The Narrative’s Last Reckoning

In the years before the federal government’s final departure from Philadelphia in June 1800, a single pamphlet began its journey through the recovering city, a small blue-bound object passing from hand to hand. This movement traced a path from a printer’s shop on a street scarred by memory and dispute, down to the specifics of its formal title, its accessible price, and the names and year declared within.

The city that received this document was no longer the city that had broken. Philadelphia’s streets had refilled, its markets had reopened, and its port had resumed the commerce that fed the republic’s treasury.

But the narrative of what had happened between August and November of 1793 was still unsettled, still contested, still being written and rewritten by men who had not been present when the dying was done. Jones and Allen had published their rebuttal, 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, in 1794. Now, in the years that followed, that rebuttal would have to survive a contest it had not been designed for, not against the fever itself, which had returned and would return again, but against the machinery of public memory, which ground slowly and ground fine.

The pamphlet’s structure was deliberate. It opened with an account of how the crisis had come to Philadelphia’s black residents: the approach from Benjamin Rush, the belief that Black people possessed a natural immunity to yellow fever, the decision by the Free African Society to answer the call regardless. It moved through the labor itself, the nursing, the bleeding, the carrying of bodies, the digging of graves. It recorded the deaths of black nurses at the same rate as white citizens. And then it turned to the censures it existed to refute. Its tone was one of measured outrage, each charge answered with evidence, each accusation met with a documented counter. The pamphlet did not plead. It corrected.

What made the document unusual was its authorship. Black writers in 1790s America had published sermons, petitions, and antislavery arguments. This was something different: a self-authored history of a public crisis, written by the people whose labor had sustained the city through that crisis, asserting their own account against the accounts of men with larger presses and wider audiences. The pamphlet was, in its way, an act of historical sovereignty, a claim that the story of what had happened in Philadelphia in 1793 could not be told without the testimony of those who had carried the sick and buried the dead.

Against this stood Mathew Carey’s account. Carey had published his Short Account of the Malignant Fever while the epidemic still raged, and by 1794 it had gone through multiple editions, each one widening its reach and hardening its claims. Carey was a printer and a man of commerce, and his pamphlet bore the marks of his trade: it was vivid, it was readable, and it was profitable. It was also, in its treatment of Philadelphia’s black residents, accusatory. Carey had written that some black nurses had demanded exorbitant wages, had exploited the sick, had profited from the city’s catastrophe. The charge was not incidental to his narrative. It was part of a larger argument about civic breakdown, about the collapse of order when authority fled, about the costs of a society that could not trust its own members.

Carey’s revised editions did not retract these claims. They amplified them. Each reprinting reached a larger audience, and each audience encountered the black community’s role in the epidemic through Carey’s framing: not as laborers who had died at the same rate as the people they tended, but as opportunists who had charged too much and given too little. The arithmetic was simple. Carey had a printer’s network, a reader’s appetite, and the authority of an eyewitness. Jones and Allen had a pamphlet, a congregation, and a claim that the public record was wrong.

Benjamin Rush occupied a different position in this contest, and a more complicated one. Rush had been the physician who appealed to the Free African Society. He had believed, and told them, that Black people were immune to yellow fever. When that belief proved false, when black nurses began to sicken and die, Rush did not publicly retract it. Instead, in the years that followed, he turned his attention to the medical dispute that the epidemic had ignited: the quarrel over bleeding and purging, the defense of his mercurial treatment, the war against the French physician Jean Devèze and the methods of the Bush Hill hospital. Rush’s subsequent publications argued that his treatment had worked, that his calomel and jalap had saved lives, that the critics who had mocked his bleeding were either ignorant or malicious. His medical reputation was the front he chose to defend.

