by Jim Murphy
Benjamin Rush emerged from the epidemic emaciated, feeble, and haunted. In a letter to Julia, he expressed what was probably on the minds of many of those who had stayed and survived. “Sometimes seated in your easy chair by the fire,” he wrote, “I lose myself in looking back upon the ocean which I have passed, and now and then find myself surprised by a tear in reflecting upon the friends I have lost, and the scenes of distress that I have witnessed, and which I was unable to relieve.”
No one would ever know precisely how many Philadelphians died of yellow fever in 1793. Many of those who traditionally kept such count—ministers, sextons, and city officials—had either fled the city or been ill themselves. The best estimates put the number of victims at between four and five thousand men, women, and children. What was clear to all was that life would never be the same. The fear had gone too deep, the losses were all too real and personal.
From Mathew Carey’s list of the dead, 1794. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)
CHAPTER TEN
Improvements and the Public Gratitude
An ill name is easier given than taken away.
—ABSALOM JONES AND RICHARD ALLEN, JANUARY 1794
Wednesday, January 8, 1794. “If the disease has disappeared as it no doubt has,” wrote “Howard” in that day’s General Advertiser, “every memento of its existence should disappear with it, that the citizens may once more enjoy repose.”
No doubt some people agreed with “Howard.” The danger was gone, they said, so let’s forget about it completely and get back to business and life as it was before yellow fever’s visit. This was an especially strong wish among the fugitives, who were embarrassed at having abandoned their city in its time of great need.
Charles Biddle, for instance, tried to ignore the entire tragedy by insisting that those who had died were all foreign-born or strangers to the city. When asked about a dead friend who had been born and raised in the United States, Biddle explained that he hadn’t really died of the fever. He had actually been “frightened to death.”
Biddle and those who thought as he did were the exceptions. Most people, like it or not, had had their lives changed too profoundly by the fever to make believe it hadn’t happened.
Take the case of Dolley Payne Todd. She had lost her adoring husband, John, and a newborn baby son to the fever; and even though she had removed herself and her two-year-old son to a farm at Gray’s Ferry, they had both become infected and been close to death themselves. Even so, Dolley returned with her mother and son to her pleasant brick home on Fourth and Walnut Streets in November and began taking in gentleman boarders to pay her bills.
This drawing of Dolley Madison was done a few years after she married James Madison and moved to the nation’s new capital in Washington, D.C. (THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA)
Dolley was no wallflower, content to spend the rest of her days living in the past. She was too intelligent, lively, and attractive for such a passive existence. Eleven months after John Todd’s death, Dolley married a congressman from Virginia named James Madison. The yellow fever certainly had a tragic impact on her life, one she would recall often in the years to come; yet it was out of this that Dolley Madison’s role in our nation’s history—as hostess for the widower president Thomas Jefferson and then first lady for her husband—was born.
Government also found itself changed. The Pennsylvania legislature realized that the state government had ceased to exist when its members scampered from the city in panic. They never admitted personal failure or cowardice; to do so might be used against them in coming elections. Instead, they factored flight into the structure of the state government; in the event that yellow fever or any other natural disaster might rout them again, they gave the governor special authority to make laws and spend money until the crisis ended.
The national government learned something because of the yellow fever epidemic as well. The states had worried so much about a future autocratic president that the federal government had inadvertently created a constitutional crisis for the one currently in office. To avoid repeating such an awkward and embarrassing situation. Congress passed a law giving the president power to call it into session outside of the nation’s capital whenever a grave hazard to life and health existed.
Changes also came to the city because of the fever. While no one knew what caused yellow fever, the doctors agreed that foul smells were not healthy and might promote disease. Therefore, efforts were made to keep the markets and streets free of offensive-smelling matter, and the laws holding homeowners responsible for cleaning up their property were strengthened. At first, these laws were rather weak and generally ignored by all. But as the nineteenth century went along and the link between filth and disease became more apparent, public health codes were strengthened and enforced.
That the poorer areas of Philadelphia—those mean, narrow alleys with their run-down, airless houses—had suffered the worst did not escape attention. However, no municipal works projects—such as putting in a sewer system to eliminate the polluted “sinks”—were initiated to change the wretched conditions. There was no money whatsoever in the city’s budget for such costly endeavors, plus no desire to undertake them. Holding down city expenditures was deemed more important at the time than public health. Instead, when the fever rampaged through Philadelphia in summers to come, vast tent encampments were erected for the poor by the Schuylkill River and in the Northern Liberties. Poor people couldn’t flee to comfortable country homes like their wealthier neighbors, but at least they could escape the most squalid and plague-ridden sections of town.
As the city gradually got back to normal, people once again strolled along the tree-lined paths behind the state house. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)
The biggest improvement was made in the way water was supplied to Philadelphia. In 1793 water for drinking, cooking, cleaning, and putting out fires all came from private and public wells or from the Delaware River. Most wells were dug in the cellars or backyards of homes, usually only a few feet away from the privy pit. In addition to human waste, the byproducts from manufacturers, such as tanneries, and refuse from the markets seeped into the drinking water. As for the Delaware, it was a handy dumping ground for anything and everything—household and human waste, manufacturing rubbish, and debris from the hundreds of ships that visited the city every year. The result was evil-smelling and evil-tasting water.
