Necropolis, page 42
109. “Public Charities,” Daily Picayune, March 2, 1860; Ellis, “Businessmen and Public Health,” 202–205.
110. CVOP, March 15, 1817, 134, and February 15, 1817, 126.
111. Cynthia Tolbert, “Alms for the Poor: An Historical Analysis of a System of Disgrace,” Loyola Poverty Law Journal 1 (Spring 1995): 60–61; CVOP, November 11, 1815, 109–110.
112. “City Council of New-Orleans,” New Orleans Scrapbook, 1813–1865, 10, ms. 920, LSU; Henry J. Leovy and C. H. Luzenberg, The Laws and General Ordinances of the City of New Orleans (New Orleans: Simmons and Co., 1870), 320.
113. Simonds, An Address, 10.
114. Comptroller’s Report, Embracing a Detailed Statement of the Receipts and Expenditures of the City of New Orleans, From Jan. 1st, 1860, to July 1st, 1860 (New Orleans: Bulletin Book and Job Office, 1860), 9–11.
115. “The Population of New Orleans and the Fever,” Tri-Weekly Commercial (Wilmington, NC), August 23, 1853.
116. 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), 19–20, 32; Board of Aldermen, Report upon the Wealth (1855), 9–11; Katherine Newman and Rourke O’Brien, Taxing the Poor: Doing Damage to the Truly Disadvantaged (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 3.
117. Einhorn, American Slavery, American Taxation, 225–226; Sacher, Perfect War, 217; “Relief of the State Treasury,” Daily Picayune, April 10, 1853; Tansey, “Prostitution and Politics,” 51. New York tax figures cited from Elizabeth Blackmar, “Housing and Property Relations in New York City, 1785–1850” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1980), 584.
118. Comptroller’s Report, 1860, 9–11.
119. “Coffeehouse License for the Second Municipality,” New Orleans Municipal Records, 1782–1925, folder 15b, ms. 16, LRC; Louisiana, Revised Statues (1856), 459–461. For taxes on coffee and liquor houses, see CVOR, November 24, 1829, 122.
120. Tansey, “Prostitution and Politics,” 57.
121. Schafer, Brothels, 147; Comptroller’s Report, 1860, 20.
122. “Board of Assistant Aldermen,” Daily Picayune, February 2, 1859; Tansey, “Prostitution and Politics,” 74; New Orleans Daily Crescent, January 31, 1856.
123. “Official,” Daily Picayune, August 16, 1854; Judith Schafer, “Slaves and Crime: New Orleans, 1846–1862,” in Local Matters: Race, Crime, and Justice in the Nineteenth-Century South, ed. Christopher Waldrep and Donald G. Nieman (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 53–54.
124. Reinders, End of an Era, 165–166.
125. John S. Kendall, History of New Orleans (Chicago: Lewis, 1922), 112; CVOR, August 14, 1829, 85–86; “Record Book of Licenses, Bakers’ Declarations, and Statements of Public Works, 1812,” AA420, mf 89-236, NOPL; “No Place of Abode,” Daily Picayune, August 26, 1852.
126. “Police Matters,” Daily Picayune, January 21, 1857, September 18, 1858.
127. “Second Municipality Council,” Daily Picayune, September 2, 1846; “Recorder Seuzeneau’s Court,” Daily Picayune, May 11, 1852; Henry Watkins Allen, The Travels of a Sugar Planter or, Six Months in Europe (New York: J.F. Trow, 1861), 236.
128. Daily Picayune, September 7, 1841; “Fines for December,” Daily Picayune, January 9, 1859. See also: “Quiet Times,” Daily Picayune, January 1, 1853; “Fined,” Daily Picayune, November 10, 1854; Daily Picayune, July 24, 1855; “First District Court,” Daily Picayune, July 19, 1855.
129. CVOR, November 27, 1816, 104–106.
130. Crété, Daily Life, 58; Burns, “Twenty-Five Dollars or Thirty Days,” 74.
131. Schafer, Brothels, 145–146; Tansey, “Prostitution and Politics,” 49, 60.
132. Schafer, Brothels, 19; “Police Matters,” Daily Picayune, September 5, 1856. Bridget Malony landed in New Orleans with her husband Thomas in 1851 from County Galway, Ireland. He died about a week after landing. Evidently, she fell on hard times and died from yellow fever during the 1853 epidemic. For the 24 women, see “Police Matters,” Daily Picayune, February 15, 1857; “Police Matters,” Daily Picayune, August 27, 1857.
