The Society’s Pledge

The hospital on Bush Hill needed hands. The estate’s windows stood dark against the September sky, its corridors filling with patients carried up from the city below. The Committee of Twenty had secured the property, appointed a French physician named Jean Devèze to superintend the wards, and begun admitting the sick who had nowhere else to go. What the institution lacked was not beds or medicine. It lacked people willing to enter the rooms of the dying, to sit with the sick through the crisis, to carry the dead from their houses to the carts and from the carts to the graves. With deaths climbing past thirty a day and the white nursing class gone, the mayor and the committee turned to the one population that had not fled — and that, according to a theory gaining force among the city’s remaining doctors, might not even be susceptible.

The belief had circulated through Philadelphia’s medical conversations with the ease of something that confirmed a social order already in place. Benjamin Rush had noted it in his correspondence. The idea moved through the language of the educated class as though it were settled observation rather than conjecture. Africans and people of African descent, the theory held, were constitutionally less liable to yellow fever. The disease that struck down white Philadelphians with terrifying speed might pass over Black ones. The evidence was thin — a handful of reports from the West Indies, anecdotal, uncontrolled.

But in a city where white nurses had evaporated, the theory served an operational purpose: it designated a population to fill a vacuum. Amid fierce debates over the causes of the disease and its potential for contagion, Rush incorrectly believed that yellow fever was not contagious and that it would be less likely to affect people of color.

On a day in mid-September, the appeal reached the Free African Society.

The Society met in a room that served as both chapel and council chamber. Absalom Jones and Richard Allen had built the organization from the wreckage of a different exclusion. They had walked out of St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church when white leaders segregated Black worshippers, pulling them from their knees during prayer and directing them to a gallery. The two men led the Black congregants out of the building and into the work of constructing their own institutions. The Free African Society they founded was a mutual aid organization, non-denominational, designed to assist fugitive slaves arriving from the South and new migrants entering the city. It provided burial funds, sickness relief, and a framework of collective obligation among free Black Philadelphians. The Society stood as a civic institution built by people denied civic standing.

The appeal that arrived at the Society’s door asked for everything. Nurses to sit with the sick in their houses and at Bush Hill. Men to drive the dead carts and dig the graves. Women to wash bodies and prepare them for burial. The labor was dangerous, exhausting, and relentless. The pay, such as it was, had to be negotiated against the certainty that many who performed it would not survive.

Jones and Allen did not answer immediately. The decision they faced was not simple. The Society’s members were free Black Philadelphians, people who had built lives in a city that permitted their residence while denying their citizenship. Absalom Jones had purchased his wife’s freedom so that their children would be freeborn, navigating the colonial law that fixed a child’s status to the mother’s condition. Richard Allen had been born enslaved, had bought his own freedom, and had preached to Black congregations that white Methodists tolerated only on terms they set. Both men understood the architecture of exclusion from the inside. They knew what it meant to be summoned by white authority when white authority had use for Black hands.

The deliberations of the Society are not recorded in minutes that survive. What survives is the account Jones and Allen published the following year, a pamphlet they titled A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia in the Year 1793 and a Refutation of Some Censures, Thrown upon Them in Some Late Publications. The pamphlet answered Mathew Carey’s account, which had accused Black Philadelphians of profiting from their nursing work, of extorting money from the sick and dying. Jones and Allen described a different story. They described the decision to answer the mayor’s call, the deployment of Society members into houses and hospital wards, and the cost that followed.

What the pamphlet makes clear is that the Society’s leaders understood the appeal as both danger and opportunity. The danger was immediate and physical. Black nurses would enter homes where the air was thick with contagion, where the sick lay in their own filth, where the dead sometimes went uncollected for days. The opportunity was structural. If free Black Philadelphians served the city in its extremity, if they nursed the sick and buried the dead at the cost of their own health and lives, they would perform a service that the republic’s own founding documents claimed as the basis of citizenship. They would demonstrate, in the most concrete terms possible, that they belonged to the civic body. The hope was that service would earn what argument had not: recognition.

This was the calculation. It was made by men who had walked out of a church that would not let them pray on their knees. It was made in a city where the federal government — the Congress, the President, the secretaries — had departed for safer latitudes, leaving behind a municipal shell and a population that could not afford to leave. The calculation was not naive. Jones and Allen knew that the theory of Black immunity was false, or at least unproven. Black Philadelphians had already sickened and died of the fever. But the theory had given them a point of leverage, a reason to be asked. In the asking lay a chance to claim a standing that the law denied.