While the College of Physicians assured everyone that yellow fever did not originate in the water, the majority of citizens felt otherwise. If the foul smell of rotting coffee could cause health problems, they reasoned, why couldn’t foul-smelling water? Complaints about the water and its link to yellow fever increased with each new visitation, until action was finally taken in 1799. That was when the city hired Benjamin Latrobe to design and construct Philadelphia’s first waterworks.
Water was lifted by a steam-engine pump from the Schuylkill River (which was then purer than the Delaware) and forced along a tunnel to the central pump house, located in the large central square at Broad and High Streets, just two blocks from Ricketts’ Circus. There another steam-engine pump lifted the water into huge wood reservoirs, from where it was fed by gravity to households and businesses around the city.
Water from the system—the first water system in the United States—was sweeter tasting and had no offensive odor. Plus the water flowed with enough force to hose streets and docks clean and to flush open clogged sewers. Eliminating the backbreaking need to hand-pump every drop of water had another beneficial effect as well. People began to bathe more often. Elizabeth Drinker took a bath in 1799, a full twenty-eight years after her previous bath!
The large central square where the holding tank of the waterworks was constructed became a popular place to visit and have picnics. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)
Even President Washington learned a valuable lesson as a result of his encounter with yellow fever. The president had enjoyed his stay at David Deshler�
��s comfortable, rambling home in Germantown during the autumn of 1793. When yellow fever returned to Philadelphia the next summer, Washington wasted no time in removing Martha, himself, and the rest of his household—along with his official papers!—to that safe location again. This became the nation’s first “summer White House,” and presidents ever since have followed the tradition by establishing their own warm weather residences.
As for Washington’s French problem, the fever had an impact on it as well. Genêt had fled Philadelphia and its epidemic for Manhattan in September, but the passions surrounding him and the Neutrality Act seemed to have died along the way. His reception in Manhattan was tepid; meanwhile, his supporters in Philadelphia had their minds on survival, not politics. In time, the French government, prompted by complaints from the United States, replaced Genêt with a new minister, who brought along orders for Genêt’s arrest. The tensions between the United States and France would linger for years, but the immediate crisis ended. Years later John Adams would recall the street riots outside George Washington’s residence: “The coolest and the firmest minds . . . have given their opinion to me, that nothing but the yellow fever . . . could have saved the United States from a total revolution of government.”
No, the memory of the yellow fever wouldn’t disappear as easily as “Howard” demanded. Besides, some people just wouldn’t let it fade from their memory. The doctors, for instance, were still disputing. One of the first things Governor Mifflin did when he returned in late October was to ask the College of Physicians to write a report concerning the cause of the disease.
As requested, the College assembled, but the veneer of mutual respect and consideration had worn very thin. Physicians had been forced to take sides during the fever when the squabbles hit the newspapers; they came to the meeting with their opinions fixed. Instead of a careful discussion of the disease, the physicians bickered and fought.
The doctors holding that the fever had been imported won out simply because there were more of them. To the delight of Governor Mifflin and Philadelphia businessmen, the College declared: “No instance has ever occurred of the disease called yellow fever, having originated in this city, or in any other parts of the United States.”
Rush was incensed at what he viewed as flawed medical logic and professional jealousy—and promptly resigned from the College of Physicians. One of the few doctors who had not quarreled with Rush tried to persuade him to reconsider: “Oh, my friend,” wrote Dr. Samuel Griffitts, “search & see if our Resentments are to make us quit places where we can be eminently useful.”
But Rush’s mind was made up, and everyone knew what that meant. He would not back down. In fact, he was seriously thinking of leaving Philadelphia and the practice of medicine altogether. “The envy and hatred of my brethren has lately risen to a rage,” Rush explained. “They blush at their mistakes, they feel for their murders, and instead of asking forgiveness of the public for them, vent all of their guilty shame and madness upon the man who convicted them of both.”
In the end, Rush stayed in the city and reestablished a strong medical practice (though he never attended another gathering at the College). But the controversy persisted. Many doctors took up the pen in order to write about their experiences during the plague, as well as to argue in support of whichever treatment they favored. And so from the pages of the newspapers to the pages of books the accusations and name-calling raged on.
Actually, the writing began long before the deadly fever disappeared. Dr. William Currie’s sixty-four-page A Description of the Malignant, Infectious Fever Prevailing at Present in Philadelphia appeared at the beginning of September, when the fever was confined to a few streets and alleys. It was the first book on Philadelphia’s plague, and while Currie did not call it yellow fever, his description of the fever’s symptoms is detailed and accurate. Other physicians followed Currie’s lead, with David Nassy, Jean Devèze, Isaac Cathrall, Nathaniel Potter, and, of course, Benjamin Rush publishing books in the weeks and years to come.
