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By the end of August, as more and more people began dying from this mysterious affliction, wealthier residents of the nation’s capital were fleeing in droves. The city’s free black community, meanwhile, largely stayed behind and many were enlisted to help care for the sick.

“It is called a yellow fever, but is like nothing known or read of by the Physicians,” wrote Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson in September 1793.

Debate Over Yellow Fever's Causes

At the time, no one knew what caused yellow fever or how it spread. Some thought it had been brought to Philadelphia by a ship bearing French refugees from a slave rebellion in Santo Domingo (now Haiti). Others—including the city’s leading physician, Dr. Benjamin Rush—believed it originated in the poor sanitary conditions and contaminated air of the city itself.

However, the disease had arrived, and Philadelphians in 1793 desperately sought to avoid getting it. They began keeping their distance from each other and avoided shaking hands. They covered their faces with handkerchiefs dipped in vinegar or smoked tobacco, which they thought would prevent them from breathing in contaminated air.

The Well-to-Do Exit the City

Those who had the means to leave the city quickly did so, including Jefferson himself. President George Washington, who returned to his beloved Mount Vernon estate, blamed his exit on the concerns of his wife, Martha.

Alexander Hamilton contracted yellow fever early in the epidemic, and he and his family left the city for their summer home a few miles away. Hamilton’s wife, Eliza, soon fell ill as well, and their children were evacuated to Eliza’s parents home in Albany, New York. They both recovered under the care of Dr. Edward Stevens, a boyhood friend of Hamilton’s from St. Croix whom he met again in Philadelphia.

Among the mass exodus of some 20,000 Philadelphians—nearly half the city’s total population at the time—during the yellow fever epidemic were many of the city’s doctors, who were terrified of getting ill themselves. But Rush, the country’s most prominent medical professional and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, stayed behind, working tirelessly to treat rich and poor patients alike. Rush lost his sister to the disease and even fell ill himself, although he recovered.

Controversial Treatment Methods

Despite all his efforts, Rush had just a flawed understanding of yellow fever as anyone else at the time. His undeniably harsh treatments—including bloodletting, “Mercurial Sweating Powder,” and forced vomiting—did not curb the spread of the disease, and critics argued it only increased his patients’ suffering. These critics included Hamilton, who took up his pen to spread the word of the gentler methods prescribed by his own doctor, which involved taking cold baths, drinking Madeira wine and hot brandy and ingesting large amounts of quinine (aka “Peruvian bark”), according to biographer Ron Chernow.

Stevens’ homeopathic approach proved little more effective than Rush’s more traditional methods, however, and yellow fever continued to spread. By the time it subsided in November 1793, the disease had killed 5,000 people, or about one-tenth of Philadelphia’s population at the time, and infected hundreds of thousands of others. Despite extensive research on the disease in the decades that followed the epidemic, it would take more than a century—and a savage outbreak among troops fighting the Spanish-American War—before Dr. Walter Reed proved in 1900 that mosquitoes carried yellow fever.

Philadelphia's Free Black Community Care for the Sick

"Parents desert their children as soon as they are infected, and in every room you enter you see no person but a solitary black man or woman near the sick,” Rush wrote to his wife, Julia, who was in Princeton, New Jersey, with the couple’s children, during the 1793 epidemic. “Many people thrust their parents into the street as soon as they complain of a headache.”

As his letter indicates, Rush enlisted members of Philadelphia’s free African-American community to treat many of the fever’s victims as well as do much of the essential labor necessary to keep the city going during the epidemic. He and other white physicians initially (and wrongly) believed African Americans were immune to yellow fever due to supposed biological differences based on race.

Rush was an ardent abolitionist and had been supportive of the efforts of the city’s black community to form their own churches in protest over the segregation of white-led ones. Led by Richard Allen, the co-founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and his fellow minister Absalom Jones, black volunteers provided crucial labor during Philadelphia’s yellow fever epidemic.

When the publisher Mathew Carey, who served on the city’s health committee, issued his account of the epidemic beginning in October 1793, he accused members of Philadelphia’s free black community of profiting off the epidemic, even stealing from the houses of fever victims. In response, Allen and Jones published their own pamphlet in early 1794 refuting these accusations in detail. By including eyewitness testimony of the work black Philadelphians did to treat patients, along with detailed documentation of payments and expenses, the two ministers forced Carey to revise his chronicle of the epidemic in later editions.

