LITMIR.BIZ

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      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

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