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CHAPTER 1

Neighborly Citizenship in Absalom Jones and Richard Allen’s A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late and Awful Calamity in Philadelphia in the Year 1793

With regard to the emigration to Africa you mention, we have at present but little to communicate on that head, apprehending every pious man is a good citizen of the whole world.

—Reply of the Free African Society (Philadelphia,

Pennsylvania) to the Union Society of Africans

(Newport, Rhode Island), October 1789

The 1789 response from the Free African Society (FAS) to the African Union Society of Rhode Island’s proposal for a settlement in Africa projects a sense of optimism at the close of the eighteenth century. Rather than cite the new federal Constitution or the spread of “republicanism,” the FAS sees a cosmopolitan citizenship manifesting in the “expressive language of conduct” of those “persons who are sacrificing their own time, ease and property for us, the stranger and the fatherless, in this wilderness.”¹ More than an article of faith, however, the FAS provides a statement about citizenship practices by way of what the good citizen does and, as important, how the good citizen views and engages others, stranger and friend alike. The pious citizen does not identify fellow citizens based on “worth,” nor can we identify the pious citizen outside this citizen’s actions. Rather, pious citizens reach out to those in need according to an ethic of neighborliness suggested in the golden-rule injunction to, as the FAS puts it, “do unto all men as we would they should do unto us.”² The pious may be citizens of the world, but they demonstrate this citizenship through concrete local, everyday interactions.

Though formal citizenship was in flux for black citizens, accounts of citizenship such as the above statement from the FAS provide key critiques and interventions within contemporaneous paradigms. Even as federalists and antifederalists debated the nature of the bonds between citizens in a republic, the role of human interests in maintaining and/or disrupting those bonds, and the kinds of institutions best suited to managing those (particularly economic) interests, black citizens were forming citizenship practices based on their own experiences and understandings of political and religious texts. Even as civic republican and liberal versions of citizenship took shape in the late eighteenth-century United States, other civic schematics were not only possible but also concurrently being developed and enacted.

This chapter takes up one such account, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen’s A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late and Awful Calamity in Philadelphia in the Year 1793 and A Refutation of Some Censures, Thrown upon Them in Some Late (1794), to develop a social theory of citizenship as a practice of neighborliness.³ Written partially in response to Matthew Carey’s accusations of black theft and extortion during Philadelphia’s 1793 yellow fever epidemic in his A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia (1793), Narrative draws on the image of the pious citizen of the world, Christian ethics, civic republicanism, and the notion of an “expressive language of conduct” to theorize neighborly citizenship as the proactive engagement with the suffering stranger out of what Narrative calls “real sensibility.”⁴ This active principle and Jones and Allen’s articulation of it through black citizenship pointedly critique and revise emergent notions of civic republican citizenship and fellow feeling.

Carey’s Account provided Jones and Allen with a distillation of early U.S. citizenship. This rendering of citizenship, outlined in this chapter’s first section, attempted to assuage fears that republican citizenship failed during the yellow fever epidemic by (1) drawing attention to “respectable citizens” whose virtue led them to assume responsibility for the faltering city and (2) noting that the massive flight during the epidemic did not signal the failures of fellow feeling but rather the freedom of republican governance. Jones and Allen reveal that the ethics subtending this reading encouraged a more passive approach to fellow citizenship that depended less on what citizens did on the ground and more on the power of narration to justify these activities. Indeed, this chapter’s second half, following Jones and Allen’s own critical strategies, highlights the ways the form and point of view Narrative takes model the kinds of bonds and citizenship practice Jones and Allen were theorizing. In contrast to Carey’s emphasis on the virtues of a managerial elite, Narrative reproduces some of Account’s key scenes from the perspective of the citizens on the ground, very ordinary “poor black” men and women, whose actions were otherwise unnoted or vilified.

Narrative’s vignettes describe specific encounters among strangers in the style of the parable of the Good Samaritan, fleshing out neighborliness as a citizenship practice robust enough to promote mutual responsibility yet open enough to promote more democratic engagement. Just as the parable uses narrative inversion to critically reevaluate the terms of the question “Who is my neighbor?” Narrative interrogates late eighteenth-century theories about the ethical relation between citizens by thinking about the kinds of relations the good citizen should actively produce rather than the inverse, how to produce or identify the good citizen.⁵ This shift in perspective suggests that fellow citizenship did not fail during the crisis; rather, early national narratives such as Carey’s sought it in the wrong places, ignoring the citizenship practices and potential fellow citizens right in front of them.

The pamphlet’s main thrust, then, was not simply refuting Carey’s charges. As I argue throughout this chapter, Jones and Allen’s Narrative provides a positive vision of citizenship that exceeds the goals stated in the title and that have preoccupied criticism on Narrative. I am not suggesting here a call-and-response model in which Narrative responds to Account’s provocation. Rather, Account provided a convenient and widely read medium for arguments already developing in black political thought through institutions such as the Free African Society and Church and from individuals including Benjamin Banneker. They appropriate the occasion of responding to Carey and use his text as a substrate—a widely circulating articulation of a common understanding of citizenship—for ideas that the two men and the collectives they represented had been working through over the past decade, as suggested in the Free African Society’s response to their Rhode Island counterparts.

Responding to Carey allowed Jones and Allen to use the style of public “Refutation” to make claims against Carey and the nation more broadly. As I discuss in this chapter’s final section, the appended “Address to Those Who Keep Slaves, and Approve of the Practice,” in turn, uses the proceedings of the black people as a case study that justifies and provides a framework for further “experiments”: emancipation, abolition, and the full incorporation of black citizens after slavery. In the moments characterized by Myra Jehlen as “history before the fact” or, in this case, citizenship before the fact, the terms of fellow citizenship were unsettled not just in Philadelphia in the immediate aftermath of the epidemic but also across a new republic still unsure of its federal compact.⁶ Even as Jones and Allen recounted events in recognizably republican terms, their narrative structure represents an attempt to reshape the discourse of citizenship in the messy moments when the city and the nation were trying to make sense of what seemed to be wholesale civic failure during the crisis.

Seizing the Moment: Jones and Allen’s Print Politics

Published in January 1794 after the third edition of Carey’s Account, A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People provides a chronology of black work during the epidemic, beginning with Jones, Allen, and William Gray’s voluntary efforts and the FAS and Free African Church’s (FAC’s) response to Mayor Matthew Clarkson’s call for assistance and ending with an accounting of the group’s expenditures and disposal of beds.⁷ Jones and Allen contest “kind assurances” of black immunity that were widely accepted as fact at the time, detail their management of relief works (black convicts among them), and set out to counter “partial, censorious” accounts of the black workers as a response to not only Carey but also, in Jones and Allen’s words, “the many unprovoked enemies who begrudge us the liberty we enjoy, and are glad to hear of any complaint against our colour, be it just or unjust.”⁸ In part owing to the strength of this defense of black Philadelphians, much of the scholarship on Narrative has examined how its authors distinguish black virtue and sensibility from white inhumanity to carve out space for black citizenship. Sarah Knott, for instance, notes Jones and Allen “understood, as Carey perhaps did not, that social belonging depended on the claim to sensibility; it did not just easily flow from it.” Where Knott sees mastery, Philip Gould suggests Jones and Allen fell victim to the same tensions within sensibility that they set out to critique. Their concern with financial losses undercut their claims to benevolent disinterest.⁹ Even as this scholarship illuminates Jones and Allen’s challenge to contemporary understanding of sensibility and citizenship, however, it still tends to frame it in terms of appropriation and reaction, not creation.

Figure 1. Title page, Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People (1794).

My point here is not that this scholarship is misreading Narrative per se but rather that the emphasis on response and protest can obscure how Jones and Allen leverage the moment to demand a wholesale rethinking of the relationship between citizenship and sensibility in the period.¹⁰ In their initial justification for entering print, Jones and Allen employed stylistic tactics indicative of a black intellectual tradition critiquing those who, as Phillis Wheatley famously observes in “On Being Brought from African to American” (1773), “view our sable race with scornful eye” (5–8) and, as Benjamin Banneker notes in his letter to Thomas Jefferson, “have long … looked [on us] with an eye of contempt.”¹¹ For both writers, the stated occasion for entering print provides a vector but not the ultimate target from their arguments.¹² From this perspective, Joanna Brooks argues, the overemphasis on Narrative’s status as primarily a response to Carey points to a larger tendency to ignore how the tract “resonates with the impassioned and embittered voices of two men who are themselves only a few years free from chattel slavery, who witness that the slave trade continues with the legal sanction of the U.S. government.” These men, she continues, saw “the fragility of fellow-feeling and sympathy revealed during the yellow fever epidemic, and their text demonstrated how insufficient these frameworks were for communicating black grievances.”¹³ Or, more accurately, how efficient they were at eliding them. Narrative may recapitulate the contradictions in contemporary political and racial discourse, but it also strategically reenacts these contradictions to expose rather than reproduce them.

Jones and Allen’s emphasis on the white production of virtue throughout Narrative suggests that they recognized in 1794 the problem with virtue politics. In that sense, Narrative is both descriptive of how black citizens might enter the civic sphere under already operative terms—civic republicanism, benevolence and sensibility, virtue politics, and the like—and prescriptive in the way its account of black activities exceeds these frameworks. While Jeannine DeLombard describes Narrative as a “documentary account of black civic virtue,” she also notes that if virtue politics failed, Jones and Allen could produce an “altogether different kind of black public presence” by converting impositions of black criminal culpability into “civil ‘capacity’” and claims to full citizenship.¹⁴ Converting “culpable legal personhood” was one strategy Narrative deployed; at the same time, this chapter argues, Narrative produces something quite different, using the ethics articulated in Jesus of Nazareth’s discourse on Mosaic law in the Gospel Luke, not contemporaneous constructions of citizenship or personhood, as their guide.

The connection to Banneker in particular might run deeper. Jones and Allen potentially had access to “A Copy of a Letter from Benjamin Banneker to the Secretary of State, with His Answer,” printed in Philadelphia in 1792.¹⁵ I will discuss this text in more detail in this chapter’s last section, but its path to print is worth rehearsing here as a precursor to Narrative and as an illustration of strategies already in play. Banneker claims in the letter, “It was not originally my design” to write a letter critiquing Jefferson’s hypocrisy in championing political freedom in the Declaration of Independence while still supporting enslavement. “But,” he maintains, “having taken up my pen in order to direct to [Jefferson]” his 1792 Almanac “as a present,” Banneker was “unexpectedly and unavoidably led” to respond to the racist claims Jefferson makes in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785).¹⁶ Banneker sent the Almanac in manuscript, noting that he was unsure of bringing it to print. The letter itself excoriated Jefferson through the language of both Notes and the Declaration of Independence: “It was” in the early days of the Revolution, Banneker reminds Jefferson, “that your abhorrence thereof was so excited, that you publicly held forth this true and invaluable doctrine, which is worthy to be recorded and remembered in all succeeding ages,” before quoting from the Declaration. After Jefferson responded to Banneker, affirming his wish to see a plan for emancipation enacted, Banneker published his initial letter and that response in pamphlet form. He also included the exchange in the Almanac he would publish that year. The entire sequence of events shows Banneker manipulating the print public not only to publish an incisive antislavery pamphlet but also to cannily drum up potential interest in his Almanac. Jefferson may have been Banneker’s addressee, and he was clearly one of Banneker’s objects of critique, but it is just as clear that Banneker likely had larger goals in mind from the start. Whether or not Jones and Allen read Banneker’s pamphlet or almanac that year, the resemblance in print and rhetoric strategy is striking: Jones and Allen similarly claim to have taken up the pen to refute Carey’s Account but also capitalize on the opportunity to address other “Censures, Thrown upon Them in Some Late Publications” noted in their pamphlet’s title.

