LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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