by Jim Murphy
His opponent, Benjamin R. Morgan, denounced the results, saying the fever had driven “respectable inhabitants” out of town. Morgan petitioned the state senate, arguing that Israel’s election was illegal because people from the two poorest sections of town had been allowed to vote without proving they had taken an oath of allegiance. The oath had been instituted by the state after the Revolutionary War to weed out anyone who might want to see the British back in power; although the law remained on the books, taking the oath had not been a voting requirement since 1790. But that didn’t matter to the senate. It ordered a reelection at the end of February 1798.
Needless to say, the reelection became a war of words in the newspapers. A backer of Israel who called himself “A Friend of Justice” argued that if the oath were uniformly required, not a single legislator could claim to be legally elected. Another signed his name as ‘’A Republican” and said Israel’s election had been put aside only because he was a “zealous defender of, and advocate for liberty and equality amongst men, disapproving of all distinctions, titles, [and] every other political measure which lays a burden on the common and poor people for the benefit of the rich.”
Morgan supporters (one of whom was the prickly publisher of The Porcupine’s Gazette, William Cobbett) fired back, warning that “the hour of danger is come. . . . Our government and laws totter under the unremitting exertions of ruffians panting for tumult, plunder and bloodshed . . . and in hellish anticipation [they] view your property as already their own.”
Over 8,700 ballots were cast in the reelection, and this time Benjamin Morgan won by 357 votes. The deciding votes came from the Quakers, among Philadelphia’s most prosperous and pious citizens, who did not want to see a “grogshop man fixed in the Senate.” Israel Israel could be an important part of the power structure during times of distress, the voters seemed to be saying, but he was not welcome there when things returned to normal.
As for Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, and the hundreds of other blacks who nursed the city’s sick, they suffered an even worse indignity. On November 13, 1793, just a few days after President Washington’s early-morning ride, publisher Mathew Carey issued what would become a best-selling book: A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia . . . .
The first edition sold out in nine days, and Carey ran off a second. Seven days later he printed a third. More editions would follow. Carey kept the type in place and ready to go, so it was fairly easy for him to make corrections and to add what he referred to as “improvements.” One of the most popular improvements was a necrology, a list of the names of the dead, which began appearing in the third edition.
Readers loved Carey’s book. Its style was lively and direct; he presented the fever in all its hideousness and did not spare any details. He began by making readers face the terrible illness: “About this time, this destroying scourge, the malignant fever, crept in among us.” Then he let readers relive the mass flight from the city, see the closed shops and empty streets, and meet suffering fever victims and those who bravely stayed to help them.
There were villains as well, though he did not name names. “Who, without horror, can reflect on a husband deserting his wife . . . in the last agony—a wife unfeelingly abandoning her husband on his death bed—parents forsaking their only children—children ungratefully flying from their parents. . . . Masters hurrying off their faithful servants to Bushhill, even on suspicion of fever . . . servants abandoning tender and humane masters.”
Such generalizations offended very few readers. They did not recognize themselves or family members in these scenes. And because Carey took a rather gentle approach to the fugitives—he pointedly referred to them as “friends” and openly welcomed them back—he insured that this sizable, book-loving segment of the population would not feel uncomfortable reading his text.
A drawing of Mathew Carey that was done while he was lecturing in Ireland. (THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA)
Yet despite such a careful approach, Carey did go out of his way to vilify one segment of the population: the black volunteers. At one point in his Account, he spoke about the Free African Society offering to procure nurses for the sick under the direction of Jones, Allen, and Gray. Then, without describing the daunting task faced by black nurses or praising them for acting fearlessly when everyone else had fled in terror, he attacked them. “The great demand for nurses afforded an opportunity for imposition,” Carey stated, “which was eagerly seized by some of the vilest of the blacks. They extorted two, three, four, even five dollars a night for attendance, which would have been well paid by a single dollar. Some of them were even detected in plundering the houses of the sick.”
Carey ended this paragraph on a note of restraint, admitting that it would be “wrong to call a censure on the whole for this sort of conduct,” because “the services of Jones, Allen, and Gray, and others of their colour, have been great, and demand public gratitude.”
Jones and Allen were justifiably shocked and angered by Carey’s comments. His condemnation was severe and wide-ranging, while his praise seemed like a grudging afterthought: Hundreds of blacks had come to their white neighbors’ aid, so why not say so? And why didn’t Carey praise blacks with the same ringing prose he used to praise the committee (of which Carey was a member)?: “I trust that the gratitude of [the committee’s] fellow-citizens will remain as long as the memory of their beneficent conduct, which I hope will not die with the present generation.”
Jones and Allen answered Carey with a book of their own, published in January 1794: A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793: and a Refutation of Some Censures, Thrown upon Them in Some Late Publications.
The Narrative is not just a firsthand account of what the free black community in Philadelphia did for the sick and dying of the city; it is the very first document published in the United States in which leaders of the black community confronted an accuser directly and attempted to articulate the depth of their anger. It is a remarkable essay, tightly argued and organized, passionate and unrelenting.
