The Judgment Upon the Society

In 1793, one document sat stacked in a bookseller’s window near the corner of Second and Market, its fourth edition already wearing the handling of dozens of readers. Another lay in manuscript sheets on a table where Absalom Jones sat writing. The first was Mathew Carey’s A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, printed and reprinted through the fall, its accusations sharpened with each new edition. The second was the answer Jones was drafting with Richard Allen, a pamphlet that would become 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.

Two texts, one city. The contrast was total. Carey’s pamphlet carried the authority of a white publisher, a man of letters, a member of the Committee of Twenty who had helped govern the city through the worst weeks. Jones and Allen’s reply would carry the authority of men who had carried the sick and buried the dead.

The frost had come. The fever had broken. What remained was the accounting.

In December 1793, Philadelphia’s surviving residents returned to a city that still smelled of vinegar and smoke, the disinfectants that householders had burned in their rooms and sprinkled on their floors through the worst weeks of September and October. The federal government was preparing to come back. George Washington had returned from Germantown in November, and Congress was expected to convene in the temporary capital at Philadelphia in the new year. The city was resuming its functions. But the resumption was not a clean return. The epidemic had left a residue of accusation, and the accusation was settling, as accusation does, on those least able to deflect it.

Carey’s pamphlet had gone through four editions by the time the first frost arrived. Its accusations were specific. He charged that Black nurses had demanded exorbitant pay for tending the sick, that some had exploited the dying by charging fees far beyond what the crisis warranted, and that members of the Black community had profited from the suffering of white citizens. The pamphlet was a commercial success. It was read, cited, and trusted by a readership hungry for a coherent account of what had happened to them. Carey was a credible narrator. He had been in the city. He had served on the committee. His account carried the texture of witnessed events, and the accusations against Black Philadelphians were woven into that texture so tightly that a reader might not notice where observation ended and judgment began.

The charges mattered because they arrived at a moment when the city was looking for someone to blame. The epidemic had killed roughly five thousand people. It had emptied the capital of the United States. It had exposed the fragility of every institution the new republic had built. The federal government had fled. The municipal government had collapsed. The medical establishment had fractured into warring camps over bleeding and purging. In the absence of a single villain, the impulse to assign responsibility turned toward the people who had been most visible during the crisis: the Black nurses and carters and grave-diggers who had worked in the homes and streets when most white Philadelphians had fled.

Jones and Allen understood what was at stake. The Free African Society had agreed to provide nurses and carters when Benjamin Rush appealed to them, acting on the belief that Black people were immune to yellow fever. That belief had proved false. Black Philadelphians had died at the same rate as white ones. The Society had lost members to the fever. The promise of immunity, which had sustained the community’s willingness to serve, had been a deadly error. And now, in the aftermath, the community was being accused not of sacrifice but of extortion.

The drafting of the Narrative was an act of intellectual and political agency. Jones and Allen gathered testimony. They collected accounts from Society members who had nursed the sick, who had carted the dying to Bush Hill, who had buried the dead in trenches at the cemetery grounds. They itemized the costs. They recorded the names of members who had died. They compiled a record that functioned simultaneously as a moral brief and a financial accounting, a document that said: we were there, we did this work, here is what it cost us, and here is what you said about us afterward.

The pamphlet’s structure was deliberate. It opened with a narrative of the Society’s actions during the epidemic, detailing the decision to answer Rush’s appeal, the organization of nurses, the work of tending the sick and burying the dead. It then moved to a refutation of Carey’s specific charges. Allen and Jones noted that some Black workers had served without pay, that some had refused compensation, that others had died in the work. They confronted the accusation of extortion directly, arguing that the few who had charged for their services had done so under conditions of extreme danger and that the rates, while high, reflected the risk of death. They pointed out that white nurses and physicians had also charged for their services, and at rates that no one had thought to condemn.

The Narrative was also a document about grief. Jones and Allen recorded the deaths of Society members with the precision of a parish register. Each name was evidence. Each death was a refutation of the claim that Black Philadelphians had profited from the crisis. The dead had not profited. The dead had served, and the serving had killed them.

The pamphlet was published by Franklin’s Head, a press associated with the Black community’s intellectual life. It appeared in 1794, by which time Carey’s account had already hardened into the received narrative. The delay was not a failure of will. It was a function of the conditions under which Black Philadelphians worked. Jones and Allen did not have Carey’s access to a printing press or his network of distribution. They did not have his capital. What they had was the evidence of their own experience and the determination to place it on the public record.

