Despite all the controversies between doctors spread out in newspapers,and most still managed to get printed and distributed, people in the city were not necessarily paying attention to what doctors wrote. They knew the fever was contagious, and they imprisoned themselves in their houses. If they still got the fever, they ascribed it to god's will. The behavior within the family once the disease struck, which varied from panicked abandonment to round the clock care, depended on the character of the family, not physicians' advice. Each family crisis played out within days. Decisions were instantaneous, and to some the drama was ennobling.
Wistar's essay did not even regulate the behavior of his aunt Margaret Wistar Haines, who got the fever shortly after it was published. Margaret Haines was a Quaker famed for her tireless work with the poor. However since the beginning of the epidemic the 64 year old woman confined herself to her house, entertained in the main by Rebecca Jones who preached that one could not escape the rod. When Margaret had "a severe chill," followed by a "smart fever," she sent her daughter away, "for it's a serious thing to visit the sick at his awful time," and asked for a black nurse.
The nurse her daughter hired seemed "little used to good nursing," but she proved to be "very attentive," and "pleased" the patient. Margaret's son came into the city, much to the distress of his wife. Margaret kept him from her room arguing that coming from the country air he was too vulnerable. She looked at him from a window. He stayed in the house, anxiously taking preventatives like Fothergill's pills which "opened" his body "cleverly." When he went to the door to talk to his mother he had "garlick or segar constantly" in his mouth. He worried that the letters he sent to his wife in the country might carry infection so he smoked them and wrote warnings on the envelop, e.g. "don't let the bearer come into the house," or "turn this horse into the pasture and then nobody go near him." He was discomforted by the warm temperature, in the low 80s that weekend, and found "they have more misketoos in the house than I remember and wonder how they can sleep at all."
Margaret was bled and blistered by Dr. Parke. She let Daniel Offley pass into the sickroom because he had visited many of the sick. Offley did more than comfort Margaret. When a prominent Quaker like Haines died, a notice describing her life and her demeanor at death was included in the Society's records. Offley waited through her deliriums and heard her repeat twice, "O Lord, thy will and not mine be done, be with me to the end if it be thy holy will, blessed be thy name, forever and ever." Her daughter, who did sneak into her room, got chills and then fever, and took to her own bed feeling as if she had been blessed. The nurse could provide what little else her dying mother needed, so she, the daughter, could die happily, for her "life had been spared while I was capable to render any assistance or relief to my dearest and valued parent." She went to her room with "a black lad who was to stay that night with me." After "dreadful conflict and bodily suffering," Margaret died quietly at 5 a.m. Her daughter's fever abated. The distraught son did not get infected and was encouraged by friends to believe that he had done all a dutiful son could.
A powerful logic kept many families in the grip of disease and death. Once the Yearly Meeting ended John Todd, Jr., a delegate, planned to join his wife Dolley, his son and baby, at Gray's Ferry along the Schuylkill. John, Sr., and his wife, who had also stayed for the meeting, would join their other son James who had removed his family elsewhere in the countryside. But before the meeting ended, Todd's clerk got sick. Todd decided he could not leave him. James came in to get his parents, but they decided they could not leave John. Todd nursed his clerk, and didn't get the disorder. But on Friday the 27th Todd's father did. The clerk died the next day. John's wife Dolley, who was with the children at Gray's Ferry along the Schuylkill, was desperate. She had been raised in Virginia and had few friends in Pennsylvania. The letters she wrote to her husband begging him to come to her are lost. She also wrote to her brother-in-law: "a revered father in the jaws of death, and a lov'd husband in perpetual danger.... I am almost distracted with distress and apprehension - is it too late for their removal? - or can no interference of their earthly friends rescue them from the too general fate? I have repeatedly entreated John to leave home, from which we are now unavoidably banished - but alas he cannot leave his father...."
Benjamin Smith was finally in a position to take his family out of the city. His family was together once again, and all relatively healthy, as was his in-laws on Walnut Street. His wife's aunt was no longer having fits and Margaret Morris was alarmed because the "Destroying Angel" was "within a few doors." Yet they all decided to stay. On Friday Smith explained in a letter that the very health of his family meant they had to stay. Rush had told Smith's cousin, after he had recovered from the fever, that it was okay for him to leave but not his healthy wife, "for the exercise of riding and keenness of the country air would probably excite into action the infection that might be in her body, when by remaining in town there was a probability that it might pass off again without any effect." Plus, Smith thought, to take the infection to friends in the country would be unforgivable.
That left Smith longing for something to do. The ships William Penn and George Barclay had arrived from London only to be warned not to come up because consignees had fled and the customs house was closed. The only business Smith transacted was taking two notes to a bank where he "threw" them at a clerk.
A trip by the Smiths to Burlington would have been problematical. The rest of the country from Boston to Savannah was redoubling its vigilance against refugees from the Philadelphia epidemic. The merchant Levi Hollingsworth reacted bitterly when he received pleas from his brothers in Baltimore that he and his family should flee before it was too late. At the same time one brother was officially sent by Baltimore's health committee to organize troops along the Susquehanna River to prevent refugees from crossing. The Baltimore brothers thought that if Levi and his invalid wife camped in the country a few nights, no more than seven which was the quarantine Baltimore required, they could come get them.
The newspapers harped on the cruel treatment meted out to those who left the city. A Trenton mob let a man starve to death because he had been in a house where another man from Philadelphia had died of the fever. An enfeebled and sick Irish immigrant trying to get to Lancaster died by a fence "a few paces beyond the tavern on this side of Mill Creek, where he could not obtain admittance. Ye unfeeling savages!" A wagon from Philadelphia had been stopped by a mob at Milford, Delaware, that "seized a woman that was in the waggon, stripped, tarred and feathered and otherwise ill treated her." Later, a citizen of Milford wrote saying nothing of the kind happened there, but may have in Easton, Maryland.
Newspapers exaggerated the terror inflicted on refugees, but it would have been difficult to exaggerate the fear. Private letters reported that the principal streets in Baltimore were "guarded by fixed bayonet." The minutes of New York's health committee record the ordeal of a widow whose husband was said to have died of yellow fever. A mob wouldn't let her return to her lodging. The committee sent a doctor to supervise the burial and plead with the mob. The family had not even been in Philadelphia. Before Alexander Hamilton and family were allowed to come to the Albany home of Gen. Philip Schuyler, Mrs. Hamilton's father, Schuyler agreed with the Albany city council that the Hamilton family would submit to an examination by physicians (paid for by Schuyler;) their clothing would be destroyed and fresh clothes provided; and they would remain at Schuyler's house under guard (the guards paid by Schuyler.) Once in Albany Hamilton rebelled at the restrictions which "paternal anxiety" led Schuyler to accept. Hamilton argued that Albany was "not at liberty to sport with the rights and feelings of fellow citizens." If enforced to the fullest extent, the rules would expose one "to perish in the fields without subsistence and without shelter." The Albany city council did not change its rules but excepted Hamilton because he had not been in Philadelphia for over 14 days.
