MANUMISSION AND THE RIGHT TO RELIEF

The close link between Rhode Island policy on race and on the poor can be seen, first of all, in the gradual emancipation law itself. Although certainly a milestone on the road from slavery to freedom for most black Rhode Islanders, this law nevertheless contained pieces of a new racial policy in its own text. The law assumed that ex-slaves would be particularly likely to need poor relief, and it restricted the right to poor relief to only a small proportion of these ex-slaves. In this way, ex-slaves were both identified with poor relief and largely cut off from it at the same time.

For the proponents of the law, however, this discussion of poor relief was secondary to the main goal of ending slavery in the newly independent state. A handful of antislavery Rhode Islanders had begun to press for limitations on slavery and the slave trade in the 1770s. This activism was spearheaded by the Quaker Moses Brown, who emancipated his own ten slaves in 1773. It was not until 1783 that the Rhode Island General Assembly acted. In its first legislative response to Moses Brown and his allies’ petitions, the General Assembly considered a draft antislavery law on Christmas day of 1783. After substantial revision, this law passed in February 1784. The law included a fifty-seven-word prologue against slavery in the style—and wording—of the Declaration of Independence. Ninety-two words established gradual emancipation. In short, no children born to enslaved mothers after March 1, 1784, would be considered slaves; 116 words addressed the education of these free-born children. Another 205 words, the largest section on one topic, dealt with how free children and manumitted adults would be integrated into the poor relief system. Clearly, the impact of freedpeople on the poor law was an aspect of emancipation that very much concerned the state’s lawmakers.Footnote ⁵

As proposed in December 1783, the law encouraged slaveholders to manumit their slaves by repealing, in some cases, the old requirement for a £200 bond upon manumission. This bond had been required as a guarantee that slaveholders would pay any poor relief required by ex-slaves, and was intended to discourage slaveholders from shifting expenses for old or ill slaves to their town’s poor relief system. The Christmas Day bill changed that by requiring towns to treat freedpeople just as they would any ordinary legal resident, if they met certain conditions: they had to be deemed by their town council to be of “sound Mind and Body,” and to have reached the age of majority (twenty-one for males and eighteen for females) and be younger than forty-five. Freedpeople too young, too old, or perceived to have some handicap were to be provided for by their former masters. As the General Assembly debated this proposed law, however, one of the changes they made was to reduce the upper age limit for manumitted slaves who had rights to town coffers to forty, instead of forty-five. Then, in October 1785, the upper age limit was reduced again, so that only freed adults under the age of thirty were eligible for town poor relief.Footnote ⁶

There was a practical reason for restricting the rights to town poor relief to adults under a certain age. In the past, Rhode Island slaveholders had used town poor relief as a sort of retirement insurance for aged slaves. Decades earlier, it had been possible for a slaveholder to benefit from the prime working years of an enslaved person and then manumit the enslaved person when he or she was no longer able to work as hard. That way, the slaveholder could get out of his responsibility to provide for an elderly slave. To prevent this, in 1728, Rhode Island began requiring slaveholders to post bonds of £100 for every manumitted slave. That requirement was later increased to £200. As Joanne Pope Melish has pointed out, in the context of the bond requirements dating back to 1728, the 1784 reversal of this policy, even just for some freed adults, could be seen as a step toward political membership rights for freedpeople. In that sense, the fact that a minority of freedpeople now “belonged” to a town with all of the privileges of town poor relief that that entailed was a step in the direction of citizenship.Footnote ⁷

In addition to the practical reasons for these restrictions on who could have access to town money, however, the restriction also served as a legal marker of race. For that proportion of slaves who did not meet the age requirements, they remained in a relationship with their former masters analogous to that of a child and parent. According to legislators, former masters who failed to provide for their former slaves “shall be liable . . . in like Manner as Parents are by Law liable to support and maintain their poor Children.” In this way, the General Assembly insisted that young, old, and handicapped freedpeople retain some aspect of their childlike dependence on their former masters, if ever in need. These freedpeople would be denied rights to poor relief despite the fact that the emancipation law required them to pay taxes just as citizens born free. No comparable law existed for white servants and agricultural workers, who were not assumed by the legislature to be so dependent on someone else for sustenance. Moreover, whatever the intention of the law, whether to avoid the practice of dumping elderly slaves on the town or to mark them as different or both, the law was part of the special application of poor laws to the black community for decades to come. This special application of the poor law can also be seen in poor law officials’ concerted efforts to take control of the lives of black children.Footnote ⁸

FREE-BORN CHILDREN AND THE OVERSEERS OF THE POOR

As noted above, many freed adults were to be treated, legally speaking, as children and wards of their former masters. In contrast, free children, whether born to enslaved or free mothers, were intended at first to be wards of their town councils. The 1784 law of emancipation expressed its hopes for the free-born children of enslaved mothers in this way: “It is the Desire of this Assembly, that all such as are freed by this Act, be educated in the Principles of the Christian Religion, and instructed in Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic.” Assuming that such instruction could not be provided by the parents of these children, the law directed that “upon Application of those who may hold [in slavery] the Mothers” of free children, town councils would be required to “bind out those hereby emancipated for a Term sufficient to repay such Expence as has arisen for their Instruction as aforesaid, or for Sickness, so as not exceed [sic] the Term of Four Years after they become of Age.” In this way, free children of enslaved mothers were not free to remain with their mothers if their mothers’ owners preferred otherwise. Rather, their labor would be at the disposal of the town council until the ages of twenty-five for men and twenty-one for women, up to four years past the ages of majority for most apprenticed children.Footnote ⁹

