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Poor Laws and the Construction of Race in Early Republican Providence, Rhode Island

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2013

Gabriel Loiacono
Gabriel Loiacono*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh
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Journal of Policy History , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , April 2013 , pp. 264 - 287
Copyright
Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2013

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References

NOTES

1. On race in the antebellum North, see Litwack, Leon, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago, 1961)Google Scholar; Cottrol, Robert, The Afro-Yankees: Providence’s Black Community in the Antebellum Era (Westport, Conn., 1982)Google Scholar; Jones, Jacqueline, American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (New York, 1998)Google Scholar, chaps. 6, 8, and 9; Melish, Joanne Pope, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, 1998)Google Scholar; and Sweet, John Wood, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. For an argument emphasizing the rights of citizenship gained by freedpeople in the wake of this law, see Melish, Joanne Pope, “The Manumission of Nab,” Rhode Island History 68, no. 1 (Winter–Spring 2010): 40.Google Scholar

3. As Susan M. Ryan has illustrated for the mid-nineteenth century, “The categories of blackness, Indianness, and Irishness (or, at times, a generic ‘foreignness’) came to signify, for many whites, need itself” (Ryan, Susan M., The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence [Ithaca, 2003], 2Google Scholar). Also, Ruth Wallis Herndon has shown that town councils throughout Rhode Island in the last half of the eighteenth century warned out women and people of color out of all proportion to their numbers. See Herndon, , “Women of ‘No Particular Home’”: Town Leaders and Female Transients in Rhode Island, 1750–1800,” in Women and Freedom in Early America, ed. Eldridge, Larry D. (New York, 1997)Google Scholar, and Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (Philadelphia, 2001). Thus, it seems likely that town officials identified people of color with paupers well before emancipation, but that after emancipation this became a more important part of racial ideology. After emancipation, town councils seem to have targeted people of color in what Joanne Pope Melish has termed “periodic roundups” (Melish, Disowning Slavery, 191).

4. On the 1822 disenfranchisement of black men in Rhode Island, see Malone, Christopher, Between Freedom and Bondage: Race, Party, and Voting Rights in the Antebellum North (New York, 2008), chap. 4.Google Scholar

5. Zilversmit, Arthur, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago, 1967), 120–21Google Scholar. Arnold, Samuel Greene, History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations from the Settlement of the State, 1636, to the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, 1790, vol. 2 (New York, 1860), 506Google Scholar. Bartlett, Records of the State of Rhode Island, 1784 to 1792, vol. 10, 7–8.

6. For the draft legislation, see Newport Mercury, 10 January 1784, or [Providence] United States Chronicle, 15 January 1784. For the legislation as passed, see Bartlett, Records of the State of Rhode Island, 10:8, 133. For further discussion of how this law was applied, see also Melish, “The Manumission of Nab.”

7. Melish, “The Manumission of Nab,” 39–40.

8. Newport Mercury, 10 January 1784. In “The Manumission of Nab,” Joanne Pope Melish makes the argument that this law was a step toward citizenship, 40.

9. Bartlett, Records of the State of Rhode Island, 10: 7–8.

10. Ibid., 132–33.

11. Newport Mercury, 4 February 1792.

12. Ibid., and Sweet, Bodies Politic, 252.

13. Ibid.

14. “An Act relative to Slaves, and to the Manumission and Support,” in The Public Laws of the State of Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations, As revised . . . January, 1798, reprinted in John D. Cushing, ed., The First Laws of the State of Rhode Island (Wilmington, 1983), 2: 610.

15. This list is a rare, self-reflective glimpse into the Providence town councilmen’s own view of what their most significant—and time-consuming—duties were. Complaining to the General Assembly about how much work they had to do, the town council listed all of their responsibilities as they saw them. Providence Patriot and Columbian Phenix, 23 July 1825.

16. For 1800, see Return of the Whole Number of Persons . . . According to . . . the second Census . . . of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1801), 26. For 1790, see Return of the Whole Number of Persons . . . According to “An Act . . .” Passed March the First, One Thousand Seven Hundred and Ninety-One (Philadelphia, 1793), 34. The total population of Rhode Island in 1790 was 68,825 and in 1800 was 69,122.

17. “Petition of Simeon H. Olney and others to Town Council Respecting Black People Oct. 1806,” “Petition of Thomas Sessions and others respecting black people Oct 1806,” and “Petition of Philip Allen and others respecting black people Oct 1806,” Providence Town Papers (MSS 214, sg 1, series 3, vol. 60, nos. 008727, 008728, and 008729), Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence.