The epidemic’s medical legacy was, in fact, a field of competing claims that the College of Physicians had tried and failed to settle. Devèze had treated patients with cooling regimens, rest, and wine. Rush had bled them until their pulses disappeared and purged them until their bodies emptied. Both physicians claimed success. Both had mortality statistics that could be read in their favor, depending on which patients were counted and which were excluded. The College’s inquiry heard testimony from both camps and issued findings that satisfied neither. In the absence of a definitive verdict, the dispute became a matter of public argument, carried forward in pamphlets, lectures, and medical correspondence.

Rush’s defense of his methods was political as much as scientific. He had told the citizens of Philadelphia that his treatment was the treatment, that any physician who disagreed was a danger to the public, and that the city’s survival depended on the adoption of his protocols. When the epidemic passed and the death toll was counted, roughly five thousand in a city of fifty thousand, the question of whether Rush’s bleeding had helped or harmed could not be separated from the question of his authority. If his treatment had failed, then the city’s most prominent physician had prescribed a course that may have killed the patients he intended to save. The stakes of the medical dispute were, for Rush, indistinguishable from the stakes of his career.

This was the landscape of competing narratives that Jones and Allen entered. Their pamphlet did not address the medical quarrel directly. It addressed something more fundamental: the question of who had served, who had died, and who deserved the public’s recognition. The Narrative recorded that black nurses had worked for free in many cases, that they had charged wages in others, and that the wages they charged were no different from those charged by white nurses who had also remained in the city. It recorded that black Philadelphians had died of yellow fever at the same rate as white Philadelphians, refuting the immunity claim that had been used to recruit them. And it named the publications that had accused them, placing Carey’s account at the center of its refutation.

The pamphlet’s accounting was meticulous. It listed the labor performed, the arrangements made, the payments received and denied. It treated the epidemic’s aftermath as a matter of public record that could be corrected by evidence. And it insisted that the black community’s contribution to the city’s survival was not a footnote to be acknowledged in passing but a central fact that the narrative of the epidemic could not omit without falsification.

What the Narrative confronted was a process that might be called narrative triage, the competitive sorting of facts, accusations, and claims that determines which version of an event hardens into history and which is discarded. In the immediate aftermath of the epidemic, the city’s attention had been consumed by survival, by the return of the federal government, by the resumption of commerce. The story of what had happened was still being assembled. Carey’s pamphlet had moved quickly, as pamphlets did, filling the vacuum with a readable account that confirmed what many white Philadelphians wanted to believe: that the city’s breakdown had been the fault of its least powerful residents, not the failure of its most powerful institutions. Rush’s medical publications moved more slowly but with greater authority, casting the physician as the hero of a crisis that had tested the republic’s capacity to survive.

Jones and Allen moved against both currents. Their pamphlet could not match Carey’s distribution or Rush’s professional standing. What it had was the weight of testimony, the specific, documented record of men who had been present, who had performed the labor, who had watched their own community die. The Narrative was an accounting, not an opinion, and its power lay in its refusal to abstract the epidemic into a medical event or a civic breakdown. It kept the labor visible. It kept the deaths counted. It insisted that the story of 1793 was a story of bodies carried and graves dug, and that the people who had carried and dug deserved the credit that Carey had denied them.

The reception of the Narrative was quiet. It did not provoke a public controversy on the scale of the medical dispute or the commercial panic that followed the epidemic. It was read by those who sought it out, discussed in the circles where the black community’s role was already known, and largely ignored by the audiences that had consumed Carey’s account. This was the nature of the contest. Carey’s pamphlet was profitable and popular. Rush’s medical writings carried the authority of a university and a College of Physicians. Jones and Allen’s Narrative carried the authority of experience, which in the hierarchy of public memory ranked below both commerce and credentials.

But the Narrative endured. It was cited in antislavery literature, in sermons, in the records of the African Methodist Episcopal Church that Allen would help found. It became the document to which later writers turned when they sought to correct the record, the text that proved the black community had spoken for itself, had named its accusers, and had refused the role that Carey’s narrative had assigned it. The pamphlet’s quiet persistence was its own kind of victory, not the victory of a bestseller or a public vindication, but the victory of a document that could not be discarded because it carried the evidence of its own claims.

