The Unsettled Debt of Bush Hill

Seen from above, the architecture of public finance in the 1790s was a slow machine, hand-cranked for ordinary times, with no gears for catastrophe. Across Philadelphia’s counting houses and legislative chambers, the paper trail of a reckoning lay waiting—bundles of debt folded and refolded, endorsed and re-endorsed, passed from desk to desk. Petitions stacked in the State House; committee minutes gathered dust; personal ledgers recorded sums advanced and never returned.

From the height of the State House roof, a observer looking down on the city in 1795 would have seen Philadelphia rebuilt, repopulated, and busy again. The wharves were full. The federal government had returned. The streets that had been silent except for the rumble of dead carts now echoed with the ordinary noise of commerce. But beneath that restored surface, the obligations incurred during the fever were still unresolved. The city had borrowed time, borrowed labor, borrowed lives. Now the creditors wanted payment.

Stephen Girard carried the largest single bundle of unsettled accounts. The merchant banker had personally managed the Bush Hill hospital during the worst weeks of the epidemic, transforming the abandoned mansion outside the city limits into functioning wards, hiring nurses, ordering medicines, supervising burials, and signing for supplies with his own credit. Substantial personal funds had been advanced. The exact totals were in dispute, which was part of the problem. But the scale was unmistakable. Girard was not a man who forgot a ledger entry.

The petition he and other members of the Committee for Relieving the Sick and Distressed submitted to the state legislature in 1795 was a thick document. It itemized medicines purchased, nurses’ wages paid, provisions procured, burial costs covered, and buildings maintained. Each line represented a transaction during the weeks when the city’s ordinary financial mechanisms had broken down. The committee had acted as an improvised treasury, paying cash from personal reserves and hoping for reimbursement. Hope was not a ledger entry. The legislature received the petition, acknowledged it, and referred it to a committee for review. That referral was the first of several.

The mechanism of settlement was designed for delay. A petition arrived at the State House. It was read into the legislative record. It was referred to a select committee, usually composed of members who had not been in Philadelphia during the epidemic and had no personal knowledge of what had been spent or why. The select committee reviewed the itemized accounts, sometimes requesting additional documentation, sometimes simply letting the petition sit. When the committee finally reported back, its recommendation went to the full House for a vote. If the House approved an appropriation, the bill went to the Senate. If the Senate concurred, the governor had to sign. At any point in this chain, the process could stall. A legislative session could end without a vote. A new session required a new petition. The whole cycle began again.

Girard understood this machinery. He had built a fortune by understanding how systems worked and where they broke down. A petition, he knew, was an opening bid in a negotiation that could take years. He also knew that the longer the accounts remained unsettled, the harder they would be to collect. Witnesses died. Memories faded. Receipts were lost. The epidemic itself had destroyed records. Bush Hill’s patient logs were incomplete. Burial records were contradictory. The very chaos that had made the expenses necessary now made them difficult to verify.

The legislature’s reluctance was not simple stinginess. Pennsylvania’s treasury was not deep. The state had its own obligations, its own infrastructure projects, its own political pressures. Every dollar appropriated for epidemic debts was a dollar not spent on roads, bridges, or frontier defense. Legislators from western counties asked why their constituents should pay for a Philadelphia crisis. Legislators from Philadelphia asked why the state had not done more during the crisis itself. The debates circled the same questions. Who owed whom? What was a fair price for a nurse’s labor during a plague? How much was a burial worth?

The committee’s minutes, published in March 1794, were supposed to provide clarity. The Mayor’s Committee had published its minutes as a public record of decisions made and funds expended during the crisis. Other yellow fever outbreaks struck Philadelphia and cities across the Northeast in the years that followed, and each one produced its own published accounts of efforts to contain and survive the disease. Among the most notable was the work of the Lutheran minister J. Henry C. Helmuth. But the minutes themselves were incomplete. They captured the committee’s resolutions but not always the full financial picture. They listed appropriations but not always disbursements. They named committee members but not always the laborers and nurses who had been paid, or who had been promised payment and never received it.

This is where the Free African Society’s claims entered the machinery. During the 1793 yellow fever epidemic, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones had rallied free Black Philadelphians to serve as nurses, cart drivers, and grave diggers when the white population had fled and the city’s medical infrastructure had collapsed. They were appealed to by respected physician Benjamin Rush, who incorrectly believed the disease was not contagious and would be less likely to affect people of color. Their labor had kept the city functioning. It had also cost lives. Some of the nurses Allen and Jones recruited had died of the fever. Others had survived but were never paid.

The Society’s members had been promised compensation. The committee had resolved to pay nurses and laborers at rates established during the crisis. But the mechanism of payment was the same mechanism that stalled Girard’s petition. Claims had to be submitted. Claims had. witnesses who were often dead or gone. The process favored those with the resources to navigate it. Girard had clerks. Girard had lawyers. Girard had the social standing to walk into the State House and be heard. Allen and Jones had a pamphlet.

