1
Patriotic Fever
In mid-September 1804, syndic Juan de Castañedo reported to New Orleansâs city council some troubling intelligence he had received: a group of armed Black men had been meeting in the home of Widow LeSassier on Rue LâHĂŽpital, just inside the city gate. Given the agitation of that summerâa short sea voyage away, the slaves of Saint-Domingue had successfully thrown off their white masters and declared the independent nation of HaitiâCastañedo grew concerned for the publicâs safety. He asked two friends, the Creole planters Claude TremĂ© and François Hulin, to join his inspection of LeSassierâs residence. There they discovered a group of Black men âwith no white to watch them.â Searching the rooms and attic of the house, they uncovered a stockpile of thirteen guns, a sword, and one bayonetâhard evidence, thought Castañedo, that something nefarious was afoot. Alarmed, the city council investigated further. It determined that the guns actually belonged to Captain Robert Davis, a white American, who had purchased them to protect his ships against pirates. In an apologetic letter, Davis insisted that the unsupervised slaves were Creoles from the Bahamas, not the revolutionary crucibles of Saint-Domingue or Jamaica, and thus should not inspire fear. But Davis vowed to keep his weapons in a safer place in the future, as even âif his negroes [had] no evil intentions, there [were] many others disposed differently.â1
City councilors seemed satisfied by Davisâs explanation, but the majority of New Orleansâs white residentsâparanoids disposed to treat even the smallest of slave âinfractionsâ with suspicionâwere not. Many townspeople interpreted the discovery as the latest episode in a vast conspiracy stretching far beyond the walls of the French Quarter. All summer there had been reports of Black revolutionaries from Saint-Domingue pouring onto the levee, infecting âthe slaves of this countryâ with their colorblind ideas of libertĂ©, Ă©galitĂ©, fraternitĂ©. For those looking for it, evidence of the Haitian contagion was everywhere. In late June the city council ordered the arrest of a Black man named Marseille, who was said to be without a ârightful master.â When questioned (and perhaps tortured) by the mayor, Marseille confessed to having served âin the insurgent armies in San Domingo.â Then in July two white men named Delery and Boulingy killed one unarmed slave and injured another, claiming their use of lethal force was justified because the men were running away. As Article 8 of the Public Orders of 1795 immunized whites against prosecution for killing escaping enslaved people, the murderers âcould be assured that this affair would have no serious results for them.â Suspiciously, however, no white man had come forward seeking financial restitution for property destructionâthe death of this enslaved man. And by late summer, many whites complained that the epidemic of running away could no longer be ignored; emboldened slaves did ânot hesitate to collor [sic] the white people and have even dared to raise and strike them with their sacrilegious hands.â2
On sugar plantations surrounding New Orleans, whites complained about a new work-shirking attitude among the enslaved who âwander[ed] about at night without passportsâ and were said to be âin a shameful state of Idleness ⊠stealing, drinking and rioting.â Still others, demonstrating a âgreat Savageness of Character,â had been overheard speaking âof eating human fleshâ and boasting of their participation in âthe horrors of St. Domingo.â And in early August, New Orleans mayor Ătienne de BorĂ©, an extremely wealthy sugar planter, warned that a colored man named Dutaque, suspected of âhaving taken a very active partâ in the revolution in Saint-Domingue, was aboard an inbound ship, his purposes for coming to Louisiana unknown. White fears spiraled. By September it was said that 6,000 enslaved Blacks and gens de couleur libres in and around New Orleans would imminently unite, rise up, plunder the cityâs arsenal, kill the white men, rape the white women, and burn the city to the ground.3
For Americaâs fledgling territorial government, based in New Orleans, such unrest could not have come at a worse time. The United States had just taken formal possession of Louisiana and had only tenuous control over the space and its people. New Orleans sat more than 1,000 miles away from Washington, D.C. There was no regular standing army there, and Spaniards in West Florida were threatening to attack, perhaps with their Houma Indian allies. Louisianaâs court systemâshifting from civil law to a civil-common law hybridâwas in chaos. The anciennes had shown little enthusiasm, and sometimes even downright disdain, for these new Americans claiming authority. When the cityâs various ethnic and racial factions were not fighting each other, they happily attacked W. C. C. Claiborne, the twenty-eight-year-old monolingual Virginian recently installed as acting governor of Orleans Territory, a man universally derided as incompetent. In fact, 250 influential Creoles were in the process of drafting a âRemonstranceâ to the US Congress, a litany of complaints against Claiborne personally and American policy more generally.4