It begins by describing how blacks were asked to become involved in the crisis, detailing in dramatic fashion what they did. It then goes on to address and counter every negative statement and implication made by Carey.
The charge of extortion and gouging the sick for more money was particularly painful to the two leaders. Here they pointedly reminded Carey that when these accusations had first surfaced in September, they had been answered to everyone’s satisfaction (as he, a member of the committee, should have recalled). In fact, Mayor Clarkson had agreed that the vast majority of black nurses were doing their work both competently and honestly.
“That some extravagant prices were paid, we admit,” wrote Jones and Allen, “but how came they to be demanded?” The answer was that white people had driven the prices higher by “over-bidding one another” for the services of the few black nurses available. Again, this was something Jones and Allen had explained to the mayor’s satisfaction and that Carey should know about. Why didn’t he mention this?
What is more, they argued, “we know as many whites who were guilty” of taking advantage of the sick, “but this is looked over, while the blacks are held up to censure.” They then cited examples to illustrate their point. There was an instance where five whites charged $43 to put a corpse in a coffin and haul it downstairs to a waiting wagon. It was a white nurse who stole the valuables of her two dead patients, Mr, and Mrs. Taylor, while another white nurse was discovered in a drunken stupor wearing rings that belonged to the recently dead Mrs. Malony. And there were the numerous white landlords who raised rents during the plague and even evicted tenants who could not afford the increases. Why hadn’t Carey referred to them by skin color and called them the “vilest”? “Is it a greater crime,” Jones and Allen asked, “for a black to pilfer, than for a white to privateer?”
The title page of Absalom Jo
nes and Richard Allen’s groundbreaking rebuttal to Mathew Carey’s allegations of misconduct by black nurses. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)
Jones and Allen then turned the tables on Carey. “Had Mr. Carey been solicited to such an undertaking, what would he have demanded?” Carey, of course, had been a volunteer on the committee and taken no pay for his time, but the authors of the Narrative would not let him fall back on this fact. They pointed out that Carey had fled the city for a while during the plague, then accused him of returning for the purpose of profiteering in his own way: “We believe he has made more money by the sale of his ‘scraps’ [that is, his book] than a dozen of the greatest extortioners among the black nurses.”
Further, they stated that the money their society had collected for making coffins and burying the dead “has not defrayed the expense of wages which we had to pay to those whom we employed.” In fact, by their calculations, the Free African Society was out of pocket at least $500.
At another point in his Account, Carey dismissed the grave danger the black nurses had faced by saying that “they did not escape the disorder, however, the number of them that were seized with it, was not great,” adding that those blacks who did get yellow fever were cured easily. Jones and Allen replied by saying blacks had suffered the fever to the same degree as whites, and that the nurses, despite the offensive nature of the disease and the danger, had stayed with patients at the expense of their own families.
Carey was offended by the countercharges leveled at him in the Narrative. He was against slavery, he would point out in The Address of M. Carey to the Public (1794), and his magazine, The American Museum, often ran antislavery articles and included writings by black authors, something most other journals did not do. As to leaving the city, he had done so with the permission of the mayor, and had been gone only a short time to settle some business accounts.
Finally, he had mentioned Jones and Allen by name in his book and praised their selfless behavior. “I would fain ask the reader,” Carey demanded, “is this the language of an enemy? Does this deserve railing or reproach? Is it honorable for Jones and Allen to repay evil for good?”
Individual praise wasn’t what Jones and Allen had been concerned about. Blacks had offered their services as a group, and yet Carey had not bothered to praise them for this or honor them to the same degree he honored those on the committee. Instead, by broadly condemning black nurses, Carey put the entire black community “in the hazardous state of being classed with those who are called the ‘vilest.’”
They were sorry, Jones and Allen had said, if their words seemed harsh or if anything they said gave offense, “but when an unprovoked attempt is made, to make us blacker than we are, it becomes less necessary to be over cautious on this account.”
They had concluded with a powerful statement of principle and self-worth. “We have many unprovoked enemies,” they told the reader, “who begrudge us the liberty we enjoy, [who] are glad to hear of any complaint against our colour, be it just or unjust; in consequence of which we are more earnestly endeavoring all in our power, to warn, rebuke, and exhort our African friends, to keep conscience void of offense towards God and man; and, at the same time, would not be backward to interfere, when stigmas or oppression appear pointed at, or attempted against them, unjustly; and, we are confident, we shall stand justified in the sight of the candid and judicious, for such conduct.”
Jones and Allen had framed their rebuke of Carey as carefully as possible to allow little room for him to dispute their claims. They realized that one response to their Narrative would be a dismissive “It’s their word against mine.”
To counter such a simple response and put an official seal of approval on their analysis of the situation, they ended their book with the words of someone who was both unassailable and white: Matthew Clarkson. The mayor’s note to the authors recognized not only Absalom Jones and Richard Allen but all of the people who volunteered under their direction. “I with cheerfulness give this testimony of my approbation of their proceedings,” Clarkson wrote. “Their diligence, attention and decency of deportment, afforded me, at the time, much satisfaction.”
