The Exodus Begins

The deaths had crept past the wharves and into the streets where merchants lived and where government clerks rented their rooms. By the last week of August, households on Second and Walnut were shuttering their windows, not because anyone had ordered them to but because the air itself seemed to carry something lethal. The Federal Gazette still ran its columns of shipping news, but between the mercantile notices appeared a new entry—deaths, reported with a frequency that thickened each day. The Mayor had consulted. The College of Physicians had advised. Nothing decisive had followed. And so the people of Philadelphia began, household by household, to do what the government would not. They left.

President George Washington watched the sickness from the President’s House on High Street, a modest brick building at the corner of Sixth that had once belonged to Robert Morris. His secretary, Tobias Lear, kept him informed of the spreading deaths. Washington was a Virginian, accustomed to the seasonal rhythms of illness in the South, where planters retreated from low-lying country during the sickly months. In many parts of the United States, even in the Northeast, August and September were considered the sickly season, when fevers were prevalent. Natives of a region often believed themselves immune to its diseases, while newcomers suffered. Washington knew this pattern well. But Philadelphia was the capital, and he was the President, and the decision to stay or go carried a weight that no seasonal habit could resolve.

He held his ground through the final week of August. Callers came to the President’s House, correspondence moved across his desk, and the business of a government still functioned, however thinly. But the callers grew fewer. The streets outside grew quieter. The reports from the infected districts grew worse.

On September 1, a Sunday, Washington attended services at Christ Church. The congregation was noticeably diminished. That same day, Lear noted the fever’s spread through the city’s core with alarm. Washington began, quietly, to prepare for departure. He did not announce it. He simply arranged his affairs. The decision, when it came, would look like a private matter—a gentleman’s retreat to Mount Vernon for a season of rest. It was the first departure of the federal government from its own capital.

Washington’s carriage left Philadelphia on September 3. The trunks were packed. The horses were harnessed. The President, his secretary, and a small retinue rolled north out of the city on the road toward Germantown and then south toward the Potomac. No formal announcement came. No address to the citizens. No handover of authority. The President simply went, as any man of means might go, leaving behind a government skeleton that depended on his presence to function.

The departure was quiet, but not invisible. High Street was a public thoroughfare, and the President’s carriage was a recognizable vehicle. People saw it pass. What they understood, in the way people understand such things without being told, was that if the most powerful man in the republic had decided the city was unsafe, then it was unsafe. The flight of a president is a political act. It tells every citizen with the means to follow that the crisis has crossed a threshold.

Washington was not the first to leave, and he would not be the last. But his departure marked the moment when the exodus stopped being a private response and became a civic fact.

The federal government, such as it was, scattered in the days that followed. Washington went to Mount Vernon. Thomas Jefferson, the Secretary of State, had already departed for Monticello, his leaving framed as a long-planned journey rather than a flight. Henry Knox, the Secretary of War, remained briefly, then followed. Edmund Randolph, the Attorney General, stayed longer than his colleagues, but he too eventually went. The departments of state, war, and treasury, which had operated from cramped offices in Philadelphia, were left to clerks and junior functionaries who had no authority to make decisions and no instructions on how to proceed.

The Treasury Department felt the effects most immediately. Alexander Hamilton had been ill, though not with the fever, and was absent. His chief clerk and a skeleton staff kept the office open, but the work of the federal government slowed to a crawl. Customs revenue went unprocessed. Debts went unpaid. Correspondence with foreign ministers went unanswered. The republic’s machinery did not stop. It simply ran with no one at the controls.

The State Department’s clerks found themselves in an impossible position. Foreign ministers still in Philadelphia—the French envoy and the British representative—sent requests and received no replies. The War Department, responsible for the nation’s defenses, had no secretary to receive reports. The government of the United States, barely four years old under the Constitution, was operating at a remove. Its center had emptied.

The departure of the President and the secretaries was the top of a cascade. Below them, the merchants, the professionals, the shopkeepers, and the artisans made their own calculations. Each departure made the next one easier and more urgent. A merchant who saw his neighbor’s counting house shuttered began to consider shuttering his own. A family that learned their minister had left town began to pack. The logic was not cowardice. It was contagion of a different kind: the contagion of example.