It seems that many slaveholders took advantage of this law freeing them from the responsibility of supporting their slaves’ children. Within a year and a half, the General Assembly revoked that provision, complaining that it was “extremely burthensome” to the towns. Thereafter, free children of enslaved mothers were, legally, to be supported and educated by their mothers’ masters. Thus, the legislature folded children of enslaved mothers into the same, still-dependent, category of freedpeople over the age of thirty.Footnote ¹⁰

In this case, though, slaveholders and town officials often ignored the law and continued the practice of town authority over children of enslaved mothers. Some former masters deeply resented having to care for the free children of their female slaves and did not believe it was their responsibility. A 1792 letter to editor of the Newport Mercury complained bitterly about this. “A COUNTRYMAN” wrote that it was “very burthensome, unjust and hard—that children born of slaves should be free—that the owners be at the whole charge and expence of the mother’s lying-in, and nursing the woman and child, and have no property in the child.” Apparently unaware of the 1785 revised law requiring masters to care for their slaves’ free children, “A COUNTRYMAN” insisted that masters only cared for these free children out of their “Christian charity and compassion” because the town councils were not taking responsibility for them. Assuming that enslaved mothers had no right to retain care of their own children, “A COUNTRYMAN” wrote that masters “allowed” these children to stay with their mothers for one year “out of favour (it is said).”Footnote ¹¹

The letter from “A COUNTRYMAN” raised a question that would resurface several times throughout the first half of the nineteenth century in Rhode Island: How free would Rhode Islanders of color be in the aftermath of slavery? As “A COUNTRYMAN” ruefully pointed out, the General Assembly’s gradual emancipation and manumission law had incidentally crippled even those master-slave relationships that it left sanctioned by law. “The slave that has a mind to be free is rendered very saucy, disobedient and undutiful,” he complained. Historian John Wood Sweet has substantiated “A COUNTRYMAN’s” complaint, demonstrating that many enslaved Rhode Islanders were often able to pressure or persuade their masters to manumit them shortly after the 1784 law, which eased manumission in addition to introducing gradual emancipation. As a result, Sweet argues, “Enslaved people were able to seize their freedom far more rapidly than legislators anticipated.” But, as town officials and many white Rhode Islanders made clear time and time again, they would not tolerate complete independence for the former slaves.Footnote ¹²

“A COUNTRYMAN” wanted to see the discipline of slavery extend as far into the era of emancipation as possible. He wondered what was to be done with these free children, whose labor masters could not control and for whose care masters did not want to be responsible. He asked, “Where then must it [the free-born child] be sent or put for nourishment?” In answer to his own question, he refers to a mysterious “they:” “…give it away, they tell us.” But, he argued in reply to this suggestion, “there are very few who will take it, especially girls.” The best answer, he said, was that towns should take responsibility for these free children of color just as they would for ordinary children of poor parents. And this is, essentially, what happened. Very quickly, most children of black parents, whether enslaved or free, would be treated as wards of the towns, whether or not their parents were poor.Footnote ¹³

Just as “A COUNTRYMAN” had assumed that enslaved mothers had no right to custody of their children, so town officials began to assume that black parents had less right to custody of their own children than white parents had. When delegates to the General Assembly met in 1798 to recodify the laws, they quietly inserted a special law to clarify which black children were eligible for poor relief. The legislators described how masters were still responsible for free children of enslaved mothers, but they emphasized that “other children of black or coloured parents . . . whose parents are unable to support them, shall be supported and maintained by the towns where they are legally settled.” Concerned about how to pay for this support, the legislature made clear that “Town-Councils may bind out such children as apprentices, at any time after they arrive at the age of one year.” On the face of it, this law put poor black children on an equal legal standing with poor white children. Town officials—the overseers of the poor and the town councils—had the power to bind out all children of parents who were too poor to care for them.Footnote ¹⁴

In practice, however, town officials singled out black children for special attention in early nineteenth-century Rhode Island. Because it was up to overseers of the poor and town councils to determine who was poor or unable to support their children, the law left open the possibility that town officials could unilaterally decide to remove black children from their parents’ homes, regardless of whether their parents were able to support them. Increasingly, the law gave cover to an assumption that town councils had special province to oversee and separate black families. By 1821, for example, the Providence Town Councilmen listed among their responsibilities that they had to “bind out children of blacks,” with no mention of binding out children of any other description, and no qualification that this meant just poor black children. In this report, the intent of which was to complain that the town council had too many duties, the newspaper editor thought it unremarkable to apply the poor laws in special ways to people of color. For generations after emancipation, then, vestiges of the enslaved status clung to Rhode Islanders of color, especially by means of the poor laws. Uniquely for African Americans, town governments claimed and exercised an authority over their family life on the basis of race alone. Town councils felt no need to demonstrate a black family’s neediness in order to bind out its children: blackness was a sufficient justification.Footnote ¹⁵ This race-specific application of the poor law to black children was not written into law, as noted above. Similarly, poor-law officials assumed unlegislated powers over adults of color as well.