Carey’s only concession to the arguments of Jones and Allen was to add to his book a brief mention that a number of white nurses had also stolen from patients and acted badly in other ways. Again, it seemed too little and too late. The new information did not appear in the main text, only in a footnote, and only in the very last edition printed. He did not eliminate or even soften in the slightest his attack on the black nurses, despite having the type sitting in his printing shop and ready for “improvements.”
So life went on in Philadelphia, in many ways changed forever, in many ways sadly the same as before the yellow fever epidemic began. The sidewalks, shops, taverns, churches, and theaters once again filled with people and buzzed with talk and prayer and gossip. Many had had close calls with death and seen it on a daily basis in the streets of their neighborhoods; everyone—even those who had run from the city—considered himself or herself a survivor.
They were a people left scarred, emotionally and physically. Sudden, mass death had stricken their city, and they were no wiser at all about the nature of the killer. They knew only one thing for certain: When next summer’s hot, humid weather returned, yellow fever might very well visit their homes again.
From the 1910 translation of Gabriel Marotel’s article on the link between disease and certain insects. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“A Modern-Day Time Bomb”
For all of history and all over the globe she has been a nuisance, a pain, and an angel of death.
—ANDREW SPIELMAN AND MICHAEL D’ANTONIO, 2001
September 1, 1858. Emotions were running high at the Marine Quarantine Hospital on Staten Island. Major yellow fever epidemics had struck Manhattan and the surrounding towns in 1702, 1731, 1742, and 1743, and then every year from 1791 through 1821. Now, after a gap of 37 years, the fever was back again, infecting and killing more and more people every day.
New York’s medical community knew little more about this invisible killer in 1858 than Philadelphia’s had in 1793. The one difference was that early in the nineteenth century Manhattan had established very strict quarantine rules. Anyone suspected of having the disease was shipped off immediately to the Quarantine Hospital. There they could recover—or die—well away from the healthy population.
While no one knew the exact origin of yellow fever, most ordinary citizens as well as many medical professionals insisted it was an imported disease. Very few people wanted to believe that such a terrible killer could originate in their hometown. This belief that the disease was brought in resurfaced wherever the fever struck. In 1793, for instance, most Philadelphians blamed the refugees from Santo Domingo. In Manhattan the Irish were blamed, and the quarantine effort was aimed primarily at weeding out sick Irish immigrants from arriving ships.
A mob storms the Marine Quarantine Hospital in 1858. (HARPER’S WEEKLY, SEPTEMBER 11, 1858)
The Quarantine Hospital was the country’s leading facility for the treatment of yellow fever and highly praised for its cleanliness and safety. But this didn’t matter to its neighbors. People living near the hospital blamed it and its Irish patients for “breeding pestilence” and spreading it throughout the island. As darkness fell on September 1, 1858, angry citizens took matters into their own hands. “About nine o’clock on Wednesday,” Harper’s Weekly reported, “a large party, disguised and armed, assailed the Hospital on two sides at the same time; one squad forced the gate, and the other scaled the wall.”
Alarms were sounded, but “before any effective resistance could be offered, the rioters had removed the patients out of the buildings, carrying them bodily up in their mattresses, and depositing them upon the ground some hundred yards from the wards.”
Once this was accomplished, the building was set on fire and “burned like a pile of shavings.” Next, the resident doctor’s hou
se was set afire, followed by a small hospital on a nearby hill. The harbor police and firefighters arrived and managed to put out the latter two fires before the buildings were completely destroyed. The very next day the determined crowd came back and finished burning down the remaining structures.
While Harper’s Weekly described the efforts of the firefighters and police as “a stirring scene,” the magazine’s editors were clearly opposed to the presence of the hospital, calling it a “grave injury” to both Staten Island and Manhattan. Some arrests were made, but no one was ever prosecuted for rioting or arson. The specter of yellow fever had incited a normally peaceful group of individuals to violence, and Staten Island officials did not want that mob to turn its fury on them.
Yellow fever terrorized many major cities throughout the 1800s—not only Philadelphia and Manhattan, but Boston, Baltimore, Mobile, Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia, Savannah, Charleston, and Jacksonville, to name a few. Nine thousand died in New Orleans in 1853, while Memphis saw 2,000 buried in its 1873 epidemic and another 5,000 in 1878. As late as 1897, letters from the South often arrived with the words “All mail fumigated with formaldehyde” written on them.
Countries outside the United States suffered deadly yellow fever attacks as well. When Toussaint L’Ouverture led a revolt of black Haitian slaves in 1801, Napoleon sent his brother-in-law, General Charles LeClerc, and a military force of approximately 29,000 to crush the rebels. The French killed nearly 150,000 Haitians in their attempt to take back control of the island. Then yellow fever hit the French troops. After 26,000 French soldiers and sailors (including LeClerc) had died, the French packed their tents and left. Haiti was lost to the French, and Napoleon’s ambitions for an empire in the New World withered away. Two years later, in 1803, France sold its North American territory to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase.