sensible that it was our duty

If any group of individuals had reason to ignore the sufferings of their neighbors, the elders of the Free African Society certainly did. Yet they did not hesitate. They were… “sensible that it was our duty to do all the good we could to our fellow mortals.”

The elders went out that very day in pairs, visiting houses around the city. Jones and Allen went together and immediately discovered a house in tiny Emsley’s Alley where the mother was already dead, the father was dying, and two small children huddled together, frightened and hungry. They sent word to city hall and then went to another and another and another house. “We visited upwards of twenty families that day,” they recalled. “They were scenes of woe indeed!”

Volunteers from the Free African Society were the first to enter the homes of most fever victims. What they saw was burned forever into their memories. “Many whose friends, and relations had left them,” Jones and Allen said, “died unseen, and unassisted. We… found them in various situations, some laying on the floor, as bloody as if they had been dipt in it, without any appearance of their having had, even a drink of water for their relief; others laying on a bed with their clothes on, as if they had come in fatigued, and lain down to rest; some appeared, as if they had fallen down dead on the floor.”

They next day, Jones and Allen went to Mayor Clarkson to ask how their group could be of help. To say that Clarkson was grateful for their aid is an understatement; everyone else the mayor had counted on to help battle the spreading fever – leaders in the business community, church groups, elected representatives, and civil servants – had fled in terror. The Free African Society was the one and only group to step forward and offer its services.

After this, whenever anyone requested help, the society sent a volunteer as quickly as possible. No set fee was charged for their services, which might include nursing the individual, cleaning up the sickroom, washing clothes and linens, going out to buy food and medicine, and caring for other family members.

…Members of the Free African Society patrolled the streets daily, rounding up the ill and finding shelter for homeless children. If word came to them that a fever victim was shut up at home without anyone to care for him or her, Jones and Allen sent a representative to investigate. The most seriously ill were taken by cart to Bush Hill; the dead were placed in coffins and hauled to the graveyards.

To do this sort of work, Jones and Allen had to mobilize an army of helpers… They stepped forward to save lives and relieve suffering, and did so without thought of receiving individual acclaim…

Twenty-one-year-old Isaac Heston was quick to appreciate the work being done by Philadelphia’s blacks. “I don’t know what the people would do,” he said in his letter to his brother “if it was not for the Negroes, as they are the Principal nurses.”

This battalion of heroes ventured out into the stricken city every day without fail. “Thus were many of the nurses circumstanced,” Jones and Allen would note, “alone, until the patient died, then called away to another scene of distress, and thus have been a week or ten days left to do the best they could without sufficient rest, many of them having some of their dearest connexions sick at the time and suffering for want while their husband, wife, father, mother have been engaged in the service of the white people.”


An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 by Jim Murphy. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003. p.50, 51, 53-55