USING THE POOR LAW AGAINST AFRICAN AMERICANS

As the legal status of slavery fell out of use, the term “of color” became more frequently used. The census of 1800 reported only 380 slaves in Rhode Island, compared to 3,304 “other [not white] free persons, except Indians not taxed.” This was a noticeable decline from the census of 1790, six years after emancipation, which reported 948 slaves in the state. Rhode Island slaveholders in great numbers consented to manumit their slaves, whether out of genuine antislavery feeling or out of frustration with the impracticality of slavery in an ever-more emancipated state. No doubt the pressure exerted by slaves themselves, as John Wood Sweet argued, reduced the number of slaves. More sinister reasons also probably contributed to this decline in the number of slaves, as some slaveholders illegally sold their slaves out of state in order to capitalize on their human investments instead of letting them go free. The number of free families of color, meanwhile, had increased greatly in certain parts of the state. In the town of Providence, the number of “other free persons” increased from 417 to 656 between the censuses of 1790 and 1800, while the number of slaves counted by the census in that town dropped from forty-eight to zero. That was a growth of 57 percent in the free population of color, compared to growth of 19 percent in the population as a whole. Indeed, throughout Rhode Island, African Americans began to cluster in extended family networks in certain towns, especially Providence, Newport, South Kingstown, and Warwick, each of which, incidentally, was the most populous town in its county.Footnote ¹⁶

By the early 1800s, a tradition of conflict had developed between these small communities of color and their white neighbors. In these conflicts, whites frequently turned to the poor laws for help targeting people of color. One example is the 1806 petition—with which this article began—of William Richmond and others to the overseers of the poor. In that year, dozens of white householders complained to the authorities about the black population in Providence. The householders aimed to run the black population out of town. Tellingly, they wrote petitions not to the town council but to the Overseers of the Poor. Their petitions focused on the alleged poverty and criminal inclinations of black Providencians. “Gentlemen,” they began, addressing the town’s three Overseers of the Poor, “This Town is now infested with swarms of idle, thievish and vagabond blacks, who have no legal settlement therein, nor visible means of getting a livelihood.”Footnote ¹⁷

In this one sentence, the petitioners not only made the black population seem particularly unsavory, but they deftly gave the overseers justification for warning out the black population, since Overseers of the Poor were legally obliged to warn out any person who had no legal settlement and no visible income. A “settlement” was the legal term for what might better be described as membership in a town. The law of settlement was a rather complicated set of rules governing who would and who would not be entitled to town poor relief. In most cases, if you were not born in a town to parents with a settlement, it took years and some amount of property buying or taxpaying to acquire a settlement. Newly arrived residents and less well-off residents would rarely have a settlement. The petitioners knew how difficult it was to acquire a settlement, and knew that the language of settlement law was the language that would enable town officials to warn most new Providencians—and most black Providencians—out of town.Footnote ¹⁸

It was no coincidence that these 1806 petitions were so well suited to justify town officials in targeting the town’s black population. The petitioners were almost certainly advised—and it is quite possible that the petitions were written—by the town’s overseers of the poor. These were the town officials in charge of executing the poor laws. Annually elected, the overseers held an extremely important office in town government. They were empowered to help needy people with a settlement and banish needy people without a settlement. The budget that they administered was, until the 1820s, the largest single item in most towns’ budgets, including that of Providence. Thus, overseers of the poor had tremendous authority over both people and tax dollars in the early republic. They were the officials who could best respond to the 1806 petitions.

There were three petitions, all of which contained identical wording. And, most significant, among the signatures on the first petition were the names William G. Larned and William Richmond. William Richmond was one of the overseers of the poor. William G. Larned was the adult son of another overseer, named William Larned. Thus, when the petitioners wrote to the overseers, “You are therefore earnestly requested by the Subscribers that measures may be taken by Complaint from you to the Town Council . . . to rid the Town of this great and growing nuisance,” two of these “Subscribers” were petitioning themselves or someone in their own household!

The other subscribers mostly seem to have been property-owners, who referred to themselves as “Citizens,” a term likely synonymous in their minds with Freemen, which was the legal term for townsmen who owned property, paid taxes, and enjoyed the right to vote in Rhode Island. In their petition, in fact, the subscribers referred to three categories of people: “blacks,” “Citizens,” and “Inhabitants.” Referring to the alleged absence of visible incomes among the population of color, the petitioners said of the “blacks,” “They nevertheless subsist; and it must be by the plundering of the Citizens. They are most of them an annoyance to the publick peace[,] depredations on the property of the Citizens, and dangerous to the personal safety of the Inhabitants, their Children and families.” If the subscribers were themselves “Citizens,” “Inhabitants” seems to be a reference to other male heads of household, who did not have the right to vote but were presumably white and seen as productive members of the community with families to protect. In this schema, the “blacks” were an unproductive, parasitical class who, like paupers, were dependent and ought to be closely governed by town authorities.

