by Paul Collins
Back in Manhattan, New Yorkers like Levi Weeks and his fellow tavern idlers mused over A.B.’s letter, rolled up their newspapers to swat away the July mosquitoes, and wondered what on earth it could be that was killing Philadelphians.
BUT THE murmurs were getting louder. Unmarried young women like Elma and Hope who stayed in the city were, perhaps, courting death—and yet neither had the wherewithal to leave town. For a carpenter like Levi, there was simply too much work to be had during the summer months to leave—and, after all, the papers assured them that it was safe to stay.
“Idle tales,” scoffed one newspaper at yellow fever reports. “Our citizens may rest easy about this fever at present.”
And if they could not rest easy? Then, the editors suggested, they should at least keep a discreet silence. “A false report on that subject,” they warned, “ought to be considered a calumny punishable by law.” Yelling “Fire!” in a theater was nothing compared to yelling “Fever!” in a crowded city: It crippled trade for months. In its disastrous epidemic of 1793, when a tenth of its population had died, Philadelphia had misled other cities for weeks in a desperate bid to avoid quarantine. New York had done exactly the same in its own epidemics. And to stroll along Manhattan’s docks that July in 1799 was to see just what was at stake: Wharves packed with cargo vessels, many named for the sturdy women the owners had left at home. In the dock at that moment there was a ship named Sister, the brig Two Sisters, and the schooner Four Sisters; there was also a Louisa, a Bertha—and Betsey, Abigail, Lydia, Charlotte, Cornelia, and Prudence—and not one but three ships christened Mary. You could haggle over everything from six-pound cannons to a rather perilously matched cargo of a hundred crates of Bursley crockery and three thousand Stourbridge bricks.
But as the month wore on, the news of yellow fever watches in other cities on the Atlantic seaboard grew ominously quiet. Philadelphia’s board of health, it was said, had stopped issuing notices of the week’s burials—and had stopped talking to New York at all about their mortality records. Over on Greenwich Street, a seventeen-year-old merchant’s daughter, Elizabeth de Hart Bleecker, would be one of the first to find out why.
There’s a Negro man dying outside, she told her sister one Friday.
Bearing water that the prostrate man was whispering for, they cautiously approached the shivering mass lying in their back alley. He was a sailor on the Havannah, he said, and had just landed a few days earlier. The girls quickly sent for a doctor, who immediately had the man borne off to quarantine on Staten Island. The symptoms were unmistakable and horrifying: As one of the fever’s very first chroniclers described its victims with brutal directness, “they void and vomit blood.”
These were the fever’s stigmata: sores and blood, seeping from the ears and eyes and orifices—even from the pores of the skin itself—and a loathsome black vomit that resembled coffee grounds. They were the signs of almost certain death within days, if not hours. Victims became delirious with fever and bled from eyes stained a frightening yellow.
A few held out hope that the cases were isolated: The editor of the New-York Mercantile Advertiser, zealous as always on behalf of merchants, insisted that Philadelphia’s mortality rate was “by no means alarming.” Why should New York worry? But travelers arriving at the port told a different story: The yellow fever was now in Providence, it was in Newburyport, and it was indeed in Philadelphia. Though Levi and Elma and Hope couldn’t leave town, the mistress of their boardinghouse could and did. By August, even the New-York Mercantile Advertiser hardly blamed her or anyone else with the means for fleeing the city. In fact, at that point the paper’s editor had nothing at all to say on the matter—for he himself was dead from yellow fever.
BY SEPTEMBER 11, 1799, THE DEATHS IN MANHATTAN WERE GETTING to William Laight. He sat down that day to mark out his journal, a humble affair with columns lined in by his own hand, where each day, at 8 A.M., 3 P.M., and 8 P.M., the Greenwich Street merchant faithfully recorded the wind speed, direction, and temperature. It was a peculiar fascination, one that few others followed. But now the inexorable and mysterious cycle of fever stared back at him in those figures. On July 3, a clear day of 72 degrees and southerly winds, there’d been the first fateful hint: “Rumour of Yellow Fever at Philadelphia,” he’d penned into a margin. Days after showers on July 9, the fever struck New York. Within a couple of weeks dry heat had set in—“Dog days begin,” he’d written on the twenty-ninth—and within five days, the fever disappeared. Then, on August 10, “A shower in the night—Rumour of Yellow Fever.” It was the same mysterious and deadly cycle every time: showers followed by warm weather, an ominous pause of a few days, and then …
September was the worst.
