Necropolis, page 26
The problem was now too big to control and too widespread to cover up. As usual, the city government adjourned for the summer in late July without appropriating any funds for health care or constituting a board of health—an abdication of duty one critic called a “burlesque on municipal government.”9 Mayor Abdiel Crossman, a Whig who had campaigned on a promise of sanitation, failed to summon the aldermen back. The sick, dying, and widowed still in town were left to the care of private charities—particularly the Howard Association, which spent over $150,000 in three months on medicines for the poor, nurses’ fees, and doctor reimbursements. The Howards also established three orphan asylums for the 241 children and ninety-one nursing infants “left totally destitute” by the deaths of both parents from yellow fever. Cemeteries could not handle the influx of so many dead bodies. Corpses, bloating and stinking, piled up outside graveyard gates until workmen—paid an extraordinary $5 an hour—shoveled them onto carts and threw them into trenches, covering the dead with lime to hasten decomposition.10
News spread across the country about the calamity unfolding in New Orleans. Obituaries for victims of the “prevailing epidemic” dotted every domestic newspaper; vivid hospital scenes were rendered for European readers; the Glasgow papers called New Orleans “the most vicious and reckless city in America,” lamenting those “poor wretches” who died amid “bacchanalian orgies” of disease.11 Charity concerts, fundraisers, and food drives were staged in New York and Boston to aid Louisiana’s “distressed unacclimated.” New Yorkers sent more than $20,000 to New Orleans; Philadelphians more than $11,000. Irish immigrants in San Francisco—many of whom had passed through New Orleans on their journeys to California’s gold fields—raised $12,000. Mayor Crossman even received a check for $1,000 from the citizens of Wheeling, Virginia, population 12,000. The Howard-backed “due-bills” or bons—tickets exchangeable for ice or beef—circulated as currency around the city.12
By August, 1,000 people were dying each week from yellow fever. As one volunteer for the Howards described it, “The whole city was a hospital,” the streets deserted except for “the hasty pedestrian on an errand of mercy” and the body carters yelling “Bring out your dead!” Religious leaders preached that the epidemic was divine punishment. After Sunday, August 21—the so-called “black day” when over 300 people died—the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana, Leonidas Polk, declared a fast day. He prepared a special prayer asking God to “turn from us the ravage of the pestilence, wherewith for our iniquities, thou art now visiting us.” Unitarian minister Theodore Clapp suggested that the unusual virulence of the epidemic was a clear “display of God’s anger.” But Clapp insisted God would look kindly upon New Orleans again; that in spite of the pestilence, “there is as much of God’s love in New Orleans to-day as there ever was before, or ever will be hereafter.”13
Though old-timers said that “the fever will fail for want of food” by September, the epidemic had still not abated. City authorities still considered it too dangerous to reopen schools. With no customers, most businesses remained shuttered. “Nothing can be had here for love or money” wrote Mary Copes, the wife of a cotton merchant and insurance agent, in mid-September. With “nothing in market to eat and nothing brought from the country,” she was anxious about the epidemic’s long-term economic consequences. “This fearful epidemic will be so disastrous to the prosperity of N. Orleans,” worried Copes, “that it will take several years for her to recover from it, even if it should be healthy for several successive years.”14
The Aftermath
Unseasonably early frosts in mid-October finally brought the epidemic to a close. In five months, approximately 30,000 people had sickened with yellow fever and 12,000—about 10 percent of the city’s population—had died. As always, the epidemic took a staggering toll on particular groups: at least 3,500 people from Ireland (one-fifth of the city’s Irish-born population) perished. As Dr. Dowler, a longtime fever watcher, put it, “The bloodiest battle-fields of modern times scarcely can compare with the New Orleans epidemic of 1853, which destroyed five times more than the British Army lost on the field of Waterloo.” Though observers focused on the devastation felt by white people in New Orleans (once again, no reliable mortality estimates for Black people were committed to record), tragedy rippled outward. Sick refugees imported yellow fever to Natchez and Galveston, and by Christmas, thousands across Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Texas had died. Even landlocked towns far from the epidemic’s epicenter were devastated. On September 2, 1853, a note on a mail bill from the small village of Thibodeaux, sixty miles west of New Orleans, read: “Stores closed—town abandoned—151 cases of yellow fever—22 deaths—postmaster absent—clerks all down with the fever.”15