To fully understand the theorizing and print strategies Jones and Allen undertake through Narrative, we need to first revisit the models of white citizenship proffered contemporaneously in accounts such as Carey’s A Short Account. While Carey’s Account was neither the only nor the definitive statement on early U.S. citizenship, it provides—both for Jones and Allen and for my purposes here—a productive point of entry for limning the range of problems and potential solutions at play, along with those possibilities white observers routinely ignored or actively disqualified. Carey’s pamphlet provided a distillation of civic republican discourse and a set of formal oppositions (respectable citizens vs. unruly mass, sensibility vs. insensibility, market freedom vs. republican duty) that Jones and Allen could (1) hold up and restage for public assessment, (2) dissect as a reflection of bankrupt citizenship practices, and (3) counterpose to their own model of neighborly citizenship. As I contend throughout this chapter, Jones and Allen’s Narrative, while addressed to Carey, was not about Carey and his Account. Even so, just as black Philadelphians provided Carey and others with a convenient scapegoat for the city’s failures, so too do Jones and Allen appropriate Carey as a mascot for how the language of interests, virtue, and management propped up white supremacy and justified abdication of citizenship’s more democratic and revolutionary potential.

Carey’s Fever: A Crisis in Fellow Citizenship

Yellow fever hit Philadelphia in August of 1793, killing between 4,000 and 5,000 people (10–15 percent of Philadelphia’s population), approximately 400 of them free Africans, in a little less than three months. An additional 20,000 fled the city for safety.¹⁷ The federal government was in recess during the epidemic, leaving the recovery efforts to a Relief Committee of voluntary citizens led by Philadelphia’s mayor, Matthew Clarkson. As the epidemic dissipated in November 1793, Clarkson charged Matthew Carey, an Irish immigrant, printer, and entrepreneur, with composing the city’s official account, including theories about the fever’s causes and progression, the activities of the Relief Committee, and the general state of the city during those three horrible months. This account, initially titled A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia: With a Statement of the Proceedings that Took Place on the Subject in Different Parts of the United States, ran through five editions published in the United States and Europe and eventually sold “over 10,000 copies.” And the publication helped sustain Carey’s faltering career.¹⁸ More than a chronicle of the immediate crisis, Carey’s Short Account presents Philadelphia as a metonym for the nation’s civic and economic climate. His and other yellow fever narratives present several problems in the early republic through the fever, among them: (1) the “dissolution” of “natural” bonds, including familial, neighborly, and formal, and (2) a concomitant crisis of commercial regulation, relating to the role of the state in guiding markets and the market’s ability to regulate itself.¹⁹

As he navigates these political and economic problems, Carey employs standard tropes of an early national civic republican style that mixed classical republicanism’s emphasis on sacrifice, the common good, and a fear of luxury and corruption with a more favorable attitude toward commerce as an expression of liberty and a path toward and sign of stability and competence, all moderated by a assurance of consequences for intemperance.²⁰ In this flexible constellation of concepts, Carey links progress to regulation: “Virtue, liberty, and happiness of a nation,” he posits, depend on its “temperance and sober manners.”²¹ Virtuous citizens are not necessarily the yeomen attributed to Jeffersonian mythology but rather the “plain and wholesome” city dwellers whose daily commercial interactions knit them into a community that prized respectability, politeness, sobriety, and industry.²² City life may provide opportunities for corruption, but sober citizens could resist these temptations with proper self-regulation and institutional oversight, if not on their own merits, because maintaining a public image of self-regulation and politeness could be profitable. Moreover, when otherwise self-regulating individuals fell victim to the temptations of success, strong civic and financial institutions could help rein them in, providing a safety net for the innocent and a bulwark against the market’s (or individual’s) unpredictability for society as a whole. In such a climate, virtuous citizenship did not require the sacrifice of individual interest for the common good so much as the prudent regulation of an enlightened selfinterest—do no harm rather than do good.

On the basis of this civic republicanism, Carey’s prefatory remarks in Account about prefever Philadelphia strike a tenuous balance between the pursuit of commerce and the regulation of extravagance, individual liberty and culpability, and institutional oversight. For Carey, the stability of the Federal Constitution brought the new nation from the brink of “anarchy”: commerce flourished, and “property of every kind, rose to, and in some instances beyond its real value.”²³ The economic boom of the mid-1780s and 1790s, however, undermined this sober ethic and political economic stability: “prospects formed in sanguine hours” replaced the prudent deliberation of less prosperous times, and “luxury, the usual, and perhaps the inevitable concomitant of prosperity, was gaining ground in a manner very alarming.”²⁴ Carey’s ambivalence about the relation between economic prosperity and corruption (is luxury “usual” but avoidable, or is it an “inevitable” natural consequence) mirrors fluctuations within early national debates about such correlative or causal relations. But most agreed luxury had consequences: citizens’ extravagance and economic intemperance primed the city for “something … to humble” their “pride.”²⁵ Even so, the revival of the Bank of Pennsylvania in 1792–1793 and the “liberal conduct of the bank of the United States,” a combination of private and public management, looked to have stabilized the market, regulating currency and “saving many a deserving and industrious man from ruin.”²⁶ The consequences of the previous years’ glut had apparently taught these “deserving” men a valuable lesson while the banks softened the economic blow. With the federal government managing politics and debt, the banks watching over commerce, and the common citizen sufficiently chastened, the middling sorts and economic elite were looking forward to a prosperous fall quarter in 1793.

The yellow fever tipped the balance of this system, removing the stability and confidence that made common prosperity and individual interest compatible if not complementary. Account registers the schism between the two as competing principles of human nature, two orders of natural law at odds. In one of Account’s most often quoted passages, Carey observes, “We cannot be astonished at the frightful scenes that were acted, which seemed to indicate a total dissolution of the bonds of society in the nearest and dearest connections…. A wife unfeelingly abandoning her husband on his death bed—parents forsaking their only children—children ungratefully flying from their parents, and resigning them to chance … masters hurrying off their faithful servants to Bushhill … [and] servants abandoning tender and humane masters.”²⁷ The danger the fever presented (real or imagined) overrode the natural familial bonds that had served as a model for good citizenship.²⁸ Family units disintegrated, and every other form of relation followed suit. Readers should “not be astonished,” however, because the consequent flight was equally natural and perhaps stronger than inducements to stay. Carey describes a mass of “people at the lowest ebb of despair” whose actions were dictated by “the great law of self preservation.”²⁹ “Self-preservation,” observes Carey, is a “law” stronger than kinship, governing not just human behavior but also the “whole animated world.”³⁰ This law led those with means to flee, while those who could not flee either hid, avoiding their neighbors, or took advantage of the crisis to make a profit. In the latter case, while these people may have risked their lives in the process, the profit motive undermined their claims to goodwill; profit was a seemingly unnatural substitute for other failing bonds.

This general unneighborliness revealed holes in the civic republican matrix outlined in Carey’s prefatory remarks and mirrored both federalist and anti-federalist concerns during the constitutional debates in the previous decade.³¹ As historian Woody Holton notes, economic growth and stability were preeminent concerns shaping the push for the 1787 constitution. Madison and others were not so much concerned with “replac[ing] selfish demagogues with men of virtue” as they were with reviving a failing economy. From this frame of reference, virtue was important, Holton observers, insofar as it led to economic goods: restoring credit and properly managing specie.³² Fulfilling one’s civic duty translated into fulfilling one’s economic debt. These debates asked the same fundamental questions about social and civic relations that Carey’s Account investigates: what is the role of self-interest in shaping civil and economic society, what are the duties that citizens have to each other and to the community at large, and what is the role of government in directing and/or cultivating these interests and duties?

Carey’s Account registers these concerns in the social, recording rampant distrust, selfish neglect of duty to family and neighbors, and wholesale abandonment. The disintegration of fellow citizenship in Philadelphia spreads to the national scene as surrounding counties, states, and other “strangers” abandoned those seeking refuge. “The universal consternation,” Carey reports, “extinguished in people’s breasts the most honourable feelings of human nature … suspicion operated as injuriously as the reality.”³³ Philadelphians’ inhumanity toward each other revealed the weakness of societal bonds between friends and neighbors while the inhumanity of the surrounding communities uncovered a deeper lack of feeling (or substance in that feeling) between citizens within the new republic. If societal bonds could not survive a climate that demanded more of its citizens than politeness and sociability, could the new federal compact? The yellow fever epidemic made suspicious “strangers” out of neighbors and fellow citizens alike.

Despite the dire image of a more general unneighborliness, Carey presents the singular achievements of individuals such as Stephen Girard and members of the Relief Committee, led by Mayor Matthew Clarkson, as models of the virtuous citizenship that could sustain a republic. When “government of every kind was almost wholly vacated,” including the caretakers for the poor and orphaned, this “band of brothers” stand in as the stabilizing force, mirroring the influence of the Federal Constitution and Bank of Pennsylvania in the years before the crisis.³⁴ Girard, a French immigrant and one of the wealthiest merchants in the city, and Peter Helm are representative republican citizens in this instance. “Actuated by … benevolent motives,” they eschew the safety of retreat to serve the common good.³⁵ Their sacrifice is twofold: they sacrifice their business interests to oversee matters at Bush Hill without regard for compensation (and they can do so because they are wealthy), and they risk “little less than certain” death.³⁶ Girard and Helm, Carey continues, “without any possible inducement but the purest motives of humanity … came forward, and offered themselves as the forlorn hope of the committee…. From the time of undertaking this office to the present, they have attended uninterruptedly, for six, seven, or eight hours a day, renouncing almost every care of private affairs.”³⁷ When focused on this group, Carey’s style reflects more the rigidity of early eighteenth-century classical republicanism than the relatively fluid late eighteenth-century model of sobriety and polite sensibility outlined in his description of the prefever commercial and political climate.³⁸ Girard, Helm, and other “benevolent citizens” comprise a core managerial elite whose affluence and position give them the ability to flee but whose sense of duty compels them to stay. Carey’s emphasis on the voluntary nature of their work—sacrificing private interests without the possibility of repayment—enhances their republican credentials as the prototypes of benevolent disinterest. In short, they exemplify the temperance, sobriety, and service that sustain republican virtue as a rationale for elite enterprise.