These petitions, then, not only pointed to a legal apparatus—the poor law—that could be used effectively against “blacks.” They also provided a racial ideology, predicated on old ideas about paupers, which cast all “blacks” as dangerous annoyances who threatened the Citizens’ property. Whether these “blacks” threatened property by theft, vandalism, or use of poor relief was left unspecified in the petitions. What was clear was that the petitioners thought the poor laws the most effective way to police African Americans. In addition, their criticisms of the “black” race were closely related to their ideas about paupers.

As might be expected, the overseers of the poor moved quickly on these three petitions. The petition that William Richmond and William G. Larned had signed was dated October 4, 1806. On October 9, William Larned, the father, presented the town council with a list of more than seventy-five “Persons . . . now residing in said Town without having gained a legal settlement therein and that the said Persons are likely to become chargeable to said Town.” Although the elder Larned made no reference to race in this list, it is clear that it is a direct response to the petitions. The Town Clerk titled it “Wm. Larned overseer Complaint against certain Blacks Oct 9th, 1806,” and the names on the list—Cuff Roberts, Wife, and four Children, Gov. Tower and Wife, Yellow Sall, Hammet Achmet and Wife, Cato Roberts and Wife, Andrew Freeman and Family—are often suggestive of histories that included slavery and Africa. The town council quickly cooperated, sending summonses to the people on the list, and in most cases warning them out to other towns and committing those who refused to go to the “Bridewell,” or town jail. A receipt to Town Sergeant Edward Harwood, for example, reimbursed the sergeant for committing Cuff Roberts to the Bridewell for a day. Most likely, Roberts was jailed for his refusal to obey a warning-out order.Footnote ¹⁹

These three petitions against the whole black community of Providence, together with the swift response to them, make it clear that town officials used the poor laws specifically to target black Providencians. Indeed, calling the immense number of seventy-eight persons of color before the town council amounted to an attempted purge of more than 10 percent of the town’s people of color. There is no evidence of similar numbers of white Providencians being rounded up in this way. The officials had, by their actions, assented to the petitioners’ suggestion that “blacks,” as a category of people, were “idle, thievish . . . vagabond” and dependent, deserving special attention from poor-law officials. In the aftermath of emancipation, poor-law officials had become the one arm of the law that could police and, to an extent, control the community of color. The 1806 petition shows that town officials eagerly and informally adapted the poor laws to serve as racial control laws. They also assented to the proposition that put poverty, nuisance, and hazards to public peace and public finances high on the list of flaws that characterized the black race. In this way, both ideas and laws about the poor were used against African Americans, serving as the chief means of stigmatizing and policing the black community.Footnote ²⁰

This was not the only petition aimed at African Americans in early republican Providence, nor was Providence the only municipality where officials used the poor laws against African Americans in particular. John Wood Sweet has highlighted several such petitions in Providence, though not always addressed to the overseers of the poor. Robert E. Cray Jr. finds New York City constables fanning out through the city in 1805 and 1807 in order to find “all vagrants, negroes, common prostitutes, and other persons likely to become chargeable.” “Chargeable” means liable to be cared for out of poor relief-funds. These events in Providence and New York City fit John Wood Sweet’s, Patrick Rael’s, and Lois Horton’s timelines of the surge in anti-black racial ideologies in the early republican North. Sweet points out that American independence and anxiety over whether republicanism would work, ironically, encouraged anxious Americans to paint African Americans as decidedly unvirtuous. Rael pinpoints the discourse of thrift, after the Revolution, as part of this racialization of virtue. Critics painted African Americans as decidedly unthrifty, and therefore not virtuous enough for the full rights of political membership. Horton’s article, “From Class to Race in Early America,” demonstrates an interracial, lower-class solidarity in the eighteenth-century northern colonies. By the 1810s, however, evidence of interracial class solidarity was scarce; black-white job competition and anti-black race riots had become more common.Footnote ²¹

This article further fleshes out these analyses by highlighting the role of poor laws. Race riots were both extraordinary and extralegal events. Use of the poor law was both legal and ordinary. Even if not explicitly written into law, their use against blacks was at least sanctioned by authorities and happened far more frequently than riots. Through the poor laws, as both Cray’s article and this one demonstrate, municipal officials could cull African Americans out of the old colonial lower class, making them into special objects of government policing. Ironically, town officials took laws written in the era of interracial class solidarity and used them in new ways to differentiate between lower-class blacks and whites.