Years later a doctor, who had been a medical student at the time, recalled leaving Philadelphia after he got sick and going to his parents' farm near Salem, New Jersey. His parents nursed him but the town forbade a doctor to go to the house. That worthy met the father every day at a tree a quarter mile away and advised him on treatment. As the student recovered he was amused to look out his second story window and see "travelers along the road, apprised of my illness,... climb over fences and make a wide circuit to avoid the danger."
On Saturday the 28th Philip Freneau published "A ialogue Between a Citizen of Philadelphia and a Jersey Farmer (Ten Miles From Town.") The farmer stopped the citizen, calling him "a yellow fever looking fellow." The citizen was healthy and offered the farmer his pulse. "Feel your pulse, Sir! May I die by the grip of an anodyne neclace, if I would come within ten yards of you for ten pounds. Why, sir, your breath is pestilence - your face is the very image of destruction your eyes are death's pooplanthorns - you are a moving mass of putridity, corruption, plague, poison, and putrefaction. Your pulse! - not I, faith, - nor do I believe you have any more pulse than a man that was laid in his grave thirty years ago." When the citizen stepped forward, the farmer brandished his pitchfork and threatened to "instantly finish what the yellow fever has begun."
Rush did not have the leisure to enjoy Freneau's humor. Early Saturday morning he was woken by Dr. Griffitts whose uncle, Samuel Powel, was in a desperate situation. Rush went to the small farmhouse, failed to revive him and left Griffitts to lessen the agony of his old friend's death. As a rule, to keep up his courage and maintain his effectiveness for helping the living, Rush avoided the dying. That a former mayor, reputed one of the wealthiest men in the city, who was well attended during his illness, should be near death after using his remedies, did not give Rush pause. He blamed "the neglect of a 4th bleeding by the young doctor who attended him."
The time spent with Powel kept Rush from his sister, not that Rush blamed that for her worsening condition. "She had the disease three days before she would take a dose of medicine or submit to be bled," Rush explained to Julia on Sunday. The "infatuation" people had that they were not in danger was one of the fever's "most characteristic symptoms." But not the worst symptom. Her struggle reminded him that the disease "is indeed a most formidable one in all its forms. No wonder it requires medicines that possess the strength of Hercules to subdue it." He feared she would die that night, and prayed that God would give him strength. That said, he bragged to his wife that he "paid one-and-thirty visits and feel myself no ways weakened by them. On the contrary, the exercise of my body and mind in the duties of my profession adds daily to the vigor and activity of both. Never was the healing art so truly delightful to me! and never had I more reason to be thankful than I now have for the honor God has done me in giving me health enough to renew my intercourse with my patients." Redman was better, Coxe too. Fisher back eating at the table. Van Berckel "in a safe way" after seven bleedings.
Rush and many others noted that the mortality had declined on Friday and Saturday to half what it was ten days before. Rush thought it was owing "partly to the more general use of the new remedies." Others gave more credit to Bush Hill. Henry Helmuth recorded in his journal Saturday night, "much good news from Bush Hill that sick people get better." Rush grasped at a rumor that doctors there were being forced to use his methods by popular demand. That wasn't true. For example, a 26 year old woman came to the hospital "senseless, and almost without pulse; she mechanically applied her fingers to her nose, which she pinched, and covered her face with the black blood that came from both mouth and nostrils; her face was entirely yellow, mouth and eyes half open, which gave her a most hideous appearance." Deveze had "hot bricks" applied to her cold extremities and "ordered a cordial draught to be given in spoonfuls, when she should be able to swallow." She eventually recovered.
Rush never wrote up a case history, even of the case he must have observed most closely, his sister's. In his notebook his only reference to her was in a list he made of "exciting causes" of the fever. Samuel Powel became sick after a ride on horseback; John Swanwick after eating a "French salad;" Rush himself got the fever after eating "six spoonfuls of broth;" and his "dear sister" after "six mouthfuls of meat." Such analysis was as old as medicine itself and was a necessary form of absolution. Medical theory held that debility, especially various immoral practices, made people prone to disease. Those who were not immoral were susceptible because contagion was in the air and in their bodies and able to be excited by something as innocent as "six mouthfuls of meat.")
On Monday morning Rush closed his Sunday letter to Julia with news that his sister was alive, and "with some symptoms which are favorable." As for himself, he continued "to mend and through divine goodness even to thrive upon labor, care, persecution, and a milk and vegetable diet." It was a cloudy day and Rush prayed for "winds, rain, and hoar frost" to "destroy the pestilential contagion." Then he went out and made 33 visits.
As he rallied himself, his wife Julia was weary and fearful of his crusade. Of course, she wrote as many letters to her husband as he wrote to her. Hers of September 24 is extant. Rush received it some time that Monday. In it she reacted to some of Rush's gloomiest letters: "I feared just what has happened when I heard poor Stall was sick at our house. I think in your weak state to be exposed to as much contagion from within and without, will be too much for you.... I think for the sake of your patients and your poor children, you should have kept your own house as long free from infection.... Think how I must feel. I have not slept above three hours for two nights past." If he got sick she would come to nurse him, but "the idea of so many sick and dying in the house creates a perfect horror in my mind. The boys are much affected - they say they fear they shall lose both their parents now." She worried about Fisher lying in the room where she had put her clothes assuming the room would stay locked. "If that room is an hospital and black nurses about the house, I shall have a poor account of them I fear." Just as he did in his letters, she sought God's help, but still worried: "I tell your children, if we were all as worthy of divine favor as you are, I should not have a fear for you,... but if you are called from us, it will be for the punishment of our sins."
