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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

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