IDENTIFYING BLACKNESS WITH PAUPERISM

Just as town officers used old poor laws against people of color in new ways, so they used old ideas about the poor against people of color in new ways. Gradually, it seems that the labels “black” or “colored” became almost synonymous with “dependent” or “pauper.” Town officials began to assume that people of color were especially inclined to be poor and needy. Evidence of this comes from the records of the Providence overseers of the poor. William Larned, who spearheaded the official campaign against the black community of Providence in 1806, was still overseer of the poor in 1820. By that year, he had begun compiling reports that listed all of Providence’s paupers for a six-month period, together with how much money he had spent on each person, what kind of assistance he had given, and other observations. Larned had to make these reports at the insistence of the Town Meeting, a quarterly meeting open to all of the town’s eligible voters. In the immediate aftermath of the Panic of 1819, Providence taxpayers were among many Americans calling for “retrenchment” in town expenses, or at least public and transparent accounting.

This post-Panic experiment in transparent accounting—Larned’s report for the first six months of 1820—is a rich source of information, especially because Larned attempted to explain the neediness of many of the paupers in the “Observations” columns of his table. Whenever he could, it seems, he offered his supervisors, both in the elected town council and in the Town Meeting of all qualified voters, a reason why he had decided to help his charges with food, clothing, wood, rent, or cash. His “Observations” included such succinct but explanatory comments as “sick,” “Cripple,” “Crazy,” “very feeble,” “Old and unable to labour,” “Husband ran away [and] a sickly daughter,” “father in jail,” or “one blind the other non compos [mentis].” For one man to whom Larned gave assistance, however, he wrote under “Observations,” “Black man and an Idiot.” For others, he simply wrote “black,” or his abbreviation “Blk.” In some cases he wrote “(black)” under the pauper’s names, suggesting that it was either an identifier or a means to keep track of the number of blacks he assisted. In other cases, he wrote “black” in the “Observations” column, suggesting that the description “black” could be viewed as an explanation for the pauper’s neediness, along the same lines as “Cripple” or “Crazy.” The only other ethnic descriptions he wrote under “Observations” included one “Transient Irish” and one “Blind deaf and sick—a German.” Other labels that he put under paupers’ names included “Irish woman,” “(sailor),” or “a Chinese (black).”Footnote ²²

Larned’s notes for this last pauper, named Arsee, are particularly interesting. Eventually, Larned paid for Arsee’s “passage to Canton,” strong evidence that Arsee was actually from China. How he found himself in Providence is not clear. New Englanders had been sailing to China since the 1780s but, of course, very few Chinese could be found in New England in this period. The fact that Larned wrote “(black)” next to Arsee’s name, then, suggests that Larned was attempting to keep track of certain categories of people. Arsee did not fit into current racial categories in 1820 Providence—“white,” “black”/“of colour,” “Indian,” “Irish,” or “German”—and therefore Larned decided to count him as “black.” Clearly, Larned was interested in counting the number of black paupers he assisted: he never denoted when a pauper was “white,” and the category of “black” is far more numerous than the two Irish, one German, and one Chinese pauper he helped. At the same time, the context of some of the notations, “Black man and an Idiot,” “black—Idiot,” or even just “black” in the “Observations” column, makes these descriptions sound like explanations for the paupers’ neediness, and not just a form of racial accounting.

The fact that the descriptor “black” appeared in the “Observations” column could be explained away by suggesting that Overseer Larned was simply using that space on the paper for racial accounting, and not as an explanation for why the individual needed assistance. That explanation seems less convincing, though, in light of the 1806 petitions that tarred all black Providencians as “idle, thievish, and vagabond.” Moreover, evidence from the 1820s suggests that the identification of African Americans with paupers became even stronger in that period, no matter how financially stable individual black families were. This is because town elites blamed black householders not for receiving public funds themselves, but for harboring newcomers to town, black and white, who could potentially become paupers. In this way, town elites castigated the town’s black population even in spite of its growing stability and wealth.Footnote ²³

Equating people of color with paupers was not unique to Rhode Island, of course. For example, in 1821, a Massachusetts House of Representatives committee recommended restricting the immigration of blacks into the state. In justifying such controversial legislation, the committee insisted that a number of “evils,” as they put it, were typical of communities of color, the first of which was “Increasing the number of convicts and paupers.” The committee’s other complaints were that African Americans were “collecting in the large towns an indolent, disorderly and corrupt population” while simultaneously (and contradictorily) “substituting themselves in many labors and occupations, which, in the end, it would be more advantageous to have performed by the white and native population of the State.” This report was reprinted widely in Rhode Island, where it was usually attached to a critical rebuttal of the report from a Salem, Massachusetts, editor. Both Bay Staters and Rhode Islanders protested that this proposal duplicated a Missouri prohibition of free blacks that was reviled in New England. The national uproar that resulted in the Missouri Compromise was still fresh in readers’ minds. Still, no criticism directly challenged the assertion that people of color attracted “convicts and paupers.”