These few bright spots are just enough to bring the city through the crisis and offer hope for its recovery. Carey’s Account exudes confidence about the city’s speedy return to its prefever form and optimism: “Streets, too long the abode of gloom and despair, have assumed the bustle suitable to the season,” and as people return (including President Washington), commerce is picking back up.³⁹ Even the flight out of the city retroactively symbolizes the success of “the nature of our government” because it “did not allow the arbitrary measures” that a “despotic” government would have initiated in attempting to curtail the epidemic.⁴⁰ Overall, then, Carey’s Account simultaneously excoriates the general inhumanity, naturalizes it as concomitant with crisis itself, and suggests that the nation should not read the episode as indicative of behaviors under normal conditions. This tripartite description was calculated to explain events during the fever in a way that would protect Philadelphia’s economic interests in trade and the city’s political (and economic) interests in remaining the nation’s capital.

More broadly, Carey presents a two-tiered protective civic republicanism, a citizenship practice in which citizens able to maintain the classical republican standard of virtue and duty watch over—either in government or in philanthropy—those citizens for whom the classical model is much too demanding.⁴¹ As a citizenship practice, the two-tiered civic republican model allows citizens to act on their own interests in the comfort that government institutions and benevolent citizens like Girard and Helm would help direct those interests through prudent regulation and could protect citizens from each other. This vertical management made the marketplace less the breeding ground of distrust and corruption of classical republicanism and more a safe place to display and exercise fellow citizenship, which, in turn, opened citizenship practice to a wider range of citizens, identified by their ability to observe protocols of politeness and sociability.⁴² At the same time, these citizens become a sign of republican freedom in the sense that the state allows, if not encourages, them to be as self-interested as their morality, material circumstances, and the market permit.⁴³

Yet, could the city, let alone the nation, depend on such a division of civic labor? As a January 1, 1794, editorial in the Philadelphia Gazette and Universal Daily Advertiser observed, “property” provided a stronger call to patriotism than did love of country, customs, religion, or any number of other ties: “Will not a Turk, or a Spaniard fight as bravely for his Koran or his Crucifix, as any Republican for his property? Let history; let facts decide.” How could these citizens reconcile the apparent weakness of fellow citizenship (and their apparent desire for this weakness) in the face of crisis with its ostensible success in more stable times?⁴⁴ Without the economic and political stability that turned this defense of property into a public good, this citizenry could not be depended on to work toward a common rather than individual good. In the absence of a robust agential citizenship, the relief effort—at least in Carey’s Account—became a market, and the benignly self-interested became inhumane deserters or extortionists, their activities too focused on protecting their interests for civic republican discourse to absorb and their work too dependent on wages, their bodily sacrifice too tainted by profit-motive, for his classical virtue to applaud. The problem turns not simply around how persons—strangers and friends alike—ought to relate to one another when the “law” of “self-preservation” and the needs of the community collide but also around who can or cannot be virtuous and how notions of virtue, the common good, and, ultimately, the role of interests in constructing or obstructing the pursuit of this good get framed and toward what ends.

Carey’s Account does offer possible solutions outside of this tiered structure, even if his narrative perspective tends to obscure them. Carey mentions neighboring cities such as Springfield, New Jersey, and Elkton, Maryland, that offered refuge to their fellow citizens, suggesting that such towns model the “humanity and tenderness” other states ought to show their neighbors if such a crisis should return.⁴⁵ While elaborating on scenes of horror, Carey also reveals that people were on Philadelphia’s streets assisting the suffering, but these others were not included in the “nearest and dearest relations,” nor were they “respectable citizens” or members of the Relief Committee. While his narrative calls the audience’s attention to the “cries” of a pregnant woman surrounded by her dead family and without a midwife, for instance, he also mentions “one of the carters employed by the committee for the relief of the sick” who helped her deliver her child.⁴⁶ Elsewhere, “respectable women” depend on “servant women for assistance.”⁴⁷ Each instance provides an opportunity for Carey to meditate on the potential virtues of these lesser sorts who also risked their lives during the crisis to help neighbors in the same way that neighboring cities offered assistance to fleeing Philadelphians, yet both of these scenes foreground the abandonment rather than the service, ending with reiterations of the “dreadful spectacle.”⁴⁸ Moreover, Carey’s focus on elite actors implies that only citizens of means and “respectability” could muster the requisite resolution to act and that their force of will carried these common folk with them. From this perspective, Carey’s praise for the Relief Committee and recuperation of Philadelphia’s citizenry ultimately makes passive citizenship not only desirable but also required for a functional republic.⁴⁹

For this paradigm to hold, those who remained behind but did not fit into either category (virtuous elite or respectable victims) needed to be rendered civically dead or otherwise illegible. Such is the case with Carey’s representation of black relief efforts. Even when they make positive contributions, Carey uses the necessity for the presence of these people to signal the community’s breakdown: without the people representing the “nearest and dearest” connections in society (the “wives, children, friends, clerks, and servants”), Carey explains, “many men of affluent fortunes … have been abandoned to the care of a negro.”⁵⁰ Carey clarifies his distinction between waged service and benevolence as he excepts “Negroes” from the “nearest and dearest” of the community and the expected system of recovery. The civic republicanism that depended on notions of “natural” relationships, like familial bonds, or disinterested benevolence to define social relations had no interpretive frame for valuing their work as legitimate citizenship practice. These scenes instead signal the overall breakdown of white community during the epidemic: white readers see images of an abandoned city, left to black people without having to acknowledge white absence or cowardice.⁵¹

Blackness becomes Carey’s marker for absence, and black Philadelphians come to represent the corruptive elements at work during the crisis. Just after praising Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, and William Gray for organizing free African relief workers, Carey accuses (some) workers of extortion: “The great demand for nurses, afforded an opportunity for imposition, which was eagerly seized by some of the vilest of the blacks. They extorted two, three, four, and even five dollars a night for services that would have been well paid by a single dollar. Some of them were even detected in plundering the houses of the sick.”⁵² He further undermines their contribution by quoting from John Lining’s 1753 observation of black immunity in South Carolina, implying that the risks involved for them were minimal.⁵³ As Rana Hogarth notes, immunity theories allowed Carey, Rush, and others to minimize the risks and to claim that black Philadelphians in fact had an obligation to stay “because their biology dictated it.”⁵⁴ Tainted with commercial interest yet incompatible with civic republicanism’s regulatory schema, black citizens presented both a visible threat to and a handy release valve for Philadelphia’s postfever anxieties.⁵⁵ They provided filler for the gaps in Carey’s two-tiered civic republicanism, filler that could then be easily excised from the state’s civic imaginary. Carey’s Account reduces Jones, Allen, and Gray’s efforts at best to the exceptions that proved the rule of the general dissipation of social bonds, at worst to shady market exchanges and outright theft.⁵⁶

It is not just that Carey’s Account gives the impression of widespread black theft; rather, by emphasizing the distress of helpless citizens and the general abandonment while, as Jones and Allen suggest in Narrative, upholding a select few, he often deemphasizes those who do offer assistance, missing an opportunity to explore citizenship practices that might actually work beyond the managerial elite.⁵⁷ Even his account of black citizens enhances the notion that only a community’s elite can access civic virtue; all others must, by definition, be operating for selfish, destructive reason. Jones, Allen, and Gray, like Girard and Helm, preside over an otherwise unsung and unruly laboring mass.

Where Carey sought to reassure people that the system worked, that state and financial institutions could properly manage potentially destructive interests in normal conditions, Jones and Allen’s Narrative suggests that perhaps this management is a crutch, a shell game in which citizens take advantage of the potential individual benefits of civic republicanism’s adaptability to commerce while refusing to assume moral and political responsibility for how this commercial ethic could turn fellow citizens into antagonistic strangers.⁵⁸ Statesmen such as Alexander Hamilton, who was in the city during the crisis and, like Allen, survived his own bout with the fever, lamented that if fellow citizenship failed in the city during the crisis, then, as Richard Newman aptly summarizes, “the republic could not survive.”⁵⁹ The rest of this chapter focuses on Narrative’s account of the relief effort, contrasting it to Carey’s managerial narrative to suggest a neighborly ethics of citizenship that could provide a stronger basis for active citizenship than the “natural” bonds or elite benevolence cited in Carey’s Account. Whether or not Jones and Allen are explicitly taking on civic republican models of citizenship—they use terms like “sensibility” and “duty” sometimes ironically and at other times in ways that implicate them within civic republican discourse—we might usefully frame what Narrative offers as a third way, navigating between the layers of Carey’s tiered civic republicanism.

Response and Diagnosis: The Problem with Citizenship as Commerce

Read through Narrative’s analysis of the labor market during the epidemic and Jones and Allen’s experience as former slaves and free Africans, the civic breakdown during the epidemic was not unexpected. Rather, the stress it put on the white citizenry brought into sharp relief the structural instabilities of a civic republicanism predicated on “more a willingness to get along with others for the sake of peace and prosperity” than on the sense of shared responsibility for the common good or fellow citizenship.⁶⁰ While contemporaries like Carey claimed that Federalist regulatory structures could prevent fellow citizenship from collapsing under normal circumstances, Narrative’s account of the inability of institutions to regulate the market for relief workers emphasizes the limits of market structures in creating relations between citizens when the underlying ethic governing citizenship practice depends on and encourages atomization and exploitation. Moreover, even as Narrative offers a productive critique of civic republicanism’s economic valences, its inversion of Carey’s style underscores how readily the economic rhetoric of interests can be manipulated to justify anything from benevolent service to the slave trade.

The commercial ethic that remained submerged or managed before the fever comes to a head during the crisis and seems to overpower official regulation. Mayor Clarkson, Jones, and Allen all attempted to regulate the cost of the relief efforts by employing workers through the city and other civic institutions. The presence of these regulations highlights the economic similarities between the moment of crisis and the city under normal conditions. Jones and Allen recount their meeting with Matthew Clarkson about the rising fees: “[Clarkson] sent for us, and requested that we would use our influence, to lessen the wages of the nurses, but informing him of the cause, i.e. that of the people over-bidding one another, it was concluded unnecessary to attempt any thing on that head; therefore it was left to the people concerned.”⁶¹ As Clarkson’s response suggests, inflation not only overcame the city’s ability to influence its workers but also changed the nature of economic exchange itself. Clarkson, Jones, and Allen could “influence” the workers to lower their fees, because the workers were their employees and they provided a flat wage intended to make these services available to all, but the bidding war took the workers out of their direct employ. People offering these payments were operating squarely within a market in which their individual means and interests were their own concern. Since the workers were not setting the prices but rather were responding to the effects of supply and demand with individual consumers dictating the price ceiling, neither the mayor nor, perhaps, Jones and Allen saw a need to intervene, and even if they did, they could not.

