TheMaterialismofBiologicalEncounters 97
Republicans, on the other hand saw the proposed trade embargo as a
crafty tactics designed to disturb their fledgling economic empire built
ontheimport/exportofgoodsfromallpartsofthehemisphere.
Against this background, yellow fever soon gained significance far
in excess of its already momentous medical and therapeutic urgencies.
At this moment of crisis when disease met governmentality, medical
concerns functioned as an echo-chamber for the debate about the core
values and future direction of the new Republic. All in all, a re-
semioticization of the infectious disease occurred in which it became a
cipher and a symbol of the hemispheric precariousnessto which the
capitalcityofthenewlyindependentUnitedStatesthensuddenlyfound
itselfexposed,or,assomealleged,hadbeenwillfullyexposedbyvested
interests.^48
This widespread sense of hemispheric precariousness found its
material expression, as it were, in the humanitarian crisis that had
emergedmoreorlesssimultaneouslywiththemedicalcrisis.Morethan
2,000 French refugees had arrived in that summer as well.^49 Blacks and
whites, they had been fleeing from the slave revolution on Saint
Domingue/Haiti (E. Williams 238). The arrival of French-speaking
refugeeshadcoincidedwiththatofyellowfever;verysoon,however,in
the minds of many people that particular coincidence stopped being a
coincidence, and the Haitian refugees were accused of having brought
the U.S. Congress would find reason to leave the city and relocate elsewhere.
While much of that seems a fever-generated case of paranoia, the Federalists
were right in at least one point. Jeffersonhimself, in a letter to the city's and
Republic's leading physician, Dr. Benjamin Rush, expressed his hope that
"yellow fever will discourage the growth of big cities in our nation" (qtd. in
Pernick569).
(^48) It might be tempting to read this process in terms of Homi Bhabha's
"ContamiNation"-concept. While the term does refer to social and cultural
changes occasioned by the presence of migrants in nation states, it uses the
epidemiological term "contamination" only metaphorically. It is thus based on
what is perhaps not unfair to call an "idealistic" vision of cultural contact
(Bhabha,"DissemiNation"291).
(^49) Interestingly, some of them were multiply migrated and had first gone to
islands inside the Caribbean before ending up in the United States, not only in
PhiladelphiabutalsoinotherportssuchasCharleston(Dubois155-57).