they restaged the 1793 epidemic’s labor market, Jones and Allen both responded to white supremacy through the languages of sentiment and political economy and rethought how those discourses codified structural racism. As is the case with many of the texts I treat in The Practice of Citizenship, Narrative explicitly frames willful misreadings of black activities as a precondition for articulating white virtue.87 When Narrative moves rhetorically from an economic defense of black workers and Jones and Allen’s expenditures to a discussion of citizenship as neighborliness, it also shifts attention away from a politics dependent on the recognition of black worth toward one that holds white citizens responsible for correcting their racism. In this section, I analyze how Jones and Allen theorize neighborliness by exchanging their narrative substrate from Carey’s Account and late-century models of sensibility for the parable of the Good Samaritan and black citizens’ “real sensibility.”
Even as Narrative inserts black citizens into the civic republican polity of feeling and virtue, its shift in narrative structure and emphasis not only disrupts that discourse’s racial-economic valences—that is, whether or not “negroes” and “servants” can be respectable or virtuous citizens—but also undermines respectability and virtue as markers of good citizenship and the individualistic ethos those markers promote. Using Jones and Allen’s distinction of a “real sensibility” and the FAS’s reference to an “expressive language of conduct” as guides, we can frame what Narrative offers in its account of black citizens during the fever as an alternative practice of citizenship based on an ethics of neighborliness.88 Neighborliness corresponds with the duty to the common good suggested in classical republicanism and embodied in Girard and Helm in Carey’s Account but with a potentially more democratic ethos of equality and inclusion, demanding that neighbor-citizens serve the common good by serving each other, by being neighborly toward the individuals encountered in everyday life. This openness results in a permeable civic space, resembling more a dynamic web of associations based in mutual aid than a single sphere, a neighborhood rather than a market.
I use the term “neighborliness” to describe Narrative’s civic ethics here rather than “piety,” “Golden Rule,” “mutual aid,” “charity,” or the like for three reasons: (1) Neighborliness emphasizes that this ethic operates between individuals on terms of moral equality in a way that creates a collective. This emphasis on horizontality, moreover, distinguishes neighborliness from cultures of benevolence, classical virtue, or sensibility. (2) The term connects Jones and Allen’s investment in Christian ethics via the parable of the Good Samaritan’s narrative formula with their equal investment in developing a strong political structure for emancipation and full citizenship. (3) Consolidating this question under “neighborliness” highlights Narrative’s resonances with contemporaneous interpretations of the Samaritan parable as addressing not simply individual morality but also the law’s foundations. As Gary Nash conjectures of the black citizens’ attitude as they began their efforts, “Philadelphia’s black Christians would act as Good Samaritans, reenacting the drama of the despised man who aided a fellow human in desperate need when all the respected men of the community turned their heads.”89 Yet, beyond the allegorical value of this narrative trajectory and its social inversions, the Good Samaritan formula offers a grounding from which we can draw a critique of civic republican logics. That is, rather than read the formula as a suggestion that black Philadelphians were better or more virtuous republican citizens, I want to suggest that the formula and the overall Narrative offer an alternative to civic republicanism in much the same way that Jesus of Nazareth uses the parable to offer an alternative to what had become traditional interpretations to Mosaic Law.90
Narrative registers neighborliness as a cultural practice in black citizens’ “real sensibility”: their quest to “be useful” and their “rendering services where extreme necessity called for it.”91 One case, mirroring familiar scenes of abandonment in Carey’s Account, features the actions of a poor black man set against two others. The comparison between the three upends expected roles and creates space for a more substantive critique and revision of not only how commentators like Carey applied civic republican logic but also of the civic republican logic itself:
A poor afflicted dying man, stood at his chamber window, praying and beseeching every one that passed by, to help him to a drink of water; a number of white people passed, and instead of being moved by the poor man’s distress, they hurried as fast as they could out of the sound of his cries until at length a gentleman, who seemed a foreigner came up, he could not pass by, but had not resolution enough to go into the house, he held eight dollars in his hand, and offered it to several as a reward for giving the poor man a drink of water, but was refused by every one.92
The first half of this story follows Carey’s narrative pattern: Carey also mentions the plight of “poor” persons “without a human being to hand them a drink of water,” “men of affluent fortune … abandoned to the care of a negro,” and those whose money could not “procure proper attendance.”93 In these instances, Carey’s two-tiered model falls apart. With expected neighbors failing and no one willing to risk infection for even a considerable fee of “five dollars,” the suffering die alone, die in the presence of a negro (which amounts to the same thing in Carey’s Account), or, as in the case of a servant girl, die in a cart as the guardians of the poor attempt to find a home willing to take them in.94 Where Carey’s illustrations typically end, however, Narrative offers “a poor black man” who “came up” and not only “supplied the poor object with water” but also “rendered him every service he could.”95 When the gentleman offers to pay the black man to help the dying man, the black man responds, “Master … I will supply the gentleman with water, but surely I will not take your money for it,” punctuating the insufficiency of money as a motivating factor.96
The black man’s story undoubtedly offers a direct rebuttal to Carey’s assertion of black inhumanity, particularly in his refusal of the gentleman’s money. Above these evidentiary moves, however, the anecdote provides a more general theory of citizenship missing in Carey’s Account: an immanent sense of civic responsibility uncoupled from social status or economic motivation. The man’s action demonstrates a “real sensibility” that compels him and other black citizens to move forward even as white neighbors hide or stand by because “the dread … was so general” as to make friends “afraid of each other.”97 Both groups show a kind of sensibility when confronted with a nearly overwhelming emotional tide—fear, horror, despair, pity, and so on—that suggests a breakdown in sympathy and fellow feeling, but black citizens’ sensibility becomes “real” through the “expressive language of conduct,” that is, when at sight of “others being so backward,” they refuse to let their senses control their actions.98 Narrative’s sensibility becomes “real” or concrete only as it produces measures to alleviate the need that initiated the sensory reaction. (Hence Jones and Allen’s position that their “services were the product of real sensibility.”99)
The white gentleman in Narrative’s vignette offers a useful point of contrast between this productive “real sensibility” manifested through the “expressive language of conduct” and what Markman Ellis usefully describes as the “specular economic voyeurism” of eighteenth-century cultures of sensibility. Despite the appearance of virtue in his attitude, the gentleman’s sensibility is no more effective than other citizens’ abandonment. He fulfills the expectation that a cosmopolitan gentleman be able to “relate to strangers, to share in the feelings of others, including social inferiors and even animals,” and might even occasion admiration.100 Yet, his concern for the dying man results in inertia: “he could not pass by, but had not resolution enough to go into the house.”101 “Observations on Sensibility, or Felling, as Opposed to Principle,” a 1791 article in Carey’s American Museum, explains the difference: “This [concern] is the work of an unprincipled man of feeling, whose nerves with peculiar irritability, can tremble every hour at the touch of joy or woe; whose