Even for a disaster-steeled people like Louisianans, the “Great Epidemic” of 1853 was too serious a catastrophe to be written off as an act of God about which nothing could be done. And while many white survivors wanted to get back to making money as quickly as possible, returning politicians struggled to revert to business as usual. Much to their chagrin, outsiders blamed them, the slavery-based system of cotton capitalism they governed, and the public-health-as-private-acclimation system they endorsed for the magnitude of the epidemic. Upon reconvening in late October, the city council established multiple ad hoc committees, tasked with investigating why the epidemic had been so lethal. Hearings ensued, with performative outrage on full display. Written reports followed. Channeling the anger of committee member J. C. Simonds (who had warned in 1851 that such a disaster was nigh), the chair of the newly formed Sanitary Commission, Dr. Edward Hall Barton, directly attacked the see-no-evil attitude of city authorities, writing in his 542-page report: “It required a great calamity, like that of 1853, to open our eyes to the actual truth” that “ignorance is not bliss.” Barton estimated that the epidemic had cost the city millions in future earnings, damaged its prosperity and reputation, devalued its real estate, and swelled the ranks of orphans and widows. “Shall we say then,” Barton asked, “that all this could have been prevented?”16
Louis Dominique Grandjean Develle, French Market and Red Store, ca. 1841–1844. The Historic New Orleans Collection, The L. Kemper and Leila Moore Williams Founders Collection.
But the Sanitary Commission resurrected the same minimalist nonsolutions always proffered in the aftermath of epidemics. It concluded that yellow fever was not contagious, that it differed from other fevers only in degree, and that it resulted from a combination of local meteorological and geographical conditions. It made seventeen lackluster recommendations—other American ports might have considered them self-evident—for improved health: it called for a sewage and privy system; city-wide drainage; more paved roads; extending the water works; building an “extensive shed” across “the entire front of the business part of the city”; filling in defunct canals; moving slaughterhouses out of the city center; and banning burials within city limits. The biggest and most expensive recommendation was to establish a Health Department and a quarantine station, both under the control of the city council. All of these reforms would cost about $1.43 million, Barton estimated. Anticipating the sticker shock, he recommended the city council sell swamp lands, secure $35,000 on credit and $400,000 in a loan from John McDonogh’s estate, levy a tonnage duty on arriving vessels, tax the property of absentees, and raise the remaining revenue through a lottery.17
Immediately, the vultures swooped. Dr. Bennet Dowler—author of a competing report—bitterly attacked Barton for dilettantish posturing, calling his report “really a tedious book, abounding in absurdities, extravagances, and self-glorification.” To the Commission’s claim that yellow fever would be ameliorated by more rigorous public health infrastructure, Dowler scoffed:
Think of that, ye who live! Hear it, ye angry ghosts of the dead! Let “the filthiest city in the civilized world” open wide the door of its treasury to the inspired Commission, and yellow fever shall henceforth be “an impossibility.” Allah is great! but the Commission are the true yellow fever killers.18
The pile-on continued. In his thirteen-page introduction to the mortality lists from 1853, Dr. J. S. McFarlane—famous for his filth-is-health theory—bizarrely dedicated about half of his text to deriding quarantines, adding a plea that the city not put its health destiny into the hands of “hygienic visionaries.” Instead, he insisted that authorities should “do nothing in a hurry.”19