This despite evidence such as William Larned’s 1820 report showing that of more than 150 paupers he assisted in a six-month period, only seventeen were noted as “black.” The 1820 census found about 5½ percent of Providence’s population to be “Free Colored” and Larned’s report found approximately 10 percent of Providence’s poor relief recipients to be “black.” While overrepresented, Providencians of color were clearly not accounting for a major part of poor-relief expenditures. Nor were a great number of Providence’s African Americans receiving assistance. Seventeen black paupers account for less than 2 percent of Providence’s 975 “Free Colored” population in the 1820 census. Nevertheless, even though the Massachusetts proposal was narrowly defeated in that state, officials and public voices in both states continued to make similar complaints, identifying all people of color with transiency and pauperism. This would eventually lead to even more significant actions against African Americans than the overseers of the poor could effect, although the overseers would still be at the center of these anti-black movements.Footnote ²⁴

OVERSEERS OF THE POOR: POLICING THE BLACK COMMUNITY

Among the many powers of overseers of the poor was this: since the 1660s, newcomers to a town were supposed to be reported to the overseers or another authority. This law was intended to give the overseers a chance to warn out poor newcomers before they were in dire need. Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, the Providence town council had periodically complained that people did not observe this law. By 1822, though, the town council wanted to make a new attempt to enforce it.

As they had done many times since emancipation, the town authorities decided to focus this ostensibly race-neutral poor law on the black community in particular. They still believed that the black community, more than anyone, was to blame for welcoming and housing poor migrants without notifying the overseers. In June, they instructed the Overseer of the Poor, still William Larned, to personally inform all black householders in the town—and only black householders—that if they received into their “Houses or possessions, any transient white persons, or colored people to reside, not having a legal Settlement in this place, without giving notice thereof to said Council according to Law that they will be prosecuted therefore without Delay.” Just like the laws empowering overseers of the poor to bind out poor children, this law had been written to govern all Rhode Islanders, but officials enforced it specifically and explicitly on the black community and no one else in the 1820s. Thus, in the summer of 1822, William Larned traipsed all over town notifying every black head of household he could find.Footnote ²⁵

His peregrinations through these neighborhoods, however, also had a second purpose. As he informed black heads of households of the law, he took a census of the entire black population, writing down the names of every family or individual he found, together with the “Owners of the Houses and Tenements wherein they reside,” and whether or not they had a legal settlement in Providence. Most of these families of color seemed to live in houses owned by other people. For example, Chloe Rogers “and white Man living with her” lived in the “Tenement belonging to S.Y. Alwett.” Africa Lippett, his wife and child, together with Betsey Spywood and Zerviah Camero, all lived in the Staples House in Olney Lane. All of these people were denoted as “not settled.” In only a few cases, such as William Jackson and wife, was the column for owners of houses empty, suggesting that these families owned their own homes and probably had legal settlements in Providence.Footnote ²⁶

For those families and individuals who were not legally settled in Providence, this census held ominous significance. It was, like the 1806 list compiled by Overseer Larned, a handy index of which black families could be warned out when the town council wanted. Although the town officials did not use it right away, the list is important evidence that town officials continued to use the poor laws, in special and exclusive ways, to supervise and control the black community. For the many black Providencians judged to have no settlement in Providence, this list could have important consequences in disrupting their lives.

Even for those black Providencians on the list who did have a settlement, the list had consequences. The town council believed that even the wealthiest black householders, those who owned real estate in Providence, were connected to the town’s “problem” of transient paupers. In their order that “Coloured” “Housekeepers” and only “Coloured” “Housekeepers” be informed of the law, the town council suggested that it was something about people of color that attracted, or made it easy, for migrants to stay in Providence. Increasingly, elites outside the town government began to make this connection, too, eventually identifying all people of color, whether wealthy or not, with all paupers, whether of color or not. Officials, elites, and working-class white men began to use this identification of race with the dependent legal status of pauperdom to justify more coercive laws and violence.

Two years after the 1822 list, the Providence town council made another census of black Providencians, this time without even the ostensible purpose of informing the black population of the laws. With little comment in the summer of 1824, they appointed two constables to walk the streets and “enquire and to register the Names of all the Blacks and coloured people . . . together with their Situations and Employments.” Although the councilmen did not make their reasoning explicit, other Providence elites made it clear that they still identified African Americans with transients and poverty. In October 1824, the editor of the Providence Beacon wrote an editorial entitled “Our Black Population.” In it, he repeated the complaint that the black population was contributing to transience in the town, and bemoaned the potential burden on public funds that transients were thought to be. He complained that “many ineffectual efforts have been adopted to remove from the town a nuisance so vexatious and perplexing.” In a veiled criticism of the overseer of the poor, the editor wrote that “it is a fact that they are here cherished and protected, by those whose business it is to relieve us from such useless and dangerous kind of living lumber.” Thus, the editor of the Beacon clearly referred to the overseers’ and town council’s power over paupers when he called for some authority to “rid the town of its superabundant share” of blacks, whom he linked to transients, paupers, and the poor law. The editor also reported a series of recent sidewalk scuffles between blacks and whites. He complained that black Providencians were forcing whites off the sidewalks and making the streets unsafe for respectable people. Females walking after dark, the editor claimed, were “liable to insults, and to be cast from the sidewalks into the sewers and filth of the streets.” Two days after his editorial, these sidewalk scuffles erupted into a large riot that destroyed many of the black homes that the overseers and constables had visited over the previous three summers.Footnote ²⁷

