Hill.”146 The transaction showed the FAC supplementing and, in some cases, replacing the gutted government infrastructure with their own chain of command. Instead of calling on the mayor or the official relief committee, prisoners, many of them black, “applied” to the elders of the African Church. In the absence of a court, the black religious organization filled in the judicial gap.
Tellingly, it is in the context of this work that Rush calls Jones and Allen “two African citizens” in his own Account.147 Similarly, while describing the state of disorder at Bush Hill, Narrative reports, “only two black women were at this time in the hospital, and they were retained and the others discharged, when it was reduced to order and good government.”148 Again, their narrative pinpoints an omission in Carey’s Account, which mentions a “profligate, abandoned set of nurses and attendants … hardly any of could character” who “rioted on the provisions and comforts prepared to the sick” without the “smallest appearance of order.”149 These women of “good character” represent the ordinary black folk whose significance has only now reached the light of day.150 And through them, black presence becomes a central ingredient in the city’s return to “good government.”151 Rather than a threat to citizenship and government or a sign of their absence, as in Carey’s Account, the yellow fever epidemic opens up avenues for citizenship for Jones, Allen, and other black citizens called upon to fill in the gaps in white civic organization.
This confidence and managerial acumen presents a measure of stability within Philadelphia as well as the suggestion that internally, the free African community has its own institutions that shadow and, during the fever and the crisis of white government, function more efficiently than the white-run government. In this context, Narrative not only showcases black benevolence but also, more importantly, demonstrates the strength of black institutions with their own “peculiar” brand of republican self-government providing an ethics and structure to guide a black civil society, with Jones and Allen acting as representatives between it and the city.152 These institutions provided a tactical position, an internal organization and public presence, from which black citizens could not only “make use of the cracks” in established structures of power but also structure their own projects in republican governance.153 They had limited and uneven involvement with the city’s civic sphere before the fever, often petitioning the city for the ability to provide services for black communities that no other institution would. The FAS, for instance, arranged to lease part of Potter’s Field (formerly the city’s Stranger’s Burial Ground) from the city in 1790, conducted marriage ceremonies, and kept records of marriages and births.154 At times parallel to and intersecting with white publics, this black counterpublic “oscillate[d]” between positions in relation to other publics.155 The epidemic presented a momentary break that gave free Africans, the institutions they built, and other marginal groups the opportunity to practice citizenship on the public stage in ways heretofore limited by racial logics governing access to the public sphere.
In Jones and Allen’s hands, each of these moments come to signify black citizens’ civic power, their desire for and implementation of modes of self-government, not just as free people treated as “slaves of the community” but also as citizens who operate as partners in an increasingly dynamic civic arrangement.156 In each instance, the notion of management suggested in Carey’s civic republican model shifts from how institutions and the state could reign in variously interested constituencies to how institutions and the state might best empower and facilitate mutual aid among citizens. That is, the neighborliness animating individual actors in Narrative changes the relation between citizens and institutions. Where Carey’s respectable citizens show their respectability in terms of their management, Narrative’s leaders (Jones, Allen, Rush, Clarkson) enable other citizens to join in the collective recovery effort: Clarkson reaches out to free Africans (even if under false pretenses); Rush trains Jones and Allen to bleed and tend the ill; the FAC, in turn, liberates and superintends prisoners; Jones and Allen train people as nurses; and so on.157 While Narrative does not eliminate all criteria for authority or inclusion—Jones and Allen report that they screened prisoners before releasing them—it does suggest that these criteria should be dynamically based on meeting the community’s needs. This everwidening cast of societies suggests that the successes in Philadelphia’s recovery were not based on the strength of a virtuous elite per se but rather on the ability of its various constituencies to recognize the potential partner in each other.
Jones and Allen turn to this broader sense of potential in their appendices as they take on the epistemologies that enabled black exclusion and enslavement and one of their most famous purveyors: Thomas Jefferson. Scholars have tended to read the “Censures Thrown upon them in some late Publications” in the title as an extension of this local discussion and direct reference to yellow fever accounts positing black theft and immunity, Carey’s Account most prominently among them. The rhetorical resonances with Banneker’s pamphlet and signal words throughout the appendices, such as “experience” and “experiment,” however, also signal that these “late publications” included Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. As Gene Jarrett notes, Jefferson’s language and tone “must have been specter” for black intellectuals “as haunting as that of English intellectuals, who looked down on colonial America” and compelled Jefferson to write Notes in the first place.158 And while work on Narrative has consistently tied Jones and Allen’s arguments to Jefferson implicitly, I think it is important to note that the two men may have had Jefferson in mind very explicitly in much the same way that David Walker and subsequent writers appropriate him as representative (both as a type and as a political voice) of white supremacy.159
The “Address to Those Who Keep Slaves, and Approve of the Practice” in particular builds on Narrative’s examples of the individual and collective efforts of black citizens during the fever and its model of an incorporative neighborly ethics of citizenship to propose an “experiment.” “We believe,” they write, “if you would try the experiment of taking a few black children, cultivate their minds with the same care, and let them have the same prospect in view, as to living in the world, as you would with your own children, you would find upon the trial, they were not inferior in mental endowments.”160 The proposal responds to Jefferson’s wish in his reply to Banneker “to see a good system commenced, for raising the condition, both of their [slaves’] body and mind, to what it ought to be.”161 “No body wishes more than I do,” he proclaims in the opening lines, “to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men; and that the appearance of the want of them, is owning merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America.”162 Jones and Allen’s framing their response to racist logics as an experiment based on observation and experience signifies on late eighteenth-century empiricism and views of character as malleable, open to “cultivation” through proper care.163
Ultimately, “Address” harnesses neighborliness as both citizenship practice and empirical method to produce a formula for black citizenship. Read next to Query 14, Banneker’s “Letter,” and Jefferson’s response, “Address” appears to be not only borrowing from (or echoing) Banneker’s rhetorical strategy but also refuting Jefferson specifically point by point. The neighborly argument extends to slave owners as a plan for emancipation and to former slaves, on whom Jones and Allen “feel the obligation” to “impress” on their minds the doctrine that “we may all forgive you, as we wish to be forgiven.” The passage may seem overly obsequious, but set against Jefferson’s use of “natural enmity” as justification for not emancipating slaves or, at best (relatively speaking), the raison d’être for colonization projects, Jones and Allen are clearly and methodically answering specific objections already in circulation in the same way that Narrative responds to specific accusations during the recent epidemic.
Where Jefferson posits black inferiority as a given—whether as a natural trait in Notes or as a result of “condition”
