A Calculus of Volunteers

The ledger at City Hall told the story in a single line, but the Society’s volunteers kept their own account. On October 8, 1793, a clerk recorded that no carter could be had that morning. The ink was thin where his hand had pressed lightly, as though the notation itself were running out. Across the city, on a block of Water Street where the fever had first taken hold two months earlier, a man whose name the burial returns did not preserve lifted a body onto a handcart alone. He wheeled it toward the burial ground past houses where shutters had been nailed closed. No one came to the door. The carter worked without a companion, without a committee badge, without the premium pay the city had offered three weeks earlier to anyone who would carry the dead. The bounty had doubled since then. It had tripled. The money sat unclaimed.

The contrast was the epidemic’s central arithmetic. Inside the committee room at City Hall, the Committee of Twenty sat with its lists of available men and its stacks of requests for help. The two columns no longer matched. They had stopped matching sometime in the last week of September, when the death toll climbed past thirty a day and kept climbing. By the second week of October, the committee was recording fifty, sixty, seventy dead daily, and the lists of volunteers had shortened to a few dozen names, some already scratched through because the men had fallen ill.

The system the committee had built was rational and orderly, resting on the Enlightenment conviction that organized civic action could meet any crisis if the right structures were put in place. Bounties would attract labor. Hospitals would concentrate the sick for efficient treatment. A central committee would coordinate the distribution of nurses, carters, and grave-diggers to the points of greatest need. Every piece of this apparatus had functioned, for a time, in the first weeks of September. Now each piece was failing, and the failure came down to numbers. The sick and the dead simply outpaced the city’s capacity to respond.

The committee operated from City Hall with skeletal clerical support. A handful of clerks recorded the minutes, tracked the bounties paid, and logged the requests that arrived by letter and by word of mouth. The minutes themselves became a running ledger of attrition. Each day brought the same entries in different proportions: requests for nurses at addresses on Mulberry Street, on Cherry Alley, on North Fifth Street; requests for carters to remove bodies from houses where the living could no longer tolerate the presence of the dead; requests for grave-diggers at the burial grounds, where the earth was giving way under the volume of interments. And beside these requests, the committee’s record of what it could actually supply: two nurses sent to Spruce Street. One carter assigned to the district north of Market. No grave-diggers available until morning.

The bounties had been the committee’s primary instrument. When the epidemic began, the offer of premium pay for hazardous duty, nursing the sick, driving the dead-carts, digging graves, had drawn men forward. Some were poor and needed the money. Some were motivated by duty, or by the conviction that the fever would spare them. The bounties rose as the death toll rose, a market mechanism applied to human terror. But terror was not a commodity that responded predictably to price. By early October, the men who had been willing to carry bodies for double wages were dead, or fled, or simply unwilling. The money no longer compensated for the risk. A man could earn a week’s wages in a day driving the dead-cart, but the wages were paid to a man who might not live to spend them.

The committee raised the bounties again. The entries in the minutes show the escalation: higher pay for carters, higher pay for nurses, higher pay for grave-diggers. The money was there, or nearly there. New York City had sent five thousand dollars to the Mayor’s Committee. Towns in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts had contributed. The committee had funds. What it did not have was men.

The volunteers who remained were drawn from a narrowing pool. Some were men too poor to flee, who stayed because they had nowhere else to go and no means to get there. Some were men possessed of what the committee minutes, in their clipped phrasing, could not name but depended upon: a grim sense of obligation that overrode self-preservation. A few were men who had already survived the fever and believed themselves immune. The committee assigned them where the need was greatest, but the supply was a trickle measured against a flood.

Mathew Carey, in his 1793 account of the epidemic, contrasted the sacrifices of men like Joseph Inskeep, a Quaker who served on the Mayor’s Committee and also visited the sick, with the selfishness of others. When Inskeep contracted the fever, he asked for the assistance of a family whom he had attended when several of its members were sick. They refused. He died, which might well have happened even if they had aided him. Carey reported their refusal. His account carried the force of moral indictment, written by a man who had fled the city himself and returned to find that his absence had been noticed. His pamphlet would become one of the principal contemporary records of the epidemic, and its judgments about who served, who fled, and who deserved credit would shape the public memory of the crisis for years.