Jones and Allen’s emphasis on the forces of supply, demand, and selfinterest reveals that the black workers’ response to the market during the epidemic worked by the same logics that governed white activities before, during, and after the epidemic.⁶² The “difficulty” of finding “persons … to supply the wants of the sick” and the increasing “applications” for services that Narrative describes during the fever parallel Carey’s earlier description of the “number of applicants for houses” before the fever.⁶³ The “extravagant prices … paid” (the “two, three, four, and even five dollars a night” in Carey’s Account) mirror the prefever increase of property values to “double, and in some treble what it would have been a year or two before.”⁶⁴ In both Carey’s Account and Jones and Allen’s Narrative, the syntactic focus on environmental forces rather than individual choices—the presence or absence of an agent—absolves the actors of moral responsibility. Rents “had risen” in Carey’s Account, without mention of the property owners’ agency as a factor in driving up prices. The nursing fees, however, increased because “the vilest of the blacks … eagerly seized” the “opportunity for imposition.”⁶⁵ Here, Carey also mentions the increase in demand, but where the demand for housing drove up rents (passively), the demand for nurses provided an opportunity for corruption that black workers actively pursued. Jones and Allen use much the same strategy but inverted, contrasting the bidding war and those who were (passively) paid exorbitant prices to a “white woman” who “demanded” “six pounds” for her services.⁶⁶ Their inversion disarms Carey’s racialization of economic corruption, using Carey’s terms to demonstrate black virtue in the face of white inhumanity.

The facility with which Jones, Allen, and Carey manipulate commercial language reveals the slipperiness of the economic discourse more generally when applied as an ethical tool. The mirroring Jones and Allen enact between Narrative and Account destabilizes the economic discourse they both use, however tenuous, ironic, or adversarial that use may be. This indeterminacy disrupts any attempt to situate virtue or corruption in any one group.⁶⁷ Good citizenship from this perspective depended less on adhering to a set of ethical precepts than on maintaining the authority to set those precepts and to justify one’s actions accordingly.

The parallels between commerce before and during the fever and Narrative’s vindication of black laborers, then, offer a larger critique of how civic republican logic “protected and facilitated” the economic interests of a white elite, making self-interest, as Joyce Appleby posits, “a functional equivalent to civic virtue” that masks the maintenance of inequality.⁶⁸ The “functional” equivalency of self-interest and civic virtue breaks down when citizens are forced to choose between what the rules of commercial exchange allow them to do and what civic duty or fellow citizenship suggests they ought to do. Economic inequalities in place before the fever exacerbate this warlike relation, stripping the polite trappings of the market structure Kloppenberg describes as the “natural harmony of benignly striving individuals,” revealing it to be instead a free-for-all.⁶⁹ Jones and Allen explain, “When we procured [workers] at six dollars per week, and called upon them to go where they were wanted, we found they were gone elsewhere…. Upon enquiring the cause, we found, they had been allured away by others who offered greater wages, until they got from two to four dollars per day. We had no restraint upon the people. It was natural for people in low circumstances to accept a voluntary, bounteous reward.”⁷⁰ People followed their “natural” inclinations, and individual means would control just how far these inclinations could go. If it was natural for white people in Carey’s Account to abandon the “nearest and dearest,” was it not more natural for black citizens to lay aside questions of fairness to strangers in the name of self-preservation and economic self-interest? This principle holds doubly true for “people in low circumstances,” who, unlike Girard and Helm, were not financially secure even before the fever.

Narrative’s juxtaposition of pilfering and privateering illustrates how official discourse produces this functional equivalency and its uneven, racialized results: “We know as many whites who were guilty of it [theft and extortion],” Jones and Allen write, “but this is looked over, while the blacks are held up to censure.—Is it a greater crime for a black to pilfer, than for a white to privateer?”⁷¹ The comparison indicts both black and white citizens for taking advantage of the breakdown during the fever to make a profit.⁷² Compared to “pilfer,” however, “privateer” invokes a more pernicious attitude toward commerce that may be legal, strictly speaking, but also involves an antagonistic ethic that perhaps causes the waning virtue Carey notes in Account’s opening lines.⁷³ Coming directly after a sentence focused not on white theft but rather on people offering accounts that “[look] over” white theft while highlighting black criminality, “privateer” confronts the duplicity of official narratives and structures that essentially legalize white theft.⁷⁴ Just as a state’s letter of marque authorizes the private citizen to approach “foreign” ships in a way that would amount to piracy under other conditions, the collective attitude toward commerce authorizes, if not encourages, citizens to approach each other in ways that would otherwise amount to theft, as if they were not just strangers but also enemies.⁷⁵

Gould has noted rightly that the slipperiness of commercial discourse in both yellow fever narratives points to “the ideological inextricability during this transitional era between sentiment and the capitalist market, between benevolence and supply-and-demand as the regulators of human behavior.”⁷⁶ In Jones and Allen’s pilfer versus privateer figure, Gould finds not a tactical deployment of contemporaneous discourse but rather “Narrative’s major flaw”: the ironic comparison indicts both black and white citizens for taking advantage of the breakdown during the fever to make a profit; Jones and Allen’s insistence on their economic losses during the fever, visually punctuated with an inserted ledger, he argues, destabilizes any claims they might make to disinterested benevolence.⁷⁷ We should not, however, take Jones and Allen’s reproduction of Carey’s narrative as an adoption of the principles subtending that narrative. Focusing so much on the economic discourse misses Jones and Allen’s structural critique: economics and market logics of interest, while useful for descriptive purposes, make for poor ethical tools and not all people inhabit the market on the same terms or from the same position.

An expanded reading of Narrative’s form suggests that Jones and Allen leveraged this rhetorical slipperiness to proffer an analysis absent in Account: citizenship in which state and social convention could turn theft into fair trade depends less on adhering to a set of ethical precepts than on maintaining the power to validate some narratives as impartial and dismiss others as “the insidious arts of whispering slander,” Carey’s description of Jones and Allen’s Narrative.⁷⁸ These passages do suggest the equivalency and invocation virtue of politics that critics have noted but in terms of the kinds of interestedness the early republic “protected and facilitated.”⁷⁹ By invoking the institutional distinctions between pilfer and privateer, Jones and Allen signify acerbically on how arbitrarily these concepts can be deployed to suit political ends. They reveal that no matter how enlightened self-interest might be, it still encouraged duplicitous practices contrary to the fellow citizenship Carey attempts to extrapolate from it.⁸⁰

While the fever surfaced this antagonistic tendency, Jones and Allen already had an analogue in an everyday life sanctioned by the state: the slave trade. Both men were former slaves whose family members had been sold when they were relatively young: Jones’s mother and siblings in 1762, Allen’s parents and younger siblings in the 1770s to settle his master’s debts.⁸¹ Just as Philadelphians attempted to outbid each other for services at the expense of their neighbors’ lives, slave owners battled each other for the lives of other human beings. And just as the “purchasers” of slaves, as Anthony Benezet put it, “[encourage] the Trade, [become] partaker in the Guilt of it,” so, too, do these bidding citizens bear responsibility for the chaos their bidding engendered.⁸² Notwithstanding Carey’s view of the Federal Constitution as a stabilizing force, black Americans were still subject to enslavement and the caprice of white interests, with the 1793 Fugitive Slave Law the most recent in a string of setbacks.⁸³ As Jones explains in a 1799 petition to the “President, Senate, and House of Representatives,” the law codified on the federal level the treatment of human beings “like droves of cattle.”⁸⁴ While Narrative’s bidding war and a slave market are not the same, they do operate by similar premises. Neither Jones and Allen nor Mayor Clarkson has (or takes) authority to regulate these exchanges between yellow fever victims, citing the independence of economic exchanges between individuals in a way that parallels the federal government’s refusal to “interfere” with individual property rights and the rights of the several states for the sake of preserving the union.

Narrative does not suggest that commerce in itself is corrupt or that state and civic institutions should not have a hand in regulating commerce or providing a framework and direction for civic activity. Jones and Allen cite several black workers who charged for services but always with the caveat that the worker “charged with exemplary moderation” or “enough for what she had done.”⁸⁵ Recall also that Jones, Allen, and Gray worked with the city’s government to coordinate their efforts during the crisis, that the FAS and FAC were both institutions created to coordinate civic activities, and that Allen himself was an especially adept businessman.⁸⁶ Rather, depending on a managerial elite (either the federal system, heroes like Girard and Helm, or civic leaders like Clarkson, Jones, and Allen) to ensure that citizens work toward their own general welfare or to simply protect citizens from each other removes the need for citizens to be responsible to and concerned for each other, requiring only that they appear to be so. Even if, as Carey’s Account claims, citizens’ freedom to flee the city during the fever showcases the strength of republican governance, the implication that preventing wholesale abandonment of Philadelphians by fellow Philadelphians and those in neighboring states might have required a mandate points to weaknesses in the relation between the citizens themselves. If, under these terms, white Philadelphians could be justified in abandoning the “nearest and dearest” in the interest of self-preservation, then civic republicanism would be inadequate to the task of addressing enslavement, let alone the white supremacy subtending it.

Figure 2. Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Courtesy, Library of Congress.

Solution: Neighborly Citizenship

As they restaged the 1793 epidemic’s labor market, Jones and Allen both responded to white supremacy through the languages of sentiment and political economy and rethought how those discourses codified structural racism. As is the case with many of the texts I treat in The Practice of Citizenship, Narrative explicitly frames willful misreadings of black activities as a precondition for articulating white virtue.⁸⁷ When Narrative moves rhetorically from an economic defense of black workers and Jones and Allen’s expenditures to a discussion of citizenship as neighborliness, it also shifts attention away from a politics dependent on the recognition of black worth toward one that holds white citizens responsible for correcting their racism. In this section, I analyze how Jones and Allen theorize neighborliness by exchanging their narrative substrate from Carey’s Account and late-century models of sensibility for the parable of the Good Samaritan and black citizens’ “real sensibility.”

Even as Narrative inserts black citizens into the civic republican polity of feeling and virtue, its shift in narrative structure and emphasis not only disrupts that discourse’s racial-economic valences—that is, whether or not “negroes” and “servants” can be respectable or virtuous citizens—but also undermines respectability and virtue as markers of good citizenship and the individualistic ethos those markers promote. Using Jones and Allen’s distinction of a “real sensibility” and the FAS’s reference to an “expressive language of conduct” as guides, we can frame what Narrative offers in its account of black citizens during the fever as an alternative practice of citizenship based on an ethics of neighborliness.⁸⁸ Neighborliness corresponds with the duty to the common good suggested in classical republicanism and embodied in Girard and Helm in Carey’s Account but with a potentially more democratic ethos of equality and inclusion, demanding that neighbor-citizens serve the common good by serving each other, by being neighborly toward the individuals encountered in everyday life. This openness results in a permeable civic space, resembling more a dynamic web of associations based in mutual aid than a single sphere, a neighborhood rather than a market.

