The body politic: Passions, pestilence, and political culture in the age of the American Revolution

This study is an examination of the social construction of middle-class identity in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia. It goes beyond many earlier studies of class formation that define the middle class solely in socioeconomic strata or occupational terms. A few historians have recently begun to highlight the bourgeois dimension of eighteenth-century political culture, but these works have consisted almost exclusively of textual analyses of the public ideological expressions of an expanding middle-class. In order to examine the personal values, sensibilities, and behavior patterns of individual actors, this dissertation is based primarily on the private writings of middle-class Philadelphians.;An overriding feature of middle-class life was an interest in health preservation through self-restraint, in terms of both the body natural and the body politic. Consequently, this dissertation is focused on the social and cultural dimensions, particularly those of class, race, and gender, of several yellow fever epidemics in Philadelphia from 1741 to the 1790s, with an emphasis on the devastating epidemic of 1793. The presence of epidemic disease forced the body, perhaps the most basic element of personal identity and a key to understanding the creation of middle-class culture, into the realm of public consciousness. The 1793 epidemic, in particular, reinforced certain emerging bourgeois patterns in the social and familial fabric of eighteenth-century Philadelphia life, such as an emphasis on physical and emotional self-control; a growing interest in personal hygiene; a tendency to define the affective family in biological, rather than economic, terms; and a proclivity for moral reform, values and sensibilities that have come to define this middle stratum of society. Thus, middle class individuals not only worried about protecting and improving their own health and that of their family members, they also saw issues of health and disease as emblematic of problems within the post-Revolutionary body politic in general. This study, therefore, not only analyzes the significance of the more private sphere of social interaction, but also examines the role of public social institutions, including prisons, almshouses, hospitals, and insane asylums, in the process of middle-class formation.