How America has changed on paupers

How we have changed this country over time. Lets take the subject of welfare. There has been a need for welfare since the time that this country was started, but not as we know it today

Did you know that the “Common Council” of People of Colonial Albany in 1799 posted a list of the needy and those who was in need of maintenance?

Even in our liberal state of Massachusetts this took place in 1833:

Towns are bound by law to support, comfortably, all such of their inhabitants as may from time to time fall into distress and stand in need of relief, and to continue such support so long as it may be needed; and during its continuance they are entitled to the reasonable services of those supported by them. . . . The rights and duties of towns and paupers are correlative. While the town supports the pauper, the pauper is bound to labor for the town. But when the support becomes unnecessary, the right to control the labor ceases.

As late as the 1880s, in some locales, paupers continued to be legally bound to serve the town which was supporting them. In 1884, for example, Connecticut towns were still farming out their paupers and still assigning the rights to their labor. In Groton, Connecticut, "the keeper of the town poor" still operated "under a written contract received an annual compensation for three years of $ 2,300 and for an additional term of three years the annual sum of $ 2,800 and the services of the paupers during both periods. http://www.sou.edu/polisci/pavlich/steinfeld_suffrage.htm

I can assure you that this kind of thing would not happen today. Can you just see what the ACLU would do if our city council would list the names of people on our welfare rolls today. Can you see us making these people even do a lick of work? Something to think about.