The Unpaid Account

The Free African Society’s pledge, entered into its minutes in late August with the gravity of a covenant, authorized members to serve as nurses and attendants to the sick and to carry the dead from houses where no one else would enter. Three weeks later, the burial returns from the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas began listing names that the city’s fever registers sorted into a separate column. Nurses were appearing among the dead. The question of what it was owed, for that labor and for the lives it had cost, was about to be asked.

Mid-October 1793, and the epidemic had not yet peaked. The first frost was still weeks away, and the burial ground behind the African Episcopal Church was receiving new interments every day. The Society had entered the crisis in August with the formal dignity of a civic pledge, its members volunteering under a belief that proved fatal. Now the returns told a story that the pledge’s language could not contain.

Absalom Jones had stood before the gathered members on a Sunday in late August and read aloud the appeal that Benjamin Rush had sent through the city’s alarm channels. Rush, the most respected physician in Philadelphia, incorrectly believed that yellow fever was not contagious and that it would be less likely to affect people of color. The belief was not Rush’s alone. It circulated through the medical correspondence of the Atlantic world, a half-inherited assumption drawn from Caribbean plantation records where enslaved Africans had survived epidemics that decimated European populations. The assumption ignored the conditions of that survival—forced exposure, prior infection in childhood, acquired immunity that had nothing to do with race. But in the panic of August, the belief landed as providence.

Jones and Richard Allen, the Methodist preacher who had led the Black members out of St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church to form the Free African Society, agreed to organize volunteers. The Society, a non-denominational mutual aid society that assisted fugitive enslaved people and new migrants coming into Philadelphia, turned its infrastructure toward the crisis. Members volunteered as nurses, attendants, and carters of the dead. They went into houses where entire families lay stricken, where the smell of black vomit hung in closed rooms, where white neighbors had fled or would not enter.

The city’s white leadership received the offer as deliverance. Mayor Matthew Clarkson, heading the Committee of Twenty that now governed the emptied city, accepted the Society’s service with the grateful formality of men who believed they were witnessing a providential arrangement. The committee’s minutes recorded the arrangement in the clipped language of municipal accountancy: Negro nurses engaged, so many per week, so much per diem. The sums were modest. The gratitude was genuine. The premise was fatal.

By the second week of September, the first Black nurses had begun to sicken. By the first week of October, the burial returns from the African Episcopal Church and from the separate ground where Allen and Jones organized interments showed a rising count. Three, four, five names a day, where there had been none. The numbers were not yet catastrophic. But they were relentless.

Allen, who had purchased his own freedom from slavery in Delaware and now operated a chimney-sweeping business and a boot-making shop, recorded the names of members who had fallen ill in the course of their nursing duties. Jones, who had purchased his wife’s freedom so that their children would be free under colonial law that assigned children the legal status of their mother, kept a parallel list of the dead from his congregation. The two lists, when set side by side, told a story that neither man had anticipated when the Society’s service was pledged in August.

Rush’s assurance had carried the weight of medical authority. The city’s physicians had not contradicted it. The belief that God, in the strange economy of creation, had made Black bodies equal to a task that was killing their white neighbors gave the work a shape both religious and civic—a duty performed under conviction, not compulsion. The fever did not honor the conviction. It did not honor the premise.

By mid-October, Jones and Allen had begun to count the cost in terms that went beyond grief. The Society’s funds, never large, had been spent on medicines, on coffins, on the hire of carts to carry the dead. Members who had earned wages as nurses had given those wages back to the community, paying for the care of others when they themselves fell ill. The Society had functioned as a parallel welfare apparatus inside a city whose formal institutions had collapsed. The Committee of Twenty had been improvised to address that collapse. But the committee’s reach was limited, its funds were donations solicited from the wealthy who had fled, and its attention stretched across a city of ten thousand sick.

The appeals began quietly. Allen and Jones approached the committee through intermediaries, seeking compensation for the families of members who had died in service. They sought reimbursement for the coffins the Society had purchased, for the medicines it had distributed, for the carts it had hired. The committee received the appeals with sympathy. The sympathy did not translate into payment. The minutes recorded the requests and deferred them. The deferrals accumulated.

