Mathew Carey reported that it took some time before the curious fever attracted the attention of the public.[1] Its symptoms were new to most of the city’s doctors. The last outbreak in Philadelphia had occurred thirty-one years before. After a bout of chills, the victims’ skin turned yellow. They suffered unbearable pain and vomited black matter resembling coffee grounds. Some survived, but most died. By August 19, as the death toll mounted, Dr. Benjamin Rush announced the citizens of Philadelphia were suffering from an epidemic of yellow fever.[2] In four months, it caused the deaths of 4,000 citizens of Philadelphia, the nation’s capital.[3]

Philadelphians responded by leaving the city in droves, moving to the countryside. Those who stayed behind remained in the safety of their homes.   They considered tobacco smoke as a deterrent. Even women and young boys were seen smoking cigars. Others chewed garlic or ventured out with handkerchiefs soaked in vinegar or camphor. Afraid of the contagion, people avoided one another refusing to shake hands.[4]

Officials appointed Carey to the Committee of Health to organize aid to the dying and the orphaned children. He wrote A Short Account of the Malignant Fever Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia, and published four editions in rapid succession. The first edition, published October 16, was just twelve pages long.[5]

His view of the situation, aside from the sheer horror of the suffering, was mainly economic. He published the accounts, especially the second edition, to describe the situation to European creditors and explain the delinquency of payments coming from Philadelphia.[6] The following year, he published his account in French, Dutch, German and Italian for creditors on the Continent.[7]

His introductory remarks centered on the prosperity in Philadelphia before the epidemic. He noted the rapidity with which the population was growing, and its effect on the housing market. Despite the vast number of new houses, rents doubled or tripled from what they had been just a year or so before. Demand far exceeded supply. Applicants outbid one another simply for a place to live.

He noted that financial difficulties beginning in November of 1792 were caused when the Bank of Pennsylvania was established. The circulation of specie, so critical to business expansion, had significantly slowed down, causing distress for many businesses.   Failures in England aggravated the situation. He praised the Bank of the United States for its liberal conduct, which saved many businesses from failure. By July 1793, the Bank of Pennsylvania offered good terms of credit, and Philadelphia businesses once again prospered.

Democratic-Republicans, like Dr. Rush, laid the blame on the unsanitary air of the city, especially from the swamps and docks. Federalists thought the influx of French refugees fleeing Toussaint-L’Ouverture’s revolution underway in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), had brought the disease with them. The cause of the disease was unknown. In his account, Carey reported the French refugees were the vector. No one yet understood the mosquito-borne basis for the disease.

Dr. Benjamin Rush (1745-1813) blamed the outbreak of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia on unsanitary air and treated his patients by bleeding them.

Newspapers quickly politicized the issue. French revolutionaries had beheaded Louis XVI early in 1793. Britain had declared war on France. The reign of terror was underway. Based on the belief that French refugees had imported the disease, Federalists urged a quarantine of the French, fearing radical French revolutionaries would foment discontent in the United States. They also pressed for limits on trade with French islands in the Caribbean.[8]

Democratic-Republicans, especially merchants involved with trade in the Caribbean, suspected Federalists of trying to ruin their business prospects. Federalist merchants thought the Democratic-Republicans were conspiring to move businesses from large cities to the countryside.   While the Federalists gave lip service to the government’s embargo of trade with the West Indies, they were far more intent in fanning the flames of fear of what the French and Democratic-Republicans might be conspiring to do.[9]

Alexander Hamilton polarized the issue along party lines when he published an account of his cure from the fever, crediting it to the use of quinine and wine by Dr. Stevens. Hamilton’s praise was a backhanded criticism of his political opponent, Dr. Benjamin Rush, who bled his patients hoping for a cure.[10]

The Federalist press seized the opportunity making it a national issue by promoting quinine and wine as the Federalist remedy and discrediting Rush’s techniques. Rush was unable to rally many of his Democratic-Republican allies to support him in countering Hamilton’s charges, because some of the Democratic-Republican doctors favored the quinine and wine cure.[11]

The exception was Andrew Brown, who as editor of the Federal Gazette, remained in town to publish his paper as an impartial forum. Brown could not remain above the partisan fray. The Gazette became Dr. Rush’s public forum where he promoted his cure.[12] Like Carey, Brown shipped his paper to other cities to keep the nation informed of the fever.[13]

The Democratic-Republican press promoted the idea that members of their party were the heroes. While some Federalists remained in the city to provide relief for the victims, most were Republicans. Of the eighteen leaders of the Citizen’s Committee, nine were Democratic-Republican, seven were neither Federalist nor Democratic-Republican.[14]