But Carey’s account also performed a quieter function. It established a framework for understanding the epidemic’s heroism and its failures, a framework that would be contested. The men who served on the committee, the men who drove the carts and dug the graves, the men who entered sickrooms and held the dying: these were the heroes of Carey’s narrative. The men who fled were the cowards. The distinction was clean and satisfying. It was also incomplete.

The committee’s minutes reveal a more complicated reality. The formal administrative structure of relief did not collapse because men were cowardly. It collapsed because the arithmetic was relentless. Each day, the number of sick increased. Each day, the number of volunteers decreased. The committee could not recruit men who did not exist. It could not pay men who were already dead. The system of bounties, designed to incentivize hazardous duty, could not overcome the elementary fact that the hazard was killing the labor pool.

The correspondence of the men who had fled reveals its own arithmetic. The federal officials, the merchants, the physicians of standing wrote from Germantown, from Trenton, from New York, counting the days until the frost would come and make the city safe again. They counted their losses in business and reputation. They counted the contributions they had sent back to the committee. What they did not count, in many cases, was the cost being borne by the men and women who had stayed. The letters constructed a narrative of responsible withdrawal, of necessary precaution, of civic duty fulfilled at a distance through financial contribution rather than physical presence. The narrative being shaped in private correspondence would, in time, shape the public record.

The committee knew the cost. Its minutes recorded the deaths of volunteers with the same flat notation they used for all the dead. A carter assigned to the Northern Liberties district fell ill on October 5 and died on October 9. A nurse sent to a house on Vine Street contracted the fever from her patient. The entries did not editorialize. They did not need to. The ledger was accumulating an account that no amount of contributed funds could settle.

By the second week of October, the committee’s daily operations had become an exercise in managing scarcity. The requests for nurses arrived faster than the committee could process them. Some requests came by letter, the handwriting cramped and hurried. Some came by messenger, a neighbor or a relative sent to City Hall to plead for help. The committee logged each request, assigned a priority, and dispatched whatever it had, which was, increasingly, nothing. A nurse might be sent to one house, and the next three requests would go unanswered. A carter might cover a single district in a morning, and the dead in adjacent districts would wait another day, or two, or three.

The system of monetary bounties had once been an incentive. Now it was a measure of failure. The committee offered higher and higher sums for work that fewer and fewer men would perform. The bounties were recorded in the minutes with a precision that bordered on the absurd: three dollars for a day’s work as a carter, then four, then five. The numbers climbed. The volunteers did not.

The committee was not unaware of the structural impossibility. Its minutes show the moment when the lists stopped matching the need, not as a sudden recognition but as a gradual acknowledgment that the system could not hold. Entries that had once specified assignments gave way to entries that recorded only the absence. No nurse available. No carter to be had. No grave-diggers. The language of allocation became the language of vacancy.

The consequences fell on each party differently. For the committee, the consequence was helplessness. The men who sat at the table in City Hall, recording the minutes and dispatching the few volunteers they had, were watching their authority drain away. They had been constituted as the city’s governing body in the absence of the elected government, the federal officials, and the merchant elite. They had taken on the authority to tax, to spend, to command. Now their authority extended only as far as the next volunteer who was willing to go out, and the next volunteer was increasingly difficult to find.

For the volunteers, the consequence was isolation. The men who drove the dead-carts and dug the graves and entered the sickrooms worked alone or in pairs, cut off from the institutional support that had once sustained them. The committee could no longer guarantee a partner for a carter, or a replacement for a nurse who fell ill, or even a meal for a grave-digger who worked through the night. The volunteers were on their own, performing the most hazardous duties in the city without the structures that had made those duties, if not safe, at least organized.

For the sick, the consequence was abandonment. The committee’s failure to supply nurses meant that the ill lay in their beds without care, without water, without anyone to change the soiled linens or open a window. Some died alone in houses where every other inhabitant had fled or died before them. The committee’s failure to supply carters meant that the dead remained in those houses, sometimes for days, the living neighbors unable to bury them and unwilling to approach. The committee’s failure to supply grave-diggers meant that the burial grounds, already overcrowded, fell behind. Bodies accumulated. The earth could not be turned fast enough.

The Free African Society’s nurses, whose withdrawal had been chronicled in the weeks before, left a vacuum that the committee could not fill. Richard Allen and Absalom Jones had organized Black Philadelphians to serve as nurses and carters, responding to Benjamin Rush’s appeal and to the belief that Black people were immune to the fever. The belief was false. Black nurses had sickened and died. The survivors had withdrawn, exhausted and disillusioned, their service unrewarded and in some cases unpaid. The committee had lost its largest source of volunteer labor in a single week.

