Diplomatic scandals involving sex were not unusual in the eighteenth century, nor are they now. Sally McKean had a bit of gossip to tell her friend Dolley Madison in Virginia, concerning an enraged husband and a member of the Spanish delegation to the United States.
Following on yesterday’s post, the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia (1793) was cause for concern in other parts of the country. Isabella Graham, writing from New York, gave a heartrending description of the situation in that stricken city to a friend.
A pestilential fever made its appearance in Philadelphia about two months ago. Between the 19th of August and the 5th of October, four thousand and sixty-four of its citizens died, besides many who quitted the city with infection on them, and died elsewhere. By yesterday’s accounts matters are no better: several of the physicians have been carried off by it, and some of them have fled. Doctor [Benjamin] Rush’s praise is in every mouth; he is still in the city, exerting himself to the utmost, and his prescriptions are universally followed. No neighbouring town will suffer any person to enter their gates till they have been fourteen days out of the city. The stages have been stopped, and even the horses shot, in some cases, where they have been bribed to force their way through. The most dismal stories have been related of whole families dying, and no one to nurse the last. It is not uncommon for people to be well, and in their graves in twelve hours. No friends attend the funerals; most of them are buried in the night, and every precaution taken to conceal the real amount of evil.
It appears that one attempt to prevent the spread of the disease was the imposition of a quarantine.
Epidemics in the eighteenth century were regarded with apprehension and terror, understandable because there was little knowledge of their causes or treatment. In 1793, Philadelphia, the largest city in the nation, was in the grip of a yellow fever epidemic. The summer had been hot and dry, and there had been an influx of refugees from a revolution in the French colony of Sant Domingue (now Haiti), many of whom were already infected. Mosquitoes, which bred in stagnant pools of water, spread the disease. Christina Young Leech of Kingsessing, Pennsylvania, noted in her diary the effect of the epidemic on her family and on the city.
September 9th. My eldest son, William Leech, died at 7 o’clock in the morning of yellow fever, at the age of 37 years and two months, after a sickness of five days. Many people in the town died of this disease. …
There died in the town of Philadelphia, between the 1st of August, and November 9, 4031 people of yellow fever or pestilential fever; it bears a great resemblance to that dreadful disease, the plague. 17,000 inhabitants moved out of the City, and at Bush Hill was the Hospital; over 300 children lost father and mother, and were placed in one house to be cared for.
Modern scholars reckon the loss of life was closer to 5,000 people, a tenth of the city’s population of 50,000. The noted physician Dr. Benjamin Rush treated those stricken by bleeding and purges (induced vomiting and diarrhea), attempts to flush the disease out of the body. It was not discovered that yellow fever was spread by infected mosquitoes until 1881.
Catharine “Kitty” Livingston was the daughter of William Livingston, the governor of New Jersey, and sister to Sarah Livingston who married John Jay. The Jays’ son Peter Augustus was in her care at Liberty Hall, the Livingston home in Elizabethtown, when she wrote to his parents in November 1777, reporting that he had been successfully inoculated against smallpox. Peter was 22 months old at the time.
My Dear Sister & Brother
It is with very great pleasure I announce to you, the recovery of your little Boy from the Small Pox; please to accept of the Congratulations of the Family on the happy event. No person ever was more favor’d in that disorder, he had only one pustule, & scarce a days illness. The Dr. bid me tell you that he had behaved manfully thro the whole. … If Sally you have at any time felt a regret at having left him least he should be spoil’d, be assured there never was a better Child. I have my doubts if ever any equaled him in goodness, I have but one Complaint to lodge against him, & that is, that we cannot make him talk; it is something extraordinary in our Family; but I flatter myself he will prattle every thing before he leaves us. …
Kitty’s letter goes on to comment on the billeting of soldiers in her father’s house. Located in a hotly contested area, Liberty Hall had been occupied by American troops or Hessians depending on battle lines. Here Kitty complains about the former. The bullock guards she refers to were soldiers in charge of cattle intended to feed the army.
Yesterday I returned from Elizath. Gen. [Philemon] Dickenson is at that Post with between eight hundred & a Thousand Troops. My Fathers House for six weeks was made a Guard House, for a Bullock Guard the first instance I beleive of a Governors House being so degraded. I do not exaggerate In telling you the Guards have done ten times the mischief to the House that the Hessians did; they have left only two locks in the House taken off many pains of glass, left about a third of the paper hanging, burnt up some mahogany banisters, a Quantity of timber, strip’d the roof of all the lead, one of the men was heard to boast that he had at one heat taken 30 pd. of Lead off. The furniture that mamma left there when Sally & myself was last down is stolen except a few things of which there is only some fragments. It is as in the time of Pharoah what the Canker worm dont eat the Locusts destroy*. …
your truly Affectionate Sister
*This is a biblical reference (Joel 1:4) to a devouring army that leaves behind desolation and waste.
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