The First Cart from Germantown

In the last week of October 1793, a cart carried flour, salted pork, and a crate of medicinal supplies southward along the Germantown road, and the Philadelphia street it entered held nothing. Not merely quiet. Stripped the way a place is stripped after a siege, with shutters bolted tight and conveyances abandoned where their drivers had unhitched and run. Here and there a figure stood in a doorway, so gaunt that the cart’s drivers could not tell, at the distance of a half-block, whether they looked upon the living or the dead. The cargo represented the organized charity of a township six miles north. The silence around it represented what remained of a city of fifty thousand.

The frost had come on October 16. A hard frost, the kind that kills mosquitoes and breaks the back of a tropical fever in a northern port. For weeks the people who had fled to Germantown, to Frankford, to Trenton, to Baltimore had waited for it. They had waited for the air to change, for the miasma to dissipate, for whatever invisible agent had killed more than five thousand people between August and November to lose its grip. Now the frost had come, and the first response from outside the city was not a proclamation or a policy or a returning government.

A cart.

The drivers were wary. They had been warned. Baltimore and New York had quarantined people and goods from Philadelphia, and the quarantine ran in both directions. Those who had fled feared what they might bring back. Those who had stayed feared what the returnees might still carry.

No one knew what caused yellow fever. American doctors would not identify the mosquito as the vector until the late nineteenth century. In 1881, the Cuban doctor Carlos Finlay argued that mosquito bites transmitted the disease, and he credited the published account of Benjamin Rush for giving him the idea. Rush had written that mosquitoes were uncommonly numerous during the sickly autumn of 1793. The observation was not a theory of transmission, but Finlay read it and the connection formed.

In the last week of October 1793, the drivers of the cart from Germantown knew only that the air had been deadly and that the frost had changed it, and they drove south with their provisions and their fear.

Philadelphia’s formal layers had dissolved over the preceding months, one after another, in a process that amounted to civic evaporation. The federal government had left. President Washington had gone to Mount Vernon, then to Germantown, then back to Virginia, the seat of government trailing behind him like a dislodged anchor. The state government had retreated. The merchants who formed the city’s commercial spine had closed their counting houses and followed the roads out. What remained was the bare substrate: a committee of citizens governing from City Hall with whatever clerical help could be mustered; the nurses and gravediggers of the Free African Society, organized by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen; the French physician Jean Devèze at the Bush Hill hospital; the merchant Stephen Girard, who had stayed to run the hospital’s logistics alongside Devèze. These were the people who would receive the cart.

Mayor Matthew Clarkson had issued his last appeal in the days before the frost, a desperate proclamation asking the townships outside Philadelphia to send provisions. The city had been cut off from its hinterland. The farms and townships that had fed Philadelphia before the epidemic now treated it as a plague source. No one wanted to send food into a place where the air itself was thought to kill. The farmers of Germantown, Frankford, and the surrounding townships had their own fear: if they entered Philadelphia, they might contract the fever; if they sent goods, they might be quarantined on return. The quarantine was not formal in every case. Often it was simply a refusal, a turning away, a community closing its doors.

The frost did not immediately dissolve this refusal. What the cold did was create the conditions under which a few people, in the townships to the north, could begin to feel that the risk of sending a cart southward was calculable rather than suicidal. The cart from Germantown was the first. Others would follow from neighboring townships, but the first was the test, and the men who drove it knew they were being watched.

The route took them south along the Germantown road, past the scattered houses at the city’s edge, past the fields where produce had grown before the epidemic emptied the farms, and into the streets of Philadelphia proper. The first thing they noticed was the silence. A city of fifty thousand people, even a city where many had fled, should not be silent in the middle of a weekday morning. But the streets were nearly empty. A few carts stood where they had been abandoned, their shafts pointing at the sky. The shutters on the houses were closed. Some doors stood open, and from the dark interiors came a smell the drivers recognized, or thought they recognized, and they drove faster.

At City Hall, the committee had arranged a distribution point. The logistics were simple and grim. So few people were alive and well enough to receive the goods that the mechanics of unloading were almost trivial. The problem was not distribution in the ordinary sense, where a city government manages supply to a population. The problem was finding the population. The people who needed the flour and the salted pork were the people who had survived the fever and were now starving in their houses, too weak to come out, too afraid to open their doors. The people who could receive the goods were the committee members and the volunteers, and there were not many of them.

Girard was at Bush Hill. He had been there since September, running the hospital the committee had established in the abandoned estate. A merchant by trade, not a doctor, he had taken on the logistics of the hospital with the precision of a man who understood supply chains. The kitchen, the laundry, the dispensary — he had organized each. He had carried patients to their beds and washed them and fed them. When the cart from Germantown arrived, Girard was one of the few people in the city who could receive it, catalog its contents, and direct the goods to where they were needed. The frost did not end his work. Instead of managing a hospital overflowing with the dying, he was now managing a hospital slowly emptying of the living, and the living needed to eat.