The city and state governments, hiding behind their commission pageantry, took McFarlane’s advice. No health board or department was established. No future plans for quarantine were drawn up. That would take more epidemics and many more deaths. By December 1853 the council had returned to its more pressing business: preparing for the new business season and redrawing election wards. As the very conservative Bee put it in a brief moment of chastisement, the “languid sympathies” and “drowsy consciences” of New Orleans’s city authorities have “evinced ignorance, apathy and neglect.” Indeed, the dreadful mortality “seemed to bewilder and stupefy without adequately arousing them.” Any other city, the Bee continued, would have actively sought to “discover [yellow fever’s] cause and to prevent its recurrence.”20
Denying the problem, of course, did not fix it. Another epidemic struck in 1854, killing over 3,000 people. Once again the newspapers remained silent (the Picayune never acknowledged that yellow fever was epidemic); politicians fled to the country without appropriating money for health care; no quarantine was installed; no board of health was established. Clearly frustrated, Barton wrote another account for the Sanitary Commission, copying whole sections and recommendations from the previous year’s report. But this time he took sharper aim at the apathy of those with the power to affect change: “When pinned to the wall to account for this frightful mortality occurring year after year, the impudent and ungrateful reply is—‘it only consists of immigrants!’ immigrants who have made this city what it is, and consists now of no less than two-thirds of the white population.” The filthy condition of the city and its astronomical mortality “is not, at this day a matter of opinion,” Barton insisted, “it has, unfortunately for us, passed from opinion to fact, about which there is no room for dispute by any honest inquirer.”21
The Paranoid Style
Barton’s call to action would have been equally potent if he had written it in invisible ink. The state legislature—recently moved to Baton Rouge—recognized that New Orleans’s city council, if left to its own devices, would never impose quarantine, collect comprehensive data, or otherwise intervene to ensure the health of the region, and so the legislature constituted a State Board of Health. The landmark “Act to Establish Quarantine for the Protection of the State,” passed in March 1855, empowered a nine-member panel to institute quarantine—with three members appointed by the New Orleans city council to represent commercial interests. All members were required to possess “known zeal” for quarantine.22 But predictably, New Orleans businessmen styled the law “an act to harass, impede, shackle and injure the commerce and navigation of New-Orleans.” They mounted such an opposition that the quarantine imposed in 1855 was quickly dismantled. That summer another epidemic killed over 2,000 people, but that too was absorbed by New Orleans’s elite without serious concern. Instead, in its official report on internal resources, the city council celebrated that for the past ten years “New Orleans has advanced steadily and healthfully in the chief elements of a commercial greatness.” Epidemics went unmentioned, and the fact that 12,000 had died in 1853 and 3,000 in 1854 was smoothed over by extolling the record exports of cotton and sugar.23 In short, New Orleans’s economic system of intensive commodity production and export worked well for those at the top in spite of disease. Why spend money fixing a system that was not broken? As novelist George Washington Cable put it, elite minds “turned only to commerce; and the commercial value of a well-authenticated low death-rate he totally overlooked. Every summer might bring plague—granted; but winter brought trade, wealth. It thundered and tumbled through the streets like a surf.”24
Immunocapitalism certainly worked, in its way. But it was fragile. If slavery were to be abolished, if New Orleans were to lose its apex position in the cotton export trade, or if white immigration were to be rerouted even more extensively to other locations like Chicago or California—a trend that was already beginning by the 1850s—the system could collapse. The white elites of New Orleans, knowing that their fortunes and way of life depended upon replacing people, not keeping them alive, got to work on more intensely framing the yellow fever question as being, not a matter of science and mortality, but instead one of politics and sectional loyalty. Much like slavery, health and death became highly charged political issues, lightning rods in the antebellum culture wars that increasingly divided the slave South from the free North. What a white person in Louisiana said (and did not say) about disease became a litmus test for their positions on other pressing political questions: the proper role of government, states’ rights, territorial expansion, and—most of all—slavery.
