Necropolis, page 31
Black soldiers resented that white officers used their alleged immunity to demote them from brave freedom fighters to a blue-clad support crew for white soldiers.20 Grave- and trench-digging were tasks of drudgery akin to their work while enslaved; they were not the jobs, they imagined, assigned to valued soldier-citizens. Such a racial caste system within the army was insulting, especially as Black soldiers earned significantly less than white soldiers, and, because of disease and battle, suffered a higher overall death rate. And, despite what white military leaders said, not all Black soldiers or sailors were acclimated. Yellow fever, along with smallpox and typhus, killed many of them, as well as their family members who were still trapped in contraband camps or on plantations (75 percent of the enslaved were still in slavery by the Battle of Appomattox). As Olivier Blanchard, who had been enslaved in Louisiana as a young boy, remembered, “The yellow fever came durin’ that war and kill lots. All the big plantation have the graveyard for the cullud people. That fever so bad they get the coffin ready before they dead.”21 This war might have ultimately destroyed slavery. But it did not destroy yellow fever, nor did it stamp out the practice of manipulating disease for racially expedient ends.
Too Little, Too Late
Over the four years of Civil War, about 752,000 people had died.22 Not only were approximately a quarter of the Confederacy’s white men of military age dead by 1865, two-thirds of assessed southern wealth had vanished. Large parts of the South were ill prepared for recovery. Two-fifths of southern livestock had been destroyed or confiscated and half its farm machinery had been destroyed, thousands of miles of railroad had been torn up, and thousands of farms were in disrepair. Many plantations were strewn with decaying bodies and corroding bullets, and had been overtaken by weeds. When one white planter eyed the destroyed cane fields west of New Orleans, he lamented: “I felt as if in a funeral procession … This vast country, once the Eden of America, is a desert over which the weeds of mourning flourish and the clouds of sorrow weep.” In 1860 New Orleans had been the foremost transshipment point for the nation’s cotton, sugar, and tobacco from the Mississippi Valley. But after four years of war and the boom in industry to the north and west, New Orleans’s once dominant position was in jeopardy. Its banks, which had prospered from providing capital to the plantation South, now held worthless notes. As the Confederate dollar collapsed, cotton factorages on the levee faced ruin; many shut their doors. The steamboat trade had been seriously disrupted by military campaigns along the Mississippi. What white Louisianans lamented most of all, however, was that this war had destroyed the institution that had underwritten southern prosperity for two centuries. Following the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, in December 1865, more than four million people were permanently freed from slavery across the nation—more than 331,000 in Louisiana.23
White planters had never needed slavery—they had just wanted it.24 And to unionists, Republicans, freedmen, and carpetbaggers, Reconstruction offered an unprecedented opportunity for southern states and cities to rebuild modern industrial economies without enslaved labor. In time, radicals imagined, northern capital would return to the South, railways would be extended, port cities would be dredged to accommodate larger ships, infrastructure would be modernized, and the landscape would slowly recover. The political landscape would also be repaired and modernized as freedpeople went to school and participated in a contract-based economy, and as Black men began to vote and take up political office. To Democrats and their affiliates, however, Reconstruction was an abomination. Once again, New Orleans’s white political elite looked to yellow fever as justification for blocking changes to society and citizenship in the post-emancipation order. While Radical Reconstruction, at least for a time, sought to establish a new kind of American citizenship, immunocapitalists fought furiously to keep alive the old way of doing things: worshipping King Cotton while accommodating Yellow Jack, subjugating Black people and the unacclimated, and always aiming for maximum personal benefit.