The Society agreed. The terms, as Jones and Allen described them, included compensation for the nurses and buriers, though the amounts were left to the committee’s discretion and would become a source of bitter dispute. The Society deployed its members across the city’s collapsing infrastructure. Some went to Bush Hill, where Devèze was attempting to impose order on a hospital that had been, until days earlier, a filthy, abandoned estate. Others went into the neighborhoods, into the houses of the sick and dying, where they performed the work that no white nurse could be found to do.

The deployment was immediate and total. Black men drove the dead carts through streets that echoed with the sounds of a city in collapse. They entered houses where entire families lay stricken, where the living could not care for the dying and the dying could not bury the dead. They carried bodies down staircases and loaded them onto carts. They drove to the burial grounds and dug the graves, sometimes dozens in a day, and placed the bodies in the earth with whatever speed the numbers demanded. Black women sat with the sick, sponging their fevers, changing their bedding, administering the medicines that Rush had prescribed or that Devèze had ordered from the Bush Hill dispensary.

The work was killing. Within weeks, the theory of Black immunity collapsed under the weight of Black bodies. Jones and Allen recorded the names of members who sickened and died. The Society’s nurses fell ill at rates that matched the white population they served. The belief that had summoned them — the false premise that had created the opening for their service — proved lethal to the people who acted on it.

For the committee, the deployment solved an immediate crisis. The dead were collected. The sick were attended. The hospital at Bush Hill began to function as a hospital rather than a warehouse. The committee’s minutes recorded the arrangement in the language of procurement, the same language used for supplies of wood and medicine. Black labor entered the administrative record as a line item, a service obtained under terms negotiated with the Society’s leaders.

For the white citizens who remained, the appearance of Black nurses in their homes carried a complex charge. The sick needed care, and the care arrived. But the care came from hands that the social order had trained them to regard as subordinate, and it arrived under a theory that told them those hands were safe because the bodies attached to them were different from their own. The gratitude that followed was real but conditional, shaped by the same hierarchy that had made the appeal possible.

For Jones and Allen, the consequences unfolded on two levels. At the level of the body, the community absorbed the epidemic’s damage. Members died. Families were destroyed. The Society’s resources, never large, were consumed by the cost of sickness and burial among its own nurses. At the level of the institution, the two men believed they had demonstrated something that could not be undone by argument. The Society had served. Its members had risked. They had buried the city’s dead.

The pamphlet they would write the following year was an act of narrative triage, an attempt to control the story before it hardened against them. Carey’s account had already accused them of profiteering, of using the crisis to extract money from the dying. Jones and Allen answered with a counter-narrative that described the Society’s deliberations, the terms of service, and the deaths of its members. The work was sacrifice. The sacrifice was citizenship. The pamphlet was a document of reckoning, written by men who understood that the story of the epidemic would be told by whoever claimed it first.

But the reckoning was already underway in the city itself. The Society’s members were not waiting for the pamphlet to make their case. They were making it in the houses of the sick, in the wards of Bush Hill, in the burial grounds where the graves multiplied. Every body carried to a cart, every grave dug, every night spent beside a dying patient was a demonstration. The Black community had assumed a contested authority over the preservation of life — granted by a false premise, exercised at a cost that the premise’s architects would never pay.

The irony was structural and it was lethal. The theory of Black immunity, which had given the Society its opening, also ensured that Black nurses would be sent into the most dangerous environments without the caution that a true understanding of the disease’s universality would have demanded. If white Philadelphia had believed that Black people were equally susceptible, the appeal might have been different, or it might not have been made at all. The false theory did not protect the people it was supposed to protect. It designated them as expendable.

Jones and Allen knew this. The evidence arrived daily, in the sickness of nurses who had been healthy a week before. The evidence mounted in the graves they dug for their own members. Replacements had to be found, organized, sent into the same rooms. The work continued because the alternative was to withdraw — to leave the sick uncared for, to leave the dead unburied, and to surrender the only claim to civic standing the Society had ever been offered. The choice was not free. It was made under pressure, in a city that had emptied itself of its white elite and left behind a population it had summoned only when the summoning served its needs.

The Society’s pledge was not a single moment. It was a continuous act, renewed every morning as the nurses went out and every evening as the dead carts returned. It was sustained by the institutional framework that Jones and Allen had built, the mutual aid structure that had been designed for a different kind of crisis. The Society had been founded to help fugitive slaves and new migrants. Now it was performing the work of a municipal health department, a public hospital, and a burial authority, all at once, with volunteer labor and against a mortality rate that did not distinguish between Black and white.

