Response and Diagnosis: The Problem with Citizenship as Commerce
Read through Narrative’s analysis of the labor market during the epidemic and Jones and Allen’s experience as former slaves and free Africans, the civic breakdown during the epidemic was not unexpected. Rather, the stress it put on the white citizenry brought into sharp relief the structural instabilities of a civic republicanism predicated on “more a willingness to get along with others for the sake of peace and prosperity” than on the sense of shared responsibility for the common good or fellow citizenship.60 While contemporaries like Carey claimed that Federalist regulatory structures could prevent fellow citizenship from collapsing under normal circumstances, Narrative’s account of the inability of institutions to regulate the market for relief workers emphasizes the limits of market structures in creating relations between citizens when the underlying ethic governing citizenship practice depends on and encourages atomization and exploitation. Moreover, even as Narrative offers a productive critique of civic republicanism’s economic valences, its inversion of Carey’s style underscores how readily the economic rhetoric of interests can be manipulated to justify anything from benevolent service to the slave trade.
The commercial ethic that remained submerged or managed before the fever comes to a head during the crisis and seems to overpower official regulation. Mayor Clarkson, Jones, and Allen all attempted to regulate the cost of the relief efforts by employing workers through the city and other civic institutions. The presence of these regulations highlights the economic similarities between the moment of crisis and the city under normal conditions. Jones and Allen recount their meeting with Matthew Clarkson about the rising fees: “[Clarkson] sent for us, and requested that we would use our influence, to lessen the wages of the nurses, but informing him of the cause, i.e. that of the people over-bidding one another, it was concluded unnecessary to attempt any thing on that head; therefore it was left to the people concerned.”61 As Clarkson’s response suggests, inflation not only overcame the city’s ability to influence its workers but also changed the nature of economic exchange itself. Clarkson, Jones, and Allen could “influence” the workers to lower their fees, because the workers were their employees and they provided a flat wage intended to make these services available to all, but the bidding war took the workers out of their direct employ. People offering these payments were operating squarely within a market in which their individual means and interests were their own concern. Since the workers were not setting the prices but rather were responding to the effects of supply and demand with individual consumers dictating the price ceiling, neither the mayor nor, perhaps, Jones and Allen saw a need to intervene, and even if they did, they could not.
Jones and Allen’s emphasis on the forces of supply, demand, and selfinterest reveals that the black workers’ response to the market during the epidemic worked by the same logics that governed white activities before, during, and after the epidemic.62 The “difficulty” of finding “persons … to supply the wants of the sick” and the increasing “applications” for services that Narrative describes during the fever parallel Carey’s earlier description of the “number of applicants for houses” before the fever.63 The “extravagant prices … paid” (the “two, three, four, and even five dollars a night” in Carey’s Account) mirror the prefever increase of property values to “double, and in some treble what it would have been a year or two before.”64 In both Carey’s Account and Jones and Allen’s Narrative, the syntactic focus on environmental forces rather than individual choices—the presence or absence of an agent—absolves the actors of moral responsibility. Rents “had risen” in Carey’s Account, without mention of the property owners’ agency as a factor in driving up prices. The nursing fees, however, increased because “the vilest of the blacks … eagerly seized” the “opportunity for imposition.”65 Here, Carey also mentions the increase in demand, but where the demand for housing drove up rents (passively), the demand for nurses provided an opportunity for corruption that black workers actively pursued. Jones and Allen use much the same strategy but inverted, contrasting the bidding war and those who were (passively) paid exorbitant prices to a “white woman” who “demanded” “six pounds” for her services.66 Their inversion disarms Carey’s racialization of economic corruption, using Carey’s terms to demonstrate black virtue in the face of white inhumanity.
The facility with which Jones, Allen, and Carey manipulate commercial language reveals the slipperiness of the economic discourse more generally when applied as an ethical tool. The mirroring Jones and Allen enact between Narrative and Account destabilizes the economic discourse they both use, however tenuous, ironic, or adversarial that use may be. This indeterminacy disrupts any attempt to situate virtue or corruption in any one group.67 Good citizenship from this perspective depended less on adhering to a set of ethical precepts than on maintaining the authority to set those precepts and to justify one’s actions accordingly.
The parallels between commerce before and during the fever and Narrative’s vindication of black laborers, then, offer a larger critique of how civic republican logic “protected and facilitated” the economic interests of a white elite, making self-interest, as Joyce Appleby posits, “a functional equivalent to civic virtue” that masks the maintenance of inequality.68 The “functional” equivalency of self-interest and civic virtue breaks down when citizens are forced to choose between what the rules of commercial exchange allow them to do and what civic duty or fellow citizenship suggests they ought to do. Economic inequalities in place before the fever exacerbate this warlike relation, stripping the polite trappings of the market structure Kloppenberg describes as the “natural harmony of benignly striving individuals,” revealing it to be instead a free-for-all.69 Jones and Allen explain, “When we procured [workers] at six dollars per week, and called upon them to go where they were wanted, we found they were gone elsewhere…. Upon enquiring the cause, we found, they had been allured away by others who offered greater wages, until they got from two to four dollars per day. We had no restraint upon the people. It was natural for people in low circumstances to accept a voluntary, bounteous reward.”70 People followed their “natural” inclinations, and individual means would control just how far these inclinations could go. If it was natural for white people in Carey’s Account to abandon the “nearest and dearest,” was it not more natural for black citizens to lay aside questions of fairness to strangers in the name of self-preservation and economic self-interest? This principle holds doubly true for “people in low circumstances,” who, unlike Girard and Helm, were not financially secure even before the fever.
Narrative’s juxtaposition of pilfering and privateering illustrates how official discourse produces this functional equivalency and its uneven, racialized results: “We know as many whites who were guilty of it [theft and extortion],” Jones and Allen write, “but this is looked over, while the blacks are held up to censure.—Is it a greater crime for a black to pilfer, than for a white to privateer?”71 The comparison indicts both black and white citizens for taking advantage of the breakdown during the fever to make a profit.72 Compared to “pilfer,” however, “privateer” invokes a more pernicious attitude toward commerce that may be legal, strictly speaking, but also involves an antagonistic ethic that perhaps causes the waning virtue Carey notes in Account’s opening lines.73 Coming directly after a sentence focused not on white theft but rather on people offering accounts that “[look] over” white theft while highlighting black criminality, “privateer” confronts the duplicity of official narratives and structures that essentially legalize white theft.74 Just as a state’s letter of marque authorizes the private citizen to approach “foreign” ships in a way that would amount to piracy under other conditions, the collective attitude toward commerce authorizes, if