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Abstract: Early Republic communities were represented by officers of the poor law operated almshouses, distributed relief, and collaborated with other local authorities to implement the state poor laws. The scale of poverty experienced in the early American republic, when the rates of destitution and level of need for high welfare budgets were a constant preoccupation of lawmakers and philanthropists, points to the importance of this singular figure of the overseer. Working within a highly mobile population adjusting to the nascent system of wage labor in this period, overseers tracked people experiencing poverty across community lines. Overseers of the Poor acted as agents of the state writ large, operating at local and municipal levels to implement the logics of state laws relating to citizenship and poverty.
Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan (2024) studied this question.