Reviews of Books

Between 1750 and 1800, Rhode Island towns warned out thousands of unwelcome transients. The warning out system, used throughout New England, provided the means whereby town officials ensured that transients did not become eligible for poor relief in whatever community they were passing through. The settlement laws determined who had the legal right of residence in a particular town and hence who would be supported by that town if they fell on hard times. This was a system the colonists had brought with them from England, and for the most part, it ensured that everyone, pauper and property-holder alike, had some place where he or she "belonged." But in the increasingly mobile society of the late eighteenth century, the system became overburdened with large numbers of transients moving around New England in search of work, family, or opportunity. Town officials spent a considerable amount of time keeping track of transients, warning them out, and sending them back to their supposed hometowns should they appear likely to require poor relief.	1
Ruth Wallis Herndon's Unwelcome Americans casts new light on the lives of the transient poor in Rhode Island during the second half of the eighteenth century. Herndon begins her analysis with a statistical overview of the close to 2,000 persons warned out of Rhode Island towns between 1750 and 1800. The vast majority of transients were natives of Rhode Island or newcomers from neighboring colonies or states; a mere 3 percent had emigrated from the Old World. Poverty in eighteenth-century Rhode Island was very much a home-grown phenomenon. As today, so in the eighteenth century, poverty afflicted women and children disproportionately. Children figure prominently in the records, as do women and persons of color. Some two-thirds of the transients were female and considerably younger than their male counterparts (age twenty-eight, on average, compared to age forty-one for men). More than a fifth were of African or Indian descent, but that figure actually understates the rise in black transiency over time. Before 1780, no more than 10 percent of those warned out were of African descent; two decades later, in the wake of the manumission of New England's slaves, freed blacks amounted to 40 percent of transients. Not surprisingly, a majority of transients, 70 percent, were illiterate, which makes Herndon's reconstruction of their lives all the more impressive.	2
With this statistical overview as backdrop and intent on seeing the welfare system through the eyes of the poor themselves, Herndon has selected forty cases from the Rhode Island records for close analysis. Each narrative sets forth an encounter between the head of a transient family and local officials, which usually resulted in the family's ouster, either after a town order to depart or through forcible removal. Because most transients traveled in family groups that included spouses, children, aging parents, and other kin, the actual population analyzed by Herndon is well over one hundred. Wait Godfrey, for example, moved around from Providence to East Greenwich to Warwick with her six children and drew the attention of town officials multiple times during the 1780s. The stories Herndon tells are not merely "the short and simple annals of the poor" the English poet Thomas Gray found buried in eighteenth-century churchyards but remarkably coherent narratives of individuals and families and are "widely representative of the circumstances of poor people throughout southern New England" (p. 3).	3
Unwelcome Americans lays bare the lives of the poor in a sequence of chapters that take the reader through the life cycle of the typical transient, from childbirth and infancy through old age and death. Because of the difficulty of reconstructing complete life stories for the persons she analyses, this approach allows Herndon to highlight the particular problems faced by paupers at different stages of their lives. Captured at various moments in the life cycle, these persons, once invisible to history, put a human face on poverty in the eighteenth century. Separate chapters examine work and the common misfortunes faced by transients. The cumulative effect of this presentation is to underscore just how difficult it was for those who lived on the margin in the late eighteenth century to escape from poverty.	. . .