The pamphlet they published was a direct rebuttal to Mathew Carey’s published account, which had suggested that some Black nurses had exploited the crisis for personal gain, charging exorbitant fees or stealing from the sick. Allen and Jones confronted these accounts directly. They detailed the labor performed by Black Philadelphians, the risks they had taken, and the deaths among their number. They also addressed the financial question. Some nurses had been paid. Some had not. The distinction often followed lines of race and class that the epidemic’s camaraderie had temporarily obscured.

The financial claims of the Free African Society’s nurses and laborers entered the same legislative machinery as Girard’s petition. Referrals to committee followed. Reviews followed. Marginalization through procedural obfuscation followed. Claims lacked proper receipts. Claims lacked corroborating witnesses. Claims were submitted by people who could not afford to wait in Harrisburg for a legislative session to conclude. The process itself was a filter. It let through the claims of men who had the resources to persist and caught the claims of those who did not.

Girard persisted. Additional documentation was submitted. Correspondence with legislators continued. Accounts were itemized and re-itemized. The legislature made partial payments. An appropriation here, a resolution there. But the total never matched the claim. The gap between what was spent and what was reimbursed was the measure of the city’s gratitude. A concrete, quantifiable measure. And it was insufficient.

The contrast with public works was stark. Money for the waterworks was found. Money to improve the wharves was found. Money to address the sanitation problems that Rush and others had identified as contributing to the epidemic was found. These were not frivolous expenditures. They were necessary improvements. But they were also the expenditures that served the city’s commercial and political interests. A functioning waterworks served every merchant who relied on the docks. A clean wharf served every ship that brought cargo. The nurses who had risked their lives in the fever wards served no constituency that the legislature recognized as its own.

Jean Devèze, the French physician who had overseen patient care at Bush Hill while Girard managed operations, had his own accounts. Devèze’s medical approach, which had emphasized supportive care over the aggressive bleeding and purging advocated by Rush, had earned him respect among those who had witnessed it. But respect did not pay creditors. Devèze’s claims for salary and expenses entered the same machinery. They were reviewed. They were partially paid. They were never fully settled.

The Bush Hill hospital itself was a physical monument to the unsettled debt. The mansion had been converted into a ward during the crisis. It had been supplied, staffed, and maintained through improvisation and personal credit. After the epidemic, the building stood empty. Its furniture was scattered. Its supplies were depleted. The property itself was subject to legal disputes about ownership and compensation. The building that had housed the dying became a symbol of the city’s unwillingness to account for what its survival had cost.

Girard’s position was unique. His wealth could absorb the loss. His prominence ensured a hearing. His stubbornness kept the petitions coming. But his persistence was a test of the city’s willingness to honor its obligations. Each time the legislature delayed, each time a committee referred a petition without action, each time an appropriation fell short of the documented expenses, the city revealed its priorities. The epidemic had been a civic crisis. The settlement was a civic choice.

The nurses and laborers of the Free African Society did not have Girard’s resources. Their claims were smaller. Their stakes were more personal. A nurse’s wage was not a fortune. It was subsistence. For families who had lost members to the fever, the unpaid wage was a double loss. They had given labor. They had given lives. They received gratitude in print and silence in the ledger.

Allen and Jones continued to press the case. Their pamphlet was a rebuttal to Carey, and it was a claim for recognition, and recognition included payment. The pamphlet detailed the work performed, the hours logged, the risks taken. It named the dead. It was a document of labor and loss, and it was also a financial instrument. It was a public record of what was owed.

The legislature’s response to the Black community’s claims followed a pattern that would become familiar in American public life. The claims were acknowledged. The labor was praised. The legislature expressed its gratitude. Then the claims were referred to a committee, and the committee found reasons to reduce, delay, or dismiss them. The reasons were procedural. The receipts were insufficient. The witnesses were unavailable. The rates charged exceeded what the committee considered reasonable. Each procedural objection was technically valid. Each one also served the same function. It preserved the city’s treasury at the expense of the people who had kept the city alive.

The irony was not lost on Allen and Jones. The city that had appealed to the Black community in its hour of need now found that community’s claims inconvenient. The legislature that had authorized the committee to hire nurses now found the committee’s financial records inadequate. The civic leaders who had praised the courage of Black Philadelphians now allowed their accounts to languish in bureaucratic limbo. The epidemic had created a temporary equality of sacrifice. The settlement restored the permanent inequality of outcome.

Girard’s petition and the Free African Society’s claims traveled parallel tracks through the same machinery. Both were delayed. Both were partially paid. Both were never fully settled. But the parallels were not exact. Girard could absorb the loss. He could continue to petition. He could afford the time and the clerks and the correspondence. The nurses and laborers could not. Their losses were not absorbable. An unpaid wage was a missed rent payment. An empty cupboard. A child’s coat that went unpurchased.

The financial aftermath of the epidemic was a process that unfolded over years. Each legislative session brought a new round of petitions. Each committee report offered a new partial resolution. Each appropriation closed some accounts and left others open. The process itself became a kind of narrative triage, deciding which debts would be honored and which would be allowed to fade into the background. The city was choosing which parts of the story to pay for and which parts to forget.

