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The United States Before 'Disaster Politics', 1789-1850 the Greatest

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The United States Before 'Disaster Politics', 1789-1850 the Greatest Chapter 1—Dangerous Republic: The United States Before ‘Disaster Politics’, 1789-1850 The greatest ‘natural’ disaster to hit the United States during its first two decades was a Yellow Fever epidemic that killed perhaps ten percent of the population of Philadelphia in 1793. Atlantic port cities were all-too-familiar with epidemic disease, and Philadelphia was not just the new Republic’s busiest port but its largest city and the national capital.1 More than that, its elites viewed their city as “the continental seat of culture and commerce,” and prided themselves on their civic-mindedness.2 In Philadelphia, a recent historian has remarked, “association was the word of the day.”3 Yellow Fever, however, largely paralysed its institutions and its political leadership. True, the city’s Federalist mayor, Matthew Clarkson, bravely stayed at his post, and so did its leading physician, Benjamin Rush. But the resources upon which they could now draw were feeble. Most obviously, no one knew that the disease was carried by tiny mosQuitos that arrived with ship cargos, multiplied in still water, and spread the disease by biting their victims. Instead, Philadelpians adhered to the ancient assumptions that the disease was caused by unclean, ‘miasmatic’ air, and to equally antiQuated remedies—bleeding and purging victims to correct an imbalance in their ‘humours’, detonating gunpowder in order to clear the air, ringing church bells to propitiate the Lord. So far, so familiar, for this was the way that communities hit by epidemic disease understood their condition on both sides of the Atlantic in the eighteenth century. Not for another century would a series of dramatic breakthroughs in medical knowledge allow cities and public health practitioners to respond scientifically either to yellow fever or to such other ghastly scourges as cholera, typhus, and malaria. At the same time, however, European cities and states had been striving to respond methodically to epidemic disease ever since the advent of plague in the 1 On previous Philadelphia epidemics (the most recent in 1762), see John Duffy, Epidemics in Colonial America Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1953), 137-38, 165. 2 Simon Finger, The Contagious City: The Politics of Public Health in Early Philadelphia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 57; Billy Smith, 158. 3 Finger, 57. 1 thirteenth century, and during the early modern period had developed progressively more systematic mechanisms for Quarantining and hospitalising victims, cleaning streets, and dispensing charity to survivors.4 True, the last great European plague outbreak had severely tested the municipal authorities of Marseilles in 1720, and found them largely wanting. But regional and national governments had responded decisively first to the threat of contagion and (eventually) to the vast humanitarian toll of disease.5 Given that backdrop, the historian is initially surprised on encountering the best-known contemporary chronicle of the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic, authored by the printer and publisher, Matthew Carey. Its opening pages record a story not of a city and its people purposefully combatting contagion, but rather of cataclysmic social collapse. Describing “a total dissolution of the bonds of society,” Carey found that “government of every kind was almost wholly vacated.” Aldermen, justices of the peace, the governor of the state, overseers of the poor, federal officials all fled the city. Putrefying corpses lay in the street. Neighbours and family members abandoned one another in an apocalyptic environment where personal survival was the only goal. As for those public-spirited citizens who remained, their actions sometimes only added to the chaos: Carey refers to cacophonous, panic-inducing blasts of gunpowder, and to the constant ringing of church bells-- “terrify[ing] those in health, and driv[ing] the sick…to their graves”. How could the cradle of the Republic have been reduced to such a condition? Finding an explanation as thoroughly familiar on both sides of the Atlantic as the gunpowder, the bells, the 4 Mark Harrison, Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012), Chapters 1 and 2, which deal with “the naturalisation of disease” first in Mediterranean, then in northern, Europe “and its placement within the affairs of state” (quote from 12). See also John Booker, Maritime Quarantine: The British Experience, 1650-1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), which emphasises the difficulty of imposing quarantine in British political culture but an overall story of progress. 5 See Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 351-52, focussing on the role both of the Parlement of Provence at Aix and the central government in Paris. In addition to maintaining an effective cordon sanitaire, Paris spent 1.4 million livres in humanitarian aid, largely explaining “the amazing speed of recovery of Marseilles and the region.” On the limits of the municipal response, see also Daniel Gordon, “The City and the Plague in the Age of Enlightenment,” Yale French Studies, (1997), 80. 