Worse still, New Orleans was in the grip of a violent yellow fever epidemic, the fourth in a decade. The summerâs first victimâa well-connected Kentucky businessman named John A. Seitzâdied on Louisianaâs first Independence Day.5 Townspeople were tempted to read political meaning into who the disease killed: yellow fever ravaged âstrangersâ from Northern states and Europe but it spared the Creoles, those Black and white people born in Louisiana. In mid-September, Claiborne told President Thomas Jefferson that New Orleans was the âSeat of Disease,â estimating that yellow fever was killing seven or eight people per day, with new cases âhourly occurring.â By early October, Claiborne had reassessed: one-third of all recently immigrated Americans and almost every newly arrived European had died. As the health situation deteriorated, a mass exodus ensued. Wealthy merchants and aldermen escaped to their country plantations to drink away the gloom. Those without funds or freedom were forced to remain.6 Aware that the cityâs white population was rapidly diminishingâthrough death or distanceâthirty panicking whites gathered in the parlor of Michel Fortier, a powerful Creole merchant and alderman appointed to the cityâs transition government. They drafted a petition to Claiborne, emphasizing that yellow fever had made New Orleans especially vulnerable to slave insurrection. Without âactive Surveillanceâ over enslaved and free Blacks, accompanied by âSevere Justiceâ for the duration of the epidemic, Louisiana would surely fall âprey to the same Events which have laid wasteâ to the âProud and rich Colony of San Domingo.â7
Claiborne surely felt ill-equipped to handle this multifront emergency. But he was also savvy enough to know that if by some chance he handled this crisis well, it could boost his reputation and that of the United States. He therefore made two decisions. First, he âput a public Musket in the hands of every White man in the Cityâ to stop any revolting slaves and guarantee the âLives & property of the Inhabitants!â8 Second, he vowed to remain in town for the duration of the epidemic, against medical advice, just as his colonial-era predecessors had always done. Claiborne holed up with his young family in the Government Lot, a disgusting mansion known as the âmost unhealthyâ in town. Here, the brother of the last French governor, Baron de Carondelet, had died from yellow fever in 1796; so did Louisianaâs last Spanish governor, Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, who fell victim to the scourge three years later.9 The stench of putrefying waste and garbage emanating off the adjacent levee was overwhelming. The mosquitoes flitting about his chambers were maddening. Soon Claiborne was chilly and nauseous. Alternating between high fevers and bouts of delirium, he took to his bed, dictating orders to his private secretaryâwho also was feverishâto increase night patrols and arm the militia with powder and ball from the cityâs arsenal.10
Claiborne got lucky that summer in some respects. He survived his brush with yellow fever, and the slave rebellion never materialized. Even so, the epidemic took a staggering toll on him personally and professionally. On September 27, the same day Jefferson made Claiborneâs temporary governorship permanent, yellow fever killed his first wife, Eliza, and their three-year-old daughter Cornelia (his brother-in-law also died in 1804; Claiborneâs second wife, Clarisse, would die from yellow fever five years later). It also killed one-third to one-half of the new territorial governmentâs officials, including the up-and-coming Joseph Briggs, Claiborneâs private secretary, whose death left about a dozen administrative projects unfinished. Claiborneâs two deputy clerks lay convalescent for months. His two chief liaisons to the cityâs merchant communityâJohn Gelston of New York and Benjamin West of Philadelphiaâperished, as did many hundreds of other ambitious white American men seeking a foothold in the cotton and sugar industries.11 Worse still, yellow fever killed more than a hundred soldiers posted at the barracks just outside town. As Claiborne lamented to Jefferson, âLower Louisiana is a beautiful Country, and rewards abundantly the Labour of man;âBut the Climate is a wretched one, and destructive to human Life.â12
Globally, 1804 was a bad yellow fever year. Historians estimate that this epidemic killed perhaps 125,000 people across southern Europe, West Africa, and the tropical Americasâpart of a larger Caribbean-wide epidemic sparked by the Napoleonic Wars. Exactly how much of that Atlantic toll was exacted in New Orleans we will never know. In the chaos of regime changeâas the vast 827,000-square-mile territory of Louisiana transferred from French to American ruleâcollecting accurate vital statistics in New Orleans was no oneâs priority. Many yellow fever deaths went unrecorded. Bodies were hastily buried in the overwhelmed Catholic and Protestant cemeteries. The city ordered enslaved workmen to toss the corpses of indigents into the Mississippi, to float down to the Gulf of Mexico along with the trash. Proportionally, 1804 had to have been one of the most convulsive years in New Orleans history. About a third of the cityâs population of 8,000 fled and between 1,000 and 1,500 people diedâmost of them newly arrived white Americans. Americaâs imperial dreams had given way to an epidemiological nightmare.13
Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!