To mobilize the old system of immunocapitalism within this new political economy, postwar elites found they needed different tools to dominate, but they were determined to try. Now they massaged the logics of racial immunity to meet the needs of the post-emancipation order. Louisiana planters had long insisted that without Black slavery, the Lower Mississippi would revert to a wilderness. But looking back to the glory days of the Confederacy, apologists now claimed that Blackness had not been the key to yellow fever resistance; instead, enslavement had been. They invoked the high postbellum mortality rate of freedpeople to “prove” that Black people were incapable of full citizenship or capitalist participation. Just as they had misrepresented science to justify slavery before the war, the white elite now manipulated acclimation and its mysteries to attack their Reconstruction enemies and undercut them politically. They systematically distorted how yellow fever worked and spread misinformation about epidemics. They once again climate-gerrymandered to effectively disenfranchise Black people, carpetbaggers, and Republicans. Thus, yellow fever was re-weaponized to entrench white, neo-confederate power, taking its place alongside harsher methods of postbellum oppression such as obstructionist lawsuits, Black Codes, and terroristic violence.
Postwar elites maintained the arrogance of the incumbent: that New Orleans’s past advantage dictated its future prosperity. They were sure the Crescent City would always dominate St. Louis or Atlanta, just as other nations would always prefer American cotton to Egyptian or Indian. The city’s position at the mouth of the Mississippi was their trump card against disruptive market shifts, they maintained—even against modernity itself. Geographic determinism had always been at the foundation of the elite worldview, the belief that New Orleans’s position—and therefore commercial future—was fixed. But what if geography, an advantage in the steamboat era, became a disadvantage in the railroad age? As it became increasingly clear to immigrants and capitalists abroad that yellow fever risk was a drag on Louisiana’s progress, the state’s commercial-civic elite remained remarkably blind to the sea changes in transportation, health, and commerce taking place around them, transformations that in fact had already been happening by the 1850s.
First, the postwar Yellow Fever South no longer had a fixed and enslaved labor force. The city experienced an upsurge in its Black population, as people from the countryside flocked to southern cities where opportunities were more abundant.25 But with freedom to move, tens of thousands of “Exodusters” also fled Louisiana’s political repression and white supremacist violence for the farmlands and cities of Illinois and Kansas. Second, New Orleans’s attractiveness to immigrants was declining. By the 1870s, European immigration had dropped off precipitously as people increasingly bypassed the sickly South for other places of opportunity like the Middle West—where the land was plentiful and yellow fever was absent.26 Third, by the 1870s, Chicago, St. Louis, and Atlanta could compete with New Orleans in the cotton trade, their multiple railroad lines transporting product faster and more reliably than New Orleans–bound steamships. By the 1870s much of the product and people that had once fueled the Crescent City’s growth had moved elsewhere. Staring the unsustainability of their racially stratified, immigration-dependent system in the face, some whites tried to tie Black people to the land as sharecroppers. Others imported “coolie” laborers from China. Even still, the labor force shrank. As Edward Henry Durell, a Republican wartime mayor of New Orleans, had prophesied: “What is this miserable city to the growing giant of the West?”27
The death knell for immunocapitalism came after the 1878 epidemic, which killed 5,000 in New Orleans and 20,000 across the Mississippi delta. New Orleans’ elites tried to absorb these deaths as tragic but unavoidable, just as they always had. But they were shocked to find that merchants in Memphis, planters around Galveston, and shopkeepers in Natchez held them responsible for the scope and deadliness of this region-wide epidemic. And now these smaller cities in the Yellow Fever South could take their business elsewhere; they no longer had to swallow New Orleans’s health backwardness as their status quo or take unnecessary mortality in stride. Without slavery, sufficient immigration to replace the dead, and with New Orleans’s cotton-market dominance waning, immunocapitalism could no longer be justified or sustained. Staring irrelevancy in the face, city leaders finally, reluctantly adopted the sanitarian’s mantra: that “Public Health is Public Wealth.”28 But these changes were much too little, much too late. New Orleans, once the great southern metropolis, was fading into a necropolitan backwater.