Stephen Girard, the wealthy French-born merchant and banker, stayed. He would later take a central role in managing the crisis hospital at Bush Hill. But Girard was an exception. Most of his peers in the merchant class did not share his nerve or his sense of obligation. They closed their offices, settled what accounts they could, and hired carriages or wagons for the road to Trenton, to Germantown, to Lancaster, to any place that was not Philadelphia.

The French colonial refugees who had arrived earlier that spring, some with slaves, having fled Cap Français on Saint-Domingue during the slave revolution in the island’s north, were among the first to understand what was happening. They had seen yellow fever before. They knew its course. Roughly two thousand of these refugees had crowded into Philadelphia’s port, straining the city’s resources. Now some joined the exodus, moving outward, carrying the memory of what a fever epidemic could do to a city.

The roads out of Philadelphia filled. The ferry at the Schuylkill carried people and vehicles across the river in a steady stream. The Trenton road saw carriages passing at all hours. The Germantown road, which led to a pleasant village six miles north, became a corridor of flight. Coachmen and wagon drivers raised their fares. The price of a seat in a stagecoach doubled, then doubled again. People who could not afford a carriage walked, carrying bundles, leading children by the hand.

The city’s boarding houses, which had lodged congressmen, clerks, merchants, and visitors during the legislative season, emptied in a matter of days. Landladies who had spent the summer preparing for the autumn session of Congress found their rooms vacant and their boarders gone. The furniture stayed. The tenants vanished.

Market Street, the city’s principal commercial avenue, began to show the effects. Shopfronts that had displayed dry goods, hardware, medicines, and books were shuttered. The shutters went up quickly, nailed in place, sometimes with a scrawled notice pinned to the wood: gone to the country, return when the sickness abates. Some notices were more specific. Some were simply blank. The effect was the same: a street that had been the commercial heart of a capital city began to look like a place abandoned in preparation for a siege.

The banks closed. The insurance offices closed. The coffee houses, where merchants had gathered to trade news and broker deals, locked their doors. The post office remained open, but its hours were reduced. The newspapers continued to print, but their pages shrank as advertisers disappeared and the staffs of the print shops fell ill or fled.

Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, the leaders of the Free African Society, watched the exodus from within the city. Jones, a former enslaved man who had purchased his own freedom and that of his wife, was a lay preacher at St. Thomas’s African Episcopal Church. Allen, also formerly enslaved, had founded the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. They were men of standing in Philadelphia’s Black community, which numbered perhaps two thousand free people. The white population was draining away. The government had departed. The merchants, the professionals, the clergy followed. Jones and Allen understood, as clearly as anyone could, that the city was being sorted into two populations: those who could leave, and those who could not.

The Black community of Philadelphia could not leave. Most had no property outside the city, no country estates, no relatives in Germantown or Trenton. They lived in rented rooms and small houses in the neighborhoods south and west of the center. They worked as laborers, seamstresses, carters, and domestics. When the yellow fever reached their streets, they were in it.

Jones and Allen would later write about what happened. In their 1794 Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia in the Year 1793, they described the moment when the city’s leadership vanished and the burden of its survival fell, by default, on those who remained. The Narrative was written as a refutation of accounts that had criticized the Black community’s conduct during the epidemic. But it also served as a record of what it meant to be left behind.

The civic evaporation was swift. It was not a single moment but a process that accelerated as each departure made the next one feel more justified. The city’s formal structures—its government offices, its commercial houses, its churches, its charitable institutions—each lost the people who staffed them. What remained was a substrate of the poor, the sick, the trapped, and the few who chose to stay.

The churches told the story of the departure in their own way. The Anglican churches, Christ Church and St. Peter’s, saw their congregations thin. The Presbyterian churches on the northern edge of the city lost members. The Lutheran church, whose minister J. Henry C. Helmuth would later write one of the most detailed accounts of the epidemic, remained open but saw its flock scatter. The Quaker meeting houses, which served a community central to Philadelphia’s founding, saw attendance drop. Ministers left. Some congregations stopped holding services altogether. The bells that had marked the hours of the Sabbath fell silent.

