Paine's Yellow Fever": Opposition Politics and Pandemic Disease in the Early Republic

Abstract

Abstract: This article examines the disruptive impact of Philadelphia's 1793 yellow fever outbreak on the Democratic-Republican societies that opposed the Washington administration. It demonstrates how the outbreak abruptly suspended the celebrations of the French Revolution as well as the organizing and publishing activities of the emerging opposition. People's energies were directed towards physical survival rather than political mobilization during the outbreak. Philadelphia's democratic movement lost some key leaders to the fever and it also lost momentum in building a Philadelphia-centered national opposition. After the outbreak, Democratic-Republicans regrouped, but the organizational energy had dissipated and circumstances had shifted. However, Federalists, who already had seen opposition as a diseased faction, mobilized the language of disease to denounce their political foes with a new intensity, as yellow fever became linked to transatlantic radicalism and political subversion amid the ongoing threat of yellow fever outbreaks in the 1790s and beyond.