of brothers” stand in as the stabilizing force, mirroring the influence of the Federal Constitution and Bank of Pennsylvania in the years before the crisis.34 Girard, a French immigrant and one of the wealthiest merchants in the city, and Peter Helm are representative republican citizens in this instance. “Actuated by … benevolent motives,” they eschew the safety of retreat to serve the common good.35 Their sacrifice is twofold: they sacrifice their business interests to oversee matters at Bush Hill without regard for compensation (and they can do so because they are wealthy), and they risk “little less than certain” death.36 Girard and Helm, Carey continues, “without any possible inducement but the purest motives of humanity … came forward, and offered themselves as the forlorn hope of the committee…. From the time of undertaking this office to the present, they have attended uninterruptedly, for six, seven, or eight hours a day, renouncing almost every care of private affairs.”37 When focused on this group, Carey’s style reflects more the rigidity of early eighteenth-century classical republicanism than the relatively fluid late eighteenth-century model of sobriety and polite sensibility outlined in his description of the prefever commercial and political climate.38 Girard, Helm, and other “benevolent citizens” comprise a core managerial elite whose affluence and position give them the ability to flee but whose sense of duty compels them to stay. Carey’s emphasis on the voluntary nature of their work—sacrificing private interests without the possibility of repayment—enhances their republican credentials as the prototypes of benevolent disinterest. In short, they exemplify the temperance, sobriety, and service that sustain republican virtue as a rationale for elite enterprise.
These few bright spots are just enough to bring the city through the crisis and offer hope for its recovery. Carey’s Account exudes confidence about the city’s speedy return to its prefever form and optimism: “Streets, too long the abode of gloom and despair, have assumed the bustle suitable to the season,” and as people return (including President Washington), commerce is picking back up.39 Even the flight out of the city retroactively symbolizes the success of “the nature of our government” because it “did not allow the arbitrary measures” that a “despotic” government would have initiated in attempting to curtail the epidemic.40 Overall, then, Carey’s Account simultaneously excoriates the general inhumanity, naturalizes it as concomitant with crisis itself, and suggests that the nation should not read the episode as indicative of behaviors under normal conditions. This tripartite description was calculated to explain events during the fever in a way that would protect Philadelphia’s economic interests in trade and the city’s political (and economic) interests in remaining the nation’s capital.
More broadly, Carey presents a two-tiered protective civic republicanism, a citizenship practice in which citizens able to maintain the classical republican standard of virtue and duty watch over—either in government or in philanthropy—those citizens for whom the classical model is much too demanding.41 As a citizenship practice, the two-tiered civic republican model allows citizens to act on their own interests in the comfort that government institutions and benevolent citizens like Girard and Helm would help direct those interests through prudent regulation and could protect citizens from each other. This vertical management made the marketplace less the breeding ground of distrust and corruption of classical republicanism and more a safe place to display and exercise fellow citizenship, which, in turn, opened citizenship practice to a wider range of citizens, identified by their ability to observe protocols of politeness and sociability.42 At the same time, these citizens become a sign of republican freedom in the sense that the state allows, if not encourages, them to be as self-interested as their morality, material circumstances, and the market permit.43
Yet, could the city, let alone the nation, depend on such a division of civic labor? As a January 1, 1794, editorial in the Philadelphia Gazette and Universal Daily Advertiser observed, “property” provided a stronger call to patriotism than did love of country, customs, religion, or any number of other ties: “Will not a Turk, or a Spaniard fight as bravely for his Koran or his Crucifix, as any Republican for his property? Let history; let facts decide.” How could these citizens reconcile the apparent weakness of fellow citizenship (and their apparent desire for this weakness) in the face of crisis with its ostensible success in more stable times?44 Without the economic and political stability that turned this defense of property into a public good, this citizenry could not be depended on to work toward a common rather than individual good. In the absence of a robust agential citizenship, the relief effort—at least in Carey’s Account—became a market, and the benignly self-interested became inhumane deserters or extortionists, their activities too focused on protecting their interests for civic republican discourse to absorb and their work too dependent on wages, their bodily sacrifice too tainted by profit-motive, for his classical virtue to applaud. The problem turns not simply around how persons—strangers and friends alike—ought to relate to one another when the “law” of “self-preservation” and the needs of the community collide but also around who can or cannot be virtuous and how notions of virtue, the common good, and, ultimately, the role of interests in constructing or obstructing the pursuit of this good get framed and toward what ends.
Carey’s Account does offer possible solutions outside of this tiered structure, even if his narrative perspective tends to obscure them. Carey mentions neighboring cities such as Springfield, New Jersey, and Elkton, Maryland, that offered refuge to their fellow citizens, suggesting that such towns model the “humanity and tenderness” other states ought to show their neighbors if such a crisis should return.45 While elaborating on scenes of horror, Carey also reveals that people were on Philadelphia’s streets assisting the suffering, but these others were not included in the “nearest and dearest relations,” nor were they “respectable citizens” or members of the Relief Committee. While his narrative calls the audience’s attention to the “cries” of a pregnant woman surrounded by her dead family and without a midwife, for instance, he also mentions “one of the carters employed by the committee for the relief of the sick” who helped her deliver her child.46 Elsewhere, “respectable women” depend on “servant women for assistance.”47 Each instance provides an opportunity for Carey to meditate on the potential virtues of these lesser sorts who also risked their lives during the crisis to help neighbors in the same way that neighboring cities offered assistance to fleeing Philadelphians, yet both of these scenes foreground the abandonment rather than the service, ending with reiterations of the “dreadful spectacle.”48 Moreover, Carey’s focus on elite actors implies that only citizens of means and “respectability” could muster the requisite resolution to act and that their force of will carried these common folk with them. From this perspective, Carey’s praise for the Relief Committee and recuperation of Philadelphia’s citizenry ultimately makes passive citizenship not only desirable but also required for a functional republic.49
For this paradigm to hold, those who remained behind but did not fit into either category (virtuous elite or respectable victims) needed to be rendered civically dead or otherwise illegible. Such is the case with Carey’s representation of black relief efforts. Even when they make positive contributions, Carey uses the necessity for the presence of these people to signal the community’s breakdown: without the people representing the “nearest and dearest” connections in society (the “wives, children, friends, clerks, and servants”), Carey explains, “many men of affluent fortunes … have been abandoned to the care of a negro.”50 Carey clarifies his distinction between waged service and benevolence as he excepts “Negroes” from the “nearest and dearest” of the community and the expected system of recovery. The civic republicanism that depended on notions of “natural” relationships, like familial bonds, or disinterested benevolence to define social relations had no interpretive frame for valuing their work as legitimate citizenship practice. These scenes instead signal the overall breakdown of white community during the epidemic: white readers see images of an abandoned city, left to black people without having to acknowledge white absence or cowardice.51
Blackness becomes Carey’s marker for absence, and black Philadelphians come to represent