I use the term “neighborliness” to describe Narrative’s civic ethics here rather than “piety,” “Golden Rule,” “mutual aid,” “charity,” or the like for three reasons: (1) Neighborliness emphasizes that this ethic operates between individuals on terms of moral equality in a way that creates a collective. This emphasis on horizontality, moreover, distinguishes neighborliness from cultures of benevolence, classical virtue, or sensibility. (2) The term connects Jones and Allen’s investment in Christian ethics via the parable of the Good Samaritan’s narrative formula with their equal investment in developing a strong political structure for emancipation and full citizenship. (3) Consolidating this question under “neighborliness” highlights Narrative’s resonances with contemporaneous interpretations of the Samaritan parable as addressing not simply individual morality but also the law’s foundations. As Gary Nash conjectures of the black citizens’ attitude as they began their efforts, “Philadelphia’s black Christians would act as Good Samaritans, reenacting the drama of the despised man who aided a fellow human in desperate need when all the respected men of the community turned their heads.”⁸⁹ Yet, beyond the allegorical value of this narrative trajectory and its social inversions, the Good Samaritan formula offers a grounding from which we can draw a critique of civic republican logics. That is, rather than read the formula as a suggestion that black Philadelphians were better or more virtuous republican citizens, I want to suggest that the formula and the overall Narrative offer an alternative to civic republicanism in much the same way that Jesus of Nazareth uses the parable to offer an alternative to what had become traditional interpretations to Mosaic Law.⁹⁰

Narrative registers neighborliness as a cultural practice in black citizens’ “real sensibility”: their quest to “be useful” and their “rendering services where extreme necessity called for it.”⁹¹ One case, mirroring familiar scenes of abandonment in Carey’s Account, features the actions of a poor black man set against two others. The comparison between the three upends expected roles and creates space for a more substantive critique and revision of not only how commentators like Carey applied civic republican logic but also of the civic republican logic itself:

A poor afflicted dying man, stood at his chamber window, praying and beseeching every one that passed by, to help him to a drink of water; a number of white people passed, and instead of being moved by the poor man’s distress, they hurried as fast as they could out of the sound of his cries until at length a gentleman, who seemed a foreigner came up, he could not pass by, but had not resolution enough to go into the house, he held eight dollars in his hand, and offered it to several as a reward for giving the poor man a drink of water, but was refused by every one.⁹²

The first half of this story follows Carey’s narrative pattern: Carey also mentions the plight of “poor” persons “without a human being to hand them a drink of water,” “men of affluent fortune … abandoned to the care of a negro,” and those whose money could not “procure proper attendance.”⁹³ In these instances, Carey’s two-tiered model falls apart. With expected neighbors failing and no one willing to risk infection for even a considerable fee of “five dollars,” the suffering die alone, die in the presence of a negro (which amounts to the same thing in Carey’s Account), or, as in the case of a servant girl, die in a cart as the guardians of the poor attempt to find a home willing to take them in.⁹⁴ Where Carey’s illustrations typically end, however, Narrative offers “a poor black man” who “came up” and not only “supplied the poor object with water” but also “rendered him every service he could.”⁹⁵ When the gentleman offers to pay the black man to help the dying man, the black man responds, “Master … I will supply the gentleman with water, but surely I will not take your money for it,” punctuating the insufficiency of money as a motivating factor.⁹⁶

The black man’s story undoubtedly offers a direct rebuttal to Carey’s assertion of black inhumanity, particularly in his refusal of the gentleman’s money. Above these evidentiary moves, however, the anecdote provides a more general theory of citizenship missing in Carey’s Account: an immanent sense of civic responsibility uncoupled from social status or economic motivation. The man’s action demonstrates a “real sensibility” that compels him and other black citizens to move forward even as white neighbors hide or stand by because “the dread … was so general” as to make friends “afraid of each other.”⁹⁷ Both groups show a kind of sensibility when confronted with a nearly overwhelming emotional tide—fear, horror, despair, pity, and so on—that suggests a breakdown in sympathy and fellow feeling, but black citizens’ sensibility becomes “real” through the “expressive language of conduct,” that is, when at sight of “others being so backward,” they refuse to let their senses control their actions.⁹⁸ Narrative’s sensibility becomes “real” or concrete only as it produces measures to alleviate the need that initiated the sensory reaction. (Hence Jones and Allen’s position that their “services were the product of real sensibility.”⁹⁹)

The white gentleman in Narrative’s vignette offers a useful point of contrast between this productive “real sensibility” manifested through the “expressive language of conduct” and what Markman Ellis usefully describes as the “specular economic voyeurism” of eighteenth-century cultures of sensibility. Despite the appearance of virtue in his attitude, the gentleman’s sensibility is no more effective than other citizens’ abandonment. He fulfills the expectation that a cosmopolitan gentleman be able to “relate to strangers, to share in the feelings of others, including social inferiors and even animals,” and might even occasion admiration.¹⁰⁰ Yet, his concern for the dying man results in inertia: “he could not pass by, but had not resolution enough to go into the house.”¹⁰¹ “Observations on Sensibility, or Felling, as Opposed to Principle,” a 1791 article in Carey’s American Museum, explains the difference: “This [concern] is the work of an unprincipled man of feeling, whose nerves with peculiar irritability, can tremble every hour at the touch of joy or woe; whose finely-fibred heart would thrill perhaps with horror at the sufferings of—a fly.”¹⁰² The public display of sensibility, “Observations” continues, “supplies the want of religion … [,] appears more lovely than all the virtues,” and provides a benevolent analogue to the functional equivalency of self-interest.¹⁰³ The gentleman feels for the stranger very publicly (he was standing on the streets) without a concomitant identification of the stranger as one who, more than an “inferior,” requires the gentleman to overcome his irresolution.

In contrast to the poor black man who moves to help the dying man, the gentleman tries to move capital instead, “[holding] eight dollars in his hand,” implicitly valuing the man’s needs or the value of his own good citizenship at eight dollars in the process.¹⁰⁴ The gentleman is not without virtue. He does call attention to the dying man’s need, after all, and in some ways, concern for the dying man supplants class and racial boundaries: the “gentleman” foreigner asks a “poor black man” to help “a poor afflicted dying man.”¹⁰⁵ Yet, his recourse to using capital as a proxy, to stand by until the market produced an agent, alienates him from a potential neighbor, resulting in the kind of complacence that created the economic crisis before the fever and a climate of exploitation during the fever. His attempt, like Carey’s Account, shifts attention away from his inability to help, calling attention instead to those for whom his fee is not a sufficient motivator. Perhaps the gentleman even sees himself as a helpless victim of both the dread the man’s wails cause and the manifest inhumanity of passersby.¹⁰⁶ Juxtaposed against the poor black man, the gentleman’s inertia becomes less about the gentleman’s helplessness in an unwilling market than about the insufficiency of simple sensibility in general as a guide for civic action.

Narrative’s analysis of those like the “gentleman,” people of status and means looking to pay others for services, suggests that looking upward for models of good citizenship reveals an inadequacy that may be all the more dangerous because it is cloaked in performances of sensibility and class expectations rather than in an active “real sensibility.” Where the seemingly “natural” bonds between citizens (family, friends, servants, and neighbors) fail and the gentleman’s sensibility and finances prove ineffective (or, as in the previous discussion, counterproductive), the poor black man offers a third way, a neighborly ethics predicated neither on the claims of sociability or kinship nor on performances of sensibility and benevolence. Like the rank-and-file citizens, the man has no claim to respectability—Narrative describes him simply as “good natured”—like the gentleman, he cannot simply walk by. Absent any obvious tie to the dying man or social expectation of virtue, the poor black man nevertheless steps forward, his “real sensibility,” or piety in the FAS’s terms, providing the cosmopolitan link with the stranger even as the gentleman’s sensibility fails. This gentleman and passersby dramatize the “‘split subject’ of citizenship: the individual citizen understood as structured by this central division between private self and public persona.”¹⁰⁷ Narrative’s account of neighborliness suggests this private-public binary is a deceptive one. More perniciously, it enables writers like Carey and the culture more broadly to assign moral credit or blame arbitrarily and strategically in the service of buttressing white citizenship.

Jones and Allen’s invoking real sensibility, then, resonates with and intervenes in contemporaneous attempts to distinguish between sensibility as a physiological response to outside stimuli, a performative (and therefore untrustworthy) display of emotion, and an ethical imperative to act informed by reason. These discussions turned to schemes for regulating sensibility through cultivating reason, contrasting sensibility or basic sympathy to teachable principles, such as charity, or suggesting that sensibility was, itself, mediated through reason. Benjamin Rush, for instance, characterized sensibility as the “avenue to the moral faculty,” one that needed careful supervision and development because it provided the scaffold upon which society was built.¹⁰⁸ Anthony Benezet claimed the person who “possessed but a small degree of feeling” could still exercise charity because charity “consisteth in the subjection of the mind to known duties.”¹⁰⁹ And Jonathan Edwards distinguished between apparent virtue and the “truly virtuous”: “some actions and dispositions appear beautiful, if considered partially and superficially,” but are revealed to be otherwise when “seen clearly in their whole nature and the extent of their connections in the universality of things.”¹¹⁰ Jones and Allen add to this their experience with how racist accounts could obscure the whole nature of real sensibility. After all, they wrote Narrative to correct “partial” accounts of black relief efforts with testimony from those who saw the whole and could “declare facts as they really were.”¹¹¹ While Narrative does not use separate terms to differentiate between “sensibility” as a physiological response and “real sensibility” as a principle, the contrast between the gentleman’s inertia and the poor black man’s activity, his “language of conduct,” suggests that the difference between the two—sensibility and real sensibility—corresponds to these concurrent frameworks, as well as the FAS’s invocation of piety. At the same time, reworking sensibility through a narrative about an unsung black man demonstrated that black Philadelphians were not just “ready for freedom”; they were in fact were already doing the work of citizenship.¹¹²

The parable of the Good Samaritan provides a useful parallel text that offers a vocabulary for articulating the kind of relation between citizens that “real sensibility” should produce and connects events recounted in Narrative to the FAS’s notion of the pious person as a good citizen of the world.¹¹³ Reading this account through the parable’s narrative formula, a formula that would have been familiar to many of Jones and Allen’s readers, reveals how their strategy moves beyond setting black virtue against white inhumanity.¹¹⁴ The conversation between Jesus and a lawyer about law and civic responsibility frames a moment in which Jesus pivots on received understandings of the law to offer a more expansive notion of who is the neighbor or to whom the good citizen should be responsible and responsive. When a lawyer questions Jesus about eternal life, Jesus responds with a question of his own: “What is written in the law?” The lawyer replies, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy soul … strength, and … mind; and thy neighbor as thyself.”¹¹⁵ Jesus tells the lawyer that he has answered correctly, but not to be outdone, the lawyer asks a logical follow-up question: “And who is my neighbor?” Rather than answer the lawyer’s question—“who is my neighbor?”—by describing the set of people whom the lawyer should love and thus offering a restricted notion of neighborliness, Jesus offers a parable, a case study, outlining the characteristics of the neighbor as the subject, sensible to another’s suffering, in action: “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.”¹¹⁶ As in Jones and Allen’s vignette, the parable features an injured man in need of assistance. Respected community leaders and fellow Jews—symbols of the civic and moral good—recognize the man’s suffering but go out of their way to avoid helping him. Instead, a Samaritan not only aids the man but also ensures his safety until his recovery. The Samaritan, seeing past the mutual enmity between Jews and Samaritans, “discover[s] the neighbor” in the injured man and becomes the good neighbor, the keeper of the law who will “inherit eternal life,” because he acts as the neighbor rather than looking for the neighbor.¹¹⁷

This response has deep implications for the construction of community and citizenship as a point of civil law going beyond a simple moral query. In the context of the Mosaic Law, legal scholar Jeremy Waldron explains, love thy neighbor “is emphatically not a moralistic add-on to a legal code”; rather, the maxim “sums up the spirit of the legal code.”¹¹⁸ Using a Samaritan—a people viewed by Jesus’ audience as a lower caste or culturally and religiously abject—as the model of neighborliness, Jesus shifts the audience’s focus from finding the neighbor among themselves to finding the neighbor-citizen within themselves and, in so doing, expands the boundaries of “my neighbor” beyond respectability (“respectable citizens”), genealogy (whiteness), or political status. The onus falls on the sensible citizen’s ability to see the neighbor-citizen in the other person rather than on the other to demonstrate respectability to an already constituted community.¹¹⁹ The mark of the good neighbor-citizen and the good community, by extension, becomes not simply the ability to extend boundaries over an increasingly diverse set of neighbors but rather the ability to make this extension on terms of equality.