The pattern was not unique to the Free African Society. The committee was deferring everything. It governed a city in extremis with the fiscal tools of a subscription fund, and the fund was insufficient to the scale of the disaster. Joseph Inskeep, a Quaker merchant who served on the committee and also visited the sick in their homes, contracted the fever and asked for a physician. The committee sent one. When Inskeep recovered, he returned to his duties. The machinery of care, such as it was, turned on the willingness of men like Inskeep to give more than they received.

But Inskeep was a white man with a business and a meeting house behind him. The members of the Free African Society were Black Philadelphians whose businesses were small, whose congregations were new, whose legal standing was fragile, and whose service had been solicited on the basis of a medical claim that was proving false.

The falseness of that claim was not yet a matter of public dispute. Rush himself had begun to waver. His letters in late September and early October showed a physician searching for explanations that his mercurial purges and aggressive bloodletting could not provide. He had tried the stimulating remedies advocated by Jean Devèze and Edward Stevens—the cold-water treatment that Stevens claimed had cured Alexander Hamilton—and found that his patients still died. The medical dispute between Rush’s depleting method and Devèze’s stimulating approach had consumed the first week of October in a quarrel that played out in the newspapers and in the wards of Bush Hill. But neither Rush nor Devèze addressed the question of why Black nurses were falling ill. The question fell to Jones and Allen. And they were beginning to understand that the answer was not a medical curiosity but a moral indictment.

The Society’s mobilization had been, in its first weeks, an act of extraordinary civic courage. Allen and Jones had organized volunteers to enter houses where the sick lay in their own filth, where no white attendant could be found, where the dead sometimes waited days for removal. Black nurses had washed bodies caked with black vomit. Black carters had hauled corpses to the burial ground in wheelbarrows when the dead-carts could not keep pace. Black grave-diggers had dug trenches in hard autumn ground, working past dark, because the dead kept arriving.

The city had watched this happen. The Committee of Twenty had recorded it. Rush had acknowledged it in his letters. And then the city had begun, in the small ways that mattered most, to forget it.

The forgetting took a specific form. In the fourth edition of his account of the epidemic, published before the first frost, Mathew Carey wrote of the Black nurses of Philadelphia in terms that Jones and Allen would later describe as a censure. Carey contrasted the sacrifices of men like Inskeep with the selfishness of others, and in doing so he drew a line between those who served without expectation of reward and those who, in his telling, had expected payment and sometimes received it. The implication was clear. Black nurses had been paid. Some had, by Carey’s account, charged for their services. The suggestion that the Black community had profited from the epidemic inverted the truth of what had happened.

What had happened was that the Free African Society had spent itself. Its members had earned wages nursing the sick, and those wages had gone back into the community’s care. Some nurses had been paid by the families they served. Many had not. The Society had organized free service for those who could not pay. The distinction between paid nursing and volunteer service, which Carey’s account blurred, was the distinction between a community managing its own survival and a community being exploited for its labor.

The exploitation was structural, not deliberate. No one had conspired to send Black nurses into fever houses on the false premise of immunity. Rush had believed the premise. The committee had believed it. Jones and Allen had believed it. But the belief had functioned as a mechanism of extraction. It had made the Society’s service possible by making it seem safe. And when it proved unsafe, the city had no framework for accounting for the cost.

The Committee of Twenty kept its minutes in the ledger of a municipal body improvising its own authority. The Free African Society kept its records in the ledger of a religious and mutual aid organization improvising its own survival. The two ledgers did not speak to each other. The committee recorded expenditures on Bush Hill, on physicians, on medicines, on the hire of carts and the digging of graves. The Society recorded the names of its dead. The structural gap between those two ledgers was the space where the question of obligation would have to be answered.

