The Practice of Citizenship. Derrick R. Spires

For both writers, the stated occasion for entering print provides a vector but not the ultimate target from their arguments.¹² From this perspective, Joanna Brooks argues, the overemphasis on Narrative’s status as primarily a response to Carey points to a larger tendency to ignore how the tract “resonates with the impassioned and embittered voices of two men who are themselves only a few years free from chattel slavery, who witness that the slave trade continues with the legal sanction of the U.S. government.” These men, she continues, saw “the fragility of fellow-feeling and sympathy revealed during the yellow fever epidemic, and their text demonstrated how insufficient these frameworks were for communicating black grievances.”¹³ Or, more accurately, how efficient they were at eliding them. Narrative may recapitulate the contradictions in contemporary political and racial discourse, but it also strategically reenacts these contradictions to expose rather than reproduce them.

      Jones and Allen’s emphasis on the white production of virtue throughout Narrative suggests that they recognized in 1794 the problem with virtue politics. In that sense, Narrative is both descriptive of how black citizens might enter the civic sphere under already operative terms—civic republicanism, benevolence and sensibility, virtue politics, and the like—and prescriptive in the way its account of black activities exceeds these frameworks. While Jeannine DeLombard describes Narrative as a “documentary account of black civic virtue,” she also notes that if virtue politics failed, Jones and Allen could produce an “altogether different kind of black public presence” by converting impositions of black criminal culpability into “civil ‘capacity’” and claims to full citizenship.¹⁴ Converting “culpable legal personhood” was one strategy Narrative deployed; at the same time, this chapter argues, Narrative produces something quite different, using the ethics articulated in Jesus of Nazareth’s discourse on Mosaic law in the Gospel Luke, not contemporaneous constructions of citizenship or personhood, as their guide.

      The connection to Banneker in particular might run deeper. Jones and Allen potentially had access to “A Copy of a Letter from Benjamin Banneker to the Secretary of State, with His Answer,” printed in Philadelphia in 1792.¹⁵ I will discuss this text in more detail in this chapter’s last section, but its path to print is worth rehearsing here as a precursor to Narrative and as an illustration of strategies already in play. Banneker claims in the letter, “It was not originally my design” to write a letter critiquing Jefferson’s hypocrisy in championing political freedom in the Declaration of Independence while still supporting enslavement. “But,” he maintains, “having taken up my pen in order to direct to [Jefferson]” his 1792 Almanac “as a present,” Banneker was “unexpectedly and unavoidably led” to respond to the racist claims Jefferson makes in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785).¹⁶ Banneker sent the Almanac in manuscript, noting that he was unsure of bringing it to print. The letter itself excoriated Jefferson through the language of both Notes and the Declaration of Independence: “It was” in the early days of the Revolution, Banneker reminds Jefferson, “that your abhorrence thereof was so excited, that you publicly held forth this true and invaluable doctrine, which is worthy to be recorded and remembered in all succeeding ages,” before quoting from the Declaration. After Jefferson responded to Banneker, affirming his wish to see a plan for emancipation enacted, Banneker published his initial letter and that response in pamphlet form. He also included the exchange in the Almanac he would publish that year. The entire sequence of events shows Banneker manipulating the print public not only to publish an incisive antislavery pamphlet but also to cannily drum up potential interest in his Almanac. Jefferson may have been Banneker’s addressee, and he was clearly one of Banneker’s objects of critique, but it is just as clear that Banneker likely had larger goals in mind from the start. Whether or not Jones and Allen read Banneker’s pamphlet or almanac that year, the resemblance in print and rhetoric strategy is striking: Jones and Allen similarly claim to have taken up the pen to refute Carey’s Account but also capitalize on the opportunity to address other “Censures, Thrown upon Them in Some Late Publications” noted in their pamphlet’s title.

      To fully understand the theorizing and print strategies Jones and Allen undertake through Narrative, we need to first revisit the models of white citizenship proffered contemporaneously in accounts such as Carey’s A Short Account. While Carey’s Account was neither the only nor the definitive statement on early U.S. citizenship, it provides—both for Jones and Allen and for my purposes here—a productive point of entry for limning the range of problems and potential solutions at play, along with those possibilities white observers routinely ignored or actively disqualified. Carey’s pamphlet provided a distillation of civic republican discourse and a set of formal oppositions (respectable citizens vs. unruly mass, sensibility vs. insensibility, market freedom vs. republican duty) that Jones and Allen could (1) hold up and restage for public assessment, (2) dissect as a reflection of bankrupt citizenship practices, and (3) counterpose to their own model of neighborly citizenship. As I contend throughout this chapter, Jones and Allen’s Narrative, while addressed to Carey, was not about Carey and his Account. Even so, just as black Philadelphians provided Carey and others with a convenient scapegoat for the city’s failures, so too do Jones and Allen appropriate Carey as a mascot for how the language of interests, virtue, and management propped up white supremacy and justified abdication of citizenship’s more democratic and revolutionary potential.

      Carey’s Fever: A Crisis in Fellow Citizenship

      Yellow fever hit Philadelphia in August of 1793, killing between 4,000 and 5,000 people (10–15 percent of Philadelphia’s population), approximately 400 of them free Africans, in a little less than three months. An additional 20,000 fled the city for safety.¹⁷ The federal government was in recess during the epidemic, leaving the recovery efforts to a Relief Committee of voluntary citizens led by Philadelphia’s mayor, Matthew Clarkson. As the epidemic dissipated in November 1793, Clarkson charged Matthew Carey, an Irish immigrant, printer, and entrepreneur, with composing the city’s official account, including theories about the fever’s causes and progression, the activities of the Relief Committee, and the general state of the city during those three horrible months. This account, initially titled A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia: With a Statement of the Proceedings that Took Place on the Subject in Different Parts of the United States, ran through five editions published in the United States and Europe and eventually sold “over 10,000 copies.” And the publication helped sustain Carey’s faltering career.¹⁸ More than a chronicle of the immediate crisis, Carey’s Short Account presents Philadelphia as a metonym for the nation’s civic and economic climate. His and other yellow fever narratives present several problems in the early republic through the fever, among them: (1) the “dissolution” of “natural” bonds, including familial, neighborly, and formal, and (2) a concomitant crisis of commercial regulation, relating to the role of the state in guiding markets and the market’s ability to regulate itself.¹⁹

      As he navigates these political and economic problems, Carey employs standard tropes of an early national civic republican style that mixed classical republicanism’s emphasis on sacrifice, the common good, and a fear of luxury and corruption with a more favorable attitude toward commerce as an expression of liberty and a path toward and sign of stability and competence, all moderated by a assurance of consequences for intemperance.²⁰ In this flexible constellation of concepts, Carey links progress to regulation: “Virtue, liberty, and happiness of a nation,” he posits, depend on its “temperance and sober manners.”²¹ Virtuous citizens are not necessarily the yeomen attributed to Jeffersonian mythology but rather the “plain and wholesome” city dwellers whose daily commercial interactions knit them into a community that prized respectability, politeness, sobriety, and industry.²² City life may provide opportunities for corruption, but sober citizens could resist these temptations with proper self-regulation and institutional oversight, if not on their own merits, because maintaining a public image of self-regulation and politeness could be profitable. Moreover, when otherwise self-regulating individuals fell victim to the temptations of success, strong civic and financial institutions could help rein them in, providing a safety net for the innocent and a bulwark against the market’s (or individual’s)