Rush replied instantly and began by marveling at her uncharacteristic tone: "You write like a spectator only of the distresses of our city." Then he gave a ringing affirmation of his mission, his sacrifice, his idea of the epidemic, and his fearlessness. "What is a little furniture, a few clothes, a whole city, or even the globe itself compared with one human life?" began his hyperbolic defense of taking in Stall and Fisher. They had no place else to go "and had I shut my doors upon them, they must have perished in the streets." He reminded Julia of the Gospel teachings: "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another, even as I have loved you." Belief in that had allowed him to expose himself to the contagion for five weeks "with so little concern, nay with so much pleasure.... I did not dare to desert my post, and I believe even fear for a moment to be an act of disobedience to the gospel of Jesus Christ." (It's not clear if Rush had yet received a pathetic letter from Stall's mother lamenting that no one had told her of her son's illness. She had had a room in her house specially whitewashed to receive her son if he got sick and she would have come back to nurse him. She blamed a black maid left behind, not Rush, for not telling her.)
Then he soothed Julia by telling her that many in the city appreciated her sacrifice: "Wm. Hall's only son has escaped death by six, and Master Jno. Adams at Mr. Ketland's by seven bleedings. The latter asked politely two days ago for you and John and Richard, and concluded by saying that `he should always love me like a father.' Four of our neighbor Cresson's family owe their lives under God to the free use of the new remedies. They are full of affection and gratitude to our family. In short to tell you of all the people who have been bled and purged out of the grave in our city would require a book as large as the Philadelphia directory." All that said, he assured her that he used his strength "with caution. I walk to no patients but to those who are in the neighborhood."
His sister died at 3 p.m. on Tuesday, October 1. Within a half hour Rush left the house to visit patients. He did not have time to see her buried. Marcus, a mulatto boy Peter, and Billy Gray saw her buried by evening. "According as a sense of duty, or as grief has predominated in my mind," Rush wrote a few months later, "I have approved, and disapproved, of this act ever since." At last a death affected, deeply affected him. In his letter to his wife he recalled how his sister had "spoke... with great joy of the love and goodness of God, and repeated several passages from the Psalms suitable to her situation. Her last words to me last night at 10 o'clock were 'A thousand and a thousand thanks to you, my dear brother.' Soon after this she became delirious and said little that could be connected or heard." He recalled her sacrifices for others, and her expressed willingness to sacrifice her life for her brother's. He said little about his feelings. After reporting on the rest of the day's activities, he remembered his mother who bore "the death of my dear, dear sister with great resignation and fortitude." There he broke down,"Ah! why did I mention her name again? My heart has flown into the coffin with her."
In his memoir of the epidemic Rush wrote "From this time I declined in health and strength. All motion became painful to me. My appetite began to fail. My night sweats continued. My short and imperfect sleep was disturbed by distressing or frightful dreams. The scenes of them were derived altogether from sick rooms and grave-yards. I concealed my sorrows as much as possible from my patients; but when alone, the retrospect of what was past, and the prospect of what was before me, the termination of which was invisible, often filled my soul with the most poignant anguish. I wept frequently when retired from the public eye...."
If he was indeed breaking down, he concealed it well from his old friend Ebenezer Hazard. Although their relationship had been cool for several years, Hazard had once been his best friend and so might have detected an incipient breakdown. Hazard, who feared he had caught the fever, found Rush as exasperating as ever. On Monday, Rush thought him "very ill" but not in immediate danger, and had Hazard lose 12 to 15 ounces of blood and take a mercury pill. On Tuesday he thought Hazard still "in jeopardy," and he had him lose another 10 ounces and continue taking pills. On Wednesday Rush once again prescribed bleeding. Hazard felt his own pulse and objected. Rush warned him, Hazard wrote, that "this opinion [is] one of the most dangerous symptoms of the case; the disorder was extremely insidious; the case extremely critical; not a moment to be lost; send for the bleeder directly. In the mean time, take this pill; and, if that does not operate in one hour, take this. You must be glystered today; but, if your not bled today, I shall not be surprised to hear that you are dead tomorrow." Hazard called in Dr. Hodge, who offered to consult with Rush, as they had often done before. Rush refused, and, in a letter to his wife fumed, "this man has seen a great deal of the disorder, but he is no more wiser for it than the black nurses who attend the sick."
Hodge prescribed bark and wine. As he recovered Hazard recoiled at the newspaper ads for "Dr. Rush's Mercurial Sweating Purge," which reminded him of ads for a "mountebank." Recalling the doctor in the novel Gil Blas, Hazard dismissed Rush as "a perfect Sangrado, [who] would order blood enough to be drawn to fill Mambrino's helmet, with as little ceremony as a mosquito would fill himself upon your leg." Rush told his wife that purging and bleeding "laid the foundation" of Hazard's cure.
Judging from what he wrote to his wife, Rush completed the week with eclat. He certainly concealed his returning weakness from her. Her letter of the 24th had underscored how important it was to her well-being not to unduly alarm her. On Wednesday he reported that he could walk up stairs without resting and without aid of the banister. On Thursday the 3rd he "paid between 40 and 50 visits." That evening he still had strength enough to write a long letter to Dr. John R.B. Rodgers of New York City about the "new remedies." Rodgers had asked about them, as had many other doctors. Rush decided to answer him with a major statement and have it published in the newspaper which would lead to its being printed throughout the country.
He began by dismissing one controversial issue in two sentences. He had "satisfactory documents to prove that the disease was generated in our city." He would share them later. The imperative of the moment was curing the disease. He was ready to give some of the theory behind his remedies. Purges created "an artificial weak part, which, by inviting a determination of the fluids to the bowels, prevents those effusions in the brain, stomach, bowels, liver, and lungs which bring on death." "The pulse, the appearance of the blood, the spontaneous hemorrhages, and the weather" all indicated the need for bleeding. As the season advanced more and more blood had to be taken, up to 80 ounces, 5 pounds, "and in most cases with the happiest effects."
He ridiculed other remedies. Laudanum was poison in this fever. Bark, wine and cold baths were useless. He did encourage "cool air and cool drinks," and blisters were of some use for local pains if put on after sufficient purging. Only in the case of persistent vomiting, not relieved by bleeding, did he suggest a gentle remedy; "a tablespoon of sweet milk given every half hour, or... weak camomile tea."
He repeated his assertion that he cured 99 out of 100, but qualified the claim. That success came before his "late indisposition," after which some died "from the want of well-timed bleeding and purging." Recovery often depended on the application of remedies at a "certain hour." He blamed nurses, the lack of bleeders, and the increased "concentration of the contagion in every part of the city," for decreasing the success of his remedies. With proper care, however, the fever was "as much under the power of medicine as the measles or influenza." In the last part of the letter he ridiculed the opponents of his methods. In using wine, bark and laudanum, "they might as well throw water and oil at the same time upon fire in order to extinguish it." They called the disorder the jail fever, then the common remittent. By insisting otherwise he may "terrify" his patients, "but I save them by their fears, for I excite in them at once a speedy application for help and a faithful obedience to all my prescriptions."
