in November 1793, Clarkson charged Matthew Carey, an Irish immigrant, printer, and entrepreneur, with composing the city’s official account, including theories about the fever’s causes and progression, the activities of the Relief Committee, and the general state of the city during those three horrible months. This account, initially titled A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia: With a Statement of the Proceedings that Took Place on the Subject in Different Parts of the United States, ran through five editions published in the United States and Europe and eventually sold “over 10,000 copies.” And the publication helped sustain Carey’s faltering career.18 More than a chronicle of the immediate crisis, Carey’s Short Account presents Philadelphia as a metonym for the nation’s civic and economic climate. His and other yellow fever narratives present several problems in the early republic through the fever, among them: (1) the “dissolution” of “natural” bonds, including familial, neighborly, and formal, and (2) a concomitant crisis of commercial regulation, relating to the role of the state in guiding markets and the market’s ability to regulate itself.19
As he navigates these political and economic problems, Carey employs standard tropes of an early national civic republican style that mixed classical republicanism’s emphasis on sacrifice, the common good, and a fear of luxury and corruption with a more favorable attitude toward commerce as an expression of liberty and a path toward and sign of stability and competence, all moderated by a assurance of consequences for intemperance.20 In this flexible constellation of concepts, Carey links progress to regulation: “Virtue, liberty, and happiness of a nation,” he posits, depend on its “temperance and sober manners.”21 Virtuous citizens are not necessarily the yeomen attributed to Jeffersonian mythology but rather the “plain and wholesome” city dwellers whose daily commercial interactions knit them into a community that prized respectability, politeness, sobriety, and industry.22 City life may provide opportunities for corruption, but sober citizens could resist these temptations with proper self-regulation and institutional oversight, if not on their own merits, because maintaining a public image of self-regulation and politeness could be profitable. Moreover, when otherwise self-regulating individuals fell victim to the temptations of success, strong civic and financial institutions could help rein them in, providing a safety net for the innocent and a bulwark against the market’s (or individual’s) unpredictability for society as a whole. In such a climate, virtuous citizenship did not require the sacrifice of individual interest for the common good so much as the prudent regulation of an enlightened selfinterest—do no harm rather than do good.
On the basis of this civic republicanism, Carey’s prefatory remarks in Account about prefever Philadelphia strike a tenuous balance between the pursuit of commerce and the regulation of extravagance, individual liberty and culpability, and institutional oversight. For Carey, the stability of the Federal Constitution brought the new nation from the brink of “anarchy”: commerce flourished, and “property of every kind, rose to, and in some instances beyond its real value.”23 The economic boom of the mid-1780s and 1790s, however, undermined this sober ethic and political economic stability: “prospects formed in sanguine hours” replaced the prudent deliberation of less prosperous times, and “luxury, the usual, and perhaps the inevitable concomitant of prosperity, was gaining ground in a manner very alarming.”24 Carey’s ambivalence about the relation between economic prosperity and corruption (is luxury “usual” but avoidable, or is it an “inevitable” natural consequence) mirrors fluctuations within early national debates about such correlative or causal relations. But most agreed luxury had consequences: citizens’ extravagance and economic intemperance primed the city for “something … to humble” their “pride.”25 Even so, the revival of the Bank of Pennsylvania in 1792–1793 and the “liberal conduct of the bank of the United States,” a combination of private and public management, looked to have stabilized the market, regulating currency and “saving many a deserving and industrious man from ruin.”26 The consequences of the previous years’ glut had apparently taught these “deserving” men a valuable lesson while the banks softened the economic blow. With the federal government managing politics and debt, the banks watching over commerce, and the common citizen sufficiently chastened, the middling sorts and economic elite were looking forward to a prosperous fall quarter in 1793.
The yellow fever tipped the balance of this system, removing the stability and confidence that made common prosperity and individual interest compatible if not complementary. Account registers the schism between the two as competing principles of human nature, two orders of natural law at odds. In one of Account’s most often quoted passages, Carey observes, “We cannot be astonished at the frightful scenes that were acted, which seemed to indicate a total dissolution of the bonds of society in the nearest and dearest connections…. A wife unfeelingly abandoning her husband on his death bed—parents forsaking their only children—children ungratefully flying from their parents, and resigning them to chance … masters hurrying off their faithful servants to Bushhill … [and] servants abandoning tender and humane masters.”27 The danger the fever presented (real or imagined) overrode the natural familial bonds that had served as a model for good citizenship.28 Family units disintegrated, and every other form of relation followed suit. Readers should “not be astonished,” however, because the consequent flight was equally natural and perhaps stronger than inducements to stay. Carey describes a mass of “people at the lowest ebb of despair” whose actions were dictated by “the great law of self preservation.”29 “Self-preservation,” observes Carey, is a “law” stronger than kinship, governing not just human behavior but also the “whole animated world.”30 This law led those with means to flee, while those who could not flee either hid, avoiding their neighbors, or took advantage of the crisis to make a profit. In the latter case, while these people may have risked their lives in the process, the profit motive undermined their claims to goodwill; profit was a seemingly unnatural substitute for other failing bonds.
This general unneighborliness revealed holes in the civic republican matrix outlined in Carey’s prefatory remarks and mirrored both federalist and anti-federalist concerns during the constitutional debates in the previous decade.31 As historian Woody Holton notes, economic growth and stability were preeminent concerns shaping the push for the 1787 constitution. Madison and others were not so much concerned with “replac[ing] selfish demagogues with men of virtue” as they were with reviving a failing economy. From this frame of reference, virtue was important, Holton observers, insofar as it led to economic goods: restoring credit and properly managing specie.32 Fulfilling one’s civic duty translated into fulfilling one’s economic debt. These debates asked the same fundamental questions about social and civic relations that Carey’s Account investigates: what is the role of self-interest in shaping civil and economic society, what are the duties that citizens have to each other and to the community at large, and what is the role of government in directing and/or cultivating these interests and duties?
Carey’s Account registers these concerns in the social, recording rampant distrust, selfish neglect of duty to family and neighbors, and wholesale abandonment. The disintegration of fellow citizenship in Philadelphia spreads to the national scene as surrounding counties, states, and other “strangers” abandoned those seeking refuge. “The universal consternation,” Carey reports, “extinguished in people’s breasts the most honourable feelings of human nature … suspicion operated as injuriously as the reality.”33 Philadelphians’ inhumanity toward each other revealed the weakness of societal bonds between friends and neighbors while the inhumanity of the surrounding communities uncovered a deeper lack of feeling (or substance in that feeling) between citizens within the new republic. If societal bonds could not survive a climate that demanded more of its citizens than politeness and sociability, could the new federal compact? The yellow fever epidemic made suspicious “strangers” out of neighbors and fellow citizens alike.
Despite the dire image of a more general unneighborliness, Carey presents the singular achievements of individuals such as Stephen Girard and members of the Relief Committee, led by Mayor Matthew Clarkson, as models of the
