by Jim Murphy
Most people weren’t interested in doing household experiments and instead played it safe by hiding indoors. They kept busy, however. Day after day was spent scrubbing floors, walls, and ceilings. Rooms were whitewashed and then sprinkled with vinegar. Logs burned day and night in fireplaces despite the oppressive heat, and gunpowder and other noxious chemicals were tossed in frequently.
Charles Willson Peale, noted painter, inventor, and collector of natural history objects, shut himself, his wife Betsy, and six of his children inside his large museum-residence. He spent a great deal of time classifying his mineral collection, though he made certain “the house is fumed with Vinegar” and that he performed “about 6 firing of a [musket] within the House” every day. The live birds he had collected as specimens were cooked and eaten, eliminating the need to go to the market.
All went well until Betsy ventured into the garden and, according to Peale, smelled something disagreeable. The next day she fell ill and was confined to bed. Their family doctor had already died of the fever, and his replacement soon caught it also. After this, Peale took over the doctoring chores himself even though he too eventually contracted a mild case of yellow fever. Both would survive, though they never got over the fear these near escapes caused and kept their doors securely bolted against all visitors throughout the plague.
Dr. Benjamin Duffield, a member of the College of Physicians, had his own recommendation for dealing with the fever, which he gladly published in the newspapers for all to read. Fresh dirt should be strewn around every room to a depth of two inches, he wrote, and that dirt should be changed every day. For additional protection, he suggested taking frequent warm baths and inhaling finely ground black pepper.
Ordinary citizens also offered advice and preventives through the town’s newspapers. One writer who signed his name “A Hint” said the cause of the fever was the stinking barrels of rotting garbage routinely found in backyards and basements. He suggested that instead of storing garbage in these containers, the “bones, with some flesh on them, the entrails of poultry, and many other corruptive matters” should be tossed into the street “where the dogs would devour the meat, and the cows the vegetables.”
Like many people in Philadelphia, Charles Willson Peale decided to lock himself and his family inside their house in an attempt to avoid the fever. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)
“W. F.” warned everyone to prepare carefully before venturing out of doors and suggested that “Vinegar of the Four Thieves” be used liberally. For the uneducated. “W. F.” provided a detailed recipe: “Take of Rue, Wormwood and Lavender, of each one handful; put these altogether with a gallon of the best vinegar into a stone pan . . . and let them stand within the warmth of a fire, to infuse for eight days.” This brew was to be combined in quart bottles with three-quarters of an ounce of camphor. Next the reader—assuming he or she has not contracted the disease during the long cooking process—should “rub the temples and loins with this preparation . . . wash the mouth, and snuff up some of it into the nostrils.” “W. F.” was confident that anyone who followed this procedure could wander about town in complete safety.
Midwives, nurses, dentists, barbers, apothecaries, wandering healers, quack physicians, and next-door neighbors offered opinions on the disease, too. Ads appeared in the newspapers hawking Peruvian bark, salt of vinegar, refined camphor, and other concoctions, such as Daffey’s Elixir (which contained so much pure alcohol that a glass of it could put a person into a drunken stupor). The science of medicine at the end of the eighteenth century still relied a great deal on ancient myths and folk remedies. Because of this, people did not automatically reject the opinion of someone simply because that person wasn’t a trained doctor.
Despite all the helpful suggestions offered, people continued to die. Twenty-two on Wednesday; twenty-four on Thursday; twenty on Friday. Benjamin Rush took time out of a busy day to write his wife. He told her about his dead and dying patients, and about the neighbors who had abandoned their homes and businesses. “Our neighborhood will be desolate in a day or two,” he concluded solemnly.
During times of plague, quack doctors always appeared to sell their “cures” to frightened citizens. This mid-eighteenth-century engraving shows one hawking his medicines to villagers in northern Europe. (THE COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS OF PHILADELPHIA)
Philadelphia was a city in panic and flight. It did not even help when Mayor Clarkson acted on another recommendation from the College of Physicians. The tolling bells that had so thoroughly terrified everyone were ordered to remain still. The great silence that followed did little to comfort those left behind. It was too much like the eternal silence of the grave.
From The Federal Gazette, September 14, 1793. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)
CHAPTER FOUR
Confusion, Distress, and Utter Desolation
In fact, government of every kind was almost wholly vacated.
—MATHEW CAREY, NOVEMBER 1793
Friday, August 30. The deathly quiet of this Friday morning was shattered by the sharp, echoing boom of a cannon. Several minutes went by, and then another boom rattled windows and shook houses in the city. Under orders from Mayor Clarkson, a militia company from nearby Fort Mifflin was hauling a small cannon along the streets of Philadelphia, stopping every few yards to fire off another blast.
Actually, the cannon wasn’t Clarkson’s idea. Governor Mifflin and the state legislature had sent him an urgent note insisting that “gunpowder, and other salutory preparations, be flashed through the streets” as the College of Physicians had suggested.
