the fever and Narrative’s vindication of black laborers, then, offer a larger critique of how civic republican logic “protected and facilitated” the economic interests of a white elite, making self-interest, as Joyce Appleby posits, “a functional equivalent to civic virtue” that masks the maintenance of inequality.68 The “functional” equivalency of self-interest and civic virtue breaks down when citizens are forced to choose between what the rules of commercial exchange allow them to do and what civic duty or fellow citizenship suggests they ought to do. Economic inequalities in place before the fever exacerbate this warlike relation, stripping the polite trappings of the market structure Kloppenberg describes as the “natural harmony of benignly striving individuals,” revealing it to be instead a free-for-all.69 Jones and Allen explain, “When we procured [workers] at six dollars per week, and called upon them to go where they were wanted, we found they were gone elsewhere…. Upon enquiring the cause, we found, they had been allured away by others who offered greater wages, until they got from two to four dollars per day. We had no restraint upon the people. It was natural for people in low circumstances to accept a voluntary, bounteous reward.”70 People followed their “natural” inclinations, and individual means would control just how far these inclinations could go. If it was natural for white people in Carey’s Account to abandon the “nearest and dearest,” was it not more natural for black citizens to lay aside questions of fairness to strangers in the name of self-preservation and economic self-interest? This principle holds doubly true for “people in low circumstances,” who, unlike Girard and Helm, were not financially secure even before the fever.
Narrative’s juxtaposition of pilfering and privateering illustrates how official discourse produces this functional equivalency and its uneven, racialized results: “We know as many whites who were guilty of it [theft and extortion],” Jones and Allen write, “but this is looked over, while the blacks are held up to censure.—Is it a greater crime for a black to pilfer, than for a white to privateer?”71 The comparison indicts both black and white citizens for taking advantage of the breakdown during the fever to make a profit.72 Compared to “pilfer,” however, “privateer” invokes a more pernicious attitude toward commerce that may be legal, strictly speaking, but also involves an antagonistic ethic that perhaps causes the waning virtue Carey notes in Account’s opening lines.73 Coming directly after a sentence focused not on white theft but rather on people offering accounts that “[look] over” white theft while highlighting black criminality, “privateer” confronts the duplicity of official narratives and structures that essentially legalize white theft.74 Just as a state’s letter of marque authorizes the private citizen to approach “foreign” ships in a way that would amount to piracy under other conditions, the collective attitude toward commerce authorizes, if not encourages, citizens to approach each other in ways that would otherwise amount to theft, as if they were not just strangers but also enemies.75
Gould has noted rightly that the slipperiness of commercial discourse in both yellow fever narratives points to “the ideological inextricability during this transitional era between sentiment and the capitalist market, between benevolence and supply-and-demand as the regulators of human behavior.”76 In Jones and Allen’s pilfer versus privateer figure, Gould finds not a tactical deployment of contemporaneous discourse but rather “Narrative’s major flaw”: the ironic comparison indicts both black and white citizens for taking advantage of the breakdown during the fever to make a profit; Jones and Allen’s insistence on their economic losses during the fever, visually punctuated with an inserted ledger, he argues, destabilizes any claims they might make to disinterested benevolence.77 We should not, however, take Jones and Allen’s reproduction of Carey’s narrative as an adoption of the principles subtending that narrative. Focusing so much on the economic discourse misses Jones and Allen’s structural critique: economics and market logics of interest, while useful for descriptive purposes, make for poor ethical tools and not all people inhabit the market on the same terms or from the same position.
An expanded reading of Narrative’s form suggests that Jones and Allen leveraged this rhetorical slipperiness to proffer an analysis absent in Account: citizenship in which state and social convention could turn theft into fair trade depends less on adhering to a set of ethical precepts than on maintaining the power to validate some narratives as impartial and dismiss others as “the insidious arts of whispering slander,” Carey’s description of Jones and Allen’s Narrative.78 These passages do suggest the equivalency and invocation virtue of politics that critics have noted but in terms of the kinds of interestedness the early republic “protected and facilitated.”79 By invoking the institutional distinctions between pilfer and privateer, Jones and Allen signify acerbically on how arbitrarily these concepts can be deployed to suit political ends. They reveal that no matter how enlightened self-interest might be, it still encouraged duplicitous practices contrary to the fellow citizenship Carey attempts to extrapolate from it.80
While the fever surfaced this antagonistic tendency, Jones and Allen already had an analogue in an everyday life sanctioned by the state: the slave trade. Both men were former slaves whose family members had been sold when they were relatively young: Jones’s mother and siblings in 1762, Allen’s parents and younger siblings in the 1770s to settle his master’s debts.81 Just as Philadelphians attempted to outbid each other for services at the expense of their neighbors’ lives, slave owners battled each other for the lives of other human beings. And just as the “purchasers” of slaves, as Anthony Benezet put it, “[encourage] the Trade, [become] partaker in the Guilt of it,” so, too, do these bidding citizens bear responsibility for the chaos their bidding engendered.82 Notwithstanding Carey’s view of the Federal Constitution as a stabilizing force, black Americans were still subject to enslavement and the caprice of white interests, with the 1793 Fugitive Slave Law the most recent in a string of setbacks.83 As Jones explains in a 1799 petition to the “President, Senate, and House of Representatives,” the law codified on the federal level the treatment of human beings “like droves of cattle.”84 While Narrative’s bidding war and a slave market are not the same, they do operate by similar premises. Neither Jones and Allen nor Mayor Clarkson has (or takes) authority to regulate these exchanges between yellow fever victims, citing the independence of economic exchanges between individuals in a way that parallels the federal government’s refusal to “interfere” with individual property rights and the rights of the several states for the sake of preserving the union.
Narrative does not suggest that commerce in itself is corrupt or that state and civic institutions should not have a hand in regulating commerce or providing a framework and direction for civic activity. Jones and Allen cite several black workers who charged for services but always with the caveat that the worker “charged with exemplary moderation” or “enough for what she had done.”85 Recall also that Jones, Allen, and Gray worked with the city’s government to coordinate their efforts during the crisis, that the FAS and FAC were both institutions created to coordinate civic activities, and that Allen himself was an especially adept businessman.86 Rather, depending on a managerial elite (either the federal system, heroes like Girard and Helm, or civic leaders like Clarkson, Jones, and Allen) to ensure that citizens work toward their own general welfare or to simply protect citizens from each other removes the need for citizens to be responsible to and concerned for each other, requiring only that they appear to be so. Even if, as Carey’s Account claims, citizens’ freedom to flee the city during the fever showcases the strength of republican governance, the implication that preventing wholesale abandonment of Philadelphians by fellow Philadelphians and those in neighboring states might have required a mandate points to weaknesses in the relation between the citizens themselves. If, under these terms, white Philadelphians could be justified in abandoning the “nearest and dearest” in the interest of self-preservation, then civic republicanism would be inadequate to the task of addressing enslavement, let alone the white supremacy subtending it.
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