Revolutionary War

New York Minister Introduces Fellow Clergymen in Wake of Yellow Fever Epidemic



JOHN RODGERS, Autograph Letter Signed, to Ashbel Green, December 1, 1798, New York, New York. 1 p., 6.5" x 8". Contemporary tears where the seal was broken.



Complete Transcript

New York, Decr 1st 1798

My dear Sir,

This will be handed to you by the revd Mr Bebee of Woodbridge, Connecticut, a Gentn of Character, who is traveling to the Southward for his Health. Your politeness superceeds the Necessity of my recommending him to your Attention during the short stay he may make in your City.

I sincerely rejoice with you & your fellow Citizens on your return to your habitations in Life & Health, after the late awful visitation of Heaven to your City & Ours. O! that the Lord would sanctify this Solemn Providence to our respective Inhabitants.

I have only time to add my best Compliments to Mrs Green & my young friend Mr Janesway, from you affectionate Bro in the Gospel of a precious [JCh?

John Rodgers

Dr Green



Historical Background

Five years after the 1793 yellow fever epidemic killed 10 percent of Philadelphia’s population, it returned to both Philadelphia and New York. In the summer of 1798, approximately 2,000 people died in New York City, out of a population of about 70,000, while in Philadelphia, as many as 4,000 people died in a city of 70,000 residents, of whom perhaps 50,000 fled the city. If they did, then the death rate was more than double that of five years earlier. In all, approximately 10,000 people died in American port cities that summer. New York City had worse outbreaks that reached epidemic proportions in 1795, 1799, and 1803, killing thousands.



Rodgers introduces Reverend David Lewis Beebe (1763-1803), who was pastor of the Amity Church in Woodbridge, Connecticut. Beebe graduated from Yale College in 1785 and became pastor at Woodbridge in 1791. His pastorate continued for nine years, but he was forced to resign in 1800 when his health failed. This letter suggests Beebe made an effort to recover by moving to the South for a time. He later worked as a merchant in Connecticut and New York before his death.





John Rodgers (1727-1811) was born in Boston but soon moved to Philadelphia. Converted under the preaching of George Whitefield, he began studying Biblical languages with several ministers, including Gilbert Tennent. Though he had no formal college education, Rodgers learned much. After preaching in Virginia and Maryland for a time, he became pastor of a Presbyterian Church in New Castle, Delaware, in 1749. In 1765, he moved to New York, where he became pastor of the Wall Street Presbyterian Church. The congregation opened a second location, Brick Presbyterian Church in 1768. In the 1760s, he received honorary doctor of divinity degrees from Princeton University and the University of Edinburgh. In 1776, Rodgers fled the city before it came under British occupation and settled in Connecticut and then New Jersey. Rodgers returned to New York City when the British evacuated it late in 1783. In 1789, he was elected the first Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America.



Ashbel Green (1762-1848) was born in New Jersey and served as a sergeant during the American Revolutionary War. After the war, he attended the College of New Jersey (Princeton) and graduated as valedictorian in 1783. He married Elizabeth Stockton in 1785, and they had three children. He served as the third Chaplain of the United States House of Representatives (1792-1800), the eighth President of the College of New Jersey (1812-1822), and the second President of the Bible Society of Philadelphia, of which he had been a founding member. In 1817, he emancipated his family’s slave Betsey Stockton, taught her, and recommended her as a missionary to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. They accepted her, and she became the first single female overseas missionary sent from the United States. From 1822 to 1825, she was a missionary in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii).





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