Even friendly biographers would find these claims the height of Rush's gall, given that upwards of 100 a day were dying. Indeed, Rush was no longer a reliable witness to the course of the epidemic. Perhaps his paranoia blinded him to what was actually happening in the city. Van Berkle told him how he had bumped into Alexander Hamilton on the road, and was told, that if he got the fever, to get directions on Stevens's methods from Oliver Wolcott. The story gnawed on Rush. On the one hand Wolcott had asked him to treat a servant left in town. On the other, Hamilton was the manipulative party leader. Rush couldn't accept that Hamilton was only trying to help his friends by sharing the methods of a doctor who had been his friend since childhood. "I think it probable that if the new remedies had been introduced by any other person than a decided Democrat and a friend of Madison and Jefferson," Rush wrote to his wife, "they would have met with less opposition from Colonel Hamilton."
Even in that highly politicized era, such thoughts in the darkest days of the epidemic were strange. The editor Benjamin Franklin Bache who was notorious for tarring every issue with the muck of politics had just closed his newspaper and left the city later explaining that printing the disputes of the physicians was "very injurious," and no one had any taste for politics.
In Rush's defense, given the death of his sister, his fatigue, it's understandable that he was unable to reflect on his valiant crusade as a scientist. He craved apotheosis, not epidemiology. He was partially successful. Rush's energetic style, erudition, conviction, and most importantly his remaining in the city fighting the epidemic made his letter to Rodgers a beacon of hope, giving the nation a sense of triumph against the deadly scourge. His sacrifice especially appealed to younger doctors. A recent student of Rush's in New York, Elihu Smith, made it a point to talk with friends who had made it out of Philadelphia. A young doctor Smith had known in medical school, Samuel Conover, described his own cure early in the epidemic with wine and opium, and told Smith that Rush had not been as successful "as Rush himself supposes." Smith passed that on to a Hartford doctor without endorsing it, "But I trust more to Rush than to Conover. I foresee that if Rush survives it, he is going to be extremely ill-treated by some and perhaps the greater part of the physicians there. But he will come forth as gold from a furnace."
But in Philadelphia, the reprinting of Rush's letter to Rodgers caused less of a stir. It was the mayor's Committee's efforts, not Rush's, that became the symbol of the city's struggle. By focusing on the Committee's work with the poor, rather than on Rush's theories, the community could define the epidemic in acceptable terms. Certainly the continuation, if not the cause of the epidemic, could be blamed on the improvident poor. Another letter from the city published in New York was not inspiring like Rush's but it did explain the death toll: "It is well ascertained that the disorder rages most violently and destructively in confined places and narrow alleys,... in poor dirty houses, and amongst the intemperate, imprudent people, and sad havoc made among sailors, woman of bad character, and those who frequent such places. Water Street, Pewter-Plater, Coombes, Mead, and other Alleys..., are most infected."
Ironically by not visiting the poor, Rush was spared a side of the epidemic that Committee members and others regularly saw. As Henry Helmuth noted, "poor people did not take the slightest precaution to cleanse the stuffy air - windows and doors closed; no fumigation; no sprinkling of vinegar." Helmuth once turned back from the door of one hovel because he sensed a "strong death odor." Usually he went and saw the horrors: a woman with "coal black eyes and a green nose;" and a man "who turned black while he was praying." The principal shock was the neglect, "The woman dying in an exceedingly small room, the man wretched with the very same disease; no one to attend them except a very small boy. No neighbor approaches the house."
The deaths of Committee members were blamed on their visits to the poor. The cardmaker and choir master, Andrew Adgate got the fever on the 25th and died five days later. Daniel Offley went to bed with the fever on October 3. The Committee took pains to prove the poor at fault. It hired a man to conduct a block by block census. On Market Street he counted 163 houses shut, 112 open, 807 people had fled, 849 had stayed. Only 39 people had died. Then he went into the alleys off the street where the poor crowded. In Letitia Court with 14 houses, only 3 were shut; of 88 who remained in them, 18 had died. He found that mortality in some alleys off Front Street was as high as 31%.
Increasingly the agency best able to save the city became in most people's eyes, not Rush and his pills, but Bush Hill. On Saturday the 28th the patient count at Bush Hill reached 106. On October 1, 48 new patients were admitted. Rumors of cures increased the flow of patients. Dr. William Annan, who worked for the Committee examining people who wanted to go the hospital, found that "no sooner was a person afflicted with a head ache or oppression about the praecordia [chest] then he became anxious to be removed to Bush Hill." On October 2 the Committee ordered a new building, 50 by 20 feet, built at Bush Hill. Soon there were a total of 174 beds divided into 20 rooms, plus, in an adjacent barn, 97 beds for convalescents. Patients were separated by sex and there were separate rooms for the dying and the "very low." Each room had a nurse. Other nurses kept a constant supply of "herb-tea and beverages," principally centaury tea and boiled lemonade. Doctors visited each patient twice a day. At 11 a.m. patients were fed "broth with rice, bread, boiled beef, veal, mutton and chicken, with cream of rice to those whose stomachs will not bear stronger nourishment." There was a lighter meal at 6 p.m. featuring broth, rice and boiled prunes.
From afar many in the nation admired Rush's heroism but the example of charity that Bush Hill provided forced them to change their estimate of the epidemic. In early October the guilt ridden refugees who crowded outlying towns began raising money. Many communities began imitating the example. Farmers and merchants sent food. The mayor of New York wrote to Mayor Clarkson asking him what the city needed. The Committee welcomed help from neighboring communities, especially those tied closely to the city commercially. The offer from New York was eyed suspiciously. By describing the epidemic as a crisis primarily caused by and suffered by the poor, Philadelphia's leaders defined a situation that seemed manageable, providing the continuity, not the dislocations, in the city were remembered. The poor could hardly be scapegoats if the better sort in the city were thought to be at the end of their resources.
In reply to New York, the Committee instructed the mayor to say that "notwithstanding our calamitous situation, all necessaries and comforts are here to be found in abundance," including money, thanks to loans from the Bank of North America. New York could send cash to help repay the loans. It sent $5,000.
