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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

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