Black People provides a chronology of black work during the epidemic, beginning with Jones, Allen, and William Gray’s voluntary efforts and the FAS and Free African Church’s (FAC’s) response to Mayor Matthew Clarkson’s call for assistance and ending with an accounting of the group’s expenditures and disposal of beds.7 Jones and Allen contest “kind assurances” of black immunity that were widely accepted as fact at the time, detail their management of relief works (black convicts among them), and set out to counter “partial, censorious” accounts of the black workers as a response to not only Carey but also, in Jones and Allen’s words, “the many unprovoked enemies who begrudge us the liberty we enjoy, and are glad to hear of any complaint against our colour, be it just or unjust.”8 In part owing to the strength of this defense of black Philadelphians, much of the scholarship on Narrative has examined how its authors distinguish black virtue and sensibility from white inhumanity to carve out space for black citizenship. Sarah Knott, for instance, notes Jones and Allen “understood, as Carey perhaps did not, that social belonging depended on the claim to sensibility; it did not just easily flow from it.” Where Knott sees mastery, Philip Gould suggests Jones and Allen fell victim to the same tensions within sensibility that they set out to critique. Their concern with financial losses undercut their claims to benevolent disinterest.9 Even as this scholarship illuminates Jones and Allen’s challenge to contemporary understanding of sensibility and citizenship, however, it still tends to frame it in terms of appropriation and reaction, not creation.
Figure 1. Title page, Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People (1794).
My point here is not that this scholarship is misreading Narrative per se but rather that the emphasis on response and protest can obscure how Jones and Allen leverage the moment to demand a wholesale rethinking of the relationship between citizenship and sensibility in the period.10 In their initial justification for entering print, Jones and Allen employed stylistic tactics indicative of a black intellectual tradition critiquing those who, as Phillis Wheatley famously observes in “On Being Brought from African to American” (1773), “view our sable race with scornful eye” (5–8) and, as Benjamin Banneker notes in his letter to Thomas Jefferson, “have long … looked [on us] with an eye of contempt.”11 For both writers, the stated occasion for entering print provides a vector but not the ultimate target from their arguments.12 From this perspective, Joanna Brooks argues, the overemphasis on Narrative’s status as primarily a response to Carey points to a larger tendency to ignore how the tract “resonates with the impassioned and embittered voices of two men who are themselves only a few years free from chattel slavery, who witness that the slave trade continues with the legal sanction of the U.S. government.” These men, she continues, saw “the fragility of fellow-feeling and sympathy revealed during the yellow fever epidemic, and their text demonstrated how insufficient these frameworks were for communicating black grievances.”13 Or, more accurately, how efficient they were at eliding them. Narrative may recapitulate the contradictions in contemporary political and racial discourse, but it also strategically reenacts these contradictions to expose rather than reproduce them.
Jones and Allen’s emphasis on the white production of virtue throughout Narrative suggests that they recognized in 1794 the problem with virtue politics. In that sense, Narrative is both descriptive of how black citizens might enter the civic sphere under already operative terms—civic republicanism, benevolence and sensibility, virtue politics, and the like—and prescriptive in the way its account of black activities exceeds these frameworks. While Jeannine DeLombard describes Narrative as a “documentary account of black civic virtue,” she also notes that if virtue politics failed, Jones and Allen could produce an “altogether different kind of black public presence” by converting impositions of black criminal culpability into “civil ‘capacity’” and claims to full citizenship.14 Converting “culpable legal personhood” was one strategy Narrative deployed; at the same time, this chapter argues, Narrative produces something quite different, using the ethics articulated in Jesus of Nazareth’s discourse on Mosaic law in the Gospel Luke, not contemporaneous constructions of citizenship or personhood, as their guide.
The connection to Banneker in particular might run deeper. Jones and Allen potentially had access to “A Copy of a Letter from Benjamin Banneker to the Secretary of State, with His Answer,” printed in Philadelphia in 1792.15 I will discuss this text in more detail in this chapter’s last section, but its path to print is worth rehearsing here as a precursor to Narrative and as an illustration of strategies already in play. Banneker claims in the letter, “It was not originally my design” to write a letter critiquing Jefferson’s hypocrisy in championing political freedom in the Declaration of Independence while still supporting enslavement. “But,” he maintains, “having taken up my pen in order to direct to [Jefferson]” his 1792 Almanac “as a present,” Banneker was “unexpectedly and unavoidably led” to respond to the racist claims Jefferson makes in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785).16 Banneker sent the Almanac in manuscript, noting that he was unsure of bringing it to print. The letter itself excoriated Jefferson through the language of both Notes and the Declaration of Independence: “It was” in the early days of the Revolution, Banneker reminds Jefferson, “that your abhorrence thereof was so excited, that you publicly held forth this true and invaluable doctrine, which is worthy to be recorded and remembered in all succeeding ages,” before quoting from the Declaration. After Jefferson responded to Banneker, affirming his wish to see a plan for emancipation enacted, Banneker published his initial letter and that response in pamphlet form. He also included the exchange in the Almanac he would publish that year. The entire sequence of events shows Banneker manipulating the print public not only to publish an incisive antislavery pamphlet but also to cannily drum up potential interest in his Almanac. Jefferson may have been Banneker’s addressee, and he was clearly one of Banneker’s objects of critique, but it is just as clear that Banneker likely had larger goals in mind from the start. Whether or not Jones and Allen read Banneker’s pamphlet or almanac that year, the resemblance in print and rhetoric strategy is striking: Jones and Allen similarly claim to have taken up the pen to refute Carey’s Account but also capitalize on the opportunity to address other “Censures, Thrown upon Them in Some Late Publications” noted in their pamphlet’s title.
To fully understand the theorizing and print strategies Jones and Allen undertake through Narrative, we need to first revisit the models of white citizenship proffered contemporaneously in accounts such as Carey’s A Short Account. While Carey’s Account was neither the only nor the definitive statement on early U.S. citizenship, it provides—both for Jones and Allen and for my purposes here—a productive point of entry for limning the range of problems and potential solutions at play, along with those possibilities white observers routinely ignored or actively disqualified. Carey’s pamphlet provided a distillation of civic republican discourse and a set of formal oppositions (respectable citizens vs. unruly mass, sensibility vs. insensibility, market freedom vs. republican duty) that Jones and Allen could (1) hold up and restage for public assessment, (2) dissect as a reflection of bankrupt citizenship practices, and (3) counterpose to their own model of neighborly citizenship. As I contend throughout this chapter, Jones and Allen’s Narrative, while addressed to Carey, was not about Carey and his Account. Even so, just as black Philadelphians provided Carey and others with a convenient scapegoat for the city’s failures, so too do Jones and Allen appropriate Carey as a mascot for how the language of interests, virtue, and management propped up white supremacy and justified abdication of citizenship’s more democratic and revolutionary potential.
Carey’s Fever: A Crisis in Fellow Citizenship
Yellow fever hit Philadelphia in August of 1793, killing between 4,000 and 5,000 people (10–15 percent of Philadelphia’s population), approximately 400 of them free Africans, in a little less than three months. An additional 20,000 fled the city for safety.17 The federal government
