By the time Henry Bissex was born in 1796, Philadelphia was crucial in the foundation of the United States. It was the largest American city by population and had one of country’s largest trade ports. Its economy had boomed after the end of the Revolutionary War in 1787 and Philadelphia experienced massive growth in population and trade. By 1790, Philadelphia was chosen to be a temporary (and first) national capital of the United States under the new United States of America Constitution. The city had already been the capital of the Pennsylvania state government for centuries and was the site of both the First and Second Continental Congress. In 1791, Philadelphia was the location of the First Bank of the United States. It was chartered for a term of twenty years by the United States Congress and United States Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton on February 25, 1791 as an attempt to stabilize the United States’s national credit and pay debts from the war. …show more content…
The August 1793 epidemic was caused by a large influx of refugees from Saint-Domingue. Many fled from the Caribbean after the start of the Haitian Revolution. These refugees and the increase of international shipping led to mosquitos from the islands to appear in Philadelphian ports. These mosquitoes carried the yellow fever virus and instilled fear in its residents. A month after the beginnings of the epidemic, nearly half of Philadelphia’s 50,000 population had already left the city in attempt to escape the virus. The city was in quarantine and Philadelphia goods and people were prohibited from entering nearby towns and cities like New York and Boston. By the middle of November, the cold weather had set in and the plague officially had ended. 5,000 people, early a tenth of Philadelphians, had died as a result of the