Same Disease, Old Tricks
If the white elites of New Orleans had honestly reflected on the city’s Civil War experience, they would have seen that many of their fundamental truths about disease were baseless. The war had proved that Black people were not entirely immune to yellow fever; that the city’s health could be improved; that quarantines were effective; and that northern critics of their system were not ignorant quacks but actually had some good ideas. To shake its image as a backward, sickly city and to position itself for future prosperity, New Orleans and its hinterlands required a number of things to happen quickly. New Orleans needed a reliable laboring population to pick and process cotton; a speedy inflow of capital from the North and Europe to modernize its infrastructure and diversify its economy; and a return of river-based steamboat traffic to prewar levels. Perhaps above all, New Orleans would need new rail connections, and to repair the Jackson and Opelousas lines that had been damaged and degraded by the war.29
In fact, New Orleans was in as good a position as any southern city—better, even—to bounce back from the war. Having been occupied early, it suffered little structural damage. No other major southern city escaped so intact. Large portions of Atlanta, Charleston, Vicksburg, and Richmond had been razed by shellfire. By many metrics, in fact—health, infrastructure, and population—New Orleans had actually improved during the war. Indeed, the city had never been so clean or healthy as in 1865. Perhaps because New Orleans had suffered so little damage in the war, and because its leading citizens associated its current cleaner condition with the “Beast” Butler and Northern despotism, they did not take the South’s defeat as a prompt to rethink the city’s purpose and prospects. Instead, the postwar merchant elite—essentially indistinguishable from its prewar counterpart—were hyperfocused on resurrecting the river-dependent cotton economy and reinstituting slavery in all but name, even if that meant a return of yellow fever.
Under wartime occupation, Louisiana’s board of health had been converted into a military bureau with the Department of the Gulf’s medical director serving as its president. After New Orleans was returned to civilian control in March 1866, the state’s health board reverted to its prewar form, with six members appointed by the governor and three by the New Orleans city council. This reconstituted board of health was “not a Reconstruction body” concerned with progressive health improvement. Instead it focused on protecting the health of the reemerging cotton industry and thus “delayed and protracted their actions” on all health questions, especially quarantine. The hotheaded wartime mayor John T. Monroe, once jailed and exiled by Butler but reelected to the mayoralty in 1866, supported a policy of public health cheapness. He also stacked the police force with specially pardoned former Confederates, men who showed little interest in promoting the public’s health and much interest in harassing freedpeople.30
Predictably, filth returned. The Picayune reported that the city lacked a “health police” and nobody was enforcing any sanitation rules. By August 1866 one doctor commented that “the city is now filthy in the extreme.”31 Provost-Marshall James Bowen, who had served for two years in the Union army in New Orleans, predicted that “with the usual lax administration of such laws by civil authority, the city will once again be subject to [yellow fever’s] visitation.” Dr. Edward Fenner agreed, writing that the city’s recent cleanup represented a “Herculean task,” though a futile one for New Orleans in the long term, as only the “military despotism” of General Butler “would have accomplished it.”32
These prophecies proved correct. Cholera and yellow fever killed hundreds in 1866, coinciding with a brutal massacre in which ex-Confederates killed dozens of Black people at Louisiana’s Constitutional Convention. And in 1867 New Orleans suffered through its worst yellow fever epidemic since 1858. In late August of that year, General Philip S. Sheridan—commanding officer of the federal forces in Louisiana—telegraphed Washington that yellow fever was again epidemic in New Orleans, though local health authorities and the city’s press remained unconcerned. The Picayune prodded the city to repeal the quarantine, called it a “folly,” and reminded readers that “seventy-seven deaths in a week”—seven-eighths of them unacclimated Europeans and northerners—“does not create much alarm in a community that has suffered in the same space of time to the number of twelve hundred.” And besides, this iteration of the disease, unlike that of 1853, was “mild” and “easily managed.”33