As the epidemic abated, returning citizens began to lay blame. The evacuees represented about one-third to one-half of Philadelphia’s population of 50,000. Many of them were Federalists, but most were not. Critics charged that the Citizen’s Committee was too costly and had grown too powerful. Although most doctors and the Committee offered their services free of charge to the poor, one of Rush’s students claimed that he had profited significantly from the epidemic, and a druggist put his business before his relief work on the Committee.[15]

In this highly charged atmosphere, Mathew Carey’s detractors charged him with evading bankruptcy and profiting from the situation. They claimed he published the account of the misfortunes of others, when in fact he had lost a daughter to the fever.[16] A subscriber to one of Carey’s publications named Edmund Hogan, writing under the pseudonym of “Argus,” charged him with leaving the city, irresponsibly failing to perform his duties.[17]   Carey responded with a rebuttal in 1794, “Address of M. Carey to the Public” defending himself by explaining that he had obtained permission from the Committee to do so, to collect accounts in Virginia and Maryland.[18] In his rebuttal, Carey included testimonials by James Swaine, William Currie and James Sharpwood to the falsehood of the accusations.[19]

He sustained criticism in a noteworthy pamphlet written by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, two prominent African American citizens of Philadelphia who were former slaves. They sought to set the record straight when they published “A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia” in 1794. They found fault with the third edition of the Account where Carey praised the work done by the nurses at Bush Hill, but failed to mention that two-thirds of them were African American. They took offense to comments in the second edition, because he cast aspersions on African Americans for charging exorbitant fees for their services. While Carey did mention the services of Jones and Allen as significant and worthy of gratitude, they considered his treatment of African Americans in the account as disparaging. Although Carey amended his fourth edition in response to their criticisms, they wrote “Mr. Carey’s first, second, and third editions, are gone forth into the world, and in all probability, have been read by thousands that will never read his fourth…” To counteract public misinformation, Jones and Allen published the first pamphlet of protest by African Americans in the United States, a significant achievement.[20]

Absalom Jones (1746-1818) was an African-American Episcopalian priest and abolitionist, who with Richard Allen (1760-1831) an African American Methodist minister, published a pamphlet in 1794 that criticized Carey’s account of the Yellow Fever epidemic.

Carey opposed slavery, and even published pieces by abolitionists and writings by African Americans in the American Museum. In 1822 in Letters on the Colonization Society, he opposed slavery, praised the accomplishments of some African Americans, but expressed concerns that free African Americans could ever achieve equality in the United States.[21]

Carey published his accounts to inform creditors of the difficulties Philadelphia merchants faced in honoring their debts. Carey’s criticism of African Americans and the response by Jones and Allen was part of a larger context of laying blame.

TRANSITION TO PUBLISHER | Books of American Manufacture to Compete with British Imports

[1] Mathew Carey, A Short Account of the Malignant Fever Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia, (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, Fourth Edition, 1794) 16.

[2] Martin S. Pernick, “Politics, Parties and Pestilence: Epidemic Yellow Fever in Philadelphia and the Rise of the First Party System,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, V. 29 N. 4 (October, 1972).

[3] Mark A. Smith, “Andrew Brown’s ‘Earnest Endeavor’: The Federal Gazette’s Role in Philadelphia’s Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, V. 120 N. 4 (October, 1996) 321.

[4] Carey, A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, 21-2.

[5] William Clarkin, Mathew Carey: A Bibliography of His Publications 1785-1824 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1984) 18-24.

[6] Mathew Carey, Autobiography, (Brooklyn: Research Classics, 1942) 25-6.

[7] Clarkin, A Bibliography, 23-4.

[8] Pernick, “Politics, Parties and Pestilence,” 568.

[9] Pernick, “Politics, Parties and Pestilence,” 568.

[10] Pernick, “Politics, Parties and Pestilence,” 574.

[11] Pernick, “Politics, Parties and Pestilence,” 576.

[12] Smith, “Andrew Brown’s ‘Earnest Endeavor’,” 322.

[13] Smith, “Andrew Brown’s ‘Earnest Endeavor’,” 339.

[14] Pernick, “Politics, Parties and Pestilence,” 577-8, 583.

[15] Pernick, “Politics, Parties and Pestilence,” 584-5.

[16] Edward C. Carter II, The Political Activities of Mathew Carey, Nationalist, 1760-1814, Bryn Mawr College Ph.D. Dissertation, 1962, 120.

[17] Mathew Carey, “Miscellanies II,” (ms. C. 1834) private collection, 45.

[18] Carter, The Political Activities of Mathew Carey, 121.

[19] Clarkin, A Bibliography, 22.

[20]Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, “A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia (1794) in Pamphlets of Protest, An Anthology of Early African Protest Literature, 1790-1860, Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, Phillip Lapsansky, eds. (New York: Routledge) 2001, 32-42.

[21] Jacqueline Bacon, “Rhetoric and Identity in Absalom Jones and Richard Allen’s ‘Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia’,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, V. 125 Nos. 1-2 (January-April, 2001) 60.