Each case, the parable of the Good Samaritan and Jones and Allen’s Narrative, inverts audience expectations to reveal an ethics of neighborhood that foregrounds the citizen’s choice to be the good neighbor. This interpretation of the parable would not have been lost on those among Narrative’s readers familiar with popular biblical commentaries. A similar exegesis of neighborliness, if not necessarily applied to black people, appeared in William Burkitt’s Expository Notes (1789). For Burkitt, Luke 10:29–37 positions “real charity [as] an active operative thing given to the distressed, nor in compassionate beholding of them, nor in a pitiful mourning over them, but in positive acts of kindness towards them. The Samaritan here is an example of a real and thorough charity.”¹²⁰ Burkitt’s emphasis on “real” and “positive acts” and his contrast to “compassionate beholding” and “pitiful mourning” reappear throughout Narrative in references to black citizens’ “real sensibility”: “Our services were the production of real sensibility;—we sought not fee nor reward, until the disorder rendered our labour so arduous that we were not adequate to the services we had assumed” they sought to “be useful,” and as a result, black citizens demonstrated “more humanity, more real sensibility” than their white counterparts.¹²¹ It suggests a degree of equality lacking in models of disinterested benevolence. This inversion moves beyond setting black virtue against white inhumanity toward redefining what it means to be a citizen or, in the parable’s terms, a neighbor.

Narrative answers Carey and the larger culture’s implicit query—who is my fellow citizen, who is the good neighbor—by reproducing some of Account’s key scenes from the perspective of people of a caste—“servant,” “negro,” “foreigner”—neglected in Carey’s Account. Through this staging, Narrative suggests that good citizens have a duty “to do all the good” they can toward “suffering fellow mortals,”¹²² that is, to approach others as equals not simply out of a desire not to offend but rather out of a position of proactive goodwill. Such contact, “conducted in a mode of good will” across social boundaries (between Samaritans and Jews, free African and white citizens, strangers, etc.), as Samuel R. Delany would later explain, “is the locus of democracy as visible social drama,” providing “the lymphatic system of a democratic metropolis.”¹²³ In other words, Jones and Allen realized that this vision of and action toward others as neighbors (Narrative’s real sensibility) could create horizontal structures and day-to-day engagements more conducive to egalitarian citizenship than could contemporary notions of tiered civic republicanism.

The neighborly citizen understands that benevolence means more than appearing virtuous; it means mutual aid: collective action against needs that threaten individual competence, in the recognition that a threat to the individual is, ultimately, a threat to all. In the context of the fever, the implication of mutual aid in “suffering fellow mortals” should not be overlooked. Jones and Allen’s multiple references to those in need as “fellow mortals,” rather than distinguishing between themselves and the people they helped (as in Carey’s repeated “respectable” or “benevolent” citizens), suggest a sense of moral equality in the contingency of mortality and the “frailty of human nature,” an acknowledgment that circumstance is the only difference between those in present need and those currently able to meet that need.¹²⁴ Everyone was susceptible to the fever—Gray dies of the fever and Allen and Alexander Hamilton (who lived just a few houses down from Allen) contract the fever but recover—making death or the threat of death the great equalizer and making the shared vulnerability much more visceral.¹²⁵ If the fever itself offers an immediate social equalizer, the notion that no one can “survive on self-interested negotiation alone,” as Daniel Vickers posits of the early national backcountry context, suggests a more fundamental codependence and equality.¹²⁶ This recognition of fellow mortality, of a shared condition, between individuals presupposes and affirms each individual as having equal moral worth regardless of prior social, political, or economic status. In this sense, Jones and Allen’s structure invokes less the Leviticus admonition to offer hospitality to strangers, as strangers, and more an ethos intended to produce ongoing relations of neighborhood.¹²⁷

Neighborly citizenship happens in the day-to-day interactions between individuals, not as commercial agents but rather as members of a community collectively engaged in being “useful” to each other and sharing responsibility for their mutual well-being. Narrative illustrates this every-dayness through an “elderly black woman” who asks simply for “a dinner master on a cold winter’s day” as she “went from place to place rendering every service in her power without an eye to reward.”¹²⁸ The kind of exchange represented in the woman’s movements across the city creates neighborhood rather than a market: a link between neighbors based on a “mutual relation,” as Jonathan Edwards explained some fifty years earlier, “equally predicable of both those between whom there is such a relation.”¹²⁹ If we take seriously Narrative’s distinction between the woman’s request for dinner and her not having “an eye to reward,” the exchange—meeting a present need in return for security against a future need—reworks notions of obligation subtending gradual emancipation and reproduces the framework of societies like the FAS in which members contributed to a general fund against the needs of its collective membership or others. The poor black woman makes an informal contribution to the collective and acknowledges her mutual dependence with those to whom she makes her contribution in the same move. She did not owe white Philadelphians’ service but rather offered it freely.¹³⁰ In so doing, she made a “master” into a neighbor. And while the woman’s example comes from a moment of extreme duress, like the Samaritan’s narrative, her actions in the crisis yield lessons for the postfever world.

Such a practice could serve as a bulwark against the atomizing market exchanges dominating the opening pages of Carey’s Account and the echoes of the slave market that haunt Jones and Allen’s Narrative. The elderly woman understands that while the “reward” may not be immediate or public, so long as the overall community follows the ethic of neighborliness, everyone benefits. This neighborliness corresponds with Thomas Paine’s figure of society as a “great chain of connection” created by “the mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilised community upon each other.”¹³¹ Such a dynamic form of association suggests a turn from the capitalist citizenship proffered by Carey to something approximating the classical republican notion of civic duty—recognition that being a good neighbor-citizen means sharing responsibility for the community’s well-being. Yet, it also builds on a late eighteenth-century sense of democratic voluntarism and equality that shrinks the scope of neighborliness from a distant “common good” and abstract humanity to everyday concrete individual relations.¹³² It parallels the openness of late eighteenth-century politeness and sociability but focused less on their middle-class or performative valences and more on the material usefulness of such gestures.

By reading Narrative through the parable’s familiar formula, then, we see real sensibility as a mode of neighborly citizenship, the good neighbor-citizen producing neighborhood through an immanent impulse not only to identify with the stranger but also to approach the stranger as a neighbor, as a fellow mortal of equal moral worth in a mutually dependent community.¹³³ This account of black citizens during the fever not only shows the weakness of social status as an indicator of civic virtue but also offers neighborliness as a citizenship practice that creates horizontal relationships between citizens where civic republicanism would suggest hierarchy and allow abandonment. In this framework, the poor black man’s labor deserves as much “credit” as Girard’s, or rather, their efforts during the fever represent a common, neighborly citizenship that the white Philadelphians in Narrative’s vignette do not practice.

Narrative’s rhetorical play and shift to neighborliness suggest that Jones and Allen were aware of how unstable appeals to black virtue could be, how easily black virtue could be explained away or transmuted into criminality in the print public. As much as Narrative at times works through this politics, the necessity of its existence also speaks to this politics’ failures. Yet, it was still a tool that they’d leverage even as they critiqued the capriciousness of their intended audience and virtue’s conceptual instability. By characterizing black relief efforts as economic exchange, Carey ensured that readers would interpret their work as private and self-serving instead of political and coming from a concern for the common good. This is why attending to the formal affordances of the parable of the Good Samaritan is crucial.¹³⁴ The parable shifted fundamentally the meaning of neighborliness and community. It refuses to function on the terms that the lawyer brought to the conversation—how others can signal to the individual their membership in a preconstituted community. By reframing their efforts as representing the essence of the law and as a process of community building, Jones and Allen also reframe black Philadelphians as political subjects practicing citizenship.

As we have seen in this section, Narrative maps a similar trajectory. In Narrative’s first act, Jones and Allen described black Philadelphians eschewing the contracts they (Jones and Allen) negotiated on their behalf with Clarkson and the city to make their own contracts. Disagree with the terms, Jones, Allen, and Clarkson (and Carey) might, but they had a right to work on terms closer to fair market value, as did their white counterparts. When Narrative shifts registers to acts of neighborliness, it similarly shows black Philadelphians setting their own terms. In these cases, the terms appear as refusals to frame their efforts as purely economic transactions—the poor black man refuses the gentleman’s money and the black woman refuses the proffered “reward.” At the same time, the black woman also establishes a wider ranging social compact: I do not perform this act as a laborer seeking wages but rather as an equal member of a community in which mutual dependence and responsiveness is the guiding ethic. I render aid to you today recognizing that you will render aid to me later.¹³⁵ Here, as elsewhere, Narrative does not rely on any single strategy but rather deploys multiple strategies that black theorizers will take up and revise well into the nineteenth century. These two moments offer images of black virtue and critiques of white avarice that ultimately suggest that virtue politics was never sufficient, not just because white Americans would continually misread black public acts but also because a polity based on this kind of performative citizenship would always be insubstantial, not “real.”

Experiments in Structural Neighborliness

In the preceding sections, I have contrasted the civic and narrative schematics of Carey’s Account and Jones and Allen’s Narrative to outline an ethics of neighborliness, a civic ethos animated by a sensibility made material or “real” through concrete actions. The neighborly focus on being useful to others, on being a good neighbor rather than finding the good neighbor, creates bonds between citizens independent of other forms of association—familial, racial, economic, national, and so on. While, as I have suggested, neighborliness ultimately manifests in concrete actions between individuals, its logics have implications for how civic institutions take shape. Neighborly practices ultimately produce neighborly institutions; the ethos and actions that characterize the neighborly citizen also characterize the neighborly state.