133. “Police Matters,” Daily Picayune, October 11, 1858.
134. CVOR, October 27, 1827, 92; September 12, 1829, 88. Crété, Daily Life, 57; “The City Workhouse,” Daily Picayune, January 10, 1857.
135. Commissioners, Report of a General Plan for the Promotion of Public and Personal Health (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1850), 254.
5. Denial, Delusion, and Disunion
1. “Health, Mortality, &c.,” NOMSJ 9, no. 3 (November 1852): 415–417; Jo Ann Carrigan, The Saffron Scourge: A History of Yellow Fever in Louisiana, 1796–1905 (Lafayette: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 1994), 58–59; Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 87–88; Urmi Engineer Willoughby, Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2017), 71.
2. “Testimony of Dr. M. M. Dowler and Mr. Ebbinger,” RSC, 4; quote from Erasmus Darwin Fenner, History of the Epidemic Yellow Fever, at New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1853 (New York: Hall, Clayton and Co., 1854), 21.
3. “Testimony of Mr. Vandelinden, Clerk of the Charity Hospital,” RSC, 3; “Testimony of Dr. L. B. Lindsay,” RSC, 9.
4. RSC, ix.
5. “Examination of Dyson” and “Louisiana Items,” Daily Picayune, June 23, 1853; Ari Kelman, “New Orleans’s Phantom Slave Insurrection of 1853: Racial Anxiety, Urban Ecology, and Human Bodies as Public Spaces,” in The Nature of Cities: Culture, Landscape, and Urban Space, ed. Andrew Isenberg (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 6.
6. Quoted from Carrigan, Saffron Scourge, 61, 371.
7. “New Orleans in Midsummer,” Daily Crescent, June 22, 1853; “The Yellow Fever Alarm,” Daily Picayune, June 23, 1853; “Splinters,” Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, July 1853, 173.
8. Fenner, History of the Epidemic, 25.
9. “The Plague in the South-West,” DBR 15, no. 6 (December 1853): 609–611, 620; George Washington Cable, “Flood and Plague in New Orleans,” Century Illustrated Magazine, July 1883, 428.
10. Report of the Howard Association of New Orleans: Epidemic of 1853, with Addenda (New Orleans, 1854), 23–28, ms. RC211.L9 H6 1853, HNOC; “The Orphans,” Daily Picayune, August 23, 1853.
11. See “Died,” The Tennessean, September 21, 1853; “Touching,” Burlington Courier, September 29, 1853; Glasgow Herald, September 5, 1853.
12. “Benefit to the Sufferers,” Daily Picayune, September 19, 1853; “Relief for New Orleans,” Cooper’s Clarksburg Register (Virginia), August 24, 1853; “The Plague in the South-West,” DBR 15, no. 6 (December 1853): 633; San Francisco Daily Alta, September 24, 25, and 26, 1853; “Donations,” Daily Picayune, September 7, 1853.
13. William L. Robinson, The Diary of a Samaritan: By a Member of the Howard Association of New Orleans (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1860), 150–151; “The Yellow Fever in New Orleans,” Zion’s Herald (Boston), July 23, 1868; Bishop Leonidas Polk, “The Following Prayer,” August 9, 1853, ms. BV283.Y4E6 1853, HNOC; Theodore Clapp, “Is God Capable of Being Angry?,” Daily Picayune, September 2, 1853.
14. “The Pestilence in New Orleans,” Daily Journal (Wilmington, NC), August 15, 1853; Mary Copes to Joseph Copes, September 9 and 18, 1853, Joseph S. Copes Papers, box 10, folder 9, ms. 733, LRC.
15. Quotes from Bennet Dowler, Tableau of the Yellow Fever of 1853 with Topographical, Chronological, and Historical Sketches of the Epidemics of New Orleans since Their Origin in 1796 (New Orleans: Office of the Picayune, 1854), 60–61; E. D. Fenner, “Report on the Epidemics of Louisiana,” AMA 7 (1854): 459; Carrigan, Saffron Scourge, 73. For lists of the dead, see Stanford Chaillé, “The Vital Statistics of New Orleans, from 1769 to 1874,” NOMSJ (July 1874): 6–7; The Epidemic Summer: List of Interments in All the Cemeteries of New Orleans (New Orleans: Proprietor of the True Delta, 1853), 1–67.