Of course, there were two sides to this struggle for the sidewalks, the cleanest and most desirable part of the streets. The African Narragansett memoirist William J. Brown recalled that young white men frequently harassed men and women of color who were walking on the sidewalks, ordering all blacks off the sidewalks and into the middle of the streets, which were likely to be laden with animal droppings. Before he became more devoutly religious and tried to avoid fighting, Brown wrote that he “had had frequent skirmishes on the street” and had a reputation as a fighter. Brown remembered that people of color had “little or no protection from the law” in this period, and faced the choice of either acceding to the demands of white toughs or banding together and fighting. Under these circumstances, then, white and black gangs in the fall of 1824 seemed to be roaming the streets in search of fights.Footnote ²⁸

October 16 was the day that the Providence Beacon complained both about blacks attracting transients and about their hogging the sidewalks. On October 17, a fight between blacks and whites broke out. As one anonymous journalist described it, “a sort of battle royal took place between considerable parties of blacks and whites, in consequence of an attempt of the latter [the whites] to maintain the inside walk in their peregrinations through the town.” In retributive anger, dozens of white men from all over the city planned revenge for the next night. Everyone apparently knew of the plan. At a town council meeting on October 18, the council added men to the Town Watch and ordered them to be on guard from 8 o’clock that evening until the next morning. News spread quickly among Providence’s working-class men as well. And so, much of Providence, including about fifty attackers and an estimated one thousand spectators, among them the Town Watch and at least one town council member, all converged on a small neighborhood on the northwestern outskirts of Providence called Addison Hollow or, more infamously, Hard-Scrabble. It is not clear what connection the neighborhood had to the brawl of the previous evening, except that it was a largely black neighborhood. It was here that the attackers chose to unleash their fury, essentially mounting a pogrom against black Providencians.Footnote ²⁹

Beginning as early as seven o’clock, and ending well after midnight, about forty to fifty white men used clubs, axes, and their bare hands to destroy seven houses and badly damage a handful of others. First, they worked their destruction in Hard-Scrabble and then, after midnight, moved to another small black enclave on Olney’s Lane. The criterion for choosing a house to destroy seems to have been nothing more than whether or not it was inhabited by people of color. Thus, although one house was used in part as a dance hall, and another house was used in part as a cake shop, all of them were at least partly used as dwelling houses. The inhabitants were, most likely, quickly chased away. The attackers expected reprisals and posted armed men to guard them, but there was no serious opposition as they methodically went about their destructive business. Probably the hundreds of spectators were largely sympathetic to the rioters’ work. Although some later testified that they had silently disapproved, a Town Watch member said that “none of the spectators interfered to stop the proceedings.” He and his colleagues did not think it would have been “proper or prudent” to step in, and he believed he was “doing his duty by going there and keeping as still as possible.” Town Councilman Danforth was there, but he also believed that it would have been unsafe to intervene. It is safe to say that the relatively small gangs of black men had similar reactions to the crowd.Footnote ³⁰

The next morning, one of the Town Watch men visited Hard-Scrabble, finding “the houses demolished, the inhabitants without shelter and everything in ruins.” The memoirist William J. Brown recalled that rioters had stolen furniture from the houses they had demolished and then sold the furniture at auction in neighboring Pawtucket. The town council met again and deplored the destruction, declaring a reward of one hundred dollars for information leading to the conviction of any attackers. Although they normally met just twice a week, the town council met three times on the day following the riot in order to coordinate increased law enforcement with the sheriff and the governor. The extra law enforcement may have prevented new flare-ups in the following evenings, but ultimately town officials had one major police power at their disposal that they used to any effect: the power to remove needy residents who did not “belong” to Providence.Footnote ³¹

Even in the tense days after the riot, the overseer of the poor continued to present complaints about poor residents in Providence. During one extraordinary town council meeting called to address the issues surrounding the riot, the overseer took the opportunity to arrange the interrogation of an ill widow whose husband had died only weeks before, with the aim of establishing whether or not she had rights to public assistance. So, when the tensions began to subside, the town council returned in earnest to interviewing poor newcomers and warning many of them out. Within a week, they had before them one of the victims of the riot. William Greene, “a black Man,” came to the council on complaint of the overseer. He and his wife and child had been living in Hard Scrabble, where they rented rooms and kept a cake and fruit shop. During the attacks, the house he rented had been one of those torn down by rioters, who also destroyed or took his furniture. Far from providing some recourse to justice, the council ordered him to leave within five days. Although they had at first deplored the riot, the council and other elites quickly seized upon it as an opportunity to focus their police powers on the black community in an effort to reduce its numbers.Footnote ³²