Another burlesque, probably by Freneau, suggested why the city did not want for supplies. There was money to be made. Two Jersey farmers discussed the situation. George couldn't resist the temptation and went to market with his wife's butter and eggs. At Cooper's Ferry he saw "everything across the river look so terribly yellow," so he stuffed his nose and ears with putty, put a handkerchief over his mouth and ventured forward. His friend William was incredulous about his actually seeing the fever. "Bless your heart, I tell you the whole town is as a yellow as my pumkin patch." George landed at Arch Street ferry and on his way to market was so struck by a smell from a house where 59 people had died that he was knocked "sprawling in the gutter." Although he saw six people die on the spot, he managed to get up and sell his produce for exorbitant prices to the Negroes, "for they only come to market." William asked if he picked up any news. The Negroes told George that "14,200 have already died - 29,000 have gone out of town - so that only 1425 people remain!" William marveled at the devastation but lured by the high prices decided to hurry into town with his produce.
The bakers, provisions sellers, and butchers (not one butcher got the fever) who stayed in business were not, at that time, publicly blamed for profiteering. Later Andrew Brown was damned as a money grubbing tyrant for continuing to print his Gazette oblivious to the sickness and death in his shop. Brown justified staying as a public service to those still in the city and as a corrective to the lies spread about the city in newspapers around the country. There were almost daily notices, asking for needed supplies at the hospital and continued vigilance in keeping the city clean. On October 1, a notice from Mayor Clarkson called for citizens and fire engines to "wet and clean the streets and alleys" at 8 o'clock the next morning. There had been no rain to speak of since September 9.
This was not merely a brave front put up by the city's establishment. Not only were there enough people in the city to pitch in, there was also many who went about their business as if nothing was amiss. Rush was incredulous when he got a letter from his landlord raising his rent. Around October 1 he saw a man "busily employed laying in wood for the approaching winter." Rush would, he later wrote, "as soon have thought of making provisions for a dinner on the first day of the year 1800." And there was a state wide election scheduled for Tuesday, October 8. There was no campaigning, but no suggestion that it be postponed.
A few ship loads of immigrants even arrived. The ship Polly pulled up to a Philadelphia wharf in late September. One passenger, Peter Seguin, wrote in his diary, that they were able to find bread a quarter mile from the quay. Some Frenchmen at the market overheard Seguin and asked if his ship brought letters from France. Upon learning that he was a clerk in a Bordeaux shipping firm, they suggested he look up Stephen Girard, who took Seguin in and let him dine with him and his other clerks. "At night," Seguin continued in his diary, "I went to walk with one of the young men and to make acquaintance with a young girl which lives in south sixth street."
Go to chapter 10
That left Smith longing for something to do. The ships William Penn and George Barclay had arrived from London only to be warned not to come up because consignees had fled and the customs house was closed. The only business Smith transacted was taking two notes to a bank where he "threw" them at a clerk.
A trip by the Smiths to Burlington would have been problematical. The rest of the country from Boston to Savannah was redoubling its vigilance against refugees from the Philadelphia epidemic. The merchant Levi Hollingsworth reacted bitterly when he received pleas from his brothers in Baltimore that he and his family should flee before it was too late. At the same time one brother was officially sent by Baltimore's health committee to organize troops along the Susquehanna River to prevent refugees from crossing. The Baltimore brothers thought that if Levi and his invalid wife camped in the country a few nights, no more than seven which was the quarantine Baltimore required, they could come get them.
The newspapers harped on the cruel treatment meted out to those who left the city. A Trenton mob let a man starve to death because he had been in a house where another man from Philadelphia had died of the fever. An enfeebled and sick Irish immigrant trying to get to Lancaster died by a fence "a few paces beyond the tavern on this side of Mill Creek, where he could not obtain admittance. Ye unfeeling savages!" A wagon from Philadelphia had been stopped by a mob at Milford, Delaware, that "seized a woman that was in the waggon, stripped, tarred and feathered and otherwise ill treated her." Later, a citizen of Milford wrote saying nothing of the kind happened there, but may have in Easton, Maryland.
Newspapers exaggerated the terror inflicted on refugees, but it would have been difficult to exaggerate the fear. Private letters reported that the principal streets in Baltimore were "guarded by fixed bayonet." The minutes of New York's health committee record the ordeal of a widow whose husband was said to have died of yellow fever. A mob wouldn't let her return to her lodging. The committee sent a doctor to supervise the burial and plead with the mob. The family had not even been in Philadelphia. Before Alexander Hamilton and family were allowed to come to the Albany home of Gen. Philip Schuyler, Mrs. Hamilton's father, Schuyler agreed with the Albany city council that the Hamilton family would submit to an examination by physicians (paid for by Schuyler;) their clothing would be destroyed and fresh clothes provided; and they would remain at Schuyler's house under guard (the guards paid by Schuyler.) Once in Albany Hamilton rebelled at the restrictions which "paternal anxiety" led Schuyler to accept. Hamilton argued that Albany was "not at liberty to sport with the rights and feelings of fellow citizens." If enforced to the fullest extent, the rules would expose one "to perish in the fields without subsistence and without shelter." The Albany city council did not change its rules but excepted Hamilton because he had not been in Philadelphia for over 14 days.
Years later a doctor, who had been a medical student at the time, recalled leaving Philadelphia after he got sick and going to his parents' farm near Salem, New Jersey. His parents nursed him but the town forbade a doctor to go to the house. That worthy met the father every day at a tree a quarter mile away and advised him on treatment. As the student recovered he was amused to look out his second story window and see "travelers along the road, apprised of my illness,... climb over fences and make a wide circuit to avoid the danger."
On Saturday the 28th Philip Freneau published "A ialogue Between a Citizen of Philadelphia and a Jersey Farmer (Ten Miles From Town.") The farmer stopped the citizen, calling him "a yellow fever looking fellow." The citizen was healthy and offered the farmer his pulse. "Feel your pulse, Sir! May I die by the grip of an anodyne neclace, if I would come within ten yards of you for ten pounds. Why, sir, your breath is pestilence - your face is the very image of destruction your eyes are death's pooplanthorns - you are a moving mass of putridity, corruption, plague, poison, and putrefaction. Your pulse! - not I, faith, - nor do I believe you have any more pulse than a man that was laid in his grave thirty years ago." When the citizen stepped forward, the farmer brandished his pitchfork and threatened to "instantly finish what the yellow fever has begun."
Rush did not have the leisure to enjoy Freneau's humor. Early Saturday morning he was woken by Dr. Griffitts whose uncle, Samuel Powel, was in a desperate situation. Rush went to the small farmhouse, failed to revive him and left Griffitts to lessen the agony of his old friend's death. As a rule, to keep up his courage and maintain his effectiveness for helping the living, Rush avoided the dying. That a former mayor, reputed one of the wealthiest men in the city, who was well attended during his illness, should be near death after using his remedies, did not give Rush pause. He blamed "the neglect of a 4th bleeding by the young doctor who attended him."
