An American Plague Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  No One Noticed

  “All Was Not Right”

  Church Bells Tolling

  Confusion, Distress, and Utter Desolation

  “It Was Our Duty”

  The Prince of Bleeders

  “By Twelve Only”

  “This Unmerciful Enemy”

  “A Delicate Situation”

  Improvements and the Public Gratitude

  “A Modern-Day Time Bomb”

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Illustrations

  Index

  About the Author

  Clarion Books

  215 Park Avenue South

  New York, NY 10003

  Copyright © 2003 by Jim Murphy

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Murphy, Jim

  An American plague : the true and terrifying story of the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 / by Jim Murphy,

  p, cm.

  1. Yellow fever—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—History—18th century— Juvenile literature. [1. Yellow fever—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—History—18th century. 2. Pennsylvania—History—1775–1865.] 1. Title.

  RA644.Y4 M875 2003

  614.5'41'097481109033—dc21 2002151355

  ISBN 978-0-395-77608-7 hardcover

  eISBN 978-0-547-53285-1

  v1.0914

  For Mike and Ben—my wonderful, at-home germ machines. This one’s for you!

  With love, Dad

  From James Hardie’s Philadelphia Directory and Register, 1793. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)

  CHAPTER ONE

  No One Noticed

  About this time, this destroying scourge, the malignant fever, crept in among us.

  —MATHEW CAREY. NOVEMBER 1793

  Saturday, August 3, 1793. The sun came up, as it had every day since the end of May, bright, hot, and unrelenting. The swamps and marshes south of Philadelphia had already lost a great deal of water to the intense heat, while the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers had receded to reveal long stretches of their muddy, root-choked banks. Dead fish and gooey vegetable matter were exposed and rotted, while swarms of insects droned in the heavy, humid air.

  In Philadelphia itself an increasing number of cats were dropping dead every day, attracting, one Philadelphian complained, “an amazing number of flies and other insects.” Mosquitoes were everywhere, though their high-pitched whirring was particularly loud near rain barrels, gutters, and open sewers.

  These sewers, called “sinks,” were particularly ripe this year. Most streets in the city were unpaved and had no system of covered sewers and pipes to channel water away from buildings. Instead, deep holes were dug at various street corners to collect runoff water and anything else that might be washed along. Dead animals were routinely tossed into this soup, where everything decayed and sent up noxious bubbles to foul the air.

  Down along the docks lining the Delaware, cargo was being loaded onto ships that would sail to New York, Boston, and other distant ports. The hard work of hoisting heavy casks into the hold was accompanied by the stevedores’ usual grunts and muttered oaths.

  The ferryboat (right) from Camden, New Jersey, has just arrived at the busy Arch Street dock. (THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA)

  The men laboring near Water Street had particular reason to curse. The sloop Amelia from Santo Domingo had anchored with a cargo of coffee, which had spoiled during the voyage. The bad coffee was dumped on Ball’s Wharf, where it putrefied in the sun and sent out a powerful odor that could be smelled over a quarter mile away. Benjamin Rush, one of Philadelphia’s most celebrated doctors and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, lived three long blocks from Ball’s Wharf, but he recalled that the coffee stank “to the great annoyance of the whole neighborhood.”

  Despite the stench, the streets nearby were crowded with people that morning—ship owners and their captains talking seriously, shouting children darting between wagons or climbing on crates and barrels, well-dressed men and women out for a stroll, servants and slaves hurrying from one chore to the next. Philadelphia was then the largest city in North America, with nearly 51,000 inhabitants; those who didn’t absolutely have to be indoors working had escaped to the open air to seek relief from the sweltering heat.

  Many of them stopped at one of the city’s 415 shops, whose doors and windows were wide open to let in light and any hint of a cooling breeze. The rest continued along, headed for the market on High Street.

  Here three city blocks were crowded with vendors calling their wares while eager shoppers studied merchandise or haggled over weights and prices. Horse-drawn wagons clattered up and down the cobblestone street, bringing in more fresh vegetables, squawking chickens, and squealing pigs. People commented on the stench from Ball’s Wharf, but the market’s own ripe blend of odors—of roasting meats, strong cheeses, days-old sheep and cow guts, dried blood, and horse manure—tended to overwhelm all others.

  One and a half blocks from the market was the handsomely refurbished mansion of Robert Morris, a wealthy manufacturer who had used his fortune to help finance the Revolutionary War. Morris was lending this house to George and Martha Washington and had moved himself into another, larger one he owned just up the block. Washington was then president of the United States, and Philadelphia was the temporary capital of the young nation and the center of its federal government. Washington spent the day at home in a small, stuffy office seeing visitors, writing letters, and worrying. It was the French problem that was most on his mind these days.