The drivers carried word from Germantown. The township was stirring. The frost had emboldened a few farmers to consider sending produce south. But there were disputes. Some in Germantown argued that no one should enter Philadelphia until the city was formally declared free of the fever. Others argued that the declaration would never come if the city starved first. The argument was a microcosm of the larger dispute that had paralyzed the region: how do you declare a city safe when no one knows what made it dangerous?

A farmer who sent a cart to Philadelphia and returned to Germantown might find his neighbors shunning him. They might refuse to buy his goods. They might insist he stay away from the township for a period of days or weeks. The fear of miasma — the theory that bad air carried the disease — meant that anything or anyone that had been in contact with Philadelphia air was potentially contaminated. The frost had cooled the air, but the fear of it had not cooled at the same rate. Fear, like fever, had its own latency, and the fear of Philadelphia would outlast the fever itself.

The cart from Germantown was a material transaction. Flour, salted pork, medicine. But it was also a test of the social fabric, a probe sent into the silence to see whether the city could still receive what its hinterland could send. The answer was yes, but barely. The drivers unloaded their goods. The committee took stock. The goods were directed to Bush Hill, to the almshouse, to the scattered houses where survivors were known to be hiding. Distribution was not orderly. Like everything else in the epidemic, it was improvised, a matter of doing what could be done with what was at hand.

Members of the Free African Society were among those who received the goods. Jones and Allen had organized Black Philadelphians to nurse the sick and bury the dead since September, when Benjamin Rush had appealed to them on the belief that Black people were immune to yellow fever. The belief was false. Black Philadelphians had died of the fever at rates comparable to white Philadelphians. But the work had continued, and the society’s members had become the city’s primary labor force, carrying the sick to Bush Hill, carrying the dead to the burial grounds, carrying food to the houses where people lay dying. Now, in the last week of October, they were carrying flour and salted pork from a cart sent by a township that, six weeks earlier, would not have sent it.

The parallel lines of the city’s remaining actors converged around the cart. The committee at City Hall, Girard at Bush Hill, the Black nurses in the streets, the drivers from Germantown. Each had a different reason to be there. The committee was there because it had taken on the governance of a city that no government wanted. Girard was there because he had chosen to stay when other men of his standing had left. The nurses were there because Rush had asked them and because no one else would do it. The drivers were there because the frost had made the risk seem, finally, acceptable.

None of them trusted the others entirely. The committee distrusted the drivers’ reports of conditions in Germantown. The drivers distrusted the city’s air. The Black nurses distrusted the white institutions that had exploited their labor and then, in some publications, accused them of profiteering. The distrust was the residue of the epidemic, and it would not be washed away by a frost.

The cart was unloaded. The drivers turned their horses north. They would return to Germantown and report what they had seen. The report would circulate through the townships, and in the following days, other carts would follow. The trickle would become a stream. But on this day, in the last week of October, the single cart was the entire connection between Philadelphia and its hinterland, a thread so thin that a dispute over quarantine, a frightened farmer, a broken axle — any of these could have snapped it.

The city had been severed from its surrounding country as thoroughly as a limb from a body. The severance was not just physical, though the empty roads and the abandoned carts testified to the physical break. It was psychological and commercial and political. The farmers who had sold produce in Philadelphia’s markets had found other markets, or had gone without. The merchants who had bought from those farmers had closed their doors. The government that had mediated between the city and the country had left. The frost reconnected the severed ends, but the connection was tentative, and the tissue was dead in places.

What the cart from Germantown represented was the first material proof that the severance was ending. Not a proclamation. Not a declaration from a doctor or a mayor. A cart with flour and salted pork, driven by men who were afraid, received by a committee that was exhausted, distributed by nurses who had been burying the dead for weeks. This was the first, necessary step before any social or political recovery could begin. The city had to eat before it could govern itself. Goods from outside had to arrive before anyone could pretend to be a city again.

The epidemic had killed roughly five thousand people. The vast majority were poor, and they died in the narrow passages behind the thoroughfares where commerce had once been transacted. When the Mayor’s Committee took its census of the dead, this was what it found: the epidemic had been, in its geography and its demographics, a catastrophe of the poor. The frost did not change this. It simply stopped the killing. The dead were still dead. The orphans were still orphans. The empty houses were still empty, and the smell of what was inside some of them was still in the air when the cart from Germantown passed.

The drivers would have smelled it. Houses with crosses chalked on the doors would have caught their eye, the marks meaning someone inside was sick or had died. Burial carts still ran through the streets, though now with lighter loads. People emerged from their houses when they heard the creak of wheels, gaunt and pale, standing in doorways, watching. The drivers would have stopped, or been told to stop, and the distribution would have begun.

The distribution was the point of contact between the hinterland and the city, between the people who had fled and the people who had stayed, between the bounty of the cart and the desolation of the street. A fragile transaction. The people who received the goods were hungry and sick and suspicious. The people who delivered them were wary and constrained by the quarantine fears of their home communities. Trust was the commodity most thoroughly depleted by the epidemic, and the transaction required it in quantities neither side possessed.