The time spent with Powel kept Rush from his sister, not that Rush blamed that for her worsening condition. "She had the disease three days before she would take a dose of medicine or submit to be bled," Rush explained to Julia on Sunday. The "infatuation" people had that they were not in danger was one of the fever's "most characteristic symptoms." But not the worst symptom. Her struggle reminded him that the disease "is indeed a most formidable one in all its forms. No wonder it requires medicines that possess the strength of Hercules to subdue it." He feared she would die that night, and prayed that God would give him strength. That said, he bragged to his wife that he "paid one-and-thirty visits and feel myself no ways weakened by them. On the contrary, the exercise of my body and mind in the duties of my profession adds daily to the vigor and activity of both. Never was the healing art so truly delightful to me! and never had I more reason to be thankful than I now have for the honor God has done me in giving me health enough to renew my intercourse with my patients." Redman was better, Coxe too. Fisher back eating at the table. Van Berckel "in a safe way" after seven bleedings.
Rush and many others noted that the mortality had declined on Friday and Saturday to half what it was ten days before. Rush thought it was owing "partly to the more general use of the new remedies." Others gave more credit to Bush Hill. Henry Helmuth recorded in his journal Saturday night, "much good news from Bush Hill that sick people get better." Rush grasped at a rumor that doctors there were being forced to use his methods by popular demand. That wasn't true. For example, a 26 year old woman came to the hospital "senseless, and almost without pulse; she mechanically applied her fingers to her nose, which she pinched, and covered her face with the black blood that came from both mouth and nostrils; her face was entirely yellow, mouth and eyes half open, which gave her a most hideous appearance." Deveze had "hot bricks" applied to her cold extremities and "ordered a cordial draught to be given in spoonfuls, when she should be able to swallow." She eventually recovered.
Rush never wrote up a case history, even of the case he must have observed most closely, his sister's. In his notebook his only reference to her was in a list he made of "exciting causes" of the fever. Samuel Powel became sick after a ride on horseback; John Swanwick after eating a "French salad;" Rush himself got the fever after eating "six spoonfuls of broth;" and his "dear sister" after "six mouthfuls of meat." Such analysis was as old as medicine itself and was a necessary form of absolution. Medical theory held that debility, especially various immoral practices, made people prone to disease. Those who were not immoral were susceptible because contagion was in the air and in their bodies and able to be excited by something as innocent as "six mouthfuls of meat.")
On Monday morning Rush closed his Sunday letter to Julia with news that his sister was alive, and "with some symptoms which are favorable." As for himself, he continued "to mend and through divine goodness even to thrive upon labor, care, persecution, and a milk and vegetable diet." It was a cloudy day and Rush prayed for "winds, rain, and hoar frost" to "destroy the pestilential contagion." Then he went out and made 33 visits.
As he rallied himself, his wife Julia was weary and fearful of his crusade. Of course, she wrote as many letters to her husband as he wrote to her. Hers of September 24 is extant. Rush received it some time that Monday. In it she reacted to some of Rush's gloomiest letters: "I feared just what has happened when I heard poor Stall was sick at our house. I think in your weak state to be exposed to as much contagion from within and without, will be too much for you.... I think for the sake of your patients and your poor children, you should have kept your own house as long free from infection.... Think how I must feel. I have not slept above three hours for two nights past." If he got sick she would come to nurse him, but "the idea of so many sick and dying in the house creates a perfect horror in my mind. The boys are much affected - they say they fear they shall lose both their parents now." She worried about Fisher lying in the room where she had put her clothes assuming the room would stay locked. "If that room is an hospital and black nurses about the house, I shall have a poor account of them I fear." Just as he did in his letters, she sought God's help, but still worried: "I tell your children, if we were all as worthy of divine favor as you are, I should not have a fear for you,... but if you are called from us, it will be for the punishment of our sins."
Rush replied instantly and began by marveling at her uncharacteristic tone: "You write like a spectator only of the distresses of our city." Then he gave a ringing affirmation of his mission, his sacrifice, his idea of the epidemic, and his fearlessness. "What is a little furniture, a few clothes, a whole city, or even the globe itself compared with one human life?" began his hyperbolic defense of taking in Stall and Fisher. They had no place else to go "and had I shut my doors upon them, they must have perished in the streets." He reminded Julia of the Gospel teachings: "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another, even as I have loved you." Belief in that had allowed him to expose himself to the contagion for five weeks "with so little concern, nay with so much pleasure.... I did not dare to desert my post, and I believe even fear for a moment to be an act of disobedience to the gospel of Jesus Christ." (It's not clear if Rush had yet received a pathetic letter from Stall's mother lamenting that no one had told her of her son's illness. She had had a room in her house specially whitewashed to receive her son if he got sick and she would have come back to nurse him. She blamed a black maid left behind, not Rush, for not telling her.)
Then he soothed Julia by telling her that many in the city appreciated her sacrifice: "Wm. Hall's only son has escaped death by six, and Master Jno. Adams at Mr. Ketland's by seven bleedings. The latter asked politely two days ago for you and John and Richard, and concluded by saying that `he should always love me like a father.' Four of our neighbor Cresson's family owe their lives under God to the free use of the new remedies. They are full of affection and gratitude to our family. In short to tell you of all the people who have been bled and purged out of the grave in our city would require a book as large as the Philadelphia directory." All that said, he assured her that he used his strength "with caution. I walk to no patients but to those who are in the neighborhood."
His sister died at 3 p.m. on Tuesday, October 1. Within a half hour Rush left the house to visit patients. He did not have time to see her buried. Marcus, a mulatto boy Peter, and Billy Gray saw her buried by evening. "According as a sense of duty, or as grief has predominated in my mind," Rush wrote a few months later, "I have approved, and disapproved, of this act ever since." At last a death affected, deeply affected him. In his letter to his wife he recalled how his sister had "spoke... with great joy of the love and goodness of God, and repeated several passages from the Psalms suitable to her situation. Her last words to me last night at 10 o'clock were 'A thousand and a thousand thanks to you, my dear brother.' Soon after this she became delirious and said little that could be connected or heard." He recalled her sacrifices for others, and her expressed willingness to sacrifice her life for her brother's. He said little about his feelings. After reporting on the rest of the day's activities, he remembered his mother who bore "the death of my dear, dear sister with great resignation and fortitude." There he broke down,"Ah! why did I mention her name again? My heart has flown into the coffin with her."
