Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made

by James Dabney McCabe

This is the testimony of Mr. Henry W. Arey, the distinguished secretary of Girard College, in whose keeping are the papers of the subject of this memoir, and it must be confessed that his view of Girard's character is sustained by the following incidents, the narration of which I have passed over until now, in order that the history of his commercial career might not be interrupted:

In the summer of 1793 the yellow fever broke out with fearful violence in Philadelphia. The citizens fled in dismay, leaving the plague-smitten city to its fate. Houses were left tenantless, and the streets were deserted. It was a season of horror and dread. Those who could not get away avoided each other, and the sufferers were left to languish and die. Money could not buy nurses in sufficient numbers, and often the victims lay unburied for days in the places where they had died. So terrible was the panic that it seemed that nothing could stay it.

On the 10th of September the Federal Gazette, the only paper which had not suspended its publication, contained an anonymous card, stating that of the visitors of the poor all but three had succumbed to the disease or fled from the city, and begging assistance from such benevolent citizens as would consent to render their aid. On the 12th and 14th, meetings were held at the City Hall, at the last of which a volunteer committee was appointed to superintend the measures to be taken for checking the pestilence. Twenty-seven men volunteered to serve, but only twelve had the courage to fulfill their promise. They set to work promptly. The hospital at Bush Hill was reported by the physician to be in a deplorable state—without order, dirty and foul, and in need of nurses. The last, he stated, could not be had for any price. Two of the committee now stepped forward and nobly offered themselves as managers of the hospital. They were Stephen Girard and Peter Helm.

Girard was now a man of wealth and influence, and with a brilliant commercial career opening before him. Above all, he was a foreigner, and unpopular in the city. Yet he did not hesitate to take the post from which others shrank. He and Helm were regarded as doomed men, but they did not falter from their self-imposed task. They went to work at once. Girard chose the post of honor, which was the post of danger—the management of the interior of the hospital. His decisive character was at once felt. Order began to appear, medicines and nurses were procured, and the very next day the committee were informed that the hospital had been cleaned and reorganized, and was prepared to receive patients.

Girard opened his purse liberally, and spared no expense where money would avail. But this was not all. Besides personally superintending the interior of the hospital, he went about through the city seeking the sick and conveying them to the hospital.

"In the great scarcity of help, he used frequently to receive the sick and dying at the gate, assist in carrying them to their beds, nurse them, receive their last messages, watch for their last breath, and then, wrapping them in the sheet on which they had died, carry them out to the burial ground and place them in the trench. He had a vivid recollection of the difficulty of finding any kind of fabric in which to wrap the dead, when the vast number of interments had exhausted the supply of sheets. 'I would put them,' he would say, 'in any old rag I could find.'"

"If he ever left the hospital, it was to visit the infected districts, and assist in removing the sick from the houses in which they were dying without help. One scene of this kind, witnessed by a merchant who was hurrying past with camphored handkerchief pressed to his mouth, affords us a vivid glimpse of this heroic man engaged in his sublime vocation. A carriage, rapidly driven by a black man, broke the silence of the deserted and grass-grown street. It stopped before a frame house, and the driver, first having bound a handkerchief over his mouth, opened the door of the carriage, and quickly remounted to the box. A short, thick-set man stepped from the coach and entered the house. In a minute or two the observer, who stood at a safe distance watching the proceedings, heard a shuffling noise in the entry, and soon saw the stout little man supporting with extreme difficulty a tall, gaunt, yellow-visaged victim of the pestilence. Girard held round the waist the sick man, whose yellow face rested against his own; his long, damp, tangled hair mingled with Girard's; his feet dragging helpless upon the pavement. Thus he drew him to the carriage door, the driver averting his face from the spectacle, far from offering to assist. Partly dragging, partly lifting, Girard succeeded, after long and severe exertion, in getting him into the vehicle. He then entered it himself, closed the door, and the carriage drove away toward the hospital." [^[A]]

For sixty days Mr. Girard continued to discharge his duties, never absenting himself from his post, being nobly sustained by Peter Helm.