“Above ten have daily died of the Fever during this Month.… Oh, oh!!!!!!!!!!!!,” Laight wrote miserably in his journal.
The lucky ones had already left—“near 1/3 of the inhabitants have removed,” he admitted in one annotation. Entire newspaper columns filled with notices of “Autumn Residences” of those “removed for the sickly season.” One local observed, “As soon as this dreadful scourge makes its appearance in New York the inhabitants shut up their shops and fly from their houses into the country. Those who cannot go far, on account of business, remove to Greenwich [Village].”
Manhattan was still small enough that Greenwich Village was indeed something of a separate village. Two miles north of City Hall, and reached only after passing through meadows and pasturage, it was still remote enough that residents addressed their letters from “Greenwich, NY.” Its sandy soil had good drainage, which many suspected had something to do with its relative freedom from feverish miasma, though nobody was quite sure why.
William Laight lived farther south on Greenwich Street, in a neighborhood still deemed less hazardous than the docksides during the fever. But it was an uneasy compromise. No Manhattan street was entirely safe, not least because householders took to firing off muskets and cannons, in the desperate notion that the percussive shock would destroy the miasma. Guns didn’t kill the fever, but—after one twelve-year-old boy wickedly loaded balls into a pistol—they did manage to kill a little girl as she stood in her father’s shop.
Others reached in desperation for patent medicines. “Very efficacious in preventing the yellow fever,” promised Lee’s True and Genuine Bilious Pills—which, conveniently, were also a sovereign remedy “after a debauch by eating or drinking.” For those who followed the fashions of Europe, there were Four Herb Pills by “Dr. Angelis, of Italy”—a place where “sometimes the same Malignant Fever prevails.” More patriotic sorts had New York Anti-Bilious Pills, which also brashly promised to cure “asthma, gout, pains in the head, fainting, worms, excruciating pains, frequent vomiting, bloody flux, piles, palsey, apoplexy, and last of all consumption.”
But among Manhattanites, the suspicion had formed that their many ills would not find true relief in pills or balms, and that any man who actually solved the problem might indeed deserve to be richly rewarded. Laight had closely allied himself to local political mastermind Aaron Burr, who was undertaking an ambitious project that would save the city—and, perhaps, their Republican Party.
The solution, they believed, was in running water.
LEVI WEEKS’S landlady hadn’t stayed around to find out if they were right. Instead, Mrs. Catharine Ring was being jarred and jostled, enduring the rutted path out of the city with all the patience her Quaker faith could muster. The coach’s carriage seating literally used a suspension: It rested on leather belts strapped to the frame, sending every shock slamming through the compartment. More miserably, her sister Hope and her cousin Elma were not with her, even though they were some of her closest family; Hope Sands had grown up with her in upstate New York, and Elma Sands—the offspring of a single mother, her father long departed for South Carolina—had now been living with the Rings for three years, working in the family millinery when her precarious health allowed. The three women were all nearly the same age, i
n their early twenties, and Hope and Elma would have been welcome company for Mrs. Ring. But help was needed at the boardinghouse—and like so many others, Elma had been sickly a good part of that summer. It was possible that she simply couldn’t withstand the slow, jolting carriage ride over rough roads into the countryside. And so, with the meadows and old Dutch farmsteads of Manhattan receding behind her, Mrs. Ring left Levi, Elma, and Hope in a city burning with fever.
The running of the boardinghouse, and the vital income that it produced for the Ring family, would be left to her husband, Elias. He was not the most practical man, it had to be admitted. First there was the flour mill he’d tried with his friend Caleb in upstate New York, a fifty-four-acre spread in Dutchess County on the worryingly named Murderer’s Creek. That arrangement hadn’t quite worked out. Next Elias had brought his wife, her sister, and her cousin to the city; he first tried to make a go of it as a mechanic and an inventor, then at running a general store, and then at running a millinery. Now he was stuck in the city, in charge of a boardinghouse that even his own wife didn’t want to stay in anymore.