16. Theodore Clapp, “A Discourse, Delivered in the First Congregational Church,” Daily Picayune, September 4, 1853; RSC, 221.
17. RSC, 452–453; for funding sources, see 458–461.
18. Bennet Dowler, “Review—On the Sanitary Commission of New Orleans,” NOMSJ 11, no. 4 (January 1855): 526–529; Karlem Reiss, “The Rebel Physiologist—Bennet Dowler,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 16, no. 1 (January 1961): 39.
19. McFarlane, “A Review of the Yellow Fever, Its Causes,” in The Epidemic Summer, v–x.
20. Quoted from The Cause and Prevention of Yellow Fever at New Orleans and Other Cities in America (New York, 1857), 11; “Work for the Council,” Daily Picayune, November 10, 1853.
21. Carrigan, Saffron Scourge, 74; Barton quoted in the Bee quoted in Edward H. Barton, The Cause and Prevention of Yellow Fever, Contained in the Report of the Sanitary Commission of New Orleans (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1855), 262–264.
22. Ben Freedman, “The Louisiana State Board of Health, Established 1855,” American Journal of Public Health 41, no. 10 (October 1951): 1279–1281; Acts Passed by the Second Legislature of the State of Louisiana, Session of 1855 (New Orleans: Emile La Sere, 1855), Act 336, 471–477; John Duffy, ed., The Rudolph Matas History of Medicine in Louisiana (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1958), 2:186.
23. “Fruits of the New-Orleans Quarantine,” The Bee, July 11, 1855; Board of Aldermen, Report upon the Wealth, Internal Resources, and Commercial Prosperity of the City of New Orleans (New Orleans: Bulletin Book and Job Office, 1855), 7, 13–14; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 2014), 98–135.
24. Cable, “Flood and Plague,” 426.
25. “Sketches of Character. No. LXXV. The Anti-Panic Man,” Daily Delta, August 13, 1853; Duffy, Rudolph Matas, 2:162.
26. This is a composite quote assembled by Kenneth Stampp from Southern journals during the late 1850s. Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), 7. For proslavery thought, see Drew Gilpin Faust, The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1981); Larry Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004); Walter Johnson, “The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism / Slavery Question,” JER 24 (Summer 2004): 299–308; Kenneth Kiple and Virginia King, “The African Connection: Slavery, Disease and Racism,” Phylon 41, no. 3 (3rd Qtr. 1980): 211–222.
27. Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Harper’s Magazine, November 1964, 77–86. See also Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), 119; James Breeden, “States-Rights Medicine in the Old South,” Bulletin of New York Academy of Medicine 52, no. 3 (March–April 1976): 348–372. See also Kelman, A River and Its City, 107–109.
28. For cultural hegemony, Gramsci, and “dominant fundamental” ideologies, see T. J. Jackson Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,” AHR 90, no. 3 (June 1985): 567–593.
29. J. C. Simonds, An Address on the Sanitary Condition of New Orleans (New Orleans: D. Davies, Son, and Co., 1851), 7; Barton, Cause and Prevention, 262–263.
30. For the arguments forwarded in 1861 to convince non-slaveholding whites to rally to the Confederacy, see “The Non-Slaveholders of the South,” DBR 30, no. 1 (January 1861): 67–77.
31. “Faithful and Bold New Orleans,” True American, November 12, 1838; Daily Picayune, July 18, 1838.
32. “Editorial Correspondence,” Daily Picayune, May 14, 1853.
33. Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 183–187; Todd L. Savitt and James Harvey Young, eds., Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 1–28.
34. “An American,” National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser, November 19, 1806.
35. “An American.”
36. Medicus, “For the Gazette,” Natchez Gazette, April 15, 1826.
37. “Domestic Statistics,” DBR 1, no. 4 (April 1846): 379–382.
38. E. H. Barton, Introductory Lecture on the Climate and Salubrity of New-Orleans and Its Suitability for a Medical School (New Orleans: E. Johns and Co., 1835), 8; Nott, “Life Insurance at the South DBR 3, no. 5 (May 1847): 362–364.