In his memoir of the epidemic Rush wrote "From this time I declined in health and strength. All motion became painful to me. My appetite began to fail. My night sweats continued. My short and imperfect sleep was disturbed by distressing or frightful dreams. The scenes of them were derived altogether from sick rooms and grave-yards. I concealed my sorrows as much as possible from my patients; but when alone, the retrospect of what was past, and the prospect of what was before me, the termination of which was invisible, often filled my soul with the most poignant anguish. I wept frequently when retired from the public eye...."
If he was indeed breaking down, he concealed it well from his old friend Ebenezer Hazard. Although their relationship had been cool for several years, Hazard had once been his best friend and so might have detected an incipient breakdown. Hazard, who feared he had caught the fever, found Rush as exasperating as ever. On Monday, Rush thought him "very ill" but not in immediate danger, and had Hazard lose 12 to 15 ounces of blood and take a mercury pill. On Tuesday he thought Hazard still "in jeopardy," and he had him lose another 10 ounces and continue taking pills. On Wednesday Rush once again prescribed bleeding. Hazard felt his own pulse and objected. Rush warned him, Hazard wrote, that "this opinion [is] one of the most dangerous symptoms of the case; the disorder was extremely insidious; the case extremely critical; not a moment to be lost; send for the bleeder directly. In the mean time, take this pill; and, if that does not operate in one hour, take this. You must be glystered today; but, if your not bled today, I shall not be surprised to hear that you are dead tomorrow." Hazard called in Dr. Hodge, who offered to consult with Rush, as they had often done before. Rush refused, and, in a letter to his wife fumed, "this man has seen a great deal of the disorder, but he is no more wiser for it than the black nurses who attend the sick."
Hodge prescribed bark and wine. As he recovered Hazard recoiled at the newspaper ads for "Dr. Rush's Mercurial Sweating Purge," which reminded him of ads for a "mountebank." Recalling the doctor in the novel Gil Blas, Hazard dismissed Rush as "a perfect Sangrado, [who] would order blood enough to be drawn to fill Mambrino's helmet, with as little ceremony as a mosquito would fill himself upon your leg." Rush told his wife that purging and bleeding "laid the foundation" of Hazard's cure.
Judging from what he wrote to his wife, Rush completed the week with eclat. He certainly concealed his returning weakness from her. Her letter of the 24th had underscored how important it was to her well-being not to unduly alarm her. On Wednesday he reported that he could walk up stairs without resting and without aid of the banister. On Thursday the 3rd he "paid between 40 and 50 visits." That evening he still had strength enough to write a long letter to Dr. John R.B. Rodgers of New York City about the "new remedies." Rodgers had asked about them, as had many other doctors. Rush decided to answer him with a major statement and have it published in the newspaper which would lead to its being printed throughout the country.
He began by dismissing one controversial issue in two sentences. He had "satisfactory documents to prove that the disease was generated in our city." He would share them later. The imperative of the moment was curing the disease. He was ready to give some of the theory behind his remedies. Purges created "an artificial weak part, which, by inviting a determination of the fluids to the bowels, prevents those effusions in the brain, stomach, bowels, liver, and lungs which bring on death." "The pulse, the appearance of the blood, the spontaneous hemorrhages, and the weather" all indicated the need for bleeding. As the season advanced more and more blood had to be taken, up to 80 ounces, 5 pounds, "and in most cases with the happiest effects."
He ridiculed other remedies. Laudanum was poison in this fever. Bark, wine and cold baths were useless. He did encourage "cool air and cool drinks," and blisters were of some use for local pains if put on after sufficient purging. Only in the case of persistent vomiting, not relieved by bleeding, did he suggest a gentle remedy; "a tablespoon of sweet milk given every half hour, or... weak camomile tea."
He repeated his assertion that he cured 99 out of 100, but qualified the claim. That success came before his "late indisposition," after which some died "from the want of well-timed bleeding and purging." Recovery often depended on the application of remedies at a "certain hour." He blamed nurses, the lack of bleeders, and the increased "concentration of the contagion in every part of the city," for decreasing the success of his remedies. With proper care, however, the fever was "as much under the power of medicine as the measles or influenza." In the last part of the letter he ridiculed the opponents of his methods. In using wine, bark and laudanum, "they might as well throw water and oil at the same time upon fire in order to extinguish it." They called the disorder the jail fever, then the common remittent. By insisting otherwise he may "terrify" his patients, "but I save them by their fears, for I excite in them at once a speedy application for help and a faithful obedience to all my prescriptions."
Even friendly biographers would find these claims the height of Rush's gall, given that upwards of 100 a day were dying. Indeed, Rush was no longer a reliable witness to the course of the epidemic. Perhaps his paranoia blinded him to what was actually happening in the city. Van Berkle told him how he had bumped into Alexander Hamilton on the road, and was told, that if he got the fever, to get directions on Stevens's methods from Oliver Wolcott. The story gnawed on Rush. On the one hand Wolcott had asked him to treat a servant left in town. On the other, Hamilton was the manipulative party leader. Rush couldn't accept that Hamilton was only trying to help his friends by sharing the methods of a doctor who had been his friend since childhood. "I think it probable that if the new remedies had been introduced by any other person than a decided Democrat and a friend of Madison and Jefferson," Rush wrote to his wife, "they would have met with less opposition from Colonel Hamilton."
Even in that highly politicized era, such thoughts in the darkest days of the epidemic were strange. The editor Benjamin Franklin Bache who was notorious for tarring every issue with the muck of politics had just closed his newspaper and left the city later explaining that printing the disputes of the physicians was "very injurious," and no one had any taste for politics.
In Rush's defense, given the death of his sister, his fatigue, it's understandable that he was unable to reflect on his valiant crusade as a scientist. He craved apotheosis, not epidemiology. He was partially successful. Rush's energetic style, erudition, conviction, and most importantly his remaining in the city fighting the epidemic made his letter to Rodgers a beacon of hope, giving the nation a sense of triumph against the deadly scourge. His sacrifice especially appealed to younger doctors. A recent student of Rush's in New York, Elihu Smith, made it a point to talk with friends who had made it out of Philadelphia. A young doctor Smith had known in medical school, Samuel Conover, described his own cure early in the epidemic with wine and opium, and told Smith that Rush had not been as successful "as Rush himself supposes." Smith passed that on to a Hartford doctor without endorsing it, "But I trust more to Rush than to Conover. I foresee that if Rush survives it, he is going to be extremely ill-treated by some and perhaps the greater part of the physicians there. But he will come forth as gold from a furnace."
