(By:  Jennifer King; Submitted by WB Sidney Breckenridge, Sr.)

 "In the fall of 1793, as Philadelphia lay in the 

grip of a deadly epidemic, the city turned to a 

pair of black clergymen to take charge 

of the war against the disease."

In early September 1793, Richard Allen, a former slave, received a letter from Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of Philadelphia's leading physicians. The city was in the midst of a yellow-fever epidemic, and Rush needed volunteers.

In his plea for help, Rush assured Allen that the fever "passes by persons of your color," and suggested that because this exemption was granted by God, it placed Allen "under an obligation to offer your services to attend the sick."

Blacks were believed to be immune to the disease, in part because during the epidemic's onset the fever had mostly afflicted white residents. At 33 years of age, Allen was a respected Methodist preacher and a founder of the Free African Society, an organization established in 1787 to help former slaves get an education and develop religious faith.

When he received Rush's plea for help, he was in the midst of overseeing the building of a church that would be led by African Americans. Allen toured the city with his friend, Absalom Jones, who had also spent his childhood as a slave and had co-founded the Free African Society with him.

Together, Jones and Allen walked the plague-ridden city and called on several stricken families. The outbreak had started in July of 1793; soon after French refugees from a bloody slave rebellion in Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) sailed up the Delaware River to Philadelphia.

Most of the leaders of Philadelphia's medical establishment failed to notice the warning signs of the disease. Today we know that yellow fever is a viral infection carried by female mosquitoes. The mosquito infects a different person as often as it feeds throughout its usual life span.

Not until 1900 was the U.S. Army Surgeon Dr. Walter Reed able to prove that mosquitoes transmitted yellow fever to humans. The day after Jones and Allen volunteered their services, Mayor Clarkson put a notice in the newspapers telling citizens that they could apply to the Free African Society for nursing care and other help.

Benjamin Rush began to train Jones, Allen, and another member of the Free African Society, William Gray. They and a number of other volunteers, most of them black, worked hard, making daytime rounds and carting the dead by night.

By mid-September, blacks too began to fall ill, and Allen was among the afflicted. It is not known exactly why Jones and other blacks continued to help. Certainly they thought they were doing the work of God, but Jones and Allen had another motive; they believed that their actions would earn the respect and gratitude of whites, and therefore hasten an end to slavery.

By the beginning of November, fatalities sank to 20 people a day. Rush and Allen had both recovered, and the Philadelphians who had fled the epidemic slowly returned. Among them was Matthew Carey, a publisher who wrote A Short Account of the Malignant Fever. The pamphlet was almost a hundred pages long but contained only two paragraphs about the contributions of blacks.

Allen and Jones, appalled at this account, challenged Carey in their volume, A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793. They told of many poor blacks that had aided the sick.

The black community continued to hold Jones and Allen in the highest regard, and they both went on to play significant roles in the black church. Jones became the head of St. Thomas's African Episcopal Church, which opened its doors for worship on July 17, 1794.

That same year, Allen founded Mother Bethel Methodist Church, and was busy seeking members when yellow fever broke out again, returning each summer for many years after. There are no records of either Jones or Allen offering their services during the later epidemics.

Still, neither man regretted caring for the victims of the 1793 outbreak. They wrote, "This has been no small satisfaction to us; for, we think, that when a physician was not attainable, we have been the instruments, in the hand of God, for saving the lives of some hundreds of our suffering fellow mortals."

They did, however, regret how their people were regarded. They concluded their account with an old proverb:

God and a soldier, all men do Adore,

In time of war, and not before;

When the war is over, and all things righted;

God is forgotten, and the soldier slighted.