The Rings did not demand that the remaining boarders abide by their Quaker religion, but they expected them to remain dignified in their life and labors. And labor they did: Levi left the house each morning for his brother’s work sites, trailed by his apprentice, William Anderson. Even with the yearly fever, the city was booming: The annexation of Loyalist property and the rebuilding of entire city blocks had made Manhattan a place of wild growth and speculation. The stock exchange that was run from the Tontine Coffee House ruled over the rise and fall of fortunes in shipbuilding, furs, and timber, and with this new wealth came new mansions.
Lagging behind the other workmen was the newest boarder, a recently immigrated English merchant named Richard David Croucher. Dapper and beginning to gray as he approached the age of forty, his tall and thin form could be seen on the streets as he set out to haggle over cloth and linens. Back at the boardinghouse, he’d talk animatedly to proprietor Elias Ring and the three unmarried ladies of the house—cousins Hope and Elma, and another boarder, named Margaret Clark. Croucher couldn’t help but keep a watchful eye on them; as did, it seemed, the other men in the house.
WITH THE streets half-emptied by the fever, Croucher proceeded over to the market daily. He made frequent outings for food, having insisted on being a roomer but not a boarder at the Ring house: He paid each week for his room and fireplace but did not sit at meals in the dining room. When he was in the mood to spend, there was always roast joint at the tavern, or dubious local specialties like Humbert’s bread and Aunt Roach’s pies. For everything else, there were the city markets, where you could buy plate-sized oysters and leeks, and—if Hebraically inclined—could stop off at a kosher stall placarded JEW’S MEAT.
To a well-dressed Englishman like Croucher—an expert in cloth, and the kind of man who would keep his collars stayed and wig powdered even in the summertime—walking up Greenwich to the market was a sartorial nightmare. Americans didn’t appear to care about clothing in the withering summer months. Girls went barefoot in the street, or kicked off their shoes and walked in stockings, perhaps inspired by the newly fashionable peasant wear of the French Revolution. Men stripped down to cotton frocks, like sleepwalkers in their nightclothes; that some still donned their powdered wigs made it more of a travesty. But worst of all was the alarming appearance of vagrants—dirty, disheveled, even worse dressed than the servants, and peering hungrily into vacant homes.
“Our streets are filled with straggling fellows,” the New-York Daily Advertiser complained on September 19, 1799, right after Croucher had moved in. “Under the pretence of begging, [they] are no doubt making observations on houses and stores, to commit nightly depredations on those that are left unoccupied.”
It was true: Neither wealth nor piety shielded residents. That week no less than Willett Hicks, a rotund merchant nicknamed “the Bishop of the Quaker Church,” found his Pearl Street shop broken into, and a iron chest carried off. Inside was a gold watch and dozens of pieces of his monogrammed silver—everything from spoons and tongs to teapots and milk pitchers. Then the nearby Flood and Tracy grocery shop was raided. Another local burgher, John Sickles, happened to walk past his darkened clothing store at midnight and out of habit tried each of its three doors; the third unexpectedly swung open to reveal thieves robbing him of fifty vests, and he was promptly stabbed in the face for his trouble. When the thieves were pursued back to a hideout, confederates were found melting silver into crude ingots that still had bits of stolen spoons sticking out.
As each night fell and the city burned with fever outside, residents barred their doors to thieves and waited. The wakeful boarders of 208 Greenwich could hear … something. Unable to sleep in the humid evening air, Levi’s apprentice might have been the first to notice the hushed movements across the creaking wooden floors, the bedroom doors locked in the night, the stirrings in the very frame of the building. Something could be discerned through the walls. Not the rifling of any thief. It was the sound of two people—and not the sound of Quaker chastity.
But who?
COME BACK SOON, Elias Ring wrote to his wife in the first days of October. I miss you.
