to this politics’ failures. Yet, it was still a tool that they’d leverage even as they critiqued the capriciousness of their intended audience and virtue’s conceptual instability. By characterizing black relief efforts as economic exchange, Carey ensured that readers would interpret their work as private and self-serving instead of political and coming from a concern for the common good. This is why attending to the formal affordances of the parable of the Good Samaritan is crucial.134 The parable shifted fundamentally the meaning of neighborliness and community. It refuses to function on the terms that the lawyer brought to the conversation—how others can signal to the individual their membership in a preconstituted community. By reframing their efforts as representing the essence of the law and as a process of community building, Jones and Allen also reframe black Philadelphians as political subjects practicing citizenship.
As we have seen in this section, Narrative maps a similar trajectory. In Narrative’s first act, Jones and Allen described black Philadelphians eschewing the contracts they (Jones and Allen) negotiated on their behalf with Clarkson and the city to make their own contracts. Disagree with the terms, Jones, Allen, and Clarkson (and Carey) might, but they had a right to work on terms closer to fair market value, as did their white counterparts. When Narrative shifts registers to acts of neighborliness, it similarly shows black Philadelphians setting their own terms. In these cases, the terms appear as refusals to frame their efforts as purely economic transactions—the poor black man refuses the gentleman’s money and the black woman refuses the proffered “reward.” At the same time, the black woman also establishes a wider ranging social compact: I do not perform this act as a laborer seeking wages but rather as an equal member of a community in which mutual dependence and responsiveness is the guiding ethic. I render aid to you today recognizing that you will render aid to me later.135 Here, as elsewhere, Narrative does not rely on any single strategy but rather deploys multiple strategies that black theorizers will take up and revise well into the nineteenth century. These two moments offer images of black virtue and critiques of white avarice that ultimately suggest that virtue politics was never sufficient, not just because white Americans would continually misread black public acts but also because a polity based on this kind of performative citizenship would always be insubstantial, not “real.”
Experiments in Structural Neighborliness
In the preceding sections, I have contrasted the civic and narrative schematics of Carey’s Account and Jones and Allen’s Narrative to outline an ethics of neighborliness, a civic ethos animated by a sensibility made material or “real” through concrete actions. The neighborly focus on being useful to others, on being a good neighbor rather than finding the good neighbor, creates bonds between citizens independent of other forms of association—familial, racial, economic, national, and so on. While, as I have suggested, neighborliness ultimately manifests in concrete actions between individuals, its logics have implications for how civic institutions take shape. Neighborly practices ultimately produce neighborly institutions; the ethos and actions that characterize the neighborly citizen also characterize the neighborly state.
Jones and Allen’s Narrative contributed to a tradition of writing from Anthony Benezet, Granville Sharpe, Benjamin Banneker, and other antislavery activists drawing on the political resonances of neighborliness via the Samaritan’s narrative to articulate a global notion of belonging.136 In The Just Limitation of Slavery in the Laws of God (1776), Sharpe explains, “No nation therefore whatever, can now be lawfully excluded as strangers, according to that uncharitable sense of the word stranger in which the Jews were apt to distinguish all other nations from themselves … all men are now to be esteemed ‘brethren and neighbours.’”137 Banneker uses a similar approach in his 1791 letter to Thomas Jefferson: “It is the indispensible duty of those, who maintain for themselves the rights of human nature, and who possess the obligations of Christianity, to extend their power and influence to the relief of every part of the human race, from whatever burden or oppression they may unjustly labor under.”138 Sharpe and Banneker use neighborliness to combine an appeal to moral equality with a call for social justice. First, they establish the equality of all people—enslaved and free, European and African—as a moral and, in Sharpe’s argument, a legal principle extending beyond the confines of a single nation or state, an equality stated in religious precepts yet applicable to a secular state. For Sharpe, the Samaritan parable’s articulation of neighborliness suggests that nations can no longer use national differences, however defined, to justify the oppression or exclusion of others: all nations and peoples are to be respected. Second, they argue that acknowledging this moral equality, what Banneker translates into secular terms as “those inestimable laws, which preserved to you the rights of human nature,” requires the state and/or the individual to actively work so that not only slaves but also “every individual, of whatever rank or distinction,” can “equally enjoy the blessings thereof.”139 For Sharpe, this principle underwrites part of the legal case against enslavement in the British empire. For Banneker, it sets up emancipation and social justice as litmus tests for the “sincerity” of early U.S. republicanism. Banneker’s rebuke of Jefferson transforms the self-love and the ability to imagine oneself in another’s position (the sympathy in Adam Smith’s Moral Sentiments) into a more radical neighborly sensibility leading to incorporative, reparative citizenship.
Read through Sharpe and Banneker, the neighborly practices modeled in Narrative are not a supplement to republican citizenship. Rather, neighborliness gets to the heart of the kind of society republican governance could produce: one in which citizens “love for yourselves, and for those inestimable laws” of human rights lead them to feel a duty to apply, in Banneker’s words, “the most active effusion of [their] exertions” to ensure that all people have equal access to the benefits thereof.140 Or, to put it in terms familiar to Narrative, they have a “duty to do all the good” they can for their “suffering fellow mortals,” because it is the best way to secure the good of all.141 Just as the good neighbor makes neighbors out of strangers, the good citizen or the good state makes citizens out of strangers. Narrative’s appendices, including addresses to “Those Who Keep Slaves, and Approve of the Practice,” “To the People of Color,” and to the “Friends of Him Who Hath No Helper,” take up these principles and shift focus from immediate events to “a refutation of some censures” and these structural questions.142
Jones and Allen’s “Refutation”—a term commanding the same typeset in the pamphlet’s title as “Narrative,” suggesting that the two modes of address were coextensive—encompasses answers to developing theories of racial difference implicit in Thomas Jefferson’s query: “What further is to be done with them?”143 Indeed, the expanded cadre of “some late publications” undoubtedly included recent legislation such as the Fugitive Slave Act (February 1793) and the Naturalization Law (1790), as well as the recent exchange between Banneker and Jefferson. Narrative proper, then, was of paramount importance but not necessarily the pamphlet’s ultimate focus, providing a case study for the kind of citizenship that could take shape after emancipation, a test not only of black freedom but also of the kind of civic space that could result from contact between ostensible strangers. The addresses, in turn, make explicit the paradigms implicit in Narrative’s account of neighborliness, applying its example to a broader agenda centered not just on emancipation but also on the full incorporation of black Americans, enslaved and free, as U.S. citizens.
Where yellow fever accounts typically linked blackness with the chaos and “dissolution” the crisis caused, Narrative links it with good management and restoration.144 As the crisis increased, so did the FAS and other black citizens’ role in the city’s infrastructure.145 During the fever, the FAS and FAC became increasingly integrated in Philadelphia’s government: they paid workers, bled victims, and vetted volunteers, and Clarkson went to Jones and Allen for help regulating rising fees. They provided a bridge between the official committee and city government and those citizens outside this official organization. Prisoners wanting to volunteer, for instance, applied to the elders of the FAC “who