The city’s hospitals were in no condition to receive the growing number of sick. The Pennsylvania Hospital, on Pine Street, accepted fever patients for a time but then closed its doors to them, fearing the spread of infection among its existing patients. The city had a fever hospital at Bush Hill, a former estate on the western edge of the built-up area, but it was understaffed and poorly supplied. The sick who could not be cared for at home, and whose families had fled or died, were taken there in carts. The hospital’s condition was a subject of growing alarm among those who remained.

Mayor Matthew Clarkson, who had received Dr. Benjamin Rush’s warning about the fever and had consulted with the College of Physicians, found himself governing a city that was emptying around him. His authority, such as it was, derived from his office and from the cooperation of the city’s civic leaders. But those leaders were leaving. The city council met, debated, and passed resolutions. But the council’s own members were falling ill or departing. The police force, a small body of men responsible for keeping order, was reduced by sickness and flight.

Clarkson’s position was an impossible one. No public health apparatus worthy of the name existed at his disposal. No municipal funds adequate to the scale of the crisis were available. No authority to compel citizens to stay or to order the quarantine of infected houses resided in his office. The Mayor’s position, in 1793, was a weak instrument. Advice was possible. Requests were possible. Convening was possible. Command was not. And now, with the President gone and the federal departments gutted and the state government largely withdrawn to Lancaster, no higher authority remained to appeal to.

The Federal Gazette continued to publish through the first week of September, but its tone shifted. The shipping notices grew shorter. The advertisements thinned. The death notices grew longer. Between the columns of news, a new message appeared: recommendations for preventing the fever, lists of remedies, advice on what to do if a household member fell ill. The newspaper had become a survival manual.

The exodus divided Philadelphia into two cities. One was the city of the departed: the President, the secretaries, the merchants, the professionals, the clergy, the newspaper editors, the bankers, the shopkeepers. They were on the roads, in the country towns, in the boarding houses of Germantown and Trenton, waiting for the sickness to pass. The other was the city of the remaining: the poor, the Black, the sick, the dying, the few who had chosen to stay, and the medical men who could not in conscience leave.

Dr. Benjamin Rush was among those who stayed. He moved through the infected districts, visiting patients in their homes, bleeding them and purging them with mercury-based compounds, following the medical theory he had committed to. He wrote letters to colleagues, to the newspapers, to anyone who would read, urging the city to take action. He was certain of his diagnosis and certain of his treatment. He was also watching the city he had served dissolve around him.

Rush’s certainty was a kind of defiance. He believed the fever was native to Philadelphia, not imported, and he believed his methods would work. Other physicians disagreed. Dr. William Currie, in the first week of September, published a description of the fever that identified it as imported and argued for different treatments. The medical profession was divided. But the division among doctors mattered less now, because the city’s attention had shifted from what caused the fever to whether to stay or go.

The people who left were not wrong to leave. The fever was deadly. The medical responses were uncertain. The city’s institutions were failing. Flight was a rational response to a genuine danger. But the rationality of each individual decision produced a collective catastrophe. Each departure weakened the city’s capacity to care for those who remained. Each shuttered shop meant one fewer source of food or medicine. Each closed office meant one fewer instrument of governance. The exodus was, in its individual choices, entirely reasonable. In its collective effect, it was devastating.

Washington, from Mount Vernon, wrote to Lear about the situation. He monitored the reports. He considered when it might be safe to return. The President’s absence was not a dereliction of duty. It was a judgment that the capital was unsafe. But the effect was the same: the government of the United States was not in the United States’ capital. It was dispersed, inoperative, and absent.

The people who could not leave watched the carriages pass and the shutters go up. The silence in the streets was not peaceful. It was the sound of a place vacated by those with the means to vacate it. The noise of commerce, of conversation, of civic life, was replaced by the sounds of sickness: the rattle of carts carrying the dead, the cries of the dying behind closed doors, the occasional voice of a doctor or a nurse passing in the street.

The city was being sorted. Not by law or decree, but by the brutal logic of means and circumstance. Those with money, property, and connections elsewhere could leave. Those without them could not. The division ran along every fault line Philadelphia already contained: wealth and poverty, white and Black, free and bound, native and foreign. The epidemic did not create these divisions. It revealed them. It made them concrete in the form of empty streets and occupied rooms, of departing carriages and stationary feet.