Clarkson did not think these “salutory preparations” would do much more than scare citizens, but he knew the legislature and the governor were in a panic. On August 27 a much depleted and very nervous Pennsylvania legislature (only ten of eighteen senators and thirty-six of seventy-two representatives) had arrived at the state house to begin their work. Two days later unease turned to fear when they discovered that something terrible had taken place during the night. Their young doorkeeper, Joseph Fry, had died in his bed of the fever.
Fry’s rooms were in the west wing of the building, not very far from where the senators and representatives met. One reason they had assembled was to find a way to reassure the citizens of Pennsylvania about the fever, but the fact that the fever had entered their building—that Fry had breathed the same air they were breathing now—unsettled them.
The speaker of the senate, Samuel Powel, sought to reassure his fellow legislators by getting Dr. Rush’s advice on how to avoid the disease. “If you can enable me to allay [their concerns],” Powel told his friend, then “the public Business will probably proceed.” Rush was so busy tending patients that he could only scribble on the back of Powel’s note,“I know of but one certain preventative of the disorder, & that is to keep at a distance from infected persons and places.”
This was not comforting news to the governor or the forty-six other men crowded into the state house. In the days that followed, the two houses, with the urgings of the governor, rushed through a series of hastily written resolutions. One recommended improvements to the public health office, while another suggested that the fever had been imported from the West Indies by French immigrants. They also rammed through a quarantine act. Then the state legislature handed over all emergency powers to the governor and adjourned until December. As Assemblyman Jacob Hiltzheimer noted in his diary, “The members decline remaining in the city.”
The governor then turned the entire problem over to Mayor Clarkson, directing him to halt ships from the West Indies for inspection and to do everything possible “to allay the public inquietude, and effectually remove its cause.” He did not tell Clarkson how he was to do any of this and did not grant him any special emergency powers or funds. The next day, Governor Mifflin claimed he wasn’t feeling well and headed for his country home far from the fouled air of the state house. In effect, the government of Pennsylvania had closed its doors as tightly as any of P
hiladelphia’s shopkeepers had.
A front view of the state house and Congress Hall prior to the outbreak of yellow fever. (THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA)
Mayor Clarkson, meanwhile, faced mounting problems. The mayor showed up at city hall every day to learn what new crisis had developed, meet visitors, and consider options. But there was little he could do. Every day more and more city officials failed to show up at work: judges and clerks, aldermen and secretaries.
Orders had been issued to clean up the streets and patrol the wharves, but few people were around to carry out such orders. One day thirty ships arrived, thirteen of them from the West Indies, but no one was available to stop them from docking or discharging passengers. The bodies of the indigent dead were carted to the potter’s field and dumped, but no gravediggers were there to bury them.
Mayor Clarkson’s greatest concern was the mounting number of penniless people in Philadelphia. As well-off citizens closed their businesses and fled the city, they left behind thousands of individuals without any source of income. When these people became ill, they had no money to pay for food, medicine, a physician, or a nurse.
The city almshouse on Spruce Street was jammed with over three hundred paupers, while private institutions, such as the Friends’ Alms House, were also filled to capacity. Desperately ill paupers were wandering the streets, or abandoned in their homes with no one to care for them. Even the Pennsylvania Hospital barred fever victims, because it feared that the crowded condition of its building would allow the disease to spread wildly.
Adding to Philadelphia’s woes was a new problem. Many nearby farmers were refusing to bring food into the diseased city; the little food that did make it to market was extremely expensive, sometimes costing two or three times as much as it had before the fever struck.
Soon after Mayor Clarkson heard Rush’s news that yellow fever had reappeared, he tried to address the problem of indigent individuals. He summoned the “Overseers and Guardians of the Poor,” the only official group then dealing with the poor of Philadelphia and surrounding areas. Six Overseers managed the almshouse and were responsible for what went on inside that building, while fourteen Guardians took care of those in need outside the almshouse.
The situation was grave, Clarkson told the Overseers and Guardians. Sick paupers had to be gotten off the streets and out of the alleyways. Not only did they frighten those who came upon them, but they might very well be spreading the disease.
The Guardians left the meeting resolved to act, but the results demonstrated how completely disorganized the city had become. The Guardians went immediately to Ricketts’ Circus at Twelfth Street and High and seized the building. Until John Bill Ricketts had taken his show to Manhattan for the summer, his circus had been one of the city’s most celebrated entertainment spots and the showplace for his equestrian talents. Latin teacher James Hardie described Ricketts’ Circus as “a place to dispel the gloom of the thoughtful, exercise the lively activity of the young and gay, or to relax the minds of the sedentary or industrious trader.”
Seven sick persons were scooped up from the streets and deposited at Ricketts’. The only trouble was that no one could be found to care for them. The sick lay in the stiflingly hot building unattended, calling out for water, moaning pitifully, and vomiting on themselves. Mathew Carey took up the story: “Of these, one crawled out on the commons, where he died. . . . Two died in the circus.” Two bodies were removed, but “the other lay in a state of putrefaction for above forty eight hours.”