18. For a description of settlement law in Rhode Island, see First Laws of the State of Rhode Island, 345–47; and Creech, Margaret, Three Centuries of Poor Law Administration: A Study of Legislation in Rhode Island (Chicago, 1936)Google Scholar, chaps. 3 and 7. For a brief history of settlement law in England, see Lees, Lynn Hollen, The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948 (Cambridge, 1998), 28–33.Google Scholar

19. “Wm. Larned overseer Complaint against certain Blacks Oct 9th, 1806,” Providence Town Papers (MSS 214, sg 1, series 3, vol. 60, no. 008728), Rhode Island Historical Society. “Receipt to Edward Harwood,” Providence Town Papers (MSS 214, sg 1, series 1, vol. 106, no. 0034530), Rhode Island Historical Society.

20. For population figures, see “Population of Providence at Different Periods,” in Edwin M. Snow, Census of the City of Providence. Taken in July, 1855 (Providence, 1856), appendix 16. Other states and jurisdictions used the poor laws as the central tool with which to govern their black population, though I have seen no study with a sustained analysis of these poor laws adapted to race. See, for example, the 1804 and 1807 laws in Ohio, which required a prohibitive bond ($500) as a guarantee that African Americans would not become public charges (Middleton, Stephen, The Black Laws: Race and the Legal Process in Early Ohio [Athens, Ohio, 2005]Google Scholar). See also Farnham, Henry W., Chapters in the History of Social Legislation in the United States to 1860 (Washington, D.C., 1938).Google Scholar

21. Sweet, Bodies Politic, 274. Cray, Robert E. Jr., “White Welfare and Black Strategies: The Dynamics of Race and Poor Relief in Early New York, 1700–1825,” Slavery and Abolition 7, no. 3 (1986): 280CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Rael, Patrick, “African Americans, Slavery, and Thrift from the Revolution to the Civil War,” in Thrift and Thriving in America: Capitalism and Moral Order from the Puritans to the Present, ed. Yates, Joshua J. and Hunter, James Davison (New York, 2011), 186–88Google Scholar. Horton, Lois E., “From Class to Race in Early America: Northern Post-Emancipation Racial Reconstruction,” Journal of the Early Republic 19 (Winter 1999): 629–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. “Report of the Overseer of the Poor of the Town of Providence . . . from the 6th day of December 1819 to the 6 day of June 1820 . . . ,” Providence Town Papers (MSS 214, sg 1, series 3, vol. 105, no. 0034531), Rhode Island Historical Society.

23. Ibid.

24. Providence Patriot, 14 July 1821. “Report of the Overseer of the Poor of the Town of Providence . . . from the 6th day of December 1819 to the 6 day of June 1820 . . .”

25. “A list of names of colored heads of families and the owners of their residences,” Providence Town Papers (MSS 214, sg 1, vol. 112, no. 0039155), Rhode Island Historical Society.

26. Ibid.

27. On this new census of 1824, see Providence Town Council Journal, 9 August 1824, Providence City Hall Archives. Only a few months before, in the spring of 1824, the Town Council Book shows a significant surge in the number of black Providencians brought before the town council by Overseer William Larned. For elite reaction, see Providence Beacon, 16 October 1824. For a very helpful analysis of the Beacon and these riots, see Crouch, John, Providence Newspapers and the Racist Riots of 1824 and 1831 (Providence, 1999)Google Scholar. Crouch’s article is also online at patriot.net/~crouch/riot.html.

28. William J. Brown, The Life of William J. Brown, of Providence, R. I. With Personal Recollections of Incidents in Rhode Island (1883, repr., Freeport, N.Y., 1971), 126.

29. Hard-Scrabble Calendar. Report of the Trials of Oliver Cummins [et al] . . . (Providence, 1824), 3.

30. Ibid., 20–23; 12–13.

31. Ibid., 12. Brown, Life of William J. Brown, 89.

32. Providence Town Council Journal, 19 October, 20 October, and 25 October 1824, Providence City Hall Archives. For an alternative interpretation of the riot, see Sweet, Bodies Politic, 368–78.

33. Providence Gazette, 23 October 1824.

34. Providence Gazette, 3 November 1824. Brown, Life of William J. Brown, 89. On use of list and subsequent warnings out, see Providence Town Council Journal, 3 November, 10 November, 22 November, and 29 November 1824, Providence City Hall Archives.

35. Brown, Life of William J. Brown, 86. “Energy and 114 others,” quoted in Coughtry et al., Creative Survival, 60. On the 1831 riot, see History of the Providence Riots from Sept. 21 to Sept. 24, 1831 (Providence, 1831). On warnings out in 1831, see MSS “Edward Harwood Book,” Rhode Island Historical Society.

36. Gilje, Paul, Rioting in America (Bloomington, 1996), 89.Google Scholar

37. History of the Providence Riots from Sept. 21 to Sept. 24, 1831, 18.