At Bush Hill, the Black nurses worked under Devèze’s direction. The French doctor had rejected Rush’s purging and bleeding regimen in favor of cooling treatments, rest, and what the hospital’s supplies could provide. The nurses administered his prescriptions, changed the bedding, fed the patients who could eat, and carried out the dead. The hospital’s survival depended on their labor. Devèze could prescribe, but he could not nurse a ward of fifty patients alone. The Committee of Twenty could supply food and medicine, but it could not find white Philadelphians willing to enter the building. The Black nurses were the hospital’s operating system.

In the neighborhoods, the nurses worked without supervision. They entered houses where the family was dead or fled, where a single survivor lay in a room with the bodies of relatives. They cleaned what they could, administered what medicines were available, and sat with the dying. The work was improvisational, shaped by the conditions they found. Some nurses were assigned to specific houses by the committee. Others found their way to the sick through the Society’s own networks, through word of mouth, through the knowledge that a family on a particular street was stricken and had no one.

The dead carts ran through the city day and night. The drivers, Black men organized by the Society, followed routes that the committee had mapped. They stopped at houses where a flag or a signal indicated a death. They carried the bodies out, sometimes through windows when staircases were blocked or floors were contaminated. They loaded the carts and drove to the burial ground, where other Black men dug the graves. The burial returns, recorded by the committee, listed the dead by name when names were known and by description when they were not. The numbers grew.

The Society’s leadership tracked the cost. Jones and Allen recorded the deaths of nurses, the sickness of buriers, the depletion of their membership. Replacements were organized. New volunteers were called. The deployment continued. The machinery they had built was simple and durable: a list of the sick, a list of the available, a system of assignment that matched one to the other. The machinery ran on the willingness of Black Philadelphians to do work that the city’s white population would not do, at a cost that the city’s white population would not pay.

The committee paid the nurses, when it paid them. The amounts were inconsistent. Some nurses received wages. Others were told they would be paid later. The question of compensation would become, in the months following the epidemic, the central dispute between the Society and the white authorities. Carey’s pamphlet accused Black nurses of charging exorbitant fees, of exploiting the sick. Jones and Allen’s pamphlet answered that the fees were necessary, that the work was dangerous, and that the accusations were a betrayal of the service the Society had performed.

The dispute was not merely about money. It was about the terms on which the Society’s service would be remembered. If Black nurses were remembered as profiteers, the civic claim collapsed. If they were remembered as sacrifices, the claim held. The pamphlet was the Society’s attempt to fix the memory before it was fixed against them. But the pamphlet came after. The work came first. And the work was killing the people who performed it.

By late September, the pattern was fixed. Society nurses staffed the wards at Bush Hill, administering Devèze’s prescriptions and carrying out the dead. In the neighborhoods, others entered houses on the committee’s assignments or the Society’s own intelligence, sitting with the dying who had no one else. On the streets, Black men drove the dead carts past empty counting houses and shut churches, following routes the committee had mapped to the burial grounds where still others dug the graves. Their labor had become a quantifiable, managed component of the emergency response, recorded in the committee’s minutes and the burial returns, paid at rates that would be disputed, and sustained by a calculation that had been made in a room where two men who had walked out of a segregated church decided to answer a call from a city that had no right to make it.

The calculation rested on a bet. The bet was that service would be recognized. That the Black community’s willingness to nurse the sick and bury the dead would be remembered as citizenship, not as labor extracted under duress. That the authority over care they had assumed — built on a false premise, exercised at a mortal cost — would translate into the standing the law denied them. The bet was made every morning, as the nurses went out, and every evening, as the carts returned. It was made by people who knew the theory of their immunity was wrong, because they were burying their own.

The dead carts rolled through Philadelphia in the last light of September, loaded with bodies that Black hands had carried from houses where white families had died, driven by Black men who would dig the graves, past the empty counting houses and shut churches of a city whose government had fled. The labor was recorded in the committee’s ledger under the heading of expenses. The names of the dead were recorded in the burial returns. The names of the nurses who sickened were recorded by Jones and Allen, to be published the following year in a pamphlet that few would read and fewer would remember. But the carts ran on time, and the graves were dug, and the sick were nursed, because the Society had pledged to do these things, and the pledge was being kept.