But in Philadelphia, the reprinting of Rush's letter to Rodgers caused less of a stir. It was the mayor's Committee's efforts, not Rush's, that became the symbol of the city's struggle. By focusing on the Committee's work with the poor, rather than on Rush's theories, the community could define the epidemic in acceptable terms. Certainly the continuation, if not the cause of the epidemic, could be blamed on the improvident poor. Another letter from the city published in New York was not inspiring like Rush's but it did explain the death toll: "It is well ascertained that the disorder rages most violently and destructively in confined places and narrow alleys,... in poor dirty houses, and amongst the intemperate, imprudent people, and sad havoc made among sailors, woman of bad character, and those who frequent such places. Water Street, Pewter-Plater, Coombes, Mead, and other Alleys..., are most infected."
Ironically by not visiting the poor, Rush was spared a side of the epidemic that Committee members and others regularly saw. As Henry Helmuth noted, "poor people did not take the slightest precaution to cleanse the stuffy air - windows and doors closed; no fumigation; no sprinkling of vinegar." Helmuth once turned back from the door of one hovel because he sensed a "strong death odor." Usually he went and saw the horrors: a woman with "coal black eyes and a green nose;" and a man "who turned black while he was praying." The principal shock was the neglect, "The woman dying in an exceedingly small room, the man wretched with the very same disease; no one to attend them except a very small boy. No neighbor approaches the house."
The deaths of Committee members were blamed on their visits to the poor. The cardmaker and choir master, Andrew Adgate got the fever on the 25th and died five days later. Daniel Offley went to bed with the fever on October 3. The Committee took pains to prove the poor at fault. It hired a man to conduct a block by block census. On Market Street he counted 163 houses shut, 112 open, 807 people had fled, 849 had stayed. Only 39 people had died. Then he went into the alleys off the street where the poor crowded. In Letitia Court with 14 houses, only 3 were shut; of 88 who remained in them, 18 had died. He found that mortality in some alleys off Front Street was as high as 31%.
Increasingly the agency best able to save the city became in most people's eyes, not Rush and his pills, but Bush Hill. On Saturday the 28th the patient count at Bush Hill reached 106. On October 1, 48 new patients were admitted. Rumors of cures increased the flow of patients. Dr. William Annan, who worked for the Committee examining people who wanted to go the hospital, found that "no sooner was a person afflicted with a head ache or oppression about the praecordia [chest] then he became anxious to be removed to Bush Hill." On October 2 the Committee ordered a new building, 50 by 20 feet, built at Bush Hill. Soon there were a total of 174 beds divided into 20 rooms, plus, in an adjacent barn, 97 beds for convalescents. Patients were separated by sex and there were separate rooms for the dying and the "very low." Each room had a nurse. Other nurses kept a constant supply of "herb-tea and beverages," principally centaury tea and boiled lemonade. Doctors visited each patient twice a day. At 11 a.m. patients were fed "broth with rice, bread, boiled beef, veal, mutton and chicken, with cream of rice to those whose stomachs will not bear stronger nourishment." There was a lighter meal at 6 p.m. featuring broth, rice and boiled prunes.
From afar many in the nation admired Rush's heroism but the example of charity that Bush Hill provided forced them to change their estimate of the epidemic. In early October the guilt ridden refugees who crowded outlying towns began raising money. Many communities began imitating the example. Farmers and merchants sent food. The mayor of New York wrote to Mayor Clarkson asking him what the city needed. The Committee welcomed help from neighboring communities, especially those tied closely to the city commercially. The offer from New York was eyed suspiciously. By describing the epidemic as a crisis primarily caused by and suffered by the poor, Philadelphia's leaders defined a situation that seemed manageable, providing the continuity, not the dislocations, in the city were remembered. The poor could hardly be scapegoats if the better sort in the city were thought to be at the end of their resources.
In reply to New York, the Committee instructed the mayor to say that "notwithstanding our calamitous situation, all necessaries and comforts are here to be found in abundance," including money, thanks to loans from the Bank of North America. New York could send cash to help repay the loans. It sent $5,000.
Another burlesque, probably by Freneau, suggested why the city did not want for supplies. There was money to be made. Two Jersey farmers discussed the situation. George couldn't resist the temptation and went to market with his wife's butter and eggs. At Cooper's Ferry he saw "everything across the river look so terribly yellow," so he stuffed his nose and ears with putty, put a handkerchief over his mouth and ventured forward. His friend William was incredulous about his actually seeing the fever. "Bless your heart, I tell you the whole town is as a yellow as my pumkin patch." George landed at Arch Street ferry and on his way to market was so struck by a smell from a house where 59 people had died that he was knocked "sprawling in the gutter." Although he saw six people die on the spot, he managed to get up and sell his produce for exorbitant prices to the Negroes, "for they only come to market." William asked if he picked up any news. The Negroes told George that "14,200 have already died - 29,000 have gone out of town - so that only 1425 people remain!" William marveled at the devastation but lured by the high prices decided to hurry into town with his produce.
The bakers, provisions sellers, and butchers (not one butcher got the fever) who stayed in business were not, at that time, publicly blamed for profiteering. Later Andrew Brown was damned as a money grubbing tyrant for continuing to print his Gazette oblivious to the sickness and death in his shop. Brown justified staying as a public service to those still in the city and as a corrective to the lies spread about the city in newspapers around the country. There were almost daily notices, asking for needed supplies at the hospital and continued vigilance in keeping the city clean. On October 1, a notice from Mayor Clarkson called for citizens and fire engines to "wet and clean the streets and alleys" at 8 o'clock the next morning. There had been no rain to speak of since September 9.
This was not merely a brave front put up by the city's establishment. Not only were there enough people in the city to pitch in, there was also many who went about their business as if nothing was amiss. Rush was incredulous when he got a letter from his landlord raising his rent. Around October 1 he saw a man "busily employed laying in wood for the approaching winter." Rush would, he later wrote, "as soon have thought of making provisions for a dinner on the first day of the year 1800." And there was a state wide election scheduled for Tuesday, October 8. There was no campaigning, but no suggestion that it be postponed.
A few ship loads of immigrants even arrived. The ship Polly pulled up to a Philadelphia wharf in late September. One passenger, Peter Seguin, wrote in his diary, that they were able to find bread a quarter mile from the quay. Some Frenchmen at the market overheard Seguin and asked if his ship brought letters from France. Upon learning that he was a clerk in a Bordeaux shipping firm, they suggested he look up Stephen Girard, who took Seguin in and let him dine with him and his other clerks. "At night," Seguin continued in his diary, "I went to walk with one of the young men and to make acquaintance with a young girl which lives in south sixth street."
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