Jones and Allen’s Narrative contributed to a tradition of writing from Anthony Benezet, Granville Sharpe, Benjamin Banneker, and other antislavery activists drawing on the political resonances of neighborliness via the Samaritan’s narrative to articulate a global notion of belonging.¹³⁶ In The Just Limitation of Slavery in the Laws of God (1776), Sharpe explains, “No nation therefore whatever, can now be lawfully excluded as strangers, according to that uncharitable sense of the word stranger in which the Jews were apt to distinguish all other nations from themselves … all men are now to be esteemed ‘brethren and neighbours.’”¹³⁷ Banneker uses a similar approach in his 1791 letter to Thomas Jefferson: “It is the indispensible duty of those, who maintain for themselves the rights of human nature, and who possess the obligations of Christianity, to extend their power and influence to the relief of every part of the human race, from whatever burden or oppression they may unjustly labor under.”¹³⁸ Sharpe and Banneker use neighborliness to combine an appeal to moral equality with a call for social justice. First, they establish the equality of all people—enslaved and free, European and African—as a moral and, in Sharpe’s argument, a legal principle extending beyond the confines of a single nation or state, an equality stated in religious precepts yet applicable to a secular state. For Sharpe, the Samaritan parable’s articulation of neighborliness suggests that nations can no longer use national differences, however defined, to justify the oppression or exclusion of others: all nations and peoples are to be respected. Second, they argue that acknowledging this moral equality, what Banneker translates into secular terms as “those inestimable laws, which preserved to you the rights of human nature,” requires the state and/or the individual to actively work so that not only slaves but also “every individual, of whatever rank or distinction,” can “equally enjoy the blessings thereof.”¹³⁹ For Sharpe, this principle underwrites part of the legal case against enslavement in the British empire. For Banneker, it sets up emancipation and social justice as litmus tests for the “sincerity” of early U.S. republicanism. Banneker’s rebuke of Jefferson transforms the self-love and the ability to imagine oneself in another’s position (the sympathy in Adam Smith’s Moral Sentiments) into a more radical neighborly sensibility leading to incorporative, reparative citizenship.

Read through Sharpe and Banneker, the neighborly practices modeled in Narrative are not a supplement to republican citizenship. Rather, neighborliness gets to the heart of the kind of society republican governance could produce: one in which citizens “love for yourselves, and for those inestimable laws” of human rights lead them to feel a duty to apply, in Banneker’s words, “the most active effusion of [their] exertions” to ensure that all people have equal access to the benefits thereof.¹⁴⁰ Or, to put it in terms familiar to Narrative, they have a “duty to do all the good” they can for their “suffering fellow mortals,” because it is the best way to secure the good of all.¹⁴¹ Just as the good neighbor makes neighbors out of strangers, the good citizen or the good state makes citizens out of strangers. Narrative’s appendices, including addresses to “Those Who Keep Slaves, and Approve of the Practice,” “To the People of Color,” and to the “Friends of Him Who Hath No Helper,” take up these principles and shift focus from immediate events to “a refutation of some censures” and these structural questions.¹⁴²

Jones and Allen’s “Refutation”—a term commanding the same typeset in the pamphlet’s title as “Narrative,” suggesting that the two modes of address were coextensive—encompasses answers to developing theories of racial difference implicit in Thomas Jefferson’s query: “What further is to be done with them?”¹⁴³ Indeed, the expanded cadre of “some late publications” undoubtedly included recent legislation such as the Fugitive Slave Act (February 1793) and the Naturalization Law (1790), as well as the recent exchange between Banneker and Jefferson. Narrative proper, then, was of paramount importance but not necessarily the pamphlet’s ultimate focus, providing a case study for the kind of citizenship that could take shape after emancipation, a test not only of black freedom but also of the kind of civic space that could result from contact between ostensible strangers. The addresses, in turn, make explicit the paradigms implicit in Narrative’s account of neighborliness, applying its example to a broader agenda centered not just on emancipation but also on the full incorporation of black Americans, enslaved and free, as U.S. citizens.

Where yellow fever accounts typically linked blackness with the chaos and “dissolution” the crisis caused, Narrative links it with good management and restoration.¹⁴⁴ As the crisis increased, so did the FAS and other black citizens’ role in the city’s infrastructure.¹⁴⁵ During the fever, the FAS and FAC became increasingly integrated in Philadelphia’s government: they paid workers, bled victims, and vetted volunteers, and Clarkson went to Jones and Allen for help regulating rising fees. They provided a bridge between the official committee and city government and those citizens outside this official organization. Prisoners wanting to volunteer, for instance, applied to the elders of the FAC “who met to consider what they could do for the help of the sick,” and it was under their supervision that the prisoners “were liberated, on condition of their doing the duty of nurses at the hospital at Bush Hill.”¹⁴⁶ The transaction showed the FAC supplementing and, in some cases, replacing the gutted government infrastructure with their own chain of command. Instead of calling on the mayor or the official relief committee, prisoners, many of them black, “applied” to the elders of the African Church. In the absence of a court, the black religious organization filled in the judicial gap.

Tellingly, it is in the context of this work that Rush calls Jones and Allen “two African citizens” in his own Account.¹⁴⁷ Similarly, while describing the state of disorder at Bush Hill, Narrative reports, “only two black women were at this time in the hospital, and they were retained and the others discharged, when it was reduced to order and good government.”¹⁴⁸ Again, their narrative pinpoints an omission in Carey’s Account, which mentions a “profligate, abandoned set of nurses and attendants … hardly any of could character” who “rioted on the provisions and comforts prepared to the sick” without the “smallest appearance of order.”¹⁴⁹ These women of “good character” represent the ordinary black folk whose significance has only now reached the light of day.¹⁵⁰ And through them, black presence becomes a central ingredient in the city’s return to “good government.”¹⁵¹ Rather than a threat to citizenship and government or a sign of their absence, as in Carey’s Account, the yellow fever epidemic opens up avenues for citizenship for Jones, Allen, and other black citizens called upon to fill in the gaps in white civic organization.

This confidence and managerial acumen presents a measure of stability within Philadelphia as well as the suggestion that internally, the free African community has its own institutions that shadow and, during the fever and the crisis of white government, function more efficiently than the white-run government. In this context, Narrative not only showcases black benevolence but also, more importantly, demonstrates the strength of black institutions with their own “peculiar” brand of republican self-government providing an ethics and structure to guide a black civil society, with Jones and Allen acting as representatives between it and the city.¹⁵² These institutions provided a tactical position, an internal organization and public presence, from which black citizens could not only “make use of the cracks” in established structures of power but also structure their own projects in republican governance.¹⁵³ They had limited and uneven involvement with the city’s civic sphere before the fever, often petitioning the city for the ability to provide services for black communities that no other institution would. The FAS, for instance, arranged to lease part of Potter’s Field (formerly the city’s Stranger’s Burial Ground) from the city in 1790, conducted marriage ceremonies, and kept records of marriages and births.¹⁵⁴ At times parallel to and intersecting with white publics, this black counterpublic “oscillate[d]” between positions in relation to other publics.¹⁵⁵ The epidemic presented a momentary break that gave free Africans, the institutions they built, and other marginal groups the opportunity to practice citizenship on the public stage in ways heretofore limited by racial logics governing access to the public sphere.

In Jones and Allen’s hands, each of these moments come to signify black citizens’ civic power, their desire for and implementation of modes of self-government, not just as free people treated as “slaves of the community” but also as citizens who operate as partners in an increasingly dynamic civic arrangement.¹⁵⁶ In each instance, the notion of management suggested in Carey’s civic republican model shifts from how institutions and the state could reign in variously interested constituencies to how institutions and the state might best empower and facilitate mutual aid among citizens. That is, the neighborliness animating individual actors in Narrative changes the relation between citizens and institutions. Where Carey’s respectable citizens show their respectability in terms of their management, Narrative’s leaders (Jones, Allen, Rush, Clarkson) enable other citizens to join in the collective recovery effort: Clarkson reaches out to free Africans (even if under false pretenses); Rush trains Jones and Allen to bleed and tend the ill; the FAC, in turn, liberates and superintends prisoners; Jones and Allen train people as nurses; and so on.¹⁵⁷ While Narrative does not eliminate all criteria for authority or inclusion—Jones and Allen report that they screened prisoners before releasing them—it does suggest that these criteria should be dynamically based on meeting the community’s needs. This everwidening cast of societies suggests that the successes in Philadelphia’s recovery were not based on the strength of a virtuous elite per se but rather on the ability of its various constituencies to recognize the potential partner in each other.

Jones and Allen turn to this broader sense of potential in their appendices as they take on the epistemologies that enabled black exclusion and enslavement and one of their most famous purveyors: Thomas Jefferson. Scholars have tended to read the “Censures Thrown upon them in some late Publications” in the title as an extension of this local discussion and direct reference to yellow fever accounts positing black theft and immunity, Carey’s Account most prominently among them. The rhetorical resonances with Banneker’s pamphlet and signal words throughout the appendices, such as “experience” and “experiment,” however, also signal that these “late publications” included Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. As Gene Jarrett notes, Jefferson’s language and tone “must have been specter” for black intellectuals “as haunting as that of English intellectuals, who looked down on colonial America” and compelled Jefferson to write Notes in the first place.¹⁵⁸ And while work on Narrative has consistently tied Jones and Allen’s arguments to Jefferson implicitly, I think it is important to note that the two men may have had Jefferson in mind very explicitly in much the same way that David Walker and subsequent writers appropriate him as representative (both as a type and as a political voice) of white supremacy.¹⁵⁹

The “Address to Those Who Keep Slaves, and Approve of the Practice” in particular builds on Narrative’s examples of the individual and collective efforts of black citizens during the fever and its model of an incorporative neighborly ethics of citizenship to propose an “experiment.” “We believe,” they write, “if you would try the experiment of taking a few black children, cultivate their minds with the same care, and let them have the same prospect in view, as to living in the world, as you would with your own children, you would find upon the trial, they were not inferior in mental endowments.”¹⁶⁰ The proposal responds to Jefferson’s wish in his reply to Banneker “to see a good system commenced, for raising the condition, both of their [slaves’] body and mind, to what it ought to be.”¹⁶¹ “No body wishes more than I do,” he proclaims in the opening lines, “to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men; and that the appearance of the want of them, is owning merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America.”¹⁶² Jones and Allen’s framing their response to racist logics as an experiment based on observation and experience signifies on late eighteenth-century empiricism and views of character as malleable, open to “cultivation” through proper care.¹⁶³

Ultimately, “Address” harnesses neighborliness as both citizenship practice and empirical method to produce a formula for black citizenship. Read next to Query 14, Banneker’s “Letter,” and Jefferson’s response, “Address” appears to be not only borrowing from (or echoing) Banneker’s rhetorical strategy but also refuting Jefferson specifically point by point. The neighborly argument extends to slave owners as a plan for emancipation and to former slaves, on whom Jones and Allen “feel the obligation” to “impress” on their minds the doctrine that “we may all forgive you, as we wish to be forgiven.” The passage may seem overly obsequious, but set against Jefferson’s use of “natural enmity” as justification for not emancipating slaves or, at best (relatively speaking), the raison d’être for colonization projects, Jones and Allen are clearly and methodically answering specific objections already in circulation in the same way that Narrative responds to specific accusations during the recent epidemic.

