by Jim Murphy
Robert Morris lent George Washington his smaller home (on the left) while the federal government was situated in Philadelphia. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)
Two days after the president left, and even before he reached his Virginia home, a meteorite fell out of the morning sky and thudded into Third Street. In a city that was fast falling apart, it was seen as an omen that even worse things were yet to come.
From The Federal Gazette, September 19, 1793. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)
CHAPTER FIVE
“It Was Our Duty”
The Lord was pleased to strengthen us, and remove all fear from us, and disposed our hearts to be as useful as possible.
—ABSALOM JONES AND RICHARD ALLEN, JANUARY 1794
Thursday, September 5. It was clear that the fever was winning. People were still streaming from the city in droves; houses, businesses, and shops were closed and dark; the sick, dying, and dead were everywhere to be seen. Amid all this a remarkable meeting took place at the Free African Society on Fifth Street, just south of Walnut.
The Free African Society was founded in 1787, the first organization in America created by blacks for blacks. Its purpose was to help members who were destitute and to provide care for widows and fatherless children. On that Thursday the elders of the society assembled to consider something extraordinary: Would they use their association members and their skills to help their struggling white neighbors?
A few days before, a letter had arrived from Benjamin Rush urging the society to help nurse the sick and attend to the dead. One reason they should come forward, Rush contended, was that God had seen fit to grant blacks a special resistance to the dreaded disease.
In reality, this wasn’t true. A small number of blacks who had grown up in either Africa or the West Indies had had the disease as children and survived. Through this encounter with the fever their blood automatically produced antibodies that either fought off the yellow fever virus entirely or reduced its impact on the individual significantly. Most blacks in Philadelphia didn’t have this natural immunity and would suffer the ravages of the fever along with whites. But early in September the vast majority of sufferers Rush saw and heard about were white. Rush truly believed what he told the elders.
Most of those gathered at the meeting had been slaves at one time and knew how oppressive some of the whites around them could be. And while Philadelphia had approximately 3,000 free blacks, there were still over 200 blacks being kept as slaves. They were also well aware that the opportunities routinely granted to white citizens—to rise in business and politics—were still being denied them. In 1793 over 50 percent of Philadelphia’s blacks were live-in domestic workers, doing the cooking, cleaning, laundering, and child caring for better-off whites.
This August advertisement for a runaway slave was just one of many reminders to free blacks in Philadelphia that their status in the United States was still quite precarious. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)
Absalom Jones gazes out resolutely in this 1810 portrait done by Charles Willson Peale’s son Raphaelle. (THE DELAWARE ART MUSEUM, GIFT OF THE ABSALOM JONES SCHOOL)
Every one of them had suffered in one way or another at the hands of whites, some of them in appalling ways. Two of the elders, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, had once been worshipers at St. George Methodist Church, a congregation composed of both whites and blacks. The blacks had actually helped erect the church building, and Allen was a preacher popular among all members.
Then one day as Jones knelt in prayer at the altar, white trustees grabbed him and ordered him to sit in the back of the church. Jones was a large man and strong enough to shake off his attackers, but he did not respond to his mishandling with force of his own. In a calm voice, he told the trustees, “Wait until the prayer is over, and I will trouble you no more.” Black parishioners then walked out of St. George’s, and Jones and Allen each established a separate church of his own.
As recently as that very summer they had been shown their position in the Philadelphia society that was now pleading for their help. Several black leaders had attempted to raise $3,000 in order to build a new church, only to discover that few whites were willing to contribute. But when the refugees from Santo Domingo began arriving, those same people were eager to hand over more than $15,000 in donations for the new arrivals’ relief. Adding to the insult was the fact that many of these refugees had brought along their own slaves.
If any group of individuals had reason to ignore the sufferings of their neighbors, the elders of the Free African Society certainly did. Yet they did not hesitate. They were, as Jones and Allen would write later, “sensible that it was our duty to do all the good we could to our fellow mortals.”
The elders went out that very day in pairs, visiting houses around the city. Jones and Allen went together and immediately discovered a house in tiny Emsley’s Alley where the mother was already dead, the father was dying, and two small children huddled together, frightened and hungry. They sent word to city hall and then went to another and another and another house. “We visited upwards of twenty families that day,” they recalled. “They were scenes of woe indeed!”
Volunteers from the Free African Society were the first to enter the homes of most fever victims. What they saw was burned forever into their memories. “Many whose friends, and relations had left them,” Jones and Allen said, “died unseen, and unassisted. We . . . found them in various situations, some laying on the floor, as bloody as if they had been dipt in it, without any appearance of their having had, even a drink of water for their relief; others laying on a bed with their clothes on, as if they had come in fatigued, and lain down to rest; some appeared, as if they had fallen down dead on the floor.”
