Necropolis, page 35
7. For the loss of a job during epidemics, see Ralph Roanoke, “Random Leaf from the Life of Ralph Roanoke,” Knickerbocker, September 1852, 196–203.
8. Roanoke, “Random Leaf,” 201. For symptoms and treatment, see Max Neubling to Theodor Neubling, May 20, 1825, Max Neubling Letter Book, ms. 873, LSU.
9. “As to Yellow Fever,” no date, George Washington Cable Papers, box 112, folder 30, ms. 2, LRC.
10. A Physician of New Orleans, History of the Yellow Fever during the Summer of 1853 (Philadelphia and St. Louis: C.W. Kenworthy, 1854), 21. For New Orleans’s Charity Hospital, see Austin Flint, The Life and Labors of Laennec: An Introductory Address Delivered at the New Orleans School of Medicine, November 14, 1859 (New Orleans: Bulletin Book and Job Office, 1859), 3; John Salvaggio, New Orleans’ Charity Hospital: A Story of Physicians, Politics, and Poverty (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1992), 35–40.
11. For yellow fever symptoms and treatment, see René La Roche, Yellow Fever, Considered in Its Historical, Pathological, Etiological, and Therapeutic Relations, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1855), 1:129–142; J. F. Beugnot, “An Essay on Yellow Fever … Read before the Louisiana Medico-Chirurgical Society, Sept. 1843,” NOMSJ 1, no. 1 (May–July 1844): 1–28, esp. 10–12; Urmi Engineer Willoughby, Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2017), 16–17.
12. “As to Yellow Fever”; William Vandergriff to Rebecca Johnson, August 10, 1825, ms. 2007.0257.21, HNOC.
13. Theodore Clapp, Autobiographical Sketches and Recollections during a Thirty-Five Years’ Residence in New Orleans (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Co., 1857), 189–194, here 189.
14. John P. Ordway, Let Me Kiss Him for His Mother: Song and Chorus, as Performed by Ordway’s Æolians and Other Popular Bands (Boston: E.H. Wade, ca. 1859); William Vandergriff to Mrs. Rebecca J. Johnson, August 10, 1825, ms. 2007.0257.21, HNOC.
15. For the “Good Death,” see Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008).
16. “Sketches of Character. No. LXX. The Acclimated Man,” Daily Delta, August 1, 1853; “Sketches of Character. No. LXXV. The Anti-Panic Man,” Daily Delta, August 13, 1853; “Sketches of Character. No. LXIX. The Unacclimated Man,” Daily Delta, July 29, 1853.
17. Bennet Dowler, Researches upon the Necropolis of New Orleans, with Brief Allusions to Its Vital Arithmetic (New Orleans: Bills and Clark, 1850), 3–28.
18. For yellow fever storytelling, see Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853 (Buffalo: Derby, Orton and Mulligan, 1853), 176–178; Erasmus Darwin Fenner, The Epidemic of 1847: Or, Brief Accounts of the Yellow Fever, That Prevailed at New-Orleans, Vicksburg, Rodney, Natchez, Houston and Covington (New Orleans, 1848). For Mary and Maria, see Mary Copes to Joseph Copes, September 18, 1853, Joseph S. Copes Papers, box 10, folder 9, ms. 733, LRC; Harry Careless, “A Tale of the Yellow Fever,” Knickerbocker, November 1848, 433–439.
19. For excellent histories of yellow fever and public health in New Orleans, see Willoughby, Yellow Fever, 37–62; Jo Ann Carrigan, The Saffron Scourge: A History of Yellow Fever in Louisiana, 1796–1905 (Lafayette: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 1994); John Duffy, Sword of Pestilence: The New Orleans Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1966), 122–124; Margaret Humphreys, Yellow Fever and the South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 45–112; Benjamin Trask, Fearful Ravages: Yellow Fever in New Orleans, 1796–1905 (Lafayette: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2005), 5–59.
20. Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
21. J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2; Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 4. For disease determinism in Atlantic history, see Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Terence Ranger and Paul Slack, eds., Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Philip Curtin, Disease and Empire: The Health of European Troops in the Conquest of Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
22. For the long history of constructing biological otherness, see Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). For risk in the nineteenth century, see Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 64–118.
23. For immunocapital, see Kathryn Olivarius, “Immunity, Capital and Power in Antebellum New Orleans,” AHR 124, no. 2 (April 2019): 425–455.
24. Cenci, August 15, 1850, in Letters of Cenci, Written Four Years Ago, on the Sanitary Reforms Needed in New Orleans and Re-Published by the Order of the City Council (New Orleans: Isaac T. Hinton, 1853), 12, Wellcome Collection, London.
25. For Barton’s quote, see Daily Picayune, November 26, 1841.
26. Jean-Louis-Marie Alibert, A Treatise on Malignant Intermittents (Philadelphia: Fry and Kammerer, 1807), 183.
27. Rana Hogarth, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (New York: Beacon Press, 2017); Khary Oronde Polk, Contagions of Empires: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Dea Boster, African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800–1860 (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2013).