2 bleeding and the purging, Carey detected the hand of God. Philadelphians had grown increasingly complacent and self-satisfied during the months leading up to this terrible visitation, he pronounced, and given to ostentatious displays of wealth. “Luxury, the usual, and perhaps inevitable, concomitant of prosperity, was gaining ground in a manner very alarming to those who considered how far the virtue, the liberty, and the happiness of the nation depend on its temperance and sober manners.” Declining to “attempt to scan the decrees of Heaven,” Carey nevertheless felt certain that “something was wanting to humble the pride of a city, which was running on in full career, to the goal of prodigality and dissipation.”6 But parallel with this story of doom, Carey also offers a counter-narrative of hero-led redemption, featuring courageous individuals such as Mayor Clarkson and Doctor Rush who called on Philadelphia and the Republic’s noblest traditions, casting self-preservation to one side in pursuit of a larger public good. Their activities reveal a somewhat more concerted public response to the yellow fever epidemic than is suggested by the author’s more lurid and nightmarish passages, and also hint at the value of construing ‘public authority’ during the early republic not narrowly in terms of governmental action, but rather in terms of partnership between governmental and non- governmental elites. Rather than arguing over the size of the American State, Brian Balogh has recently argued, historians might find it more profitable to investigate its fundamental character. Very early in the history of the Republic, he suggests, Americans developed what would become a characteristic mode of governance that involved pursuing collective goals through non- governmental action.7 Philadelphia’s response to yellow fever neatly illustrates Balogh’s point. While its Common Council lacked effective authority in addressing the formidable social problems created by rapid, uncontrolled urban growth, a recent historian uncovers a parallel civic world in which leading 6 Quoted in Gareth Davies, “Dealing with Disaster: The Politics of Catastrophe in the United States, 1789- 1861,” American Nineteenth Century History (2013), 4. 7 Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 3 merchants, physicians and other elites nourished a strong commitment to the larger public good.8 When yellow fever struck, the weakness of formal governmental authority was initially debilitating, resulting in the panic that Carey documents so avidly, and eliminating any prospect that the geographic spread of the disease beyond the docks might rapidly be curtailed. But Mayor Clarkson was at least able to draw on the energies and public spirit of the city’s College of Physicians, resulting in a series of mostly sensible instructions about sanitation and isolation that were then disseminated by mayoral proclamation. A little later, the few aldermen and overseers of the poor who remained in post worked with leading Philadelphians such as Carey and the merchant Stephen Girard to establish a hospital for the treatment of the sick, together with arrangements for disposing of the dead.9 Acknowledging the extent to which Philadelphians faced with yellow fever pursued collective ends through non-governmental means, the limits of governmental action—state and federal, as well as municipal—remain worthy of note. In 1793, the state government of Pennsylvania, like the federal government, was based in the city, but there is no suggestion in the existing literature that the Commonwealth played any role in combatting the spread of the disease or alleviating the suffering of its victims. Governor Thomas Mifflin’s most energetic actions appear to have been to berate the Mayor for not doing enough, to issue empty promises of state funds in support of more robust action, to instruct Clarkson to fire gunpowder throughout the city--and then to vacate the scene for his country estate.10 A recent monograph on Pennsylvania state government during the early national period makes no reference to yellow fever, or to public health more 8 Finger, Contagious City, Chapter 4. 9 See Eve Kornfeld, “Crisis in the Capital: The Cultural Significance of Philadelphia’s Great Yellow Fever Epidemic,” Pennsylvania History, 51, 3 (July, 1984), 198; Michal McMahon, “Beyond Therapeutics: Technology and the Question of Public Health in Late-Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” 97-98, Sally Griffith, “’A Total Dissolution of the Bonds of Society’: Community Death and Regeneration in Mathew Carey’s Short Account of the Malignant Fever,” 51, both in J. Worth Estes and Billy G. Smith, eds., A Melancholy Scene of Devastation: The Public Response to the 1793 Philadelphia Yellow Fever Epidemic (Canton, Ma.: Science History Publications, 1997). 10 See J.H. Powell, Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949), 53, 69.
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