  Rich and poor do their food shopping along Market Street. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)

  Not so many years before, the French monarch, Louis XVI, had sent money, ships, and soldiers to aid the struggling Continental Army’s light against the British. The French aid had been a major reason why Washington was able to surround and force General Charles Cornwallis to surrender at Yorktown in 1781. This military victory eventually led to a British capitulation three years later and to freedom for the United States—and lasting fame for Washington.

  Then, in 1789, France erupted in its own revolution. The common people and a few nobles and churchmen soon gained complete power in France and beheaded Louis XVI in January 1793. Many of France’s neighbors worried that similar revolutions might spread to their countries and wanted the new French republic crushed. Soon after the king was put to death, revolutionary France was at war with Great Britain, Holland, Spain, and Austria.

  Naturally, the French republic had turned to the United States for help, only to have President Washington hesitate. Washington knew that he and his country owed the French an eternal debt. He simply wasn’t sure that the United States had the military strength to take on so many formidable foes.

  Many citizens felt Washington’s Proclamation of Neutrality was a betrayal of the French people. His own secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, certainly did, and he argued bitterly with Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton over the issue. Wasn’t the French fight for individual freedom, Jefferson asked, exactly like America’s struggle against British oppression?

  The situation was made worse in April by the arrival of the French republic’s new minister, Edmond Charles Genêt. Genêt’s first action in the United States was to hire American privateers, privately owned and manned ships, to attack and plunder Br
itish ships in the name of his government. He then traveled to Philadelphia to ask George Washington to support his efforts. Washington gave Genêt what amounted to a diplomatic cold shoulder, meeting with him very briefly, but refusing to discuss the subject of United States support of the French. But a large number of United States citizens loved Genêt and the French cause and rallied around him.

  Pro-French sympathies were further heightened in July by the sudden influx of 2,100 French refugees, who were fleeing a fierce slave rebellion in Santo Domingo. Pro-French demonstrations were held near the president’s home and escalated in intensity. Vice President John Adams was extremely nervous about this “French Madness” and recalled that “ten thousand people in the streets of Philadelphia . . . threatened to drag Washington out of his house, and effect a revolution in the government or compel it to declare war in favor of the French Revolution.”

  While Washington worried, the city’s taverns, beer gardens, and coffeehouses—all 176 of them—were teeming with activity that Saturday. There men, and a few women, lifted their glasses in toasts and singing and let the hours slip away in lively conversation. Business and politics and the latest gossip were the favorite topics. No doubt the heat, the foul stink from Ball’s Wharf, and the country’s refusal to join with France were discussed and argued over at length.

  In all respects it seemed as if August 3 was a very normal day, with business and buying and pleasure as usual.

  Oh, there were a few who felt a tingle of unease. For weeks an unusually large supply of wild pigeons had been for sale at the market. Popular folklore suggested that such an abundance of pigeons always brought with it unhealthy air and sickness.

  Dr. Rush had no time for such silly notions, but he, too, sensed that something odd was happening. His concern focused on a series of illnesses that had struck his patients throughout the year—the mumps in January, jaw and mouth infections in February, scarlet fever in March, followed by influenza in July. “There was something in the heat and drought,” the good doctor speculated, “which was uncommon, in their influence upon the human body.”

  A group of well-to-do men gather at the City Tavern to drink, smoke their pipes, and talk away the afternoon. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)

  The Reverend J. Henry C. Helmuth of the Lutheran congregation, too, thought something was wrong in the city, though it had nothing to do with sickness of the body. It was the souls of its citizens he worried about. “Philadelphia . . . seemed to strive to exceed all other places in the breaking of the Sabbath,” he noted. An increasing number of people shunned church and went instead to the taverns, where they drank and gambled; too many others spent their free time in theaters which displayed “rope-dancing and other shows.” Sooner or later, he warned, the city would feel God’s displeasure.

  Rush and Helmuth would have been surprised to know that their worries were turning to reality on August 3. For on that Saturday a young French sailor rooming at Richard Denny’s boarding house, over on North Water Street, was desperately ill with a fever. Eighteenth-century record keeping wasn’t very precise, so no one bothered to write down his name. Besides, this sailor was poor and a foreigner, not the sort of person who would draw much attention from the community around him. All we know is that his fever worsened and was accompanied by violent seizures, and that a few days later he died.

  One of the many narrow, forgotten alleys of Philadelphia. (THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA)

  Other residents at Denny’s would follow this sailor to the grave—a Mr. Moore fell into a stupor and passed away, Mrs. Richard Parkinson expired on August 7, next the lodging house owner and his wife, Mary, and then the first sailor’s roommate. Around the same time, two people in the house next to Denny’s died of the same severe fever.

  Eight deaths in the space of a week in two houses on the same street . . . but the city did not take notice. Summer fevers were common visitors to all American cities in the eighteenth century, and therefore not headline news. Besides, Denny’s was located on a narrow out-of-the-way street—really more an alley than a street. “It is much confined,” a resident remarked, “ill-aired, and, in every respect, is a disagreeable street.” Things happened along this street all the time—sometimes very bad things—that went unnoticed by the authorities and the rest of the population.

