all the virtues,” and provides a benevolent analogue to the functional equivalency of self-interest.103 The gentleman feels for the stranger very publicly (he was standing on the streets) without a concomitant identification of the stranger as one who, more than an “inferior,” requires the gentleman to overcome his irresolution.
In contrast to the poor black man who moves to help the dying man, the gentleman tries to move capital instead, “[holding] eight dollars in his hand,” implicitly valuing the man’s needs or the value of his own good citizenship at eight dollars in the process.104 The gentleman is not without virtue. He does call attention to the dying man’s need, after all, and in some ways, concern for the dying man supplants class and racial boundaries: the “gentleman” foreigner asks a “poor black man” to help “a poor afflicted dying man.”105 Yet, his recourse to using capital as a proxy, to stand by until the market produced an agent, alienates him from a potential neighbor, resulting in the kind of complacence that created the economic crisis before the fever and a climate of exploitation during the fever. His attempt, like Carey’s Account, shifts attention away from his inability to help, calling attention instead to those for whom his fee is not a sufficient motivator. Perhaps the gentleman even sees himself as a helpless victim of both the dread the man’s wails cause and the manifest inhumanity of passersby.106 Juxtaposed against the poor black man, the gentleman’s inertia becomes less about the gentleman’s helplessness in an unwilling market than about the insufficiency of simple sensibility in general as a guide for civic action.
Narrative’s analysis of those like the “gentleman,” people of status and means looking to pay others for services, suggests that looking upward for models of good citizenship reveals an inadequacy that may be all the more dangerous because it is cloaked in performances of sensibility and class expectations rather than in an active “real sensibility.” Where the seemingly “natural” bonds between citizens (family, friends, servants, and neighbors) fail and the gentleman’s sensibility and finances prove ineffective (or, as in the previous discussion, counterproductive), the poor black man offers a third way, a neighborly ethics predicated neither on the claims of sociability or kinship nor on performances of sensibility and benevolence. Like the rank-and-file citizens, the man has no claim to respectability—Narrative describes him simply as “good natured”—like the gentleman, he cannot simply walk by. Absent any obvious tie to the dying man or social expectation of virtue, the poor black man nevertheless steps forward, his “real sensibility,” or piety in the FAS’s terms, providing the cosmopolitan link with the stranger even as the gentleman’s sensibility fails. This gentleman and passersby dramatize the “‘split subject’ of citizenship: the individual citizen understood as structured by this central division between private self and public persona.”107 Narrative’s account of neighborliness suggests this private-public binary is a deceptive one. More perniciously, it enables writers like Carey and the culture more broadly to assign moral credit or blame arbitrarily and strategically in the service of buttressing white citizenship.
Jones and Allen’s invoking real sensibility, then, resonates with and intervenes in contemporaneous attempts to distinguish between sensibility as a physiological response to outside stimuli, a performative (and therefore untrustworthy) display of emotion, and an ethical imperative to act informed by reason. These discussions turned to schemes for regulating sensibility through cultivating reason, contrasting sensibility or basic sympathy to teachable principles, such as charity, or suggesting that sensibility was, itself, mediated through reason. Benjamin Rush, for instance, characterized sensibility as the “avenue to the moral faculty,” one that needed careful supervision and development because it provided the scaffold upon which society was built.108 Anthony Benezet claimed the person who “possessed but a small degree of feeling” could still exercise charity because charity “consisteth in the subjection of the mind to known duties.”109 And Jonathan Edwards distinguished between apparent virtue and the “truly virtuous”: “some actions and dispositions appear beautiful, if considered partially and superficially,” but are revealed to be otherwise when “seen clearly in their whole nature and the extent of their connections in the universality of things.”110 Jones and Allen add to this their experience with how racist accounts could obscure the whole nature of real sensibility. After all, they wrote Narrative to correct “partial” accounts of black relief efforts with testimony from those who saw the whole and could “declare facts as they really were.”111 While Narrative does not use separate terms to differentiate between “sensibility” as a physiological response and “real sensibility” as a principle, the contrast between the gentleman’s inertia and the poor black man’s activity, his “language of conduct,” suggests that the difference between the two—sensibility and real sensibility—corresponds to these concurrent frameworks, as well as the FAS’s invocation of piety. At the same time, reworking sensibility through a narrative about an unsung black man demonstrated that black Philadelphians were not just “ready for freedom”; they were in fact were already doing the work of citizenship.112
The parable of the Good Samaritan provides a useful parallel text that offers a vocabulary for articulating the kind of relation between citizens that “real sensibility” should produce and connects events recounted in Narrative to the FAS’s notion of the pious person as a good citizen of the world.113 Reading this account through the parable’s narrative formula, a formula that would have been familiar to many of Jones and Allen’s readers, reveals how their strategy moves beyond setting black virtue against white inhumanity.114 The conversation between Jesus and a lawyer about law and civic responsibility frames a moment in which Jesus pivots on received understandings of the law to offer a more expansive notion of who is the neighbor or to whom the good citizen should be responsible and responsive. When a lawyer questions Jesus about eternal life, Jesus responds with a question of his own: “What is written in the law?” The lawyer replies, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy soul … strength, and … mind; and thy neighbor as thyself.”115 Jesus tells the lawyer that he has answered correctly, but not to be outdone, the lawyer asks a logical follow-up question: “And who is my neighbor?” Rather than answer the lawyer’s question—“who is my neighbor?”—by describing the set of people whom the lawyer should love and thus offering a restricted notion of neighborliness, Jesus offers a parable, a case study, outlining the characteristics of the neighbor as the subject, sensible to another’s suffering, in action: “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.”116 As in Jones and Allen’s vignette, the parable features an injured man in need of assistance. Respected community leaders and fellow Jews—symbols of the civic and moral good—recognize the man’s suffering but go out of their way to avoid helping him. Instead, a Samaritan not only aids the man but also ensures his safety until his recovery. The Samaritan, seeing past the mutual enmity between Jews and Samaritans, “discover[s] the neighbor” in the injured man and becomes the good neighbor, the keeper of the law who will “inherit eternal life,” because he acts as the neighbor rather than looking for the neighbor.117
This response has deep implications for the construction of community and citizenship as a point of civil law going beyond a simple moral query. In the context of the Mosaic Law, legal scholar Jeremy Waldron explains, love thy neighbor “is emphatically not a moralistic add-on to a legal code”; rather, the maxim “sums up the spirit of the legal code.”118 Using a Samaritan—a people viewed by Jesus’ audience as a lower caste or culturally and religiously abject—as the model of neighborliness, Jesus shifts the audience’s focus from finding the neighbor among themselves to finding the neighbor-citizen within themselves and, in so doing, expands the boundaries of “my neighbor” beyond respectability (“respectable citizens”), genealogy (whiteness), or political status. The onus falls on the sensible citizen’s ability to see the neighbor-citizen in the other