In the increasingly paranoid social and ideological context of the 1850s, anonymous boosters penned numerous glowing articles about New Orleans, professing that its sanitary condition was first in the nation, that yellow fever was barely a problem, that acclimation was a mild process easily undertaken, and that the city’s reputation as a “necropolis” was just a jealous Northern fiction. Their public essays, speeches, and “anti-panic salvos” followed a strikingly similar pattern we might call “disease denialism.” This had six steps. First, deny the validity of empirical data and adamantly discredit any accounts of sickness as outliers, propaganda, or wild exaggeration. Second, cast survival as a choice and blame victims of yellow fever for bringing the disease on themselves. Third, emphasize that acclimation was an easy, even blissful, process. Fourth, claim Northern attention to yellow fever was actually a proxy for antislavery hysteria, which was hypocritical because Northern cities also had their share of disease and labor-based suffering. Fifth, assert that any monetary penalties incurred by Southerners for yellow fever—especially the “climate premiums” levied on white Southerners seeking life insurance—were unfair. And sixth, cast all criticism—whether internal or external—as Northern in origin, the grumblings of a region that was conspiring to malign the South as sickly, even though Northern wealth depended upon it.25
Viewing plain facts like death rates with skepticism and discounting eyewitness accounts of grave digging as anecdotal, some extremists cast doubt not only on the scope of a given epidemic, but also on whether yellow fever was a problem at all. Such views may have been illogical and unbelievable, but their righteous repetition successfully shifted the terms of the debate. In time, it became acceptable even for those who conceded yellow fever was an occasional danger to claim it was a social panacea, screening out alcoholics, filthy immigrants, and lesser men only. And by the late 1850s all disease denialists came to espouse the crucial points of their argument: that Black people were intellectually inferior but immunologically superior to whites; that only abolitionists—the ultimate outsiders—died of yellow fever; that freedom, not disease, was what killed Black people; and that Black slavery was key to white public health, as “without the productive power of the negro whom an all-wise Creator has perfectly adapted to the labor needs of the South its lands would have remained a howling wilderness.”26 At its apogee, disease denialism asserted that Black people were biologically adapted to work specifically in the American South. Why else would Black people possess the “gift” of yellow fever immunity, denialists demanded, if God did not intend them to be enslaved in Louisiana?
Not one of the claims made by disease denialists was true. Indeed, to subscribe to this logic in its entirety required a special kind of delusion, with the argument collapsing under the weight of its own inconsistency. But truth and good faith were never the point. The goal of disease denialism was to construct a worldview of aggressive aggrievement in defense of the South and racial slavery through the rhetoric of annihilation and resentment. Such thinking was, by definition, not rigorous. Boosters—vacillating between cynicism, deflection, and hysteria—persisted in denying obvious facts, elevating anecdotal evidence, and undermining or eliding inconvenient truths.
Disease denialism was a paranoid ruling-class ideology, prone to, in the words of Richard Hofstadter, “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.”27 But New Orleans’s elites worked hard to generate this worldview so wholly at odds with reality. And by the 1850s, they had convinced or manipulated the vast majority of white townspeople into accepting disease denialism as the status quo—even those subordinates, especially recent immigrants and the unacclimated, for whom denying yellow fever was decidedly against their interests. Propaganda does not simply disseminate and magically delude people into “false consciousness”; cultural hegemony is not achieved by fiat. Rather, disease denialism resonated with whites across every social class because it reinforced the racial and economic order they wanted. Its logic tracked the logic of proslavery ideology, the South’s “dominant fundamental” worldview, which was similarly fact-allergic and rooted in denial. Surviving yellow fever was considered a test of an individual’s worth. Whether they then stuck to the disease denialists’ script was considered a test of loyalty—to New Orleans, to racial slavery, and to cotton. We should think of proslavery thinking and disease denialism as two parallel, occasionally intersecting ideologies. Both cloaked anti-Black racism in the language of natural science. Both heaped opprobrium on an outside enemy—malicious Northerners—whom Southerners were already primed to mistrust. And both foreclosed alternate ways of thinking about the city’s future: New Orleans was what it was, and it could be no other way.28
