The Practice of Citizenship - Derrick R. Spires

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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

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