The Practice of Citizenship. Derrick R. Spires

performative (and therefore untrustworthy) display of emotion, and an ethical imperative to act informed by reason. These discussions turned to schemes for regulating sensibility through cultivating reason, contrasting sensibility or basic sympathy to teachable principles, such as charity, or suggesting that sensibility was, itself, mediated through reason. Benjamin Rush, for instance, characterized sensibility as the “avenue to the moral faculty,” one that needed careful supervision and development because it provided the scaffold upon which society was built.¹⁰⁸ Anthony Benezet claimed the person who “possessed but a small degree of feeling” could still exercise charity because charity “consisteth in the subjection of the mind to known duties.”¹⁰⁹ And Jonathan Edwards distinguished between apparent virtue and the “truly virtuous”: “some actions and dispositions appear beautiful, if considered partially and superficially,” but are revealed to be otherwise when “seen clearly in their whole nature and the extent of their connections in the universality of things.”¹¹⁰ Jones and Allen add to this their experience with how racist accounts could obscure the whole nature of real sensibility. After all, they wrote Narrative to correct “partial” accounts of black relief efforts with testimony from those who saw the whole and could “declare facts as they really were.”¹¹¹ While Narrative does not use separate terms to differentiate between “sensibility” as a physiological response and “real sensibility” as a principle, the contrast between the gentleman’s inertia and the poor black man’s activity, his “language of conduct,” suggests that the difference between the two—sensibility and real sensibility—corresponds to these concurrent frameworks, as well as the FAS’s invocation of piety. At the same time, reworking sensibility through a narrative about an unsung black man demonstrated that black Philadelphians were not just “ready for freedom”; they were in fact were already doing the work of citizenship.¹¹²

      The parable of the Good Samaritan provides a useful parallel text that offers a vocabulary for articulating the kind of relation between citizens that “real sensibility” should produce and connects events recounted in Narrative to the FAS’s notion of the pious person as a good citizen of the world.¹¹³ Reading this account through the parable’s narrative formula, a formula that would have been familiar to many of Jones and Allen’s readers, reveals how their strategy moves beyond setting black virtue against white inhumanity.¹¹⁴ The conversation between Jesus and a lawyer about law and civic responsibility frames a moment in which Jesus pivots on received understandings of the law to offer a more expansive notion of who is the neighbor or to whom the good citizen should be responsible and responsive. When a lawyer questions Jesus about eternal life, Jesus responds with a question of his own: “What is written in the law?” The lawyer replies, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy soul … strength, and … mind; and thy neighbor as thyself.”¹¹⁵ Jesus tells the lawyer that he has answered correctly, but not to be outdone, the lawyer asks a logical follow-up question: “And who is my neighbor?” Rather than answer the lawyer’s question—“who is my neighbor?”—by describing the set of people whom the lawyer should love and thus offering a restricted notion of neighborliness, Jesus offers a parable, a case study, outlining the characteristics of the neighbor as the subject, sensible to another’s suffering, in action: “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.”¹¹⁶ As in Jones and Allen’s vignette, the parable features an injured man in need of assistance. Respected community leaders and fellow Jews—symbols of the civic and moral good—recognize the man’s suffering but go out of their way to avoid helping him. Instead, a Samaritan not only aids the man but also ensures his safety until his recovery. The Samaritan, seeing past the mutual enmity between Jews and Samaritans, “discover[s] the neighbor” in the injured man and becomes the good neighbor, the keeper of the law who will “inherit eternal life,” because he acts as the neighbor rather than looking for the neighbor.¹¹⁷

      This response has deep implications for the construction of community and citizenship as a point of civil law going beyond a simple moral query. In the context of the Mosaic Law, legal scholar Jeremy Waldron explains, love thy neighbor “is emphatically not a moralistic add-on to a legal code”; rather, the maxim “sums up the spirit of the legal code.”¹¹⁸ Using a Samaritan—a people viewed by Jesus’ audience as a lower caste or culturally and religiously abject—as the model of neighborliness, Jesus shifts the audience’s focus from finding the neighbor among themselves to finding the neighbor-citizen within themselves and, in so doing, expands the boundaries of “my neighbor” beyond respectability (“respectable citizens”), genealogy (whiteness), or political status. The onus falls on the sensible citizen’s ability to see the neighbor-citizen in the other person rather than on the other to demonstrate respectability to an already constituted community.¹¹⁹ The mark of the good neighbor-citizen and the good community, by extension, becomes not simply the ability to extend boundaries over an increasingly diverse set of neighbors but rather the ability to make this extension on terms of equality.

      Each case, the parable of the Good Samaritan and Jones and Allen’s Narrative, inverts audience expectations to reveal an ethics of neighborhood that foregrounds the citizen’s choice to be the good neighbor. This interpretation of the parable would not have been lost on those among Narrative’s readers familiar with popular biblical commentaries. A similar exegesis of neighborliness, if not necessarily applied to black people, appeared in William Burkitt’s Expository Notes (1789). For Burkitt, Luke 10:29–37 positions “real charity [as] an active operative thing given to the distressed, nor in compassionate beholding of them, nor in a pitiful mourning over them, but in positive acts of kindness towards them. The Samaritan here is an example of a real and thorough charity.”¹²⁰ Burkitt’s emphasis on “real” and “positive acts” and his contrast to “compassionate beholding” and “pitiful mourning” reappear throughout Narrative in references to black citizens’ “real sensibility”: “Our services were the production of real sensibility;—we sought not fee nor reward, until the disorder rendered our labour so arduous that we were not adequate to the services we had assumed” they sought to “be useful,” and as a result, black citizens demonstrated “more humanity, more real sensibility” than their white counterparts.¹²¹ It suggests a degree of equality lacking in models of disinterested benevolence. This inversion moves beyond setting black virtue against white inhumanity toward redefining what it means to be a citizen or, in the parable’s terms, a neighbor.

      Narrative answers Carey and the larger culture’s implicit query—who is my fellow citizen, who is the good neighbor—by reproducing some of Account’s key scenes from the perspective of people of a caste—“servant,” “negro,” “foreigner”—neglected in Carey’s Account. Through this staging, Narrative suggests that good citizens have a duty “to do all the good” they can toward “suffering fellow mortals,”¹²² that is, to approach others as equals not simply out of a desire not to offend but rather out of a position of proactive goodwill. Such contact, “conducted in a mode of good will” across social boundaries (between Samaritans and Jews, free African and white citizens, strangers, etc.), as Samuel R. Delany would later explain, “is the locus of democracy as visible social drama,” providing “the lymphatic system of a democratic metropolis.”¹²³ In other words, Jones and Allen realized that this vision of and action toward others as neighbors (Narrative’s real sensibility) could create horizontal structures and day-to-day engagements more conducive to egalitarian citizenship than could contemporary notions of tiered civic republicanism.

      The neighborly citizen understands that benevolence means more than appearing virtuous; it means mutual aid: collective action against needs that threaten individual competence, in the recognition that a threat to the individual is, ultimately, a threat to all. In the context of the fever, the implication of mutual aid in “suffering fellow mortals” should not be overlooked. Jones and Allen’s multiple references to those in need as “fellow mortals,” rather than distinguishing between themselves