28. For identity and belonging, see Conevery Bolton Valenčius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Perseus Books Group, 2002), 22–34.
29. For slaveholders’ tax aversion, see Robin Einhorn, American Slavery, American Taxation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
30. For New Orleans’s natural ecology, see Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 1–4; Lawrence N. Powell, The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Christopher Morris, The Big Muddy: An Environmental History of the Mississippi and Its Peoples from Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 9–47.
31. Pierre-Louis Berquin-Duvallon, Travels in Louisiana and the Floridas, in the Year 1802, Giving a Correct Picture of Those Countries (New York: I. Riley and Co., 1806), 35.
32. John S. Kendall, History of New Orleans (Chicago: Lewis, 1922), 1:7; C. C. Robin, Voyage to Louisiana, 1803–1805, trans. Stuart O. Landry Jr. (New Orleans: Pelican, 1966), 31. Quote from Charles Gayarré, History of Louisiana: The Spanish Domination (New York: Redfield, 1854), 332.
33. Sugar did not grow easily in Louisiana, due to the nine-month growing season (in the Caribbean, sugar had fourteen months to grow). Edouard de Montulé, Voyage to North America, and the West Indies in 1817 (London: Sir Richard Phillips and Co., 1821), 55; Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820–1860 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2005), 19.
34. W. C. C. Claiborne to Jonathan Dayton, March 18, 1802, William C. C. Claiborne Papers, folder 1, item 1, ms. 427, LRC; E. R. Mudge, Report upon Cotton (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1869), 28; Claiborne to Jefferson, July 10, 1806, CLB, 3:36.
35. Careless, “Tale of the Yellow Fever,” 434; Estwick Evans, Evans’s Pedestrious Tour of Four Thousand Miles, through the Western States and Territories, during the Winter and Spring of 1818 (Concord, NH: Joseph S. Spear, 1819), 339.
36. Pierre Clément de Laussat, Memoirs of My Life, trans. Agnes-Josephine Pastwa, ed. Robert Bush (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1978), 103 (orig. pub. 1831).
37. Elizabeth Fussell, “Constructing New Orleans, Constructing Race: A Population History of New Orleans,” JAH 94, no. 3 (December 2007): 846–855; Fredrick Mar Spletstoser, “The Impact of the Immigrants on New Orleans,” in A Refuge for All Ages: Immigration in Louisiana History, Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series, vol. 10, ed. Carl Brasseaux (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1996), 287–322, 5–33; Peter McClelland and Richard Zeckhauser, Demographic Dimensions of the New Republic: American Interregional Migration, Vital Statistics, and Manumissions, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), table C-1, 138–139; Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 109, 215–216.
38. Michael Tadman, “Slave Trading in the Ante-Bellum South: An Estimate of the Extent of the Inter-Regional Slave Trade,” Journal of American Studies 13, no. 2 (1979): 195–220; Rothman, Slave Country, 220; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1999), 6; Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
39. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 103–104; Ingraham, The South-West, 2:91. For the “second slavery,” see Dale W. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), esp. 56–71.
40. James Stirling, Letters from the Slave States (London: J.W. Parker and Son, 1857), 182; Lillian Foster, Wayside Glimpses North and South (New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1860), 168–169.
41. John Harrison, “Remarks on Yellow Fever,” NOMNHG 2, no. 2 (April 1855): 51; Kelman, A River and Its City, xi.
42. John Eadie, “The First American Life Underwriters’ Convention,” Assurance Magazine, October 1859, 273.
43. “Yellow Jack,” Daily Picayune, October 18, 1844.
44. William Holcombe, “Queer Things about Yellow Fever,” Southwestern Christian Advocate, February 6, 1879.
45. Mariola Espinosa, Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), chap. 4.
46. Wesley Bradshaw, Angel Agnes: Or, The Heroine of the Yellow Fever Plague in Shreveport (Philadelphia: Old Franklin Publishing House, 1873), 3. For profanity, see William Crenshaw to Nathaniel Bower, September 11, 1841, William Crenshaw Letters, ms. 46, NOPL.
47. Clapp, Autobiographical Sketches, 189.
48. Josiah Nott, “Life Insurance at the South,” DBR 3, no. 5 (May 1847): 358–376, here 365.
49. For mistaken or dubious acclimation, see a debate among six doctors in E. D. Fenner, “The Yellow Fever of 1853,” DBR 17, no. 1 (July 1854): 39–42, here 41.
50. Richard Henry Wilde to John Walker Wilde, August 4, 1847, in Edward L. Tucker, ed., “Richard Henry Wilde in New Orleans: Selected Letters, 1844–1847,” LH 7, no. 4 (Autumn 1966): 333–356, here 355.
51. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John Richardson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 241–258, quotes from 244, 249. See also Sven Beckert and Christine Desan, eds., American Capitalism: New Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); Geoffrey Martin Hodgson, Conceptualizing Capitalism: Institutions, Evolution, Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Jonathan Levy, “Capital as Process and the History of Capitalism,” Business History Review 91, no. 3 (2017): 483–510.
52. Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of Louisiana, Which Assembled at the City of New Orleans January 14, 1844 (New Orleans: Besancon, Ferguson and Co., 1845), 19, 32.
53. Richard Claiborne, “Three Letters of Richard Claiborne to William Miller, 1816–1818,” ed. Walter Prichard, LHQ 24, no. 3 (July 1941): 729–743, here 739.
54. Henry Anthony Murray, Lands of the Slave and the Free: Or, Cuba, the United States, and Canada (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1855), 1:248.
55. Samuel Cartwright, “On the Prevention of Yellow Fever,” NOMSJ 10 (November 1853): 316.
56. For the “Second Middle Passage,” see Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), chap. 4. Interview with Lizzie Barnett, Arkansas, 2:113, Slave Narratives.
57. Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross, Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), table on 156.
58. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Henry Holt, 2010).
59. For climatic defenses of slavery, see Mart Stewart, “What Nature Suffers to Groe”: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002).
60. “The Population of New Orleans and the Fever,” Tri-Weekly Commercial (Wilmington, NC), August 23, 1853.
61. Edward Hall Barton, RSC, 8.
62. “Editorial and Miscellaneous,” NOMNHG 2, no. 9 (November 1855): 418.
1. Patriotic Fever
1. Report of Joseph de Castanedo, CVOP, September 12, 1804, AB301, 176. For Davis’s testimony, see CVOP, September 27, 1804, AB301, 184–185. See also Rashauna Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), chap. 1.
2. CVOP, June 27, 1804, 124; June 30, 1804, 127–127b; July 7, 1804, 129.
3. John Watkins to Claiborne, February 2, 1804, CLB, 2:5–9; CVOP, August 8, 1804, 150B; Peter Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 65; Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 104–105.
4. No. 183: “Remonstrance of the People of Louisiana against the Political System Adopted by Congress for Them,” December 31, 1804, American State Papers: Miscellaneous (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1834) (hereafter cited as “Remonstrance”), 1:396–399.
5. John Clay to Henry Clay, July 6, 1804, Clay Papers, 1:139–140; Hilary Baker to Nathaniel Evans, July 7, 1804, Nathaniel Evans and Family Papers, box 1, folder 1, ms. 670, LSU.
6. Claiborne to Jefferson, September 13, September 18, and October 5, 1804, TPUS, 9:286–287, 298, 309.
7. “Petition of the Inhabitants & Colonists of Louisiana,” September 17, 1804, TPUS, 9:297.
8. Claiborne to Jefferson, September 18, 1804, TPUS, 9:298.
9. Claiborne to Madison, December 17, 1809, TPUS, 9:860; Christina Vella, Intimate Enemies: The Two Worlds of the Baroness de Pontalba (Baton Rouge: LSU Press 1997), 9–10, 84; Pierre Clément de Laussat, Memoirs of My Life, trans. Agnes-Josephine Pastwa, ed. Robert Bush (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1978), 32.
10. Eberhard Faber, Building the Land of Dreams: New Orleans and the Transformation of Early America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 140, 195–196.
11. Claiborne to Madison, January 4, 1805, and December 17, 1809, TPUS, 9:362, 860; Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible, 223–224; Benjamin Trask, Fearful Ravages: Yellow Fever in New Orleans, 1796–1905 (Lafayette: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2005), 10.
12. Claiborne to Jefferson, September 13 and October 5, 1804, TPUS, 9:286–287, 309. See also M. K. Beauchamp, Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2021).
13. For yellow fever’s global impact in 1804, see William Augustus Shubert, Yellow Fever: Its Origin, Improper Treatment, Prevention and Cure (Savannah, GA: J.M. Cooper and Co., 1860), 9–10.
14. For Indigenous populations in the Mississippi Valley, see Daniel Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 24–31; Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Daniel Clark, “An Account of the Indian Tribes in Louisiana,” September 29, 1803, TPUS, 9:63–64. For death in Virginia between 1620 and 1640, see Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), chap. 8.
15. James Pitot, Observations on the Colony of Louisiana from 1796 to 1802, trans. Henry C. Pitot (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1979), 30–31.
16. Charles Caldwell, “Thoughts on the Probable Destiny of New Orleans, in Relation to Health, Population and Commerce,” Philadelphia Journal of the Medical and Physical Sciences 6 (January 1823): 13; Claiborne to Jefferson, January 16, 1804, TPUS, 9:163.
17. Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in America (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1833), 2:212.
18. François Furstenberg, “The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History,” AHR 113, no. 3 (June 2008): 660–663.