The committee had been managing this depletion since September. Formed to coordinate the city’s response to the epidemic, it had done so with the tools available: borrowed money, volunteered labor, the authority of necessity. Its police power was negligible. Farmers could not be compelled to send food. The healthy could not be compelled to nurse the sick. The committee could only request, and organize, and hope. The cart from Germantown was the result of a request that had been heard, finally, after weeks of silence.

That silence from the townships had been one of the epidemic’s most devastating effects. Philadelphia was not a self-sufficient city. It depended on its hinterland for food, fuel, and the basic materials of urban life. When the hinterland cut the city off, the effect was immediate. Prices rose. Food became scarce. The people who had stayed — the poor who could not afford to flee, the nurses and gravediggers and committee members — began to starve. The frost did not immediately end the starvation. It ended the fever. Starvation would end when the supply lines resumed, and the supply lines would resume when the farmers felt safe enough to send their goods south.

The first cart was the signal that the farmers were beginning to feel safe. Not safe. Safer. The distinction mattered. No one felt safe entering Philadelphia in the last week of October 1793. The fever was still present, though abating. The death toll was still mounting, though the daily count was falling. The city was still a place of death. But the frost had changed the calculation, and the calculation was, for the first time in months, one that allowed for the possibility of return.

The return was not the return of the federal government. Washington was still at Mount Vernon. The departments of state, treasury, and war were still dispersed across the landscape. The return was not the return of the merchants. Counting houses remained closed. The return was not the return of the elite, who were still in Germantown and Frankford and Trenton, waiting for someone else to go back first. The return was a cart with flour and salted pork, and the men who drove it, and the committee that received it, and the nurses who distributed it.

This was the order of recovery. Material first. The city had to be fed before it could be governed. Supply lines had to be restored before commerce could resume. The people who had stayed had to be sustained before the people who had left could be persuaded to return. The cart from Germantown was the first material link, and it established a fragile connection that would enable the next flow: of information, of commerce, of public explanation. The people who had fled needed to know that the city was safe, or safe enough, and the only way to know was to send someone to look. The cart was that someone.

The drivers returned to Germantown. They reported what they had seen. The streets were empty but not entirely dead. People were out. The fever was abating. The committee was functioning. The hospital at Bush Hill was still operating, with Girard and Devèze still at their posts. The Black nurses were still working. The city could receive goods. The report would have traveled through the townships by word of mouth, by letter, by the same networks of communication that had carried news of the epidemic’s progress since August. Some would have read it and acted. Others would have ignored it.

The carts also brought something else. They brought the beginning of the story. The people who had fled had experienced the epidemic from the outside, as refugees. They had heard reports, read newspapers, received letters. The people who had stayed had experienced it from the inside, as survivors. The two experiences were different, and the difference would matter in the weeks and months to come, when the survivors began to tell their stories and the refugees began to listen, or not to listen, or to tell their own stories that contradicted the survivors’. The cart from Germantown was the first vehicle that carried not just flour and salted pork but the news of what the city looked like from inside, and that news would travel faster than the fever had traveled and would do almost as much damage.

On the day the first cart arrived, the committee recorded its contents in the minutes. Flour, salted pork, medicine. The entry was brief. It did not note the weather or the mood of the drivers or the state of the streets. It noted what the cart carried and where it came from. This was the committee’s function: to record, to organize, to manage the material reality of a city in crisis. The committee did not have time for atmosphere. Flour had to be distributed, the sick fed, the dead buried, a city held together with borrowed money and volunteered labor.

The entry in the minutes was the first record of the city’s reconnection with its hinterland. A bureaucratic notation, dry and factual, it would be followed by others as more carts arrived. But it was the beginning. The first cart from Germantown was the beginning of the end of the epidemic — not the medical end, which had come with the frost, but the social and material end, which would come with the food.

The fever was declared at an end by mid-November. The declaration came from the College of Physicians, based on the absence of new cases, not on any understanding of what had caused the fever in the first place. The declaration was a political act as much as a medical one, an attempt to tell the people who had fled that it was safe to return. The people who had stayed did not need the declaration. They had been living with the fever’s retreat since the frost. They knew the disease was dying. What they needed was food, and the carts from the townships were bringing it.

The city that the cart entered was a city of orphans and widows and empty houses and abandoned conveyances and the smell of death in the alleys. The social contract had frayed to the point of invisibility. The government had fled. The elite had fled. The only people left were the ones who could not leave or would not leave. The cart from Germantown did not change this. It did not restore the government or bring back the elite or mend the social contract. It brought flour and salted pork. It brought the first material proof that the world outside Philadelphia still knew the city was there and was willing, barely, to send help.

The drivers unloaded the last of the flour. The committee signed for it. The drivers turned their horses north and began the long crawl back up the Germantown road. Behind them, the city waited for the next cart, and the next, and the return of the people who had left, and the government that had fled, and the commerce that had stopped, and the life that had been interrupted by a fever no one understood. The first successful delivery established a fragile material link. Through it would come the next flow: of information, of commerce, of public explanation — the accounts that would fight over what had happened, who was to blame, and what the dead were owed. But the carts came first. The food came first. The city had to eat before it could explain itself.