The financial records tell a story that the medical debates could not. The disputes between Rush and Devèze, between Carey and Allen and Jones, were disputes about reputation and theory. They were important. But they were also abstract. The ledger entries were concrete. A specific quantity of medicine purchased at a specific price. A specific wage owed to a specific nurse for a specific number of days. These numbers did not interpret the epidemic. They recorded its cost.

And the cost was unevenly distributed. The merchants who had fled the city returned to find their warehouses intact, their ships still at the wharves, their commercial networks still functional. The laborers who had stayed, who had nursed the sick and buried the dead, returned to find their wages unpaid and their families diminished. The city’s recovery was a recovery for those who had the resources to wait out the delay.

The Pennsylvania legislature was not unique in its handling of crisis debts. American governments at every level in the 1790s struggled with the financial aftermath of the Revolution, the frontier wars, and the public health crises that punctuated the decade. The federal government itself was still establishing its fiscal mechanisms under the direction of Alexander Hamilton. The assumption of state debts, the establishment of the national bank, the creation of the revenue system. These were the macro-structures within which Philadelphia’s epidemic debts were supposed to be settled. But the macro-structures did not reach down to the individual nurse whose wage was recorded in a committee minute and never paid.

The city’s priorities were legible in its appropriations. Money for the waterworks. Money for the wharves. Money for the streets. Money for the public buildings that housed the federal government and made Philadelphia the capital. These appropriations flowed through the same legislative machinery that processed the epidemic claims. They moved faster. They encountered fewer objections. They were subject to less scrutiny. The infrastructure of commerce and governance was funded. The labor of survival was not.

By 1796, the financial aftermath of the epidemic was not over. It was not even close to over. Girard was still petitioning. The Free African Society’s claims were still unresolved. The Bush Hill accounts were still open. The city had moved on, but the ledger had not. The gap between what was spent and what was reimbursed remained. The gap between what was promised and what was paid remained. The gap between the epidemic’s temporary equality of sacrifice and the settlement’s permanent inequality of outcome remained.

These gaps were specific unpaid wages. They were specific unreimbursed purchases. They were specific claims dismissed for lack of documentation. They were the concrete residue of a crisis that the city had survived but not fully accounted for. The unsettled debt of Bush Hill was a line item. And it was still open.

The legislature had one more session. The committee had one more report. The petition had one more referral. The machinery ground on. The creditors waited. Some of them died. Stephen Girard, wealthy and stubborn, could afford to wait. The nurses and laborers of the Free African Society could not. Their claims grew smaller as the process ground on. Not because the claims themselves changed, but because the cost of waiting eroded them. A claim that could not be collected for two years was worth less than a claim that could be collected immediately. Time was a cost. And the machinery of settlement imposed that cost on the people least able to bear it.

The city’s financial record of the epidemic was a story of priorities. It showed what the city valued. It valued commerce. It valued infrastructure. It valued the institutions that made Philadelphia the capital. It did not value, or at least did not value enough, the labor of the people who had kept the city alive when the institutions failed. The ledger was a moral document. It recorded not just what was owed but what was honored. And what was honored was not enough.

Girard’s accounts were eventually settled. Partially. The legislature appropriated funds. Not the full amount. But enough to close the books. The Free African Society’s claims were not settled. They were not closed. They were allowed to expire. The nurses who had been promised wages died or moved or simply gave up. The laborers who had been promised compensation found that the process of claiming it was more expensive than the claim itself. The city’s gratitude was real. It was expressed in resolutions, in public speeches, in published accounts. But gratitude was not payment. And payment was what the ledger required.

The Bush Hill hospital was gone. The mansion had been emptied, its supplies depleted, its wards dismantled. The building itself was subject to disputes that would eventually be resolved through the same slow legal machinery that processed the financial claims. But the debt remained. Not the debt to Girard, which was large and eventually partially paid. Not the debt to Devèze, which was smaller and eventually partially paid. The debt to the nurses and laborers. The debt to the people who had answered the city’s appeal and served in the wards and dug the graves and drove the carts. That debt was not paid. It was not even properly recorded. It existed in the margins of the committee minutes, in the pamphlet Allen and Jones published, in the memories of the families who had lost members and never received compensation.

The city had borrowed labor and promised payment. The city had borrowed lives and promised recognition. The city had borrowed time and promised restitution. The ledger showed what was borrowed. The ledger did not show what was returned. The gap between the two was the unsettled debt of Bush Hill. It was the concrete residue of a crisis that the city had survived but not fully reckoned with. And it was still open.

The accounts lay where the process had left them. Girard’s petition, partially answered. Devèze’s claim, partially acknowledged. The Free African Society’s wages, largely unpaid. The Bush Hill expenses, partially reimbursed. The legislature had moved on to other business. The city had moved on to other concerns. The federal government was preparing for its own removal from Philadelphia, a decision that would render the question of the capital’s future urgent and the debts of 1793 irrelevant. But the ledger was still open. The numbers were still there. The nurses were still unpaid. And the machinery that was supposed to settle the debt of the crisis had instead become the mechanism by which the city decided which obligations it would honor and which it would let expire in the slow grinding of procedural time.