Necropolis

Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom

Kathryn Olivarius

• Editore: Belknap Press
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780674276079
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: North American History

Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award
Winner of James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize, SHEAR
Winner of the Kemper and Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana History
Winner of the Humanities Book of the Year Award, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities "A brilliant book…This transformative work is a pivotal addition to the scholarship on American slavery."
—Annette Gordon-Reed"A stunning account of 'high-risk, high-reward' profiteering in the yellow fever–ridden Crescent City…a world in which a deadly virus altered every aspect of a brutal social system, exacerbating savage inequalities of enslavement, race, and class."
—John Fabian Witt, author of American Contagions "Olivarius's new perspectives on yellow fever, immunocapitalism, and the politics of acclimation…will influence a generation of scholars to come on the intersections of racism, slavery, and public health."
— The Lancet In antebellum New Orleans, at the heart of America's slave and cotton kingdoms, epidemics of yellow fever killed as many as 150, 000 people. With little understanding of the origins of the illness—and meager public health infrastructure—one's only hope if infected was to survive, providing the lucky few with a mysterious form of immunity. Repeated epidemics bolstered New Orleans's strict racial hierarchy by introducing another hierarchy, a form of "immunocapital, " as white survivors leveraged their immunity to pursue economic and political advancement while enslaved Blacks were relegated to the most grueling labor.The question of health—who has it, who doesn't, and why—is always in part political. Necropolis shows how powerful nineteenth-century Orleanians constructed a society that capitalized on mortal risk and benefited from the chaos that ensued.

1

Patriotic Fever

In mid-September 1804, syndic Juan de Castañedo reported to New Orleans’s 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 L’Hôpital, just inside the city gate. Given the agitation of that summer—a short sea voyage away, the slaves of Saint-Domingue had successfully thrown off their white masters and declared the independent nation of Haiti—Castañedo grew concerned for the public’s safety. He asked two friends, the Creole planters Claude Tremé and François Hulin, to join his inspection of LeSassier’s residence. There they discovered a group of Black men “with no white to watch them.” Searching the rooms and attic of the house, they uncovered a stockpile of thirteen guns, a sword, and one bayonet—hard 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 “if his negroes [had] no evil intentions, there [were] many others disposed differently.”¹

City councilors seemed satisfied by Davis’s explanation, but the majority of New Orleans’s white residents—paranoids disposed to treat even the smallest of slave “infractions” with suspicion—were 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 “the slaves of this country” with their colorblind ideas of liberté, égalité, fraternité. 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 “rightful master.” When questioned (and perhaps tortured) by the mayor, Marseille confessed to having served “in the insurgent armies in San Domingo.” 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 “could be assured that this affair would have no serious results for them.” Suspiciously, however, no white man had come forward seeking financial restitution for property destruction—the 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 “not hesitate to collor [sic] the white people and have even dared to raise and strike them with their sacrilegious hands.”²

On sugar plantations surrounding New Orleans, whites complained about a new work-shirking attitude among the enslaved who “wander[ed] about at night without passports” and were said to be “in a shameful state of Idleness … stealing, drinking and rioting.” Still others, demonstrating a “great Savageness of Character,” had been overheard speaking “of eating human flesh” and boasting of their participation in “the horrors of St. Domingo.” And in early August, New Orleans mayor Étienne de Boré, an extremely wealthy sugar planter, warned that a colored man named Dutaque, suspected of “having taken a very active part” 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 city’s arsenal, kill the white men, rape the white women, and burn the city to the ground.³

For America’s 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. Louisiana’s court system—shifting from civil law to a civil-common law hybrid—was in chaos. The anciennes had shown little enthusiasm, and sometimes even downright disdain, for these new Americans claiming authority. When the city’s 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 “Remonstrance” 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 summer’s first victim—a well-connected Kentucky businessman named John A. Seitz—died on Louisiana’s first Independence Day.⁵ Townspeople were tempted to read political meaning into who the disease killed: yellow fever ravaged “strangers” 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 “Seat of Disease,” estimating that yellow fever was killing seven or eight people per day, with new cases “hourly occurring.” 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 city’s white population was rapidly diminishing—through death or distance—thirty panicking whites gathered in the parlor of Michel Fortier, a powerful Creole merchant and alderman appointed to the city’s transition government. They drafted a petition to Claiborne, emphasizing that yellow fever had made New Orleans especially vulnerable to slave insurrection. Without “active Surveillance” over enslaved and free Blacks, accompanied by “Severe Justice” for the duration of the epidemic, Louisiana would surely fall “prey to the same Events which have laid waste” to the “Proud and rich Colony of San Domingo.”⁷

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 “put a public Musket in the hands of every White man in the City” to stop any revolting slaves and guarantee the “Lives & property of the Inhabitants!”⁸ 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 “most unhealthy” in town. Here, the brother of the last French governor, Baron de Carondelet, had died from yellow fever in 1796; so did Louisiana’s 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 secretary—who also was feverish—to increase night patrols and arm the militia with powder and ball from the city’s 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 Claiborne’s 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; Claiborne’s second wife, Clarisse, would die from yellow fever five years later). It also killed one-third to one-half of the new territorial government’s officials, including the up-and-coming Joseph Briggs, Claiborne’s private secretary, whose death left about a dozen administrative projects unfinished. Claiborne’s two deputy clerks lay convalescent for months. His two chief liaisons to the city’s merchant community—John Gelston of New York and Benjamin West of Philadelphia—perished, 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, “Lower Louisiana is a beautiful Country, and rewards abundantly the Labour of man;—But the Climate is a wretched one, and destructive to human Life.”¹²

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 Americas—part 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 change—as the vast 827,000-square-mile territory of Louisiana transferred from French to American rule—collecting accurate vital statistics in New Orleans was no one’s 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 city’s population of 8,000 fled and between 1,000 and 1,500 people died—most of them newly arrived white Americans. America’s 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 Soto’s 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-Orléans’s 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 life—like floods or fires.¹⁴ James Pitot, a businessman and future mayor, expressed the people’s resignation to their swampy environment in 1802, writing, “The 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.” The ebb and flow of the river, the heat, and the stench, Pitot lamented, caused “periodic fevers that decimate the foreigner and bring desolation to the families of the colonists.” 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 city’s 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 “in health a Montpelier”—a place of potential riches where “disease was scarcely known … where old age was the chief waste-gate of human life.” When Claiborne arrived in New Orleans in early 1804, he relayed a version of this utopian fiction to Jefferson, writing that “the climate of lower Louisiana is unhealthy, but it is by no means so unfriendly to human life as has been represented.”¹⁶ 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 succession—in 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 Orleans—“as inseparably connected,” said British traveler Thomas Hamilton, “as ham and chicken.”¹⁷

Mass yellow fever death caused cascading structural problems for American government in Louisiana. It delegitimized American rule and embarrassed the United States’ 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 Louisiana’s 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 survive—let alone succeed—in 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 fever—and generate power from it. The first “solution” to the yellow fever problem was acce...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Introduction: A Rising Necropolis
• 1. Patriotic Fever
• 2. Danse Macabre
• 3. Immunocapital
• 4. Public Health, Private Acclimation
• 5. Denial, Delusion, and Disunion
• 6. Incumbent Arrogance
• Epilogue: Fever and Folly
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index