The epidemic returned to Philadelphia in 1797, 1798, and again in subsequent years. Each recurrence tested the city’s institutions anew. The sanitary improvements that Rush had advocated were gradually adopted. The municipal infrastructure that had collapsed in 1793 was rebuilt under the pressure of repeated crisis. The federal government, which had fled in 1793, would eventually leave Philadelphia for the new capital on the Potomac, a move that the epidemic and its aftermath had helped justify. The city that emerged from the decade of fever was not the city that had entered it.

The Free African Society continued its work through the recurrences. Jones and Allen assisted Rush again, organizing nurses, tending the sick, burying the dead. The immunity claim had been disproved by 1793’s body count, but the labor continued because the labor was necessary. The black community’s role in each subsequent epidemic was less publicly contested than it had been in 1793, not because the accusations had been retracted but because the Narrative had made the cost of such accusations visible. Carey’s later editions softened some of his language. The refutation had done its work.

What the decade between 1794 and 1806 revealed was the slow sorting of memory. The epidemic’s medical legacy hardened into two camps: Rush’s defenders and Rush’s critics, the bleeders and the coolers, each with their own statistics and their own publications. The civic legacy hardened into an argument about federalism, about whether a national government that fled its capital could be trusted to protect its citizens, about whether the republic’s survival required a stronger union. And the racial legacy, the story of who had served and who had been blamed, hardened into the competing narratives that Jones, Allen, and Carey had put before the public.

The sovereignty of care, the authority to define who had preserved life, who had earned the right to claim heroism, who had borne the cost of the city’s survival, was the prize in this contest. Carey’s narrative claimed it for the white merchants and physicians who had stayed. Rush’s publications claimed it for the doctor and his methods. Jones and Allen’s Narrative claimed it for the community that had answered the call, had died in the answering, and had been accused of profiting from the dying.

The final reckoning was not a trial or a verdict. It was the slow accumulation of readers, citations, and reprintings that determined which account would be consulted by the next generation. Carey’s pamphlet went through multiple editions and then faded. Rush’s medical publications were read by physicians and then superseded by the next century’s science. The Narrative remained, cited, referenced, returned to, because it was the only document that carried the testimony of the people who had done the work. It was not the most popular account. It was not the most authoritative. But it was the one that could not be replaced, because no one else had been there in the way that Jones and Allen had been there, and no one else had written it down.

By 1806, the year that marks the outer edge of this reckoning, Philadelphia had changed. The export of foreign goods had risen to figures that would have been unimaginable in the epidemic year. The port was busy. The streets were cleaner. The municipal infrastructure that had collapsed under the weight of five thousand dead had been rebuilt, expanded, and made accountable to a city government that had learned, through repetition, what it could not afford to lose. The College of Physicians had issued its reports. The Committee of Twenty’s minutes had been filed. The burial returns had been counted. The newspapers had published their accounts and their corrections.

What remained was the question the epidemic had asked and that the decade of aftermath had answered in fragments: what happens when a republic’s capital cannot protect its citizens, when its government flees, when its institutions fail, when the only people who stay are the people it has already failed? The answer in 1793 was improvisation, the Free African Society, the Committee of Twenty, Stephen Girard at Bush Hill, Jean Devèze and his cooling regimen, Benjamin Rush and his mercury. The answer in the years that followed was contest, over the medical record, over the civic record, over the racial record, over the question of who would be remembered and who would be accused.

The Narrative’s last reckoning was the reckoning of a city that had learned what it cost to survive. The epidemic had not been a natural disaster. It had been a stress test of the republic’s newest capital, and the results were written in the bodies of the dead, the labor of the people who buried them, and the pamphlets that argued over what it had all meant. The fever broke with the frost. The arguments did not break at all. They were carried forward, printed and reprinted, cited and ignored, until the version that survived was the version that could not be discarded, not because it was popular, and not because it was authoritative, but because it was true, and because the people who wrote it had been the ones who stayed.