Allen and Jones’ work was the first copyrighted pamphlet written by black authors in the nation’s history. Titled A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793, it documented the racism and poor treatment that free African Americans experienced, even as they played a crucial role in combating the most serious epidemic of disease in the history of the still-young nation.

From this link: https://www.history.com/articles/yellow-fever-outbreak-philadelphia

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Yellow fever, which is carried by mosquitoes, originally came from West Africa and was brought to the United States on ships carrying enslaved workers. The disease requires warm weather to survive and thrives in wet and hot summers when mosquitoes can breed prodigiously. After a three-to-six-day incubation period, an afflicted person feels flu-like symptoms such as fever and aches. After a very short remission, a more intense stage often follows, during which the victim vomits blood and suffers liver and renal failure. Jaundice is also a typical symptom, which is how yellow fever got its name. If a victim dies, it usually happens within two weeks. Survivors can feel the effects for months.

In the 19th century, it was not known that mosquitoes carried yellow fever. New York City, Philadelphia and New Orleans all experienced serious epidemics that spread rapidly and killed thousands. Memphis, a city of 50,000, had outbreaks in 1855, 1867 and 1873, with each outbreak getting progressively worse. Those who came down with yellow fever were quarantined in an effort to prevent the disease from spreading. Often, they were made to wear yellow jackets as a means of identification.

From this link: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/august-13/first-victim-of-memphis-yellow-fever-epidemic-dies

During his campaign for the White House in 1980, Reagan argued on behalf of “supply-side economics,” the theory of using tax cuts as incentives for individuals and businesses to work and produce goods (supply) rather than as an incentive for consumers to buy goods (demand). In Congress, Representative Jack Kemp, Republican of New York, and Senator Bill Roth, Republican of Delaware, had long supported the supply-side principles behind the ERTA, which would also be known as the Kemp-Roth act. The bill, which received bipartisan support in Congress, represented a significant change in the course of federal income tax policy, which until then was believed by most people to work best when used to affect demand during times of recession.

The ERTA included a 25 percent reduction in marginal tax rates for individuals, phased in over three years, and indexed for inflation from that point on. The marginal tax rate, or the tax rate on the last dollar earned, was considered more important to economic activity than the average tax rate (total tax paid as a percentage of income earned), as it affected income earned through “extra” activities such as education, entrepreneurship or investment. Reducing marginal tax rates, the theory went, would help the economy grow faster through such extra efforts by individuals and businesses. The 1981 act, combined with another major tax reform act in 1986, cut marginal tax rates on high-income taxpayers from 70 percent to around 30 percent, and would be the defining economic legacy of Reagan’s presidency.

Reagan’s tax cuts were designed to put maximum emphasis on encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship and creating incentives for the development of venture capital and greater investment in human capital through training and education. The cuts particularly benefited “idea” industries such as software or financial services; fittingly, Reagan’s first term saw the advent of the information revolution, including IBM’s introduction of its first personal computer (PC) and the rise or launch of such tech companies as Intel, Microsoft, Dell, Sun Microsystems, Compaq and Cisco Systems.

Economists have argued to what degree Reagan’s economic policy drove the boom of the 1990s, but his tax program undoubtedly set in motion powerful forces of change that would result in both short- and long-term economic gains. On the other hand, critics of so-called “Reaganomics” point out that his tax cuts and the effects of steady economic growth disproportionately benefitted the wealthy, and vastly increased the gap between the nation’s rich and poor.

From this link: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/august-13/reagan-signs-economic-recovery-tax-act-erta

1642 Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens discovers Mars's southern polar cap

1788 Prussia joins the Anglo-Dutch alliance to form the Triple Alliance to prevent the spread of the Russo-Swedish War of 1788-90

1860 American markswoman Annie Oakley who starred in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, where she was often called “Little Sure Shot”, was born

1888 John Logie Baird, Inventor of Television, was born 

1898 The U.S. Army took control of the Philippine port of Manila during the Spanish-American War

1900 Collis P. Huntington became a powerful railroad magnate, building and promoting railroads during the 19th century across America, died 

1937 Second Sino-Japanese War: Japanese forces start the Battle of Shanghai, a three-month conflict involving over one million troops

1942 The Manhattan Project commences under the direction of US General Leslie Groves with the aim of developing an atomic bomb

1961 Construction of the Berlin Wall begins in East Germany

More information on these links: 

https://www.onthisday.com

https://www.britannica.com/on-this-day