Book Review

The lives of the poor once held little interest for historians, but in the last fifty years, they became all the rage. Professional historians realized that ordinary people made contributions to societal and institutional development. The reading public, in turn, wanted to know more about people like their ancestors and less about the elite with whom few had anything in common. Although there has been a popular resurgence in what critics term "presidential history," professional historians continue to recognize the need to know more about all levels of society. How much we need to know in order to learn something new is the question. Ruth Wallis Herndon has given us a set of biographies about "marginal" people in encyclopedic form based on legal documents, specifically the proceedings of the town councils in Rhode Island cities.	1
Unwelcome Americans is about some of the thousands of individuals "warned out" of Rhode Island towns by town councilors between 1750 and 1800. Warning out was the means by which towns protected themselves from assuming financial liability for people living on the edge, whether the individuals were chronically poor or temporarily ill and unable to work. In New England, the system of caring for the indigent required towns to support them out of the tax coffers. Thus, the definition of who was a legal inhabitant of the town became essential in managing the dole. People who moved from one town to the next were expected to carry letters of introduction in order to establish themselves as legal residents of a new place. Few people actually did this, and it was only when they became unable to care for themselves that most of these transients came before officials.	2
Legal historians will be interested in how Herndon culls information and meaning from the cryptic records and supplemental file papers of the town council meetings. She uses documents that seem to yield little information and has mined them well. Rhode Island legal history especially has been sporadically researched by historians, because the majority of records have never been printed or microfilmed. One must go from town to town for probate records; the judicial records are in their original state in the judicial archives in Pawtucket. Using the records of the town council meetings required Herndon to read manuscripts in several different cities and towns in order to collect the original cases (682 in Providence alone) that she eventually distilled to forty for this book. Given the enormity of her task, she might be excused from neglecting the criminal and civil court records, the only shortcoming apparent in her comprehensive research method.	3
Herndon's extensive legwork in fact produces a paucity of new insights, except that one can put names to the outcasts. Academic historians of New England have not ignored the warning out system, but neither has anyone made it the subject of a monograph. In 1963 Sumner Chilton Powell's Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town mentioned the practice (184). Kenneth Lockridge discussed the late eighteenth-century phenomenon of an increasing class of poor people "on the town," that is, needing economic relief from the taxpayers (A New England Town: The First Hundred Years [New York, 1970], 151). He also noted the difficulty of basing "generalizations on the peculiarities of individual lives" (63). The forty case studies in Herndon's book, which include more than fifty individuals, are meant to illustrate patterns: the greater frequency of women without husbands needing poor relief; the devastation of disease upon families that otherwise had been making ends meet; the additional burden that being non-white placed upon individuals to earn a steady and respectable living. While it is important to prove assertions that have become truisms in the academy, Herndon could have gone further to demonstrate the relationship between law and society as a whole. She limits herself to using legal documents without attempting to explore the role of law itself in the lives of the poor, except as a coercive tool of those in power, and even that more by implication than argument.	4
Perhaps the reason that there is no overarching answer to the "so what?" question has to do with Herndon's choice about how to write the book. She has divided the book into chapters based on themes: childhood, family life, work, and so on. Within each chapter she reconstructs the lives of several individuals and tells their stories. Before the vignettes she comments on what these lives represent. The commentary is often superficial. The substance of the stories is engaging, although their telling is not. Moreover, too little is known about each individual, with a few exceptions, to warrant turning them into representative types. We cannot determine whether, as Lockridge said, the peculiarities of an individual account for his bad luck, or whether trends are discernible. One wonders how the other hundreds of cases might have helped weave a fuller picture of the lives of the marginal in the late eighteenth century.	5
Yet despite the rather formulaic composition of the book, it is somehow compelling reading. What continues to amaze is that one can know anything at all about people who were not, by and large, either notorious or famous, but who nevertheless came to the notice of record keepers. Herndon reproduces some of the records at the end of her book, which makes it useful for others learning how to interpret legal sources. The stories themselves are moving, and one is glad to have names for those who lived on the margins. To know even a little bit about how real people handled the chaos into which they were thrown when the law came calling makes a contribution to legal history.	6
Katherine Hermes Central Connecticut State University

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