News of the Louisiana Purchase had electrified the United States in 1803. But whether distracted by the complexity of incorporating Louisiana or blinded by the promise of Caribbean-style wealth, few Americans back east did due diligence on the disease question. Cotton might thrive there, but did people? The answer had long been a resounding no. Pathogens introduced by Hernando de Sotoâs expedition in 1540 and by later European explorers had decimated native peoples in the Lower Mississippi Valley, reducing a population that had stood as high as a million people to just 70,000 by 1700. As colonization and war accelerated in the eighteenth century, and as La Nouvelle-OrlĂ©ansâs population increased, the proliferation of diseases intensified. Mysterious fevers killed thousands of French voyageurs, Acadian farmers, Spanish soldiers, and African slaves. So many people died so fast, in fact, that Lower Louisiana became the deadliest major settlement on mainland North America, deadlier even than Jamestown, Virginia, in its sickliest years. Caught in a vast epidemiological web invisibly stretching across the tropical and subtropical regions of the Atlantic world, long-term residents of New Orleans came to accept fevers as a fact of lifeâlike floods or fires.14 James Pitot, a businessman and future mayor, expressed the peopleâs resignation to their swampy environment in 1802, writing, âThe roads have deep holes; the bridges are not maintained; and every time the Mississippi rises substantially, it causes crevasses that obstruct the roads and ruin the planters, leaving putrid remains of fish, snakes, and animals.â The ebb and flow of the river, the heat, and the stench, Pitot lamented, caused âperiodic fevers that decimate the foreigner and bring desolation to the families of the colonists.â There was simply nothing to be done about it.15
The first generation of white Anglo-Americans to head to New Orleans in 1803, however, discounted tales of the cityâs excessive fevers as exaggeration. Admitting that colonization was always a dangerous venture, especially in the torrid zone, they still preferred the myth that New Orleans was âin health a Montpelierââa place of potential riches where âdisease was scarcely known ⊠where old age was the chief waste-gate of human life.â When Claiborne arrived in New Orleans in early 1804, he relayed a version of this utopian fiction to Jefferson, writing that âthe climate of lower Louisiana is unhealthy, but it is by no means so unfriendly to human life as has been represented.â16 But Claiborne, like seemingly everyone, was caught off guard by the sickly reality. Yellow fever nearly killed him in 1804. Then four more devastating epidemics struck in quick successionâin 1805, 1807, 1809, and 1811. By the time Louisiana applied for statehood in 1812, yellow fever, a disease once most associated with the Caribbean and occasional outbreaks in Philadelphia or Charleston, had become nearly synonymous with New Orleansââas inseparably connected,â said British traveler Thomas Hamilton, âas ham and chicken.â17
Mass yellow fever death caused cascading structural problems for American government in Louisiana. It delegitimized American rule and embarrassed the United Statesâ authority at the precise moment it sought to project confidence to the local Creole population and the wider world. The virus killed so many newly transplanted government officials that it slowed the wheels of the administration, disrupted commerce, and massively delayed land and legal reform. Yellow fever impeded the creation of a basic administrative state with a functioning court system, systematized land ownership, and a tax and tariff system able to handle the deluge of goods flowing through New Orleans. Arguably, it stalled Louisianaâs application for US statehood. Most of all, the disease, which appeared to leave the Creoles unscathed, cast new Americans as unwelcome and unworthy invaders, unable to surviveâlet alone succeedâin subtropical New Orleans.18
The United States could not solve the yellow fever problem. No one could at that time. But America could not afford to lose its battle with disease. That would mean the loss of New Orleans and all the bounty flowing through it. Thus, by 1810, Anglo-Americans had devised ways to live with yellow feverâand generate power from it. The first âsolutionâ to the yellow fever problem was acce...