Ricketts’ was located in a quiet residential area many blocks away from the docks where the pestilence had first struck. The pitiful sounds coming from the circus and the sight of dead fever victims did not exactly “dispel the gloom” of the households nearby. They demanded that the sick be moved and the corpse be disposed of properly—and they threatened to burn the place down if action wasn’t taken quickly.
Ricketts’ Circus, as it appeared in 1797. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)
The Guardians sent a hauler to remove the foul body, but the driver couldn’t get it into the coffin by himself. A brave servant girl noticed the man’s trouble and, Carey continued, “offered her services, provided he would not inform the family with whom she lived (else she would be at once dismissed). She accordingly helped him put the body into the coffin, which was by then crawling with maggots, and in such a state as to be ready to fall in pieces.”
Ricketts’ was clearly not the best place to care for seriously ill patients, so the Guardians decided to find a building in a more isolated area. They chose a large, unoccupied mansion called Bush Hill, located on a rolling hill about two and a half miles northwest of the city.
Neither Mayor Clarkson nor the Guardians had the legal right to take control of Bush Hill. But the owner, William Hamilton, was living in England at the time, and his caretaker, Thomas Boyles, could do little to stop them. Those still alive at Ricketts’ were moved to Bush Hill, and other desperately ill people followed. All eleven rooms, plus the hallways and staircase landings, were quickly jammed full.
Four doctors were chosen to care for these patients. Two of them became ill shortly after being appointed, while the sickness in the city consumed the time of the other two. They did show up at Bush Hill every so often, but they never established a regular schedule for visits.
Meanwhile, volunteers were called to help at Bush Hill, but only one responded, a second-year medical student named Charles Caldwell. He found conditions at Bush Hill “limited, crude and insufficient.” The place had been taken over so hastily and with so little attention to medical needs that it was “a likeness in miniature of the city at the time, a scene of deep confusion and distress, not to say of utter desolation.”
This engraving of Bush Hill was done in 1793 to accompany an article about William Hamilton that appeared in New York Magazine. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)
And then the situation got even worse. “Shortly after this,” Carey wrote, “the guardians of the poor for the city . . . ceased the performance of their duties; nearly the whole of them having removed out of the city.” Only three remained to see to the mounting problems in Philadelphia and to administer Bush Hill. Of the three who stayed, two died of the fever, while the other became too sick to do any sort of work.
As all this was taking place, deaths in the city increased, from nineteen on September 1 to forty-two on September 8. Whole families were swept away in a matter of days. David Flickwir and five members of his family perished, as did Samuel Weatherby and his wife and their four children. Godfrey Gebler lost eleven family members. Many of these people died, Carey pointed out, “without a human being to hand them a drink of water, to administer medicines, or to perform any charitable office for them.”
Every morning found bodies lying in the streets. Every day a new horror story surfaced. Carey told of a pregnant woman who went into labor even while “her husband and two children lay dead in the same room with her.” No midwife attended her, and no relative or neighbor gave her comfort. She managed to crawl to a window and get a passerby’s attention. “With his assistance, she was delivered of the child, which died in a few minutes, as did the mother.”
By the end of the first week of September, the yellow fever epidemic had driven the state government from Philadelphia and crippled the city’s administration. It then struck at the federal government with a vengeance. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and his wife fell ill with the fever on September 5, and left the city. Six clerks of the Treasury Department also contracted the disease, leaving just one, Joshua Dawson, at his post.
Attorney General Edmund Randolph was away negotiating an Indian treaty, and his department fell into disarray almost immediately. The post office ceased doing business when three of its clerks grew ill. Thomas Jefferson, meanwhile, had submitted his resignation (which was to take effect on December 31) because of Washington’s neutrality policy and went home to his estate in Virginia. Nearly everyone
, Washington observed with consternation and annoyance, had “matters of private concernment which required them to be absent.”
The president recognized the mortal danger federal employees faced and urged department heads to move their offices from Philadelphia to Germantown, some five miles away. A few days later Washington himself began preparing to leave for Virginia.
“It was my wish to have continued [in Philadelphia] longer,” he wrote to his personal secretary, Tobias Lear, “but as Mrs. Washington was unwilling to leave me surrounded by the malignant fever wch. Prevailed, I could not think of hazarding her . . . any longer by my continuing in the City the house in which we lived being, in a manner, blockaded, by the disorder and was becoming every day more and more fatal.”
On the morning of September 10, George and Martha Washington headed south toward Mount Vernon. He planned to be away from the seat of the federal government for fifteen days or so and did not take any official papers with him. In the weeks ahead, he would postpone his return several times, as reports reached him that the epidemic was growing worse.
No contemporary illustrations of Philadelphia’s yellow fever epidemic exist, but scenes similar to this one from a cholera epidemic in France must have been very common in Philadelphia in 1793. (THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART/THE WILLIAM H. HELFAND COLLECTION)
Without realizing it, the president set a constitutional crisis in motion when he exited the city. Many people, Thomas Jefferson and future president James Madison included, felt that Washington could not legally convene Congress anywhere but within the city limits of Philadelphia. Without Congress to pass laws and appropriate money, the workings of the federal government would eventually come to a grinding halt.