five percent of the warnings to the sessions courts within the prescribed time period.
Some town selectmen were more efficient than others. Seaport towns like Salem, Marblehead, and Gloucester averaged only about five months between the time a transient appeared in town and the month of the warning in court. In contrast, the farming towns of Essex County averaged nearly eight months before entering a warrant in court. Even in Hampshire County, the three largest towns of Springfield, Northampton, and Westfield were more efficient in warning out transients than the smaller farming towns. Location was an important factor in processing a warning-out warrant. Seaports in Essex County were conveniently located to the towns where the sessions courts met, while rural constables probably made fewer trips to court. Moreover, the farming towns tended to have fewer transients than the large towns and seaports. By 1735 poverty and transiency had become so widespread in Boston that the General Court permitted the Overseers of the Poor to warn out transients “in the same manner, and with as full power as the selectmen.”
By the middle of the eighteenth century, both the substantive provisions of the settlement laws and the procedures of the warning-out system restricted the availability of public poor relief for transients. To qualify for poor relief, one had to establish a legal residence; the relevant test was primarily a twelve-month residency without a warning, and formal acceptance by the town. In addition, marriage, birth, or parentage could also establish a legal residency. But the warning-out system was directed primarily at poor transients, not marriages between people of two different towns.
The settlement laws and the warning-out system apparently were intended to identify actual or potential paupers, not simply to exclude all migrants. Since the settlement laws did not provide economic standards for identifying such transients, constables and selectmen evolved their own categories for deciding who was to be warned out. A transient might have been lower-class, poor or indigent, unemployed, unemployable, idle, single, sickly, or travelling alone with young children. If a transient had one or several of these characteristics, or even potentially might have them, he or she could be excluded from legal inhabitancy by being warned out. Since the mid-eighteenth-century settlement laws were based primarily on the geography of legal residency—not economic or social class—these attributes of poverty were left to the discretion of town officials. Only in the late eighteenth century did wealth become an explicit criterion for inhabitancy.
A case of contested residency of a transient family litigated by Waltham and Weston in 1763 dramatically reveals the consciousness of the poor laws among both the transients and town officials. Together with their five children, Elisha and Anna Cox moved from Waltham to Weston in 1752. Weston town officials warned them out of town and physically removed them to Waltham. As a result Waltham initiated a case of contested residency before the Middlesex County Sessions Court. Ultimately, the court held that, while the warning out of the Cox family by Weston was legal, the legal responsibility for these transients still fell on Weston. When the Cox family thought they were living on the Waltham border of Weston, in fact they were living on the Weston border of Waltham and were legal residents of Weston.
More importantly, testimony in this case revealed the intensity of the enforcement of the settlement laws by town officials. Josiah Allen, a Weston selectman, testified that he was conscious of the Cox family’s presence in town and believed that “it would not be safe for the town to admit [Cox and his family] to be Inhabitants. . . .” He further testified that he “thought it my Duty to Take particular care to Inform myself of the Time of their coming into Town and also to take care that they were warned out within a year . . . ,”
While the warning-out system relied on the discretion of town officials for its enforcement, and the sessions justices held selectmen to procedural accuracy, the transients themselves were also aware of the warning-out law. They certainly were aware that selectmen and constables were anxious to warn them out. Some transients probably did not care, since they would move on again soon anyway. Others, like the Cox family, tried to avoid being warned out. One of Elisha Cox’s neighbors in Weston, Mehetabel Warren, testified that she had discussed the warning out with Elisha’s wife. Warren said that she “asked [Elisha’s wife] whether she was warned out of Weston, and she said she was not,” to which Warren replied, “if it was not done in a little time, it would be too late. . . .”
line, the evidence of Mehetabel Warren reveals that transients did not necessarily have to rely on the sessions judges to look out after their interests.
Only a very few transients were so bold as to challenge overtly the town officials and justices. If transients were warned out but returned to a town, they could be prosecuted as vagabonds.
Yet enforcement of these statutes was not widespread. An occasional fragment of evidence appears in the sessions records which suggests that vagabonds were convicted, such as Constable Benjamin Smith’s commission of Betsy Travis, “a vagrant person,” to the Ipswich gaol.
Nevertheless, the law of vagabondage was important to town officials because it was a deterrent to be used if necessary; a few cases, strictly enforced, could powerfully illustrate the firmness of the law. The Selectmen of Northampton, for example, used the law of vagabondage in 1767 and 1768 to control the behavior of a transient, mulatto laborer named Philemon Lee.