The Narrative functioned as a legal brief in the court of public opinion. It demanded recognition. It itemized costs. It named the dead. It challenged the emerging post-crisis racial order, in which Black service during the epidemic was being rewritten as Black exploitation. The pamphlet’s argument was not merely defensive. It was constitutive. Jones and Allen were asserting a sovereignty of care, the right to define what their community had done, what it had cost, and what it meant. They were refusing to let Carey’s narrative stand as the official record.

The reception of the Narrative was uneven. Some white readers acknowledged its force. Rush himself, who had appealed to the Society in the first place, recognized the injustice of the accusations against Black nurses. He had seen the work firsthand. He knew the death toll within the Black community. But the pamphlet did not displace Carey’s account in the public mind. Carey’s Short Account had the advantage of priority, of commercial distribution, and of the racial assumptions that made its accusations plausible to a white readership. The Narrative was read by some, acknowledged by a few, and ignored by many. It did not undo the damage.

The conflict between the two documents was not a literary dispute. It was a contest over the moral and political outcome of the epidemic, a process of narrative triage in which the assignment of blame and heroism would determine who was remembered as a rescuer and who as a scavenger. Carey’s pamphlet performed one kind of triage. It separated the worthy from the unworthy, the heroes from the profiteers, and it placed Black Philadelphians on the wrong side of the line. Jones and Allen performed another. They separated the truth from the slander, the service from the exploitation, and they placed the evidence where anyone who cared to look could find it.

The irony of the conflict was bitter. The Free African Society had entered the crisis on the strength of a promise. Rush had told them that Black people were immune to yellow fever. The promise was false. The Society had acted on it anyway, sending its members into homes where the air was thick with the sweet smell that the pilot on the Delaware had noticed in August, the smell of a dying city. The members had nursed the sick, carried the dying, and buried the dead. This was work undertaken under conditions of extreme danger, with no institutional support beyond the Society’s own organization. No backing from the Committee of Twenty. No medical authority from the College of Physicians. In many cases, no pay at all.

And then came the accusation of profiting from it.

The Narrative documented the false promise of immunity with the same precision it brought to everything else. Jones and Allen recorded the deaths. They recorded the service. They recorded the accusation. And they placed these three things in sequence, so that the reader could see the shape of the injustice: a community asked to serve on the basis of a lie, a community that served and died, and a community that was then accused of exploiting the suffering it had tried to relieve.

The pamphlet’s most powerful passage was its simplest. Allen and Jones noted that some Black workers had worked for free, that some had died at the same rate as white citizens, and that the accusations of profiteering were false. The passage was not rhetorical. It was evidentiary. It placed the facts before the reader and let them do the work.

The Narrative was also a political document in a specific sense. It asserted the right of Black Philadelphians to speak for themselves, to correct the public record, to challenge the authority of a white publisher who had taken it upon himself to narrate their experience. This was not a petition. It was not an appeal. It was a refutation, a counter-narrative, a demand for recognition that assumed the equality of its authors with the author they were answering. The pamphlet’s very existence was an argument.

The Free African Society had been founded as a mutual aid organization, a non-denominational body that assisted fugitive slaves and new migrants to the city. Jones and Allen had formed it after experiencing racial discrimination in a local Methodist church. The Society was, in its origins, a response to exclusion. The epidemic had tested it in ways its founders could not have anticipated. The Narrative was the Society’s attempt to narrate that test, to say what it had done and what had been done to it, to claim the authority of its own experience against the authority of a printed account that had distorted that experience into a libel.

The pamphlet did not achieve what its authors hoped. Carey’s account remained the dominant narrative. The fourth edition was already in circulation. The story had calcified. Readers had settled on an account of the crisis drawn from Carey’s pages, and those pages told them that Black nurses had profiteered. The Narrative arrived after the verdict, and verdicts are difficult to overturn.

But the Narrative did something that Carey’s pamphlet could not do. It placed on the public record a counter-testimony that could not be entirely erased. It was there. It was printed. It could be read. And it carried the names of the dead, which was a form of evidence that no amount of narrative triage could make disappear.

The conflict between the two pamphlets was, at its core, a conflict over who had the authority to narrate the epidemic. Carey had the press, the distribution, and the racial privilege that made his account plausible to a white readership. Jones and Allen had the experience, the evidence, and the determination to speak. The asymmetry was structural. It was not a matter of individual malice or individual virtue. It was a matter of the institutions and assumptions that governed the production and reception of knowledge in the early republic.