The French refugees from Saint-Domingue, who had themselves fled a catastrophe, now found themselves in another. Some had resources and joined the exodus. Others did not. They had already used what they had to cross the sea. Now they were trapped in a city that was killing its inhabitants, and they had nowhere else to go.

The sick were trapped too. A family with a fever-stricken member could not leave. The infected person was too ill to travel. The healthy members would not abandon them, or could not, because there was no one to take their place. And so the households with sickness stayed, and the households without sickness, increasingly, went. The city was sorted into the well and mobile, and the sick and fixed.

Bush Hill, which would become central to the city’s response in the weeks ahead, was already receiving patients. Its corridors were filling. Its staff was inadequate. The building, a former mansion on a hill west of the city center, had been converted to a hospital but was not yet the organized institution it would become under the management of the Committee of Twenty and the direction of Stephen Girard and the French physician Jean Devèze. In these early days of September, it was a place where the sick were taken because there was nowhere else.

The Committee of Twenty had not yet been formed. Its creation lay ahead, a response to the vacuum the exodus was creating. But the vacuum was already real. The Mayor’s office could not fill it. The federal government was gone. The state government was distant. The city’s institutional capacity was draining away with every carriage that left.

The streets of Philadelphia in the first days of September were a study in contrast. On some streets, the frantic activity of departure: carriages being loaded, trunks being hauled, horses being harnessed, families hurrying into the morning with bundles and children. On other streets, the silence of abandonment: shuttered windows, closed doors, the absence of the usual sounds of trade and conversation. On still other streets, the muffled sounds of sickness behind closed doors, the occasional figure of a doctor moving quickly between houses.

By the second week of September, the exodus had reached its full velocity. The roads out of the city were crowded. The inns in Germantown and Trenton were full. The country towns around Philadelphia received refugees, sometimes welcoming them, sometimes turning them away. The fear of contagion traveled with the refugees. Towns along the routes began to post guards and turn back anyone who could not prove they came from an uninfected district.

The city’s population, which had been roughly fifty thousand, was draining. The exact number of those who left is not known with precision, but it was substantial. Half the city, or nearly half, departed during the epidemic’s course. The streets that remained populated were the streets of the poor and the Black. The streets that emptied were the streets of the merchants, the professionals, and the government.

The exodus had its own momentum. Each departure made the next one easier. Each empty house made the next house’s occupants feel exposed. Each shuttered business made the next business’s closure feel like prudence rather than panic. The city was caught in a feedback loop. The more people left, the more dangerous it became for those who stayed, because the infrastructure of care and supply was leaving with them.

The federal government’s absence was the most consequential departure. The government was not just an employer or a source of revenue. It was the symbol of national authority. Its presence in Philadelphia was the reason Philadelphia was the capital. Without it, the city was just a place—a large town on the Delaware, struggling with a disease that was killing its people. The government’s flight reduced the crisis from a national event to a local catastrophe. It removed the possibility of federal intervention, federal resources, federal coordination. The national government, in fleeing, declared that it could not protect its own seat.

Washington’s carriage, rolling south toward Mount Vernon, was a single vehicle on a long road. But it carried the weight of a republic’s credibility. The President had looked at the sickness in his capital and decided that the safest course was to leave. He may have been right. He may have been acting on the best medical advice available, which was almost no advice at all. But the consequence was clear: the city was on its own.

The city that remained was a city of those who could not leave. The sick in their beds. The poor in their rented rooms. The Black families in their neighborhoods. The doctors who would not go. The nurses who had no choice. The carters who carried the dead. The clergy who stayed to pray. The Mayor who stayed to govern what remained. They were the substrate. They were what was left when everyone who could leave had left.

Philadelphia, in the second week of September 1793, was a capital without its government, a city without its elite, a community without its institutions. The streets that had carried the noise of commerce and governance were silent. The neighborhoods that remained active were the neighborhoods of those who had nowhere else to go. The sick lay behind closed doors in their homes, and the city’s white leadership, its merchants and its officials, were on the roads to somewhere else.