Where Jefferson posits black inferiority as a given—whether as a natural trait in Notes or as a result of “condition” in his reply to Banneker—the “Address to Those Who Own Slaves” sees confirmation bias and faulty data, suggesting that neither inherent inferiority nor racial degradation is the case. To claims that the slaves’ “baseness is incurable” or, as Jefferson argues, “the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind,”¹⁶⁴ Jones and Allen present their own “degree of experience,” the term straddling aesthetic (study of senses) and scientific (study of phenomena) discourse: “a black man, although reduced to the most abject state human nature is capable of, short of real madness, can think, reflect, and feel injuries, although it may not be with the same degree of keen resentment and revenge, that you who have been and are our great oppressors, would manifest if reduced to the pitiable condition of slave.”¹⁶⁵ Just as black citizens displayed more real sensibility during the fever, enslaved Africans have maintained a remarkable degree of humanity even in the midst of their enslavement. The passage directly confronts Jefferson’s claims that enslaved Africans’ “griefs are transient,” that “afflictions … are less felt, and sooner forgotten,” with the suggestion not only that Africans feel as deeply as Europeans but also that Jefferson and others’ expectations of “resentment and revenge” bespeak more a white propensity for violence or revenge than the lack of feeling on the part of the enslaved.¹⁶⁶ The “Address” opens with the suggestion that looking for “superior good conduct” from the enslaved would be “unreasonable,” and yet “experience” has shown Jones and Allen that enslaved Africans also exceed reasonable expectations. The double move questions standard paradigms measuring the humanity of slaves, challenges the premise that such measurements can and ought to be made, and recalibrates the comparison from one between ancient Greeks and Romans to one between contemporary enslaved Africans and their white masters. Again, the comparison gestures back to Narrative’s scenes of black citizens overcoming the dread of the moment—a dread they shared with white citizens—as they went about their work. Both points emphasize black self-regulation over white self-interest; both points build on Jones and Allen’s experiential authority and narrative perspective, not necessarily to question the effects of enslavement or standards of civilization but rather to suggest that white observers like Jefferson do not have sufficient experience to report accurate data.

More than an argument that black citizens were more sensible than white citizens or a competition over innate differences between master and slave, Narrative and “Address” assume the legitimacy of black observation and testimony, even as they call attention to how white normativity and the violence of enslavement not only fostered an antagonistic sensibility but also blocked white observers’ ability to be sensible subjects. This point goes for slaveholders and abolitionists alike. Narrative establishes the importance of firsthand observation early on, suggesting that “respectable citizens” could not relate the proceedings of the black people but rather had to solicit Jones and Allen’s authority, “[seeing] that from our situation … we had it more fully and generally in our power, to know and observe the conduct and behavior of those that were so employed.”¹⁶⁷ Their observations of the nuances of bleeding as a cure—they note, for instance, that bleeding at the early onset of symptoms had greater effects than at later stages and that the patient’s positive emotional state was correlated with recovery—further establish their empiricist credentials, their ability to analyze evidence and practically apply their conclusions. The “Address,” in turn, not only applies this observational “power” as a counter to Jefferson, who appeals to scientific “experience” and his own “observations” in Notes, but also advocates including Rush, who eventually admits the fallacy of black immunity to the yellow fever but who also thought black skin a curable condition.¹⁶⁸

Jones and Allen’s request for the experiment of education combines this sensory empiricism with a neighborly civic and social ethos. Education was essential to the production of future citizens, and national debates about education swirled around questions of how best to educate citizens for republican citizenship. Rush, for instance, argues, “Our Schools of learning, by producing one general, and uniform system of education, will render the mass of the people more homogeneous, and thereby fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government.”¹⁶⁹ He saw these institutions as training grounds “to convert men into republican machines.”¹⁷⁰ The homogeneity many saw as essential to republican government could be produced through a unified system of education, offsetting other points of difference. The students coming out of this system, joined in the same program of intellectual and physical instruction, will form “such ties to each other, as add greatly to the obligations of mutual benevolence.”¹⁷¹ These ties reproduce the structures of neighborly contact created during the fever, structures that, if temporary, created a society based in mutual aid rather than competition or hierarchy.

The proposal of educating black children “with the same care” and “prospect in view” as white children challenges those who would try this experiment to try it in a neighborly frame and confronts directly gradual emancipation practices in Pennsylvania that, as Erica Armstrong Dunbar catalogues, involved indentures with the proviso that children be taught to read “if capable.”¹⁷² The “Address” takes the unspoken assumption of incapacity off the table. Their “care” demands the same degree of rigor and breadth as that for white children, the same training for republican government, creating the same “ties” between them. Training black children with the same “prospect in view” suggests that they be trained for full political and economic participation in the republic as members of what Rush calls a “great, and equally enlightened family” in which benevolence flows horizontally between fellow citizens, rather than vertically between citizens and (their) former slaves or lesser sorts.¹⁷³ That is, they should be educated with the expectation of their contribution and with the assurance that access to the full range of liberties will be available to them. And this training should not be framed as some favor for which black citizens will remain in debt but rather as a basic principle of republican governance. Beginning with children in their formative years would produce a new generation fit for participation in a “uniform and peaceable government,” because they would have received the same republican training that commentators like Rush prescribed for the general public.

Neighborliness as an approach to emancipation, then, goes beyond momentary benevolence in the face of inequality and oppression, requiring instead structural adjustments and long-term planning.¹⁷⁴ This approach contrasts sharply to the rhetoric of Jefferson or even antislavery groups and activists, such as the Quaker-dominated PAS, Benezet, and Rush, who viewed Africans, free and enslaved, as objects of study or benevolence and a problem to be solved, but rarely as partners or fellow citizens.¹⁷⁵ By suggesting a trial of educating children, rather than the trial of unaided emancipation (gradual or immediate) or a trial of indentureship, the “Address to Those Who Own Slaves” subtly critiques the efficacy of gradual emancipation programs (or at least the logics of pupilage underwriting them), suggesting that emancipation and equal access to central institutions like education were inseparable. Just as the Samaritan of the New Testament or Narrative’s poor black man attended to the suffering beyond the immediate, short-term, injuries, so too must any project of emancipation be accompanied by a program of structural adjustment. This experiment requires an approach to policy that rejects conventional wisdom, producing the fellow citizenship that racist logics preempt by encouraging a view of free and enslaved Africans as neighbor-citizens rather than potential threats. Such a program follows the neighborly logic and challenge to white nationalism articulated in both Banneker’s letter and Narrative: make the good neighbor’s incorporative move; do unto black children as you would your own, and they will become as your own children in the process.

Jones and Allen’s call for an educational experiment requires less a leap of faith on the part of white citizens and more a larger study building on the data that Jones and Allen’s Philadelphia and other like “experiments” already provide.¹⁷⁶ In the short time during the epidemic and under intense duress, Jones, Allen, and others learn bleeding techniques from Rush (or, more accurately, from “copies of the printed direction for curing the fever”); coordinate a corps of nurses, carters, and other relief workers; and manage convict laborers.¹⁷⁷ Individual black Philadelphians and black societies acted out of an ethics of neighborhood that sustained them where the bonds of society appeared to fail almost everywhere else. How much more could black citizens or any other marginalized group contribute to the common weal if their children were given the advantage of formal instruction under conditions in which success was expected? Narrative demonstrates that this community of black citizens, finding freedom during the crisis, has proven itself more than ready for the task of republican citizenship.

At the same time, however, Narrative and the “Address” speak to a community’s disillusionment upon realizing that, despite demonstrating their collective public spirit and responsibility in terms that their erstwhile white judges should have recognized and honored, no amount of “proof” would be sufficient to overcome impediments that had nothing to do with black capacity and everything to do with white power. Again, this offers a distinct contrast to nascent gradual emancipation programs. Benezet’s patronage form of gradual emancipation involved registering, supervised labor, and training so that freedpeople “might gradually become useful members of the community” and “become industrious subjects” over time.¹⁷⁸ Jones and Allen’s call to educate black children with the same “prospects” as white children directly contradicts Benezet’s assumption that newly freed slaves and, more important, their children would require any kind of supervision, patronage, or management beyond those already provided for free white citizens. They reject both the long timeline assumed in Benezet’s and similar gradual schemes and the implication that formerly enslaved people owed some form of service to either their former masters or the state. Instead, “Address” suggests that the state, enslavers, and “those who approve of the practice” owe reparations for their sanctioning enslavement.

Seizing the platform that Carey’s Account provided, Jones and Allen take the opportunity to extend their public liberties into spheres that were otherwise out of reach. They present neighborliness as a citizenship practice animated by a real sensibility that creates the permeable civic space. They then mobilize this political argument in the service of an antislavery appeal and call for structural readjustments that would ease the transition between enslavement and citizenship. Narrative reveals the extent to which black print production can reflect the inner workings of black counterpublics, but it also suggests that even in such spaces, black writers sought and found ways to assert authority, not just presence, within civil society. Despite Jones and Allen’s efforts, however, the coming decades were characterized more by decline and retrenchment than progress, with even white supporters basing that support on the need for “racial surveillance.” This trend would lead both men to reconsider their future in the United States and to give serious consideration to emigration projects.¹⁷⁹

Still, Narrative had an effect. On April 4, 1794, about four months after Narrative’s first printing, Carey issued a pamphlet ostensibly in response to a flyer by “Argus” accusing Carey of opportunism, but he also pointedly confronted Jones and Allen’s Narrative. By then, Carey’s fourth edition had replaced his quotes from Lining about black immunity with a paragraph debunking the theory, and in the fifth edition, he had changed the section accusing black workers of extortion from the “vilest of the blacks” to “some of those who acted in that capacity [as nurses], both coloured and white.”¹⁸⁰ As Brooks and others have noted, however, Carey re-presents the error of black immunity as a boon for white Philadelphians: “The error that prevailed on this subject,” he writes, “had a very salutary effect; for at an early period of the disorder, hardly any white nurses could be procured; and, had the negroes been equally terrified, the sufferings of the sick, great as they actually were, would have been exceedingly aggravated.”¹⁸¹ Even as Carey recants an earlier mistake, he does so in a way that takes away from the merit of black workers.

Jones and Allen’s words also continued to resonate with the coming generation of black activists. David Walker builds on their notion of world citizenship and piety in his Appeal; Hosea Easton picks up the Samaritan formula in his A Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U. States (1837), arguing that only by acting “the part of the good Samaritan” can the nation “open an effectual door through which sympathies can flow, and by which a reciprocity of sentiment and interest can take place”; and Robert Purvis cites events during the fever in his 1837 defense of black suffrage in Pennsylvania, asking, “Does this speak an enmity which would abuse the privileges of civil liberty to the injury of the whites?”¹⁸² Purvis’s words seem to echo Jones and Allen’s. Each case references 1790s Philadelphia as a touchstone in the theoretical and historical development of black citizenship.

Narrative combines two central threads that subsequent chapters will unfold in more detail: black writer’s engagement with the critical political concerns of their day as a function of their own lived experiences and how the texts they produce navigate a web of publics and audiences.¹⁸³ Neighborliness does not eliminate interests or disagreement altogether. Indeed, a neighborly approach to citizenship requires a mode of participatory politics that maximizes contact and exchange between citizens to ensure that one citizen’s neighborliness does not turn into unilateral oppression. Narrative itself signals the importance of deliberation to neighborly institutions through Jones and Allen’s constant references to their own deliberations, among themselves and with the mayor, during the crisis. It is to the role of participatory politics in citizenship that The Practice of Citizenship now turns. Activists in the coming years become even more focused on formal political participation, but as the black state conventions reveal, the results are also more paradoxical. As the next chapter demonstrates, negotiating the contending imperatives of practical political ends, contemporary political discourse, and the need to persuade an increasingly hostile white public produced performative texts that provide a meta-commentary on the nature of U.S. citizenship.