By mid-October, that space was widening. The Society’s appeals to the committee had produced promises but no payments. The committee was not callous; it was overwhelmed. But the effect of its overwhelm was the same as indifference to the families of Black nurses who had died believing they were immune, believing they were performing God’s work, believing the city would remember.

The city was already beginning to forget. The newspapers that had carried the daily death counts were shifting to other concerns. The Federal Gazette and Dunlap and Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser, which had continued printing through the epidemic on reduced schedules, were now carrying notices of returning merchants, of reopened shops, of the resumption of ordinary commerce. The epidemic was not over. But the city’s attention was already moving past it.

The most notable published account of the epidemic’s religious dimension was by the Lutheran minister J. Henry C. Helmuth, who had stayed in the city through the worst weeks. Helmuth’s narrative framed the epidemic as divine chastisement and the survival of the faithful as providential mercy. In this framework, the service of the Black nurses was a chapter in a story about God’s judgment on a sinful city. It was not a story about labor, or about debt, or about the particular cost borne by a particular community.

Helmuth’s account would appear in print before Jones and Allen’s. Carey’s account had already appeared. The city’s first draft of its own catastrophe was being written by white men who had stayed, white men who had fled and returned, and white men who had governed. The Black community’s own account did not yet exist. It would take the form of a pamphlet, published in 1794, that would answer Carey’s censures and lay out the Society’s record in its own voice.

The pamphlet’s existence would itself be an assertion. Its pages would claim the authority to narrate the epidemic from the perspective of those who had served and suffered. The dead would be named. The costs itemized. The framing that had made Black service a providential convenience would be refused, replaced by the language of obligation, debt, and justice.

But in mid-October 1793, that pamphlet was not yet written. Jones and Allen were still burying their dead. The Society’s funds were nearly exhausted. The appeals to the committee had produced sympathy but not compensation. And the city’s attention, such as it was, had begun to turn toward the question of when the frost would come and when the exiles could return.

The frost would come. The exiles would return. George Washington would ride back into the city in November, and the federal government would reassemble in the rooms it had evacuated. The Committee of Twenty would publish its minutes in March 1794, and the rapid succession of other yellow fever epidemics in Philadelphia and other American cities would follow, each one reactivating the questions that 1793 had raised and failed to resolve. The medical disputes would continue. Rush would defend his methods. Devèze would publish his own account. The controversy would harden into factions.

But the question of what was owed to the Free African Society would persist in a different register. It would persist because it was not a medical question. It was a question about the structure of obligation in a city that had accepted extraordinary service under a false premise and then found itself unable, or unwilling, to account for the cost.

In mid-October, that cost was still being incurred. Black nurses were still entering fever houses. Black carters were still hauling the dead. Black grave-diggers were still digging. The Society had not withdrawn its service. Jones and Allen had not called their volunteers back. The duty that had animated their mobilization in August—the conviction that Christian service required them to care for the sick without regard for race or risk—still held. What had changed was not the conviction but the understanding of what the conviction was costing, and who was bearing the cost.

The burial returns told the story in the only language the city’s record-keeping allowed. Names. Dates. The notation of color. The Free African Society’s dead were entered into the city’s mortality statistics as Black bodies in a column that did not distinguish between those who had died of the fever and those who had died of the fever contracted in the service of the city’s white sick.

The distinction mattered. To Jones, who would later write that the Society had been “censured” for conduct that deserved gratitude. To Allen, who had organized the nursing service and who had personally carried medicine into houses where no one else would go. To the families of the dead, who had lost parents and spouses and children to a disease they had been told they could not catch.

The city did not yet know that it owed them. The committee’s ledger did not have a column for moral debt. The newspapers did not print tallies of unpaid service. But the debt was accumulating, and it would find its reckoning in the pamphlet that Jones and Allen would write, in the political assertion that their community would build on the foundation of that service, and in the long argument about race and obligation that the epidemic of 1793 had opened and that the republic would not close.

The frost had not yet come. The dead were still being buried. The Society’s volunteers were still at their work. And the cost of that work, written in the only ledger that mattered, was still rising.