1853 yellow fever epidemic | |
---|---|
Location | Gulf Coast, Caribbean |
Deaths | 10,000+ |
The 1853 yellow fever epidemic of the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean islands resulted in thousands of fatalities. Over 9,000 people died of yellow fever in New Orleans alone, [1] around eight percent of the total population. [2] Many of the dead in New Orleans were recent Irish immigrants living in difficult conditions and without any acquired immunity. [3] There was a stark racial disparity in mortality rates: "7.4 percent of whites who contracted yellow fever died, while only 0.2 percent of blacks perished from the disease." [2] As historian Kathryn Olivarius observed in Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom, "For enslaved Blacks, the story was different. Immunity protected them from yellow fever, but as embodied capital, they saw the social and monetary value of their acclimation accrued to their white owners." [4]
The epidemic was an international news story. A newspaper in Cambridge, England published this evocative description of the scene in the Crescent City: [5]
The most deplorable havoc is being made in New Orleans by the yellow fever. Thousands have been carried off by its ravages, and every day adds 200 more to the ghastly record. The dead are buried in trenches by chain gangs of negroes, hired at a guinea an hour. The New Orleans Crescent, after describing the horrible system of burial adopted adds, "The stoical negroes, too, who are hired at five dollars per hour to assist in the work of interment, stagger under the stifling fumes, and can only be kept at their work by deep and continuous potations of the fire 'water.'...And thus, what with the songs and the obscene jests of the gravediggers, the buzzing of the flies, the sing-song cries of the huxter-women vending their confections, the hoarse oaths of the men who drive the dead carts, the merry whistle of the boys, and the stifling reek from the scores of blackened corpses, the day wears apace, the work of sepulture is done, and night draws the curtain." In the meantime, amusements, regattas, balls, &c. are preceding as usual, as if no such appalling pestilence was in the doomed city. [5]
Apparently one of the most popular treatments in New Orleans was by Marie Laveau, whose practice of voodoo and/or the healing arts in regard to yellow fever was so esteemed that "a committee of citizens was appointed to wait upon her, and beg her to lend her aid to the feversmitten, numbers of whom she saved." [6] In addition to death toll in New Orleans:
Multiple books were written by contemporary doctors and public health officials about the epidemic; the New Orleans city directory of 1854 included a long essay on the series of major epidemics suffered by the city since before the Louisiana Purchase. [17] The fall preceding the 1853 outbreak there were a small number of cases in the Caribbean; the Jamaican cases were documented, in part, in The Lancet by a surgeon of the Royal Navy. [18]
Yellow fever is a viral disease of typically short duration. In most cases, symptoms include fever, chills, loss of appetite, nausea, muscle pains—particularly in the back—and headaches. Symptoms typically improve within five days. In about 15% of people, within a day of improving the fever comes back, abdominal pain occurs, and liver damage begins causing yellow skin. If this occurs, the risk of bleeding and kidney problems is increased.
The internal slave trade in the United States, also known as the domestic slave trade, the Second Middle Passage and the interregional slave trade, was the mercantile trade of enslaved people within the United States. It was most significant after 1808, when the importation of slaves from Africa was prohibited by federal law. Historians estimate that upwards of one million slaves were forcibly relocated from the Upper South, places like Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri, to the territories and then-new states of the Deep South, especially Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
The Diocese of Jackson is a Latin Church diocese in Mississippi in the United States. Its ecclesiastical jurisdiction includes the northern and central parts of the state, an area of 97,458 square kilometers (37,629 sq mi). It is the largest diocese, by area, east of the Mississippi River.
The Diocese of Natchez was a Latin Church diocese of the Catholic Church; it was the predecessor of the Diocese of Jackson. It served all of Mississippi until the state was split into two dioceses, Jackson and Biloxi.
Don Manuel Luis Gayoso de Lemos y Amorín was the governor of Spanish Louisiana from 1797 until his death in 1799.
The Memphis and Charleston Railroad, completed in 1857, was the first railroad in the United States to link the Atlantic Ocean with the Mississippi River. Chartered in 1846, the 311 miles (501 km) 5 ft gauge railroad ran from Memphis, Tennessee to Stevenson, Alabama through the towns of Corinth, Mississippi and Huntsville, Alabama. The portion between Memphis and LaGrange, Tennessee was originally to be part of the LaGrange and Memphis Railroad, chartered in 1838. From Stevenson, the road was connected to Chattanooga, Tennessee via the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad. In Alabama, the railroad followed the route of the Tuscumbia, Courtland and Decatur Railroad between Tuscumbia and Decatur, the first railroad to be built west of the Appalachian Mountains.
Charles F. Hatcher, typically advertising as C. F. Hatcher, was an 19th-century American slaver dealing out of Natchez, Mississippi, and New Orleans, Louisiana. He also worked as a trader of financial instruments, specie, and stocks, and as a land agent, with a special interest in selling Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas real estate to speculators and settlers.
Ashbel Smith was a slave owner, pioneer physician, diplomat, and official of the Republic of Texas, Confederate officer and first President of the Board of Regents of the University of Texas. Smith helped lead efforts to keep Texas a Republic and slave state.
Dr. William Marbury Carpenter, a noted Southern natural scientist.
Francis Xavier Leray was a French-born prelate of the Roman Catholic Church who served as bishop of the Diocese of Natchitoches in Louisiana (1877–1879) and as archbishop of the Archdiocese of New Orleans (1883–1887).
The evolutionary origins of yellow fever most likely came from Africa. Phylogenetic analyses indicate that the virus originated from East or Central Africa, with transmission between primates and humans, and spread from there to West Africa. The virus as well as the vector Aedes aegypti, a mosquito species, were probably brought to the western hemisphere and the Americas by slave trade ships from Africa after the first European exploration in 1492. However, some researchers have argued that yellow fever might have existed in the Americas during the pre-Columbian period as mosquitoes of the genus Haemagogus, which is indigenous to the Americas, have been known to carry the disease.
Diseases and epidemics of the 19th century included long-standing epidemic threats such as smallpox, typhus, yellow fever, and scarlet fever. In addition, cholera emerged as an epidemic threat and spread worldwide in six pandemics in the nineteenth century.
John Duffy (1915–1996) was an American medical historian who wrote books and scholarly journal articles on the history of medical education, public health and epidemics.
The New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal was a bimonthly medical journal published between 1844 and 1952, and the predecessor of the contemporary Journal of the Louisiana State Medical Society. It published Samuel Cartwright's pseudoscientific theories of race and disease, including the first treatment of the conjectural disease drapetomania. The journal was involved in debates on neuroscience and circulation in the 19th century.
The Broadway Cemetery Historic District, also known as the Broadway Cemeteries, is a six-block collective of seven separate cemeteries in the city of Galveston, Texas, covering an area of 15.27 acres (6.18 ha). As of 2014, an estimated 6,000 people were buried in the district, including multiple prominent Galveston citizens. As of 2014, all cemeteries are still accepting new interments, although these are sporadic. The district has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 2014.
Bernard Moore Campbell and Walter L. Campbell operated an extensive slave-trading business in the antebellum U.S. South. B. M. Campbell, in company with Austin Woolfolk, Joseph S. Donovan, and Hope H. Slatter, has been described as one of