America's First Plague offers the definitive telling of this long-forgotten crisis, the yellow fever epidemic of 1793, which killed ten percent of Philadelphia's citizens and ravaged the Eastern seaboard. As disease spread, the national government was slow to react, citizens donned protective masks and the authorities ordered quarantines.

Historian Robert P. Watson tells the story of a young nation teetering on the brink of chaos, capturing the wave of fear that swept across the fledgling republic, and the numerous unintended but far-reaching consequences it would have on the development of the United States and the Atlantic slave trade.