More typically, for the first two thirds of the eighteenth-century Massachusetts towns monitored transients by using the warning-out system to avoid poor relief costs and by excluding unwanted persons. Suddenly, in 1767, the General Court transformed the law of settlement. Under this new statute the General Court removed the burden of the identification of transients from the towns and placed it on the transients themselves. Instead of relying on constables and selectmen to warn transients through the sessions courts, the 1767 statute required all transients to inform the selectmen of their presence as they entered a town.
14. Broadside depicting the confinement in the pillory, the whipping, and public confessional of a “rogue,” Seth Hudson, in Boston, 1762. Courtesy, Boston Public Library.
The most striking aspect of the 1767 law was its effect on the warning-out system, the primary mechanism for enforcing the settlement laws as they applied to paupers. The end of the warning-out system was particularly swift in Essex County. In 1766 the towns warned out over three hundred different families; two years later they warned only sixteen transient families. With this law of 1767 the General Court began to change the assumptions of settlement and poor relief law in Massachusetts quite radically, for the law now presumed that transients might well remain in the towns.
Still, aspects of the old settlement and warning-out laws remained. Transients who failed to gain legal residences were still liable to physical removal by the constable upon application to a justice of the peace. Transients were to pay for their own removal if they possessed some estate; otherwise the town of legal residence bore the expense. The General Court agreed to bear the costs of removal of transients who were not residents of Massachusetts, solving the persistent problem of immigrants.
The rationale behind this 1767 law is difficult to explain. The journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts remain silent on the bill. However, the preamble to the act cites the unfairness of other settlement laws which failed to account for persons who had no legal residences in Massachusetts. This question of fairness undoubtedly was important, particularly among the seaport towns like Boston that were major ports of entry into Massachusetts. A second factor was the growing organizational problems of an expanding number of warnings out. The decade of the 1760’s represented the peak in the number of warnings processed by the sessions courts in the eighteenth century, with no immediate alleviation in sight. Under the 1767 statute the sessions courts no longer had to spend time on this quasi-administrative procedure. In addition, litigation among the towns over poor relief costs also flooded the courts in the 1760’s, costing considerable sums of money and, again, taking the time of the court.
Following passage of the act, towns in Essex and Hampshire Counties generally obeyed the intent of the law and did not warn out transients. The eastern Massachusetts county of Essex integrated this new law more fully than the western county of Hampshire. Between 1768 and 1778 towns in Essex filed only seventy-two warnings with the sessions court, and none appeared again until 1786. In Hampshire the towns filed one hundred twenty-eight warnings between 1768 and 1774, and none again until 1779. Still, in both counties the sessions courts permitted warnings to be filed by towns if they chose to do so, reflecting some confusion over the change in the law itself.
During the American Revolution, the General Court did not alter the law of poverty; it simply renewed acts concerning the poor which had been in use earlier in the eighteenth century. In particular, the General Court provided that towns were to use the most “convenient” means for relieving the poor and for the assistance of families of soldiers who were involved in the war.
V.
The prelude to the new conception of the law of poverty came in the immediate post-Revolutionary years. Although the General Court had maintained the eighteenth-century poor laws by statutory renewal, the end of the war and its social and economic dislocation brought about a heightened concern over both poverty and transiency—and who was to pay for social welfare. The result was a temporary overlap between the traditional methods of welfare and control and a shift towards newer practices. Boston, for example, passed a town order placing the burden of poor relief costs on town residents who might “admit or entertain in any of their houses or tenements” any “stranger or new-comer” who had not been admitted by the Selectmen.
While the 1789 settlement law included traditional methods of identifying and limiting poor relief, it also stated new premises for determining legal residency. For the first time a Massachusetts settlement law contained an explicit test of residence based on wealth. In addition to the usual methods of gaining legal residence by approbation of the town, birth, or marriage, the law provided two standards of residence based on property ownership.
But the 1789 settlement law, with its almost virtual return to the status quo of the 1760’s, almost immediately became anachronistic. In 1794 the General Court enacted a sweeping revision of the poor laws that finally laid the warning-out system to rest, and, in the process, sought to strike a balance between the pauper’s need for public welfare and the society’s need for control.
The transformation of the law of poverty in eighteenth-century Massachusetts was symbolized by the law of 1794. This transformation was born of the unique social, economic, and demographic forces of the eighteenth century; it was nurtured by a variety of experiments with the law of settlement, the warning-out system, and custodial and institutional forms of poor relief. This new conception of poverty, one that integrated the necessity of poor relief with the desire for control, was more a product of the early and middle eighteenth century than of the Revolution itself. Banishment of transients and the warning-out system, rejected first in 1767, utimately pointed to the revised poor law of 1794 that guaranteed at least temporary care for all of the poor and the allocation of legal responsibilities for that care among the towns. In the end, the 1794 poor law gained its legitimacy because it explicitly recognized the needs of the poor and the economic interests of the towns.