  So the deaths did not disrupt Philadelphia much at all. Ships came and went; men and women did chores, talked, and sought relief from the heat and insects; the markets and shops hummed with activity; children played; and the city, state, and federal governments went about their business.

  No one noticed that the church bells were tolling more often than usual to announce one death, and then another. They rang for Dr. Hugh Hodge’s little daughter, for Peter Aston, for John Weyman, for Mary Shewell, and for a boy named McNair. No one knew that a killer was already moving through their streets with them, an invisible stalker that would go house to house until it had touched everyone, rich or poor, in some terrible way.

  From The Federal Gazette, August 23, 1793. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)

  CHAPTER TWO

  “All Was Not Right”

  8 or 10 persons buried out of Water St, between Race and Arch Sts.; many sick in our neighborhood, and in ye City generally.

  —ELIZABETH DRINKER, AUGUST 21, 1793

  Monday, August 19. It was clear that thirty-three-year-old Catherine LeMaigre was dying, and dying horribly and painfully. Between agonized gasps and groans she muttered that her stomach felt as if it were burning up. Every ten minutes or so her moaning would stop abruptly and she would vomit a foul black bile.

  Her husband, Peter, called in two neighborhood doctors to save his young wife. One was Dr. Hugh Hodge, whose own daughter had been carried off by the same fever just days before. Hodge had been an army surgeon during the Revolutionary War, and while stubborn and crusty in his ways, he was a respected physician. The other was Dr. John Foulke, who was a fellow of Philadelphia’s prestigious College of Physicians and a member of the Pennsylvania Hospital board.

  Hodge and Foulke did what they could for their patient. They gave her cool drinks of barley water and apple water to reduce the fever, and red wine with laudanum to help her rest. Her forehead, face, and arms were washed regularly with damp cloths.

  Nothing worked, and Catherine LeMaigre’s condition worsened. Her pulse slowed, her eyes grew bloodshot, her skin took on the pale-yellow color that gave the disease its name. More black vomit came spewing forth. In desperation, the two physicians sent for their esteemed colleague Dr. Benjamin Rush.

  Rush was forty-seven years old and so highly respected that he was often called in by colleagues when they were baffled by a case. His medical training had been extensive, consisting of five years of apprenticeship with the pre-eminent doctor in the United States, John Redman. After this he had gone to Europe to study under the most skilled surgeons and doctors in the western world.

  He was passionate and outspoken in his beliefs, no matter what the subject. He opposed slavery, felt that alcohol and tobacco should be avoided, urged that the corporal punishment of children be stopped, and thought that the best way to keep a democracy strong was by having universal education. Along with his beliefs went an unimaginable amount of energy. Despite a persistent cough and weak lungs that often left him gasping for air, he worked from early in the morning until late at night—writing letters and papers, visiting patients, reading the latest medical literature, or attending to any one of a number of institutions and charities he belonged to.

  Hodge and Foulke told Rush about Catherine LeMaigre’s symptoms and what they had done to help her. There was nothing much else they could do. Rush said, after the three men left her bedchamber to discuss the case. Rush then noted that in recent days he had seen “an unusual number of bilious fevers, accompanied with symptoms of uncommon malignity.” In a grave voice, his seriousness reflected in his intense blue eyes, he added that “all was not right in our city.”
/>   The two other doctors agreed, and then all three recounted the symptoms they had seen. The sickness began with chills, headache, and a painful aching in the back, arms, and legs. A high fever developed, accompanied by constipation. This stage lasted around three days, and then the fever suddenly broke and the patient seemed to recover.

  But only for a few short hours.

  The next stage saw the fever shoot up again. The skin and eyeballs turned yellow, as red blood cells were destroyed, causing the bile pigment bilirubin to accumulate in the body; nose, gums, and intestines began bleeding; and the patient vomited stale, black blood. Finally, the pulse grew weak, the tongue turned a dry brown, and the victim became depressed, confused, and delirious.

  This French watercolor, done in 1819, is perhaps the first illustration to show a yellow fever victim in the early stages of the illness. (THE COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS OF PHILADELPHIA)

  Rush noted another sign as well: tiny reddish eruptions on the skin. “They appeared chiefly on the arms, but they sometimes extended to the breast.” Physicians called these sores petechiae, which is Latin for skin spots, and Rush observed that they “resembled moscheto bites.”

  Clearly, things have gone from bad to worse for the fever patient. (THE COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS OF PHILADELPHIA)

  Hodge then pointed out that the deaths, including his daughter’s, had all happened on or near Water Street. Foulke told of other deaths along the street and said he knew the origin of the fevers: the repulsive smell in the air caused by the rotting coffee on Ball’s Wharf.