The next day, Jones and Allen went to Mayor Clarkson to ask how their group could be of help. To say that Clarkson was grateful for their aid is an understatement; everyone else the mayor had counted on to help battle the spreading fever—leaders in the business community, church groups, elected representatives, and civil servants—had fled in terror. The Free African Society was the one and only group to step forward and offer its services.
After this, whenever anyone requested help, the society sent a volunteer as quickly as possible. No set fee was charged for their services, which might include nursing the individual, cleaning up the sickroom, washing clothes and linens, going out to buy food and medicine, and caring for other family members. If an individual could afford to pay a dollar or two for a full day’s care, the money was accepted. But since the people they helped were usually poor, the black nurses often stayed and helped a person for no money at all.
Within a few days, a problem developed. Demand for in-house care far exceeded the number of nurses available. Neighbors who could afford it soon began bidding against each other for the services of available nurses, until there were times when a nurse’s fee would reach four or five dollars a day. This was a great deal of money when you consider that the average yearly income in Philadelphia then was around $200.
Virtually everyone supplying goods and services to the city had raised their rates, explaining that shortages of items and the general danger forced up their costs. Yet it was only the black nurses who were openly criticized. This anger eventually led to black nurses being abused verbally in the streets, and, in a few cases, male nurses were attacked physically.
These complaints made their way to Clarkson, though he was misled to believe that the black nurses were going about town demanding exorbitant rates for their work. It was only when he met with Jones and Allen to discuss the situation that he learned it was the white citizens who were bidding up the prices.
Some chimney sweeps and a yapping dog have gathered around a young woman who has dropped her pie on Lombard Street. Lombard Street was located in South Philadelphia and was the main artery of the Cedar Ward black community at the end of the eighteenth century. (THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA)
The mayor knew he couldn’t or
der black nurses to refuse any fee over a dollar. If he forced them to hold down their costs, he would have to do the same with every merchant, laborer, and farmer doing business in town. How much food would be brought to market if he insisted that only preplague prices be charged? How many carters would haul away diseased corpses? What was happening with the black nurses was a classic example of demand exceeding supply, resulting in higher prices, and nothing more. So Clarkson immediately issued a statement expressing his complete support for the efforts of the society. He also had an ad published in the newspapers that admonished citizens to cease bothering the black nurses as they went about town to their work.
Once this controversy was put aside, members of the Free African Society patrolled the streets daily, rounding up the ill and finding shelter for homeless children. If word came to them that a fever victim was shut up at home without anyone to care for him or her, Jones and Allen sent a representative to investigate. The most seriously ill were taken by cart to Bush Hill; the dead were placed in coffins and hauled to the graveyards.
To do this sort of work, Jones and Allen had to mobilize an army of helpers. Exactly how many blacks were involved in the relief effort is not known. They stepped forward to save lives and relieve suffering, and did so without thought of receiving individual acclaim. We know that Jones and Allen were in direct contact with approximately three hundred blacks and that there were far more black nurses (both male and female) than white nurses.
The names of most of these nurses have been lost to history. In their book Jones and Allen mention William Gray, who organized and supervised the burying of the dead, and Cyrus Bustill, who helped recruit volunteers, as well as Sampson, Sarah Bass, Mary Scott, and Caesar Cranchal. Named and unnamed, they were noticed moving about the city, performing the tasks other shunned.
The vomit that yellow fever patients spewed forth, as well as the blood and offensive odors, were particular horrors to most people, even those medically trained. Young Dr. Isaac Cathrall found these bodily discharges disgusting: “The matter ejected [from the stomach] was of a dark color, resembling coffee grounds, sometimes mixed with blood; great flatulency; haemorrhages from different parts of the body; tongue frequently covered over with blood . . . ; urine very offensive.”
Not only were these evacuations and odors loathsome, they were considered dangerous. Dr. Cathrall knew a nurse “who I am almost certain received the infection from a patient . . . for the matter thrown up by vomiting emitted a peculiarly foetid smell, which affected her soon after she had carried it out of the room.”
Dr. Cathrall flatly refused to touch the vomit of a patient for any reason, as did most other people; the black nurses, however, had no choice. Their job, after all, was to care for and clean up the patients.
Richard Allen, as he appeared several years after the 1793 yellow fever epidemic. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)
Twenty-one-year-old Isaac Heston was quick to appreciate the work being done by Philadelphia’s blacks. “I dont know what the people would do,” he said in his letter to his brother, “if it was not for the Negroes, as they are the Principal nurses.”
This battalion of heroes ventured out into the stricken city every day without fail. “Thus were many of the nurses circumstanced,” Jones and Allen would note, “alone, until the patient died, then called away to another scene of distress, and thus have been a week or ten days left to do the best they could without sufficient rest, many of them having some of their dearest connexions sick at the time and suffering for want while their husband, wife, father, mother have been engaged in the service of the white people.”