It was a hopeless request: The city was still far too dangerous. Yellow fever deaths were marching up even the formerly safe environs of Greenwich Street; William Laight had interrupted his weather log’s tally of deaths to ominously note by one entry: “Cassie, our neighbor.” A laborer a few houses farther up came next, and then a cart driver. By October 7, 1799, when a tenant died at a boardinghouse on 189 Greenwich, the inhabitants of 208 could feel death closing in. Hiding inside and peering out the window hardly brought any comfort: Pigeons with strange gangrenous sores had started appearing on the city streets.
“In this pestilential period,” one local paper mused grimly, “scarcely a species of animal escapes a portion of evil.”
Doctors scrambled to find a treatment. The eminent David Hosack confidently presented a sweating cure; and then, as his patients died writhing in perspiration, he quietly withdrew it. Then again, he could hardly compete with the cure promoted by the most popular physician in the country, Elisha Perkins. The inventor of “metallic tractors”—three-inch alloy rods that could “draw off the noxious electrical fluid that lay at the root of suffering”—Dr. Perkins had moved into the city and promptly set up shop over on John Street. Perkins had sold thousand of metal tractors, and his customers for the magic rods included George Washington; now Manhattanites would be blessed by this same doctor’s genius.
“Having obtained from various experiments satisfactory evidence that the Yellow Fever is within control,” Dr. Perkins advertised, “it is his intention, if he finds suitable encouragement, to continue his residence in this city.” Alas, he found neither. Within weeks, he was bundled into a winding sheet and sent back to Connecticut, as lifeless as his wonder-working chunks of metal.
Nothing seemed to work.
“To pour buckets of cold water on the head of a man … Three years ago this experiment was the vogue!!!” complained Noah Webster. “Copious bleeding has had its day. But [now] mercury seems to be the favorite.… Where one patient survives its effect, ten proved fatal.”
The only real relief, in this as in every other outbreak for the past century, would come from the heavens. “First frost,” noted William Laight in his logbook on October 18, 1799. Those two simple words held a vast sense of relief; for now, as the fall leaves turned bright, the fever surely would end. Word spread out into the countryside, and within a week the city’s residents had begun to reappear, hale and rested from their months away. “General movement back,” Laight dutifully wrote down in his logbook.
The summer’s refugees discovered a city that was now rather the worse for wear. Merchants found their cellars smashed into, and trunks of merchandise opened and stolen. An abandoned flock of sheep, their owner likely dead, milled around by New Street. In front of the Ton
tine Coffee House, two cannons were simply dropped on the ground, perhaps by a fleeing homeowner unable to blast the miasma out of his backyard.
But there were hopeful signs, too. Full columns of notices in the newspaper ran under the heading RETURNS. Mr. Fontbonne posted his yearly announcement of trees for sale for fall planting—PEACHES, PLUMBS, GREEN GAGES &C.—and John Street burbled with the sound of girls being sent back to Mr. Reed’s tutorials in English and geography. The city swelled back to life; soon the autumn harvest poured into the market squares, and Long Island cod landed heavily on the docks.
The frosty morning air also hinted at the coming winter. After a summer of gouging dying families on the price of coffins and nails, speculators were now buying up local supplies of wood and sticking residents for an extortionate six dollars a cord. Back at the boardinghouse, Richard Croucher prepared for the winter fabric buying season, while Elma, ailing some days but not others, often remained curled up in her bed on the second floor. Drops of laudanum helped with her pain, though not enough—“I should not be afraid to drink it full,” she’d tease after taking a few ineffectual drops from the medicine vial. Levi looked in on Elma when he could, but he was putting in long hours at his brother’s work sites, knowing the building season would soon slow.
The humbler folk of the city were already stopping work to celebrate the season. The end of the pestilence had come just in time for the city’s Irish immigrants to indulge in their peculiar love of Halloween. Living down by the muddy docks, they’d been hit worst of all by the fever. Toasting loudly and singing lilting airs, they gathered that evening to roast nuts and apples over open fires, and drank whiskey in the graveyard as the autumn night of All Hallow’s Eve closed over them and their fellow Manhattanites.
They had survived.
THE CITY’S RECOVERY WAS FAST—A LITTLE TOO FAST, SOME worried.