The Narrative was an act of intellectual resistance within those institutions. It was one of the first published works of Black print activism in the United States, a pamphlet written by Black authors, published by a Black-associated press, and addressed to a public that included both Black and white readers. It forced a segment of white society to confront its own prejudices. It did not force enough of them. But it forced some.

The pamphlet’s failure to displace Carey’s account was not a failure of argument. It was a failure of position. Black men in a society that had asked them to serve and then accused them of exploiting the service argued from a position of structural disadvantage. The publisher they answered had access to the press and the market. The narrative they corrected confirmed what white readers wanted to believe: that the crisis had been managed by white institutions, that Black participation had been marginal or exploitative, and that the city had been saved by the Committee of Twenty and the physicians and the volunteers who had stayed.

The Narrative said otherwise. It said that Black Philadelphians had been essential to the city’s survival, that they had served and died, and that the accusation of profiteering was a slander. It said this in print, with names and dates and costs, and it placed the document in the public record where it would remain.

The epidemic had been a medical catastrophe. Its scale and horror had been determined, in part, by the era’s ignorance of disease transmission and by the failure of heroic medicine. Rush’s bleeding and purging had killed patients he was trying to save. The debate over the disease’s origin had consumed intellectual energy that should have gone to treatment. These facts were real. But they were not the whole story. The epidemic was also a political and social stress test, and the results of that test were visible in the conflict between Carey’s pamphlet and the Narrative. The test revealed that the new republic’s capital, emptied of its federal government and stripped of its municipal infrastructure, had sustained itself through the labor of people who were then accused of exploiting the suffering they had relieved.

The Narrative was the Free African Society’s attempt to claim credit for that labor. It was an attempt to resist the process by which Black service was being written out of the story and Black character was being written in as predatory. It was an act of intellectual and political self-defense mounted by men who had earned the right to speak by carrying the sick and burying the dead.

The pamphlet’s reception reflected the asymmetry of the conflict. Some white readers acknowledged its force. Rush recognized the injustice. But the institutional structures that had made Carey’s account dominant, the press, the market, the racial assumptions of the readership, were not moved by a single pamphlet. The Narrative was read by some and ignored by many. It did not undo the damage. But it did establish a counter-record, a document that future readers could find and against which the accusations in Carey’s account could be measured.

The conflict between the two pamphlets was the conflict between two kinds of authority. Carey’s authority was institutional. He was a publisher, a man of letters, a member of the committee. His account carried the weight of his position. Jones and Allen’s authority was experiential. They had done the work. They had seen the deaths. They had buried the dead. Their account carried the weight of what they had witnessed and what they had suffered. In a just system, the experiential authority would have outweighed the institutional. In the early republic, it did not.

The Narrative was, in this sense, a document of a specific kind of failure. A society failed to recognize the service of people it had asked to serve. A public sphere failed to give equal weight to Black testimony. A market failed to distribute truth as efficiently as it distributed slander. And a medical establishment failed to acknowledge that the promise of immunity, on which Black service had been predicated, had been a lie.

But the Narrative was also a document of a specific kind of success. Two men sat down to write against the prevailing narrative of their time, gathered the evidence, made the argument, and found a press to print it. A community that had organized itself to serve then organized itself to speak. The pamphlet existed. It was there. It could be read.

The Narrative of Jones and Allen was not the last word. Carey’s account continued to circulate, and the racial assumptions it carried continued to shape the public memory of the epidemic. But the Narrative was a word, and it was in print, and it carried the names of the dead. That was something. In a society that was busy forgetting what Black Philadelphians had done, the act of remembering was itself a form of resistance.

The quiet image of an unpaid claim, a deferred minute in the committee’s records, a line in a ledger that had not been settled, handed off the pressure from public argument to the cold administrative accounting of the city’s books. The Committee of Twenty had governed the emptied city. The committee had kept minutes. The minutes recorded decisions, disbursements, and debts. Some of those debts were owed to the people who had done the work. Some of those debts were unpaid. The ledger was incomplete. The accounting was not finished. The city was returning to its functions, and the functions included a reckoning that the survivors would have to conduct in the cold language of numbers, in the columns of a ledger that did not care about heroism or slander but only about what was owed and what was paid.