The press was characteristically unfazed, but many townspeople were scared, especially the many freedpeople who had flocked into New Orleans from its plantation hinterlands. Many of these unacclimated people were destitute and, when sick, forced to depend on feeble institutions within this city’s already second-class health care system. Though they could go to the frightful Charity Hospital, most Black people received their care at the newly established Freedmen’s Hospital on the east side of town, administered by the radical—though overstretched and underfunded—Freedmen’s Bureau. Established by the War Department by an act of March 3, 1865, and its charter extended twice by acts in 1866 and 1868, the Freedmen’s Bureau was the South’s primary welfare institution for the emancipated millions who had no land, education, or money. It was tasked with serving the needs of the destitute, establishing schools, negotiating labor contracts, helping Black soldiers and sailors collect pensions and back pay, and reuniting families torn apart by war and the domestic slave trade. Health was a major concern of the Bureau, especially in the immediate aftermath of the war as massive smallpox epidemics ripped through contraband camps and communities of unvaccinated freedpeople, killing thousands.34
While medical facilities were thin on the ground for Black people across the rural South, larger cities like Richmond and New Orleans did have Black hospitals with professional staffs and dispensaries that provided medical care for a nominal charge. Patient records from the Freedmen’s Hospital in New Orleans display a wide array of sicknesses, many of them crowd diseases or ailments exacerbated by malnutrition and poverty. Each year, cholera, syphilis, pneumonia, hepatitis, and tuberculosis killed hundreds. Each August, fevers of all description—ship, scarlet, intermittent, and remittent—filled the wards. In October 1867 the hospital’s chief surgeon described the abject filthiness of the establishment. “For the last three Sunday nights,” Dr. David MacKay wrote, “the scavengers employed to clean the sinks attached to this Hospital have, instead of removing the filth, emptied a part of it into the canal … a proceeding very detrimental to health of patients in our Hospital and persons living in the neighborhood.” Other administrators commented that hospital conditions mirrored those that freedpeople were forced to live in all the time. After inspecting a home on Julia Street filled with feverish Black patients, the surgeon-in-chief noted the “wretched sanitary condition” of the premises, complete with “an unsightly heap of decomposing and putrescent vegetable & animal matter, which cannot but breed disease.” Moreover, he wrote, “the sink or privy is filled, and the stench from it is unendurable.”35
Over 3,300 people died in New Orleans from yellow fever in 1867 (including 200 occupying Union soldiers), one hundred times more than had died in the battle to recapture New Orleans in 1862. Most of the dead were white northerners and Europeans. Approximately 150 Black victims of yellow fever entered the Freedmen’s Hospital and dozens died from it there. If this information was known, bureaucrats noted the dead’s names, age, nativity, marital status, the name of their former owner, and their cause of death. But so much was unknown. Theodore (age thirty) and Williams (age twenty)—no last names mentioned—died of yellow fever in September 1867. Probably they, like many Black victims that year, had only just arrived in the city, perhaps to reunite with family or to find a job in an economy in turmoil. Matilda Taylor, a twenty-three-year-old woman from Kentucky, died of yellow fever in mid-October 1867, as did Leander Claire, a twenty-four-year-old man from Georgia.36 Their bodies were carted to the lonely and secluded Freedmen’s Cemetery, just downriver at Chalmette, the site where Andrew Jackson won his victory over the British in 1815.
The official reaction to the epidemic of 1867 was a facsimile of the past. Most politicians fled town when the epidemic ramped up in August, and most health officers still clung to anti-contagionism. Willfully forgetting just how well quarantine had worked during the war, some health officers insisted during the 1867 epidemic that there was no evidence that yellow fever was imported, and therefore quarantine was useless. Besides, the Picayune reasoned, “why shut the door of the sheep pen, now that the wolf has come in!” Even Stanford Chaillé—a professor at Tulane Medical School, later head of the 1879 US Havana Yellow Fever Commission, and one of the most respected voices on yellow fever in postbellum New Orleans—concluded that quarantines had historically “proved worse than useless.”37