39. “New-Orleans and Its Unwholesomeness,” New York Tribune, September 19, 1855; “New Orleans and the Tribune,” Daily Picayune, September 29, 1855.
40. John C. McKowen, Murder as a Money-Making Art (Baton Rouge: Benton Print, 1901), 3–4.
41. Cable, “Flood and Plague,” 425.
42. “The Acclimated Man,” Daily Delta, August 1, 1853.
43. Gibson’s Guide and Directory of the State of Louisiana, and the Cities of New Orleans and Lafayette (New Orleans: J. Gibson, 1838), iv, 288–289, 37.
44. James McMartin to Peter McMartin, February 9, 1849, Peter McMartin Papers, N-YHS.
45. Isaac H. Charles to John Edward Siddall, September 18 and November 18, 1847, Isaac H. Charles Letters, ms. 621, LSU.
46. Bartlett for Smith and Bro. to T. Smith & Co., August 12, 1847, T. Smith & Company Papers, mss. 930, 1116, 1232, etc., LSU. See also Jo Ann Carrigan, “Privilege, Prejudice, and the Strangers’ Disease in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans,” JSH 36, no. 4 (November 1970): 568–578, here 570–572.
47. E. H. Durell to sisters, July 5, 1853, August 26, 1855, E. H. Durell Papers, N-YHS.
48. George Washington Cable, The Creoles of Louisiana (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1884), 292–293, 297.
49. Bennet Dowler, Researches upon the Necropolis of New Orleans, with Brief Allusions to Its Vital Arithmetic (New Orleans: Bills and Clark, 1850), 5; H., “Advice That Will Not Be Taken,” Daily Delta, July 1, 1855.
50. James Wynne, Report on the Vital Statistics of the United States, Made to the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York (New York: H. Baililiere, 1857), 164.
51. Sharon Ann Murphy, Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 246; Murphy, “Life Insurance in the United States through World War I,” in EH.Net Encyclopedia, ed. Robert Whaples, August 14, 2002, https://eh.net/encyclopedia/life-insurance-in-the-united-states-through-world-war-i/.
52. Sharon Ann Murphy, “Securing Human Property: Slavery, Life Insurance, and Industrialization in the Upper South,” JER 25, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 617–618; Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 60–67, esp. 63, 95; The Revised Statues of Louisiana (New Orleans: J. Claiborne, 1856), 461.
53. Davis and Copes to Latting and Hitchcock, December 31, 1856, Joseph S. Copes Papers, box 11, folder 17, ms. 733, LRC.
54. A typical issue of the Picayune had a dedicated “Insurance” section advertising life companies from Boston to Edinburgh. See, for example, “Insurance,” Daily Picayune, November 23, 1851; Nott, “Life Insurance,” 358; Josiah Nott, “Statistics of Southern Slave Population with Especial Reference to Life Insurance,” DBR 4, no. 3 (November 1847): 286–287, at 275.
55. Arthur H. Bailey, “On the Rates of Extra Premium for Foreign Travelling and Residence,” Journal of the Institute of Actuaries 15, no. 2 (1869): 77–94.
56. Daniel Bouk, How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Bouk, “The Science of Difference: Developing Tools for Discrimination in the American Life Insurance Industry” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2009), 125–126.
57. William Bard to Henry White, August 23, 1833, GA-3, and William Bard to William Atkinson, December 31, 1833, GA-4, New York Life and Trust Company Records, ms. 797 1830–1878 N567, HBS. For standard table rates, see Timothy Alborn and Sharon Ann Murphy, eds., Anglo-American Life Insurance (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), 1:44–47.
58. Charles Gill, “Actuary’s Report to the Board of Trustees of the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York,” reprinted in Emory McClintock, “Charles Gill: The First Actuary in America, pt. 4,” Transactions of the Actuarial Society of America 15, nos. 51–52 (1914), append. F, 258–264.
59. MONY, HAR (1865), 49–50.
60. William Bard to William Atkinson, December 31, 1833, New York Life and Trust Company Records, ms. 797 1830–1878 N567, GA-4, HBS; Murphy, Investing in Life, 34–36.
61. For the extra scrutiny given to Southern policy-seekers, see policies no. 1688, William A. Dawson, July 20, 1847, and no. 2006, H. W. Kuhtmann, March 9, 1848, New England Mutual Life Insurance Company Records, ms. 797 1844–1999 N532, HBS.
