Since the debut of this blog in March 2021, we have profiled court records involving or regarding African-descended persons, Indigenous persons, women, slavery, disease, marriage, animal welfare, and prominent people in our state and nation’s history. Today, we examine several court cases involving poor, indigent, and transient persons, and discuss various methods that Connecticut towns utilized to support (or reject) the needy within their domains.
When quoting from documents, we will use the actual spelling, including transcriptions of individual words as necessary. (For more information about colonial spelling practices, see The Standardization of American English at teachinghistory.org.) In certain circumstances, we will add missing letters to abbreviated words or substitute modern spelling in brackets to enhance reader comprehension.
Woodcut depicting a gentleman giving alms to a beggar. Illustration for “Of Pride” in John Day’s A christall glasse of Christian reformation, imprinted at London in 1569, courtesy of Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
According to statute in colonial Connecticut, each town was expected to “take care of, support and maintain their own poor” (The Public Statute Laws of the State of Connecticut, Book 1, p. 552).
This was not an unusual decree for the time period. “In eighteenth-century America, no centralized system of welfare existed... [There were] no Social Security or Medicaid or unemployment insurance or old age pensions in any form. No colony or state created and maintained a safety net for those unable to support themselves; instead, each local government administered ‘poor relief’ to its own inhabitants” (Ruth Wallis Herndon, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England, p. 1).
Nearly a century before the publication of Herndon’s work, Edward Warren Capen, PhD, Alumni Lecturer at Hartford Theological Seminary, traced the development of Connecticut poor laws from the early colonial period to the early twentieth century. He likewise observed that, “From the beginning [the system of poor relief in Connecticut] has been distinctively a town matter” (The Historical Development of the Poor Law of Connecticut, p. 22).
Given that these proto-public welfare programs were funded locally through taxpayer levies, towns had a vested interest in keeping the costs of this endeavor manageable so as not to bankrupt their treasuries (Herndon, Unwelcome Americans, p. 1). As such, towns enacted firm criteria as to who was eligible for poor relief.
Excerpt of complaint made against “One William Piles a transient Person” in 1764. Legal residence was so important in colonial Connecticut that non-residents were officially noted as such in court records.
While the Puritans who settled Connecticut modeled their legal system on Biblical moral law, they did not as meticulously heed scriptural exhortations to care for the stranger. In colonial settlements, there were outbreaks of war, famine, disease, and other disasters that put strain on the availability of resources. Although the state enacted a law providing for the erection of a workhouse as early as 1727, it wasn’t until the 1800s that there was an “increased use of institutions and an enlargement of the functions of the state” in supporting the poor (Capen, Connecticut Poor Law, p. 273). As Capen also noted, “Since the burden of poor relief was to be borne by the towns, it was necessary to protect them from being charged with the support of strangers” (Connecticut Poor Law, p. 23).
In order to ensure that “strangers” did not become a burden to the treasury, towns differentiated between persons who were inhabitants and persons who were transients. Inhabitants were individuals who had the legal right to settlement in a town. Though the modern meaning of transient more broadly applies to anyone who travels, in the eighteenth century the term “specifically identified persons who had been living in a town but had not become legal ‘inhabitants’ in that town” (Herndon, Unwelcome Americans, p. 5).
The criteria for inhabitancy varied from state to state. One could not simply reside in a town to gain settlement. To be considered an inhabitant, a person had to have been born there, purchased a freehold there, served an apprenticeship to a master who was an inhabitant, or (if one was a woman) married a man who was an inhabitant (Herndon, Unwelcome Americans, p. 5). In Connecticut, there were four additional ways to gain settlement: “by vote of the inhabitants of the town, by consent of the civil authority and selectmen, by being appointed to and executing some public office, [or] by possessing in his own right in fee a real estate of £100, in the town, during his continuance there” (Capen, Connecticut Poor Law, p. 70).
While this legal framework strongly encouraged people to remain in the town of their birth, the aforementioned calamities of war, famine, disease, etc. forced many to migrate in order to make a living. The strict settlement criteria, which were meant to preserve limited town resources, ironically exacerbated economic difficulty for individuals who had few to no viable options for work in the place they were born. As Capen observed, “The laws of settlement made difficult a change of residence, and may thus, in some instances, have been a cause of pauperism” (Connecticut Poor Law, p. 58). Ben Mutschler also noted, “New Englanders wanted to have it both ways. They depended on a continuous movement of people to sustain everything from local economies to the successful prosecution of imperial warfare. But they also insisted on local responsibility for affliction. The result inevitably fueled disagreement” (The Province of Affliction: Illness and the Making of Early New England, p. 16).