The entire controversy reerupted whenever yellow fever appeared again in the city, as it did in 1794, 1796, 1797, and 1798. Rush bled and purged aggressively and argued for his cure each time; other doctors hotly argued against it and him. In 1797 Rush’s opponents were joined by a new and highly virulent voice—that of journalist William Cobbett.
Cobbett was an Englishman who had been driven from his homeland because of his attacks on corruption in the English army. He despised those American colonials who had fought against his England, yet he still chose to settle in Philadelphia, where he set up a royalist newspaper called The Porcupine’s Gazette.
William Cobbett certainly doesn’t seem to be a nasty, vengeful man as he lounges in his parlor chair. (THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA)
Cobbett hated Rush because of Rush’s prominent connection to the Revolution and his belief in representative government. “He has long, very long, been sedulously employed in scuffling up his little hillock of fame. I will down him,” Cobbett promised, then attacked Rush in prose and verse in just about every issue of his paper. “Blood, blood, still they cry, more blood!” he wrote about Rush and his followers. “In every sentence they menace our poor veins. Their language is as frightful to the ears of the alarmed multitude as the raven’s croak to those of the sickly flock.”
Even in an era when newspapers often attacked political enemies ruthlessly, Cobbett’s attacks were particularly vicious and personal. He called Rush a quack and a murderer, and even suggested the doctor was mentally unstable. Before the yellow fever epidemic, even the doctors who disagreed with Rush on medical matters would have defended him against Cobbett’s irrational assaults. But the infighting had taken such a nasty turn during the fever—thanks largely to Rush’s aggressive personality—that he was forced to defend himself on his own.
Rush stood the abuse for as long as possible, then moved to Princeton to find some peace. Cobbett continued his anti-Rush ravings anyway. When Rush applied for a position at the medical faculty of Columbia University in New York City, his appointment was blocked by another enemy of his cure, Alexander Hamilton.
Rush once again vowed to retire, but decided to regain his good name before doing so. He sued Cobbett for libel, and after a long and public trial in 1800, the jury awarded Rush $5,000, plus $3,000 court costs. Instead of paying, Cobbett fled Philadelphia and then the country. Some of Cobbett’s personal possessions were sold, and Rush donated the money to charity. The victory was enough to lure him from retirement a second time, but his reputation was forever tarnished. He spent the remaining thirteen years of his life curing diseases and battling opponents with his customary stubborn ferocity.
Many of Philadelphia’s most pious citizens would not let the fever disappear entirely, either. This group included Elhanan Winchester, Samuel Stearns, and the Reverend J. Henry C. Helmuth. The terrible visitation, they argued, had been a warning from the Almighty to mend the city’s spiritual ways. Samuel Stearns summed up their feelings in a bit of awkward verse: “This mortal Plague at thy command / And thou thereby hast humbled sinful man!”
These spiritual guardians were shocked when people in Philadelphia ignored the obvious lessons and began living as they had before the visitation. “How soon after were the play-houses opened and other scenes of amusement!” Winchester noted with disgust, adding a warning, “I tell you, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” Numerous citizens agreed with such alarming views, but certainly not a majority of the people. Most knew in their hearts that they would never completely forget the terrible weeks when illness had taken hold of their city and killed friends and family members. But they weren’t about to blame themselves for the tragedy.
What happened to the heroes of the epidemic?
Those on the committee received due praise from the returning council members and from the state legislature, but voices of criticism were also heard. In December anonymous letter writers to The Federal Gazette condemned the committ
ee members for seizing power so arrogantly. “The bulk of them,” one critic said disparagingly, “are scarcely known beyond the smoke of their own chimnies.”
The committee counted up the money it had spent and subtracted the many donations that had come in from cities like New York, Baltimore, and Boston: it had spent $3,245.12 more than it had taken in. This deficit remained the personal responsibility of the members of the committee, with chair maker John Letchworth required to pay a little over one pound (a substantial sum at that time) as his share. Most likely, the few wealthier members of the committee, such as Matthew Clarkson, Stephen Girard, and Israel Israel, shouldered the greatest part of the debt. After this, most committee members simply went back to their old occupations, happy to give up the positions of power they had held during the terrible time of death and sickness.
Israel Israel did not choose to step aside and let the workings of the city government continue as usual. He ran for the Pennsylvania state legislature three times, in 1793, 1795, and 1797. Each time his campaign stressed his commitment to the poor and the fact that the government in Philadelphia was controlled by a wealthy few who tended to disregard the welfare of its less fortunate citizens. Hire more scavengers to clean up the tiny and forgotten alleys, he recommended. Pave the streets and put in sewers to drain off excess water.
Israel lost in his first two bids. But the vote for the third election happened during the 1797 recurrence of yellow fever, when most well-to-do citizens had left the city. Israel won that election by a slim margin of 38 votes out of 4,010 cast.