History of Philadelphia - Temporary Capital

Temporary Capital

Following the Pennsylvania Mutiny of 1783, the United States Congress moved out of Philadelphia and settled in New York City, designated as the temporary capital. Besides the Constitutional Convention in May 1787, United States politics was no longer centered in Philadelphia. Due to political compromise, Congress chose a permanent capital to be built along the Potomac River. Philadelphia was selected as the temporary United States capital for ten years starting in 1790. Congress occupied the Philadelphia County Courthouse, which became known as Congress Hall, and the Supreme Court worked at City Hall. Robert Morris donated his home at 6th and Market Street as the residence for President Washington, or the President's House (Philadelphia).

After 1787 the city's economy grew rapidly in the postwar years. Serious yellow fever outbreaks in the 1790s interrupted development. Benjamin Rush identified an outbreak in August 1793 as a yellow fever epidemic, the first in 30 years, which lasted four months. Two thousand refugees from Saint-Domingue had recently arrived in the city in flight from the slave revolution. They represented five percent of the city's total population. They likely carried the disease from the island where it was endemic, and it was rapidly transmitted by mosquito bites to other residents (this was not understood at the time). Fear of contracting the disease caused 20,000 residents to flee the city by mid-September, and some neighboring towns prohibited their entry. Trade virtually stopped; Baltimore and New York quarantined people and goods from Philadelphia. People feared entering the city or interacting with its residents. The fever finally abated at the end of October with the onset of colder weather and was declared at an end by mid-November. The death toll is believed to be 4,000 to 5,000, about a tenth of the population. Yellow fever outbreaks recurred in Philadelphia and other major ports through the nineteenth century, but none had as many fatalities as that of 1793. The 1798 epidemic in Philadelphia also prompted an exodus; an estimated 1,292 residents died.

Some French colonial refugees had brought slaves with them from Saint-Domingue, but Pennsylvania had abolished slavery in 1780; after six months' residency in the state, slaves were to be freed. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society resisted refugee efforts to change the state law and, through 1796, 500 slaves from Saint-Domingue gained freedom in the city. Because of the violence accompanying the revolution on the island, people in the city (many of whom had southern ties) and the Upper South worried about the influence of such free people of color, fearing they would encourage slave insurrections in the US.

During the city's 10 years as federal capital, members of Congress were exempt from the abolition law, but the many slaveholders in the executive and judicial branches were not. President Washington, later vice-president Thomas Jefferson and others brought slaves as domestic servants, and evaded the law by regularly shifting their slaves out of the city before the 6-month deadline. Two of Washington's slaves escaped from the President's House (Philadelphia), and he gradually replaced his slaves with German immigrants who were indentured servants. The remains of the President's House (Philadelphia) were found during excavation for a new Liberty Bell Center, leading to archeological work in 2007. In 2010, a memorial on the site opened to commemorate Washington's slaves and African Americans in Philadelphia and US history, as well as to mark the house site.