In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

135 9 “A Matter of Police” Fever and Betrayal in the Federal Union In April 1796, Congressman Samuel Smith of Maryland introduced a bill to grant the president discretion over quarantine policy throughout the union, opening a grueling argument over the proper borders of state and federal power. Toward the end of the debate, North Carolina’s James Holland rose to argue that, like citizens in a community, the states were best equipped to administer local quarantines: “To preserve one’s health was an article of self-defense. Every individual should take his own measures to preserve his own health, and each State should judge the best way of doing it for its own district.”1 Individual citizens and states demanded the latitude to make their own health decisions, but they made those choices in a world of other decision makers, whose actions could undercut their own efforts or even pose an active danger. The battle over the Smith Bill reflected the challenge faced by individuals and communities both—how to establish mutually beneficial public health measures among multiple autonomous actors with sometimes competing interests. More broadly, as Holland suggested, interstate conflict over coordinating policy across jurisdictional lines also illuminates the ongoing argument over the place of consent and coercion in achieving consensus among individuals. Americans were struggling to define their political community in the 1790s, and as they debated disease, they were also working out where the stress lay in the motto E Pluribus Unum: the division implied in the “many,” or the unification in the “one.”2 Holland’s analogy of policy coordination in a community of states to the social relationships in a community of individuals suggests that the public health crises of the 1790s can illustrate the ambiguous nationhood of the early United States and the tension among the states as they attempted to situate themselves within both a national and a global context. As at every stage of their history, the borderless nature of health threats forced Pennsylvanians—Philadelphians 136 “A Matter of Police” especially—to think about the nature of their relationship with the world beyond the banks of the Delaware River. The punishing outbreaks of yellow fever were not just Philadelphia’s local problem with a local solution.3 “Fear Has Been Your Polar Star!” Quarantine and Interstate Rivalry No American city was more central to the quarantine debate than Philadelphia . The seat of the still-controversial national government was the nexus of state and federal authority. As a major port surrounded by smaller harbors , it was a proving ground for coordinating disparate quarantine policies among communities that were economically competitive in commerce but mutually interdependent in disease control. In the fever years, Philadelphia sat at the heart of American fears about disease and its relationship to politics and society, within the city and within the nation. Philadelphians themselves remembered the treatment they faced in 1793, when ominous rumors “excited the terror of our neighbors, and impelled them” to draconian measures. Refugees were “proscribed in several cities and towns—hunted up like felons in some—debarred admittance and turned back in others.” They were grateful for the hospitality of some towns, and for the relief money raised by others, but Philadelphians cherished those instances precisely because of their rarity. As they attempted to establish broader regional health regimes, Philadelphians stood accused of the same fear that so isolated them during that first awful outbreak—the same fear they thought that they had conquered. Merchants, mariners, and other American ports rankled at the rigor of Pennsylvania’s new quarantine laws, and when Governor Mifflin imposed a “stoppage of all intercourse” with New York City in 1795, resentment boiled over into a political crisis.4 Mifflin acted on advice from the Philadelphia Board of Health, which cited reports of fever in Gotham, and contended that both “the urgency of the case and the present anxiety of the Citizens” justified the embargo. New Yorkers were incensed and swiftly charged Mifflin and the board with “fabricating falsehoods about graves, ghosts, pestilence and death.” New York’s own board of health insisted that if any fever had been present, it had “greatly abated,” and Governor John Jay demanded that the Pennsylvanians disclose the source of their contrary reports. Offended by the presumption, the board refused to break confidence with their source and unanimously recommended to Mifflin an extension of the embargo until they received clear evidence of New York’s healthiness.5 New Yorkers spent the summer blasting...

Share