What kinds of people were transients? Contrary to the popular image of the lone male vagrant wandering from place to place, transients were often entire families headed by men without inhabitant status, women (single, married, or cohabiting), children, and people of color (Herndon, Unwelcome Americans, pp. 15-19). In addition, “only a tiny fraction (3.4%) of warned-out transients were foreign-born; the vast majority were native-born New Englanders, not new arrivals from the British Isles or elsewhere. This evidence indicates that by the latter part of the eighteenth century, transience and poverty were homegrown—not imported—problems. New England was not a place of opportunity for all; man born and raised there struggled to survive” (Herndon, Unwelcome Americans, pp. 13-14).
Whenever towns discovered transient persons within their bounds who were ill, impoverished, or otherwise likely to require aid, they engaged in a process called “warning out,” whereby they legally removed these non-inhabitants to their (reputed) town of legal settlement. “This sorting and sending away of transients served as the first step in the administration of poor relief, a culling out of those not entitled to town support, so as to limit the expense to taxpayers” (Herndon, Unwelcome Americans, p. 6).
However, warning out wasn’t an entirely effective solution in all instances. Transients could be too ill or infirm to be moved, elude the sheriff or constable who came to fetch them, or stubbornly return to town after their removal (Herndon, Unwelcome Americans, pp. 8-9). If warning out failed to produce the desired results, towns disputed the ultimate responsibility for poor relief with other towns in court. Such controversies could be prolonged for months or even years:
Excerpt of conservatorship petition for Ichabod Johnson that Joseph Riggs, Daniel Tucker, and Peter Johnson submitted to the court in 1764.
Before towns intervened to provide relief for their aged, sick, or impoverished inhabitants, they made an effort to find a family member to assume responsibility. “While extended family may have felt morally bound to care for their kin, the law defined family responsibility quite narrowly: grandparents, parents, and children were responsible for one another” (Mutschler, The Province of Affliction, p. 62). However, as a few of the cases below demonstrate, this requirement didn’t stop towns from summoning non-immediate relatives to court, no matter how distant or tenuous the family connection:
If an inhabitant of a town hosted or “entertained” a transient in their household for four days without proper notice to the selectmen, they could also be held liable for costs incurred (Capen, Connecticut Poor Law, p. 73):
If an inhabitant was deemed not able to manage their own affairs due to physical inability, mental limitations, or advanced age, they were placed under a conservatorship where a guardian was appointed to them in order to prevent mismanagement or predation of their estate:
Writ for State of Connecticut vs. William Fowler, 1799.
In addition to verifying inhabitancy, identifying family members, and appointing conservators where warranted, towns sorted people into the category of “worthy” or “unworthy” to determine whether they were “deserving” of poor relief.
As the cases in the previous section demonstrate, “the worthy were the ‘impotent’ poor, persons who had through age, infirmity, sickness, or misfortune been reduced to poverty” (Mutschler, The Province of Affliction, p. 44). As the case below shows, “the unworthy were able of body, but unwilling to labor for their upkeep—the so-called ‘sturdy beggar,’ the vagrant, or the malingerer, who might be made to labor in the workhouse or denied aid altogether” (Mutschler, The Province of Affliction, p. 44):
Those who attempted to aid or shield the “unworthy” from penalty could also run afoul of the court:
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Illustration from Slavery in the United States by Charles Ball, 1837, courtesy of Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
As discussed in a previous post, slavery was practiced on a smaller scale in New England than it was in the American South and the West Indies. Most households only contained a few enslaved persons, and they performed similar work as the family. Enslavers in New England tended to purchase Africans at a young age in order to train them into specialized roles, and the enslaved often spent their entire lives in servitude to a single family (William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England, pp. 5-6).
Some enslavers emancipated the enslaved in their households when they became too aged or infirm to provide useful labor, not necessarily as a boon but in a self-serving attempt to avoid financial liability for their care—in which case the formerly enslaved had no other option but to appeal to the town for poor relief. In this context, emancipation could be considered undesirable or even cruel by the recipients of such “freedom.” As one enslaved individual remarked to their enslaver, “You have had the best of me, and you and yours must have the worst. Where am I to go in sickness or old age?” (Piersen, Black Yankees, p. 34).
Abandonment of elderly and ailing enslaved persons was such a common problem that Connecticut enacted a law requiring enslavers and their heirs to support “all slaves set at liberty by their owners, and all negro, mulatto, and spanish indians who are servants to masters for time, in case they come to want, after they shall be set at liberty, or the time of their said service be expired” (The Public Statute Laws of the State of Connecticut, Book 1, p. 624).
However, this statute did not prevent controversies from arising in court:
We hope to discover more about what happened to Margaret, Caesar, and Tim when we begin processing the Superior Court records.
As noted in a previous post, the records for these cases, as well as several of the cases previously profiled in this blog, are currently in the process of being digitized. They will eventually be available for public viewing at the Connecticut Digital Archive (CTDA).
The Connecticut State Library would like to thank the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) for their generous support of this project.
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