The editors of the Providence Gazette, one of whom also had a seat on the town council and had been present at the riot, responded to the riot with an editorial. They opened by complaining that they had “frequently had occasion to deplore the increase of our coloured population,” on account of the allegedly large proportion of “idle and dissolute” people of color. Then they laid out their plans to reduce it in the near future. The “proper channel” of complaints against these people, they noted, was still “the overseer of the poor.” And, they assured readers, the town council had always “exerted” its “authority” when complaints to the overseer had been “preferred and substantiated.” In addition, however, the editors noted that the town council had recently taken an “enumeration of the black or coloured people in town,” referring to the 1824 summer census of black Providencians. Now, they assured readers, the council had begun examining this list and intended to “pursue their enquiries into the character of every individual,” who might be sent from the town. Moreover, though the editors insisted they did not want to “condemn our black population in the gross,” they believed that “a large proportion of those who reside[d]” in Providence required the “vigilant examination of our police authority.” Although rarely stated so explicitly, the Providence Gazette made clear what for many was common knowledge, that white Providencians, both elite and not-so-elite, viewed black Providencians as a nuisance. In addition, although the poor laws were originally intended only to help the needy while also protecting public money, elite Providencians viewed the poor laws now as the primary tool with which to guard against black immigration.Footnote ³³

Black Providencians responded in a number of ways. For some, the riot had made Providence too uncomfortable a place to call home. The Providence Gazette noted, approvingly, that “a large number of coloured people have, within the last week, taken passage from this town to New-York, with the intention of emigrating to St. Domingo.” Another local man, whose house had been destroyed, pulled his roof over his basement, sat out the winter with his children, and then left for Liberia in the spring. Others refused to leave of their own volition, only to be targeted by the town council. Overseer Larned and the town council apparently acted just as the Providence Gazette had suggested. On November 3, the town council met with only one item on the agenda: to examine the list of “People of Colour . . . in this Town” compiled the previous summer. By mid- to late November, a steady stream of African Americans was being compelled to come before the town council, there to be either warned out or at least “rejected” from becoming inhabitants, which established that they had no right to town poor relief.Footnote ³⁴

For those black Providencians who could neither be removed nor would leave voluntarily, the next several years were difficult. William J. Brown recalled: “At that time the colored people had little or no protection. It was thought a disgrace to plead a colored man’s cause, or aid in getting his rights as a citizen.” The community of color continued to organize themselves around the African Union Meeting House, built in 1821, but seemed to face especially bitter hostility in the mid- to late 1820s. In June 1828, would-be rioters again called for a mob to attack another black neighborhood. Styling themselves “Energy and 114 others,” they posted a notice calling for more volunteers to join them in “routing and Clearing out the abominable Gang which now inhabit Olney Lane.” It seems that no large riot occurred at that time. A second major anti-black riot did occur, however, in 1831. This riot, focused on a black enclave called Snowtown, lasted over four nights and saw at least five white rioters killed, four of them by state militia called out to suppress the riot. As alarmed as they were by the white rioters, officials still used the poor laws, as before, to target and warn out as many black Providencians as possible.Footnote ³⁵

As Paul Gilje has shown, anti-black riots were not uncommon in the early republican North. They were often raw expressions of racism, in which whites would destroy black homes and “[drive] the blacks out of the neighborhood.” As I note in this article, riots were not the only means by which whites could drive out part of the black population. In 1824, rioters and town officials effectively—though perhaps not intentionally—worked in tandem. Rioters hurt or destroyed the livelihoods of some black families, while town officials used that lack of livelihood as a reason to warn the families out. Riots could be coupled with an anti-black use of the poor law in order to be more effective in driving people of color away.Footnote ³⁶

It is clear that in the aftermath of the riots, Providence freemen still viewed people of color as, by and large, not “respectable inhabitants.” Other evidence corroborates the fact that Rhode Islanders of color still retained a separate legal status as well. An 1834 Rhode Island Supreme Judicial Court case, Town of Exeter v. Town of Warwick, reexamined the settlement laws as applied to people of color. When Warwick, a town with a well-established community of color, warned out Pruda Tillinghast, to Exeter, where Pruda Tillinghast’s father Braddock had owned land, the town of Exeter protested. Exeter argued that because Braddock Tillinghast had been a slave, he could not have acquired a settlement in Exeter. The Supreme Judicial Court replied that although formerly enslaved, Braddock Tillinghast had left the condition of slavery around the close of the Revolution, and that he had been treated as a taxpaying freeman by the town for more than thirty years, and therefore his daughter “belonged” to Exeter by virtue of her father’s contributions to, and settlement in, that town. Still, the court took pains to note that if it were Braddock Tillinghast himself who was needy, he would have to be supported by his former master’s estate, even as late as 1834. The court wanted to remind the parties involved of the special, and not completely independent, status of freedpeople in the state. Fifty years after emancipation in Rhode Island, the justices still took careful note of the special applications of the poor laws to people of color.Footnote ³⁷

As a matter of public policy, whites and blacks were not treated equally in early republican Rhode Island. Although few statutes explicitly addressed race—with the big exception of the 1822 disenfranchisement of men of color—the poor laws served as a de facto justification and instrument of racial policing. By arguing, without evidence, that blacks were a chief cause of pauperdom in the cities, elites in Providence and elsewhere helped to construct a new anti-black ideology for a new century: the nineteenth. In this way, ideas about paupers could help make race, while the poor laws could help police race. By using race-neutral provisions of the poor laws in racially specific ways, public officials found that they could have legal cover while periodically trying to reduce the African American population. In thought and practice, poor laws were among the foremost tools of public policy on race in the early republican North.