As the days wore on, they took more and more of the burden of caring for the city’s ill. When the men hauling victims to Bush Hill reported the appalling conditions there, the Free African Society sent nurses. With most carpenters gone from the city, the supply of coffins soon ran out. The society set about purchasing boards and constructing coffins.
And then the inevitable happened. Traveling through the diseased city, venturing into stifling alleyways, blacks began coming down with the fever. Suddenly, almost overnight, scores of them were seized with the same horrible symptoms as their white neighbors. Richard Allen fell ill, and Absalom Jones had to shoulder the entire burden of keeping the relief effort organized.
As more and more blacks sickened and then died, a shudder went though the white community. What would happen if blacks responded to the pestilence in the same way as whites, with panic and flight? Who would be left to deal with the sick and dead? “If the disorder should continue to spread among them,” a very gloomy Benjamin Rush commented, “then will the measure of our suffering be full.”
From The Federal Gazette, September 13, 1793. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)
CHAPTER SIX
The Prince of Bleeders
In this awful situation, the stoutest hearts began to fail. Hope flickered, and despair succeeded distress in almost every countenance.
— DR. BENJAMIN RUSH, 1805
Thursday, September 12. Benjamin Rush found himself exhausted and near collapse as the day drew to a close. It wasn’t simply that since the College of Physicians had met he had spent every waking minute seeing patients, usually over one hundred a day. Rush had yellow fever.
“My body became highly impregnated with the contagion. My eyes were yellow, and sometimes a yellowness was perceptible in my face,” he noted. His sleep was irregular, and he frequently woke to find his bed linens soaked through with his own sweat. “These sweats were so offensive,” he wrote, “as to oblige me to draw the bed-clothes close to my neck, to defend myself from their smell.”
Despite the aches, despite dizziness and nausea, despite it all, Rush still saw and advised patients. He had to. He believed that he was one of the few physicians still seeing the nearly 6,000 persons then ill with the fever. So he struggled on, day after exhausting day. “When it was evening I wished for morning; and when it was morning, the prospect of the labours of the day . . . caused me to wish for the return of evening.”
Benjamin Rush was arguably the most famous and respected doctor in the United States when the yellow fever epidemic began. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)
Word of Rush’s illness spread and increased the citizens’ fear. A number of well-known doctors had abandoned their patients and scampered to safer air; ten others had died, while still more were ill and could not receive patients. But from the moment the fever first began to claim victims, Dr. Rush had been a tower of energy and care, an everpresent Good Samaritan.
Now that he was ill, what would happen to the people who relied on him? More alarming still, Rush had recently announced that he had an absolute cure for the disease, something no other doctor had claimed. If Rush died—if his cure failed to save him—then all hope would vanish and the fever would march on unobstructed.
Rush did not happen upon his cure easily or immediately. During the earliest days of the fever Rush had treated patients with great caution. Doctors of that era believed in what was called vis medicatrix naturae, the healing power of nature. In other words, the body took its own measures to rid the humors of poisons and set them in balance once again; the doctor’s job was to coax the body along in this process.
For the most part, medical treatment was very gentle. Herb teas were prescribed to break a slight fever. A glass of brandy would help a restless patient get to sleep.
Of course, some symptoms required slightly more drastic measures to effect a cure. If a doctor suspected a patient’s intestines were blocked, he might use a few drops of a poisonous substance to induce vomiting and diarrhea. Bloodletting, or phlebotomy, was also practiced. In this procedure, a vein was opened and a small amount of blood was drawn off into a bowl. With a tad less blood, the theory went, the remaining blood would flow more freely and normally through the body.
Bloodletting was an ancient and trusted medical practice that had been in use for more than 2,500 years. Patients were bled to re
lieve headaches, depression, disease, and anxiety. Even a broken bone would bring out the lance and bowl. The various symptoms of yellow fever also called for bloodletting.
At the beginning of the epidemic, Rush used mild purges and moderate bleedings and urged patients to sit in cool air, take cold baths, and eat light meals. This clearly wasn’t enough, because his patients continued to die.
After he visited with Mrs. LeMaigre and determined that she was battling yellow fever, Rush began to change his tactics. If the patient failed to show immediate improvement with mild treatments, he stepped up his attack. He administered bark (the shaved root of a tree such as dogwood) along with wine, brandy, and aromatics, such as ginger or cinnamon. He tried to sweat the fever out of a patient by coating various parts of his or her body with a thick salve composed of herbs and chemicals. These applications were called blisters, because they often irritated the skin enough to turn it a livid red. “Finding them all ineffectual, I attempted to rouse the system by wrapping the whole body . . . in blankets dipped in warm vinegar.”
Nothing worked, and more and more of Rush’s patients went to the grave. Each death shook him personally. In a letter to his Julia, Rush’s anguish is clear: “You can recollect how much the loss of a single patient in a month used to affect me. Judge then how I must feel, in hearing every morning of the death of three or four!”