The committee’s minutes do not record this loss as a single event. They record it as a tapering: fewer Black nurses available, fewer Black carters assigned, fewer entries referencing the African Society’s volunteers. The withdrawal was not a strike or a protest, though the conditions that prompted it bordered on both. It was the natural consequence of men and women who had given everything they had to give and received, in return, the knowledge that their sacrifice was consuming them. The committee noted their absence in the only language it had: the language of shortage.

The city’s physician class, diminished by death and flight, could not replace the nurses. Rush himself was still practicing, still bleeding and purging, still visiting the sick in their homes and at Bush Hill. But Rush was one man. Jean Devèze, the French physician who had taken charge of the Bush Hill hospital, was another. Between them, and a handful of remaining practitioners, they could not cover a city of tens of thousands, even a city reduced by flight to a fraction of its former population.

The committee turned to the only resource it had not yet exhausted: the individual conscience. Men like Inskeep, who served on the committee and visited the sick, represented a model of civic action that was pre-institutional. It relied not on systems or bounties or coordinated deployment but on the willingness of a single person to do what needed to be done. The committee’s minutes, in their final weeks of full operation, increasingly recorded not assignments but individual acts. A man walked into City Hall and offered to drive the cart for a day. A woman presented herself at the hospital and asked to be put to work. These were not responses to bounties. They were acts of will.

The committee could not plan around acts of will. It could not predict them, could not schedule them, could not deploy them with any rational efficiency. The Enlightenment ideal of organized civic action, which had animated the committee’s founding, gave way to a patchwork of individual and small-group heroism. The committee became less a directing body and more a receiving station, logging the offers of help that arrived unpredictably and dispatching them to the nearest point of need.

The arithmetic was merciless. Even if every volunteer who remained worked without rest, the dead would still outpace them. The committee’s census of the dead, taken in the midst of the crisis, found that the majority of victims were poor people who died in homes located in the alleys, behind the main streets where most of the business of the city was conducted. The poor could not flee. They lived in crowded rooms where the fever spread from one body to the next with a speed that no quantity of nurses could arrest. The dead were concentrated where the living were densest, and the densest quarters were the ones the committee could least reach.

Doctors, preachers, and laymen all looked to the coming of autumn to end the epidemic. At first they hoped a seasonal equinoctial gale, common at that time of year, would blow away the fever. Instead, heavy rains in late September seemed to correlate with a higher death toll. The rains did not cleanse the air. They may have worsened it. The committee recorded the spike in mortality without speculation about causes. The numbers spoke for themselves.

On October 16, after temperatures dropped, the committee recorded a slight decline in new cases. The entry was cautious. The committee had seen false declines before, brief respites in the mortality figures that reversed within a day or two. But the cold weather continued, and the decline held. The arithmetic began, for the first time in weeks, to shift in the committee’s favor. The dead did not increase. The requests for nurses and carters did not climb. The lists, for the first time in a month, began to stabilize.

The stabilization did not mean the crisis was over. It meant that the rate of failure had slowed. The committee’s system had already collapsed. What remained was not a functioning relief apparatus but the residue of one: a few volunteers, a few nurses, a few carters still moving through streets that were quieter now not because the epidemic had ended but because so many of the people who had filled those streets were dead.

The bounties remained on the committee’s books. The money sat in the treasury, contributed by cities and towns that had responded to Philadelphia’s crisis with donations that were generous and insufficient. The committee continued to record its minutes, to log the requests, to note the assignments it could make and the vacancies it could not fill. The entries grew shorter. The clerk’s hand, pressed lightly on the page, recorded less and less.

The men who had served, the volunteers who had driven the carts and dug the graves and entered the sickrooms, were not all named in the minutes. Some appeared once, assigned to a task, and then disappeared from the record. Whether they survived or fell ill or fled, the ledger did not say. The committee had recorded their service as a line item, a deployment, a body assigned to a task. The cost of that labor, inscribed in the only ledger that mattered, was still rising.

On a block of North Fifth Street, a family that had weathered six weeks of epidemic without a single case found the fever in their home on October 12. They sent for a nurse. No nurse came. They sent for a physician. No physician came. They nailed the shutters and waited.