Carey accuses (some) workers of extortion: “The great demand for nurses, afforded an opportunity for imposition, which was eagerly seized by some of the vilest of the blacks. They extorted two, three, four, and even five dollars a night for services that would have been well paid by a single dollar. Some of them were even detected in plundering the houses of the sick.”52 He further undermines their contribution by quoting from John Lining’s 1753 observation of black immunity in South Carolina, implying that the risks involved for them were minimal.53 As Rana Hogarth notes, immunity theories allowed Carey, Rush, and others to minimize the risks and to claim that black Philadelphians in fact had an obligation to stay “because their biology dictated it.”54 Tainted with commercial interest yet incompatible with civic republicanism’s regulatory schema, black citizens presented both a visible threat to and a handy release valve for Philadelphia’s postfever anxieties.55 They provided filler for the gaps in Carey’s two-tiered civic republicanism, filler that could then be easily excised from the state’s civic imaginary. Carey’s Account reduces Jones, Allen, and Gray’s efforts at best to the exceptions that proved the rule of the general dissipation of social bonds, at worst to shady market exchanges and outright theft.56
It is not just that Carey’s Account gives the impression of widespread black theft; rather, by emphasizing the distress of helpless citizens and the general abandonment while, as Jones and Allen suggest in Narrative, upholding a select few, he often deemphasizes those who do offer assistance, missing an opportunity to explore citizenship practices that might actually work beyond the managerial elite.57 Even his account of black citizens enhances the notion that only a community’s elite can access civic virtue; all others must, by definition, be operating for selfish, destructive reason. Jones, Allen, and Gray, like Girard and Helm, preside over an otherwise unsung and unruly laboring mass.
Where Carey sought to reassure people that the system worked, that state and financial institutions could properly manage potentially destructive interests in normal conditions, Jones and Allen’s Narrative suggests that perhaps this management is a crutch, a shell game in which citizens take advantage of the potential individual benefits of civic republicanism’s adaptability to commerce while refusing to assume moral and political responsibility for how this commercial ethic could turn fellow citizens into antagonistic strangers.58 Statesmen such as Alexander Hamilton, who was in the city during the crisis and, like Allen, survived his own bout with the fever, lamented that if fellow citizenship failed in the city during the crisis, then, as Richard Newman aptly summarizes, “the republic could not survive.”59 The rest of this chapter focuses on Narrative’s account of the relief effort, contrasting it to Carey’s managerial narrative to suggest a neighborly ethics of citizenship that could provide a stronger basis for active citizenship than the “natural” bonds or elite benevolence cited in Carey’s Account. Whether or not Jones and Allen are explicitly taking on civic republican models of citizenship—they use terms like “sensibility” and “duty” sometimes ironically and at other times in ways that implicate them within civic republican discourse—we might usefully frame what Narrative offers as a third way, navigating between the layers of Carey’s tiered civic republicanism.
Response and Diagnosis: The Problem with Citizenship as Commerce
Read through Narrative’s analysis of the labor market during the epidemic and Jones and Allen’s experience as former slaves and free Africans, the civic breakdown during the epidemic was not unexpected. Rather, the stress it put on the white citizenry brought into sharp relief the structural instabilities of a civic republicanism predicated on “more a willingness to get along with others for the sake of peace and prosperity” than on the sense of shared responsibility for the common good or fellow citizenship.60 While contemporaries like Carey claimed that Federalist regulatory structures could prevent fellow citizenship from collapsing under normal circumstances, Narrative’s account of the inability of institutions to regulate the market for relief workers emphasizes the limits of market structures in creating relations between citizens when the underlying ethic governing citizenship practice depends on and encourages atomization and exploitation. Moreover, even as Narrative offers a productive critique of civic republicanism’s economic valences, its inversion of Carey’s style underscores how readily the economic rhetoric of interests can be manipulated to justify anything from benevolent service to the slave trade.
The commercial ethic that remained submerged or managed before the fever comes to a head during the crisis and seems to overpower official regulation. Mayor Clarkson, Jones, and Allen all attempted to regulate the cost of the relief efforts by employing workers through the city and other civic institutions. The presence of these regulations highlights the economic similarities between the moment of crisis and the city under normal conditions. Jones and Allen recount their meeting with Matthew Clarkson about the rising fees: “[Clarkson] sent for us, and requested that we would use our influence, to lessen the wages of the nurses, but informing him of the cause, i.e. that of the people over-bidding one another, it was concluded unnecessary to attempt any thing on that head; therefore it was left to the people concerned.”61 As Clarkson’s response suggests, inflation not only overcame the city’s ability to influence its workers but also changed the nature of economic exchange itself. Clarkson, Jones, and Allen could “influence” the workers to lower their fees, because the workers were their employees and they provided a flat wage intended to make these services available to all, but the bidding war took the workers out of their direct employ. People offering these payments were operating squarely within a market in which their individual means and interests were their own concern. Since the workers were not setting the prices but rather were responding to the effects of supply and demand with individual consumers dictating the price ceiling, neither the mayor nor, perhaps, Jones and Allen saw a need to intervene, and even if they did, they could not.
Jones and Allen’s emphasis on the forces of supply, demand, and selfinterest reveals that the black workers’ response to the market during the epidemic worked by the same logics that governed white activities before, during, and after the epidemic.62 The “difficulty” of finding “persons … to supply the wants of the sick” and the increasing “applications” for services that Narrative describes during the fever parallel Carey’s earlier description of the “number of applicants for houses” before the fever.63 The “extravagant prices … paid” (the “two, three, four, and even five dollars a night” in Carey’s Account) mirror the prefever increase of property values to “double, and in some treble what it would have been a year or two before.”64 In both Carey’s Account and Jones and Allen’s Narrative, the syntactic focus on environmental forces rather than individual choices—the presence or absence of an agent—absolves the actors of moral responsibility. Rents “had risen” in Carey’s Account, without mention of the property owners’ agency as a factor in driving up prices. The nursing fees, however, increased because “the vilest of the blacks … eagerly seized” the “opportunity for imposition.”65 Here, Carey also mentions the increase in demand, but where the demand for housing drove up rents (passively), the demand for nurses provided an opportunity for corruption that black workers actively pursued. Jones and Allen use much the same strategy but inverted, contrasting the bidding war and those who were (passively) paid exorbitant prices to a “white woman” who “demanded” “six pounds” for her services.66 Their inversion disarms Carey’s racialization of economic corruption, using Carey’s terms to demonstrate black virtue in the face of white inhumanity.
The facility with which Jones, Allen, and Carey manipulate commercial language reveals the slipperiness of the economic discourse more generally when applied as an ethical tool. The mirroring Jones and Allen enact between Narrative and Account destabilizes the economic discourse they both use, however tenuous, ironic, or adversarial that use may be. This indeterminacy disrupts any attempt to situate virtue or corruption in any one group.67 Good citizenship from this perspective depended less on adhering to a set of ethical precepts than on maintaining the authority to set those precepts
