Absalom Jones after the Fever

In the autumn of 1793, in the proud young city of Philadelphia, the dead lay faster than the living could bury them. This was the new capital of a new nation, and it was emptying in terror. Yellow fever had come. The skin of the sick turned the colour of old parchment. They bled, they vomited black, they died in their thousands. Those who could flee fled. The wealthy loaded their carriages and left the city to its corpses. And in that abandoned city, two Black men stepped forward to do what almost no one else would do.

Their names were Absalom Jones and Richard Allen. Both had once been enslaved. Both had bought or won their own freedom. Both had become leaders among the free Black community of Philadelphia, men of faith who would go on to found churches that still stand today. When the city's doctors were desperate for help, a rumour spread that Black people could not catch the fever. It was not true. But Jones and Allen heard the call, and they answered it.

Think of what they walked into. House after house with the doors hanging open. The sick crying out with no one to bring water. The dead left where they fell, because their own families had run. Jones and Allen organised the free Black community to go in. They nursed strangers. They carried the bodies. They dug the graves. They knocked on the doors that everyone else had fled, and they went inside. And they did catch the fever. They sickened and some of them died, doing mercy for a city that had largely turned its back on them.

Then came the wound that cut deeper than the work. When the fever finally broke and the frightened city returned, a printer named Mathew Carey published a popular account of those terrible months. And in it he accused the very Black people who had served. He claimed they had plundered the sick, robbed the dying, charged cruel prices for their care. The men who had carried the dead were now called thieves. The hands that had nursed the abandoned were now called grasping. It was slander, and it sold.

Jones and Allen could have stayed silent. Mercy might have whispered, let it go. But they understood something deeper. Compassion did not require them to swallow a lie. So in 1794 they did a daring thing for two formerly enslaved men in that age. They published. Their pamphlet bore a long and pointed title, a narrative of the proceedings of the Black people during the late awful calamity. In it they answered Carey plainly. They named the truth of what their people had done and suffered. They recorded the costs they had paid. And they turned the question back upon a society that expected Black hands to serve and then refused to grant Black names any honour.

That is the thing to hold. They did not choose between mercy and truth. They held both. They served when service might kill them, and then they told the truth when truth might cost them their reputation. One without the other would have been incomplete. Mercy alone would have left the lie standing. Truth alone would have been cold. Together they made a whole witness.

Absalom Jones became the first Black priest ordained in the Episcopal Church. Richard Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Their names are remembered now, carried by congregations and by the long memory of a people. But the moment that endures is smaller and harder than any title. It is two free men walking into a city of the dead because no one else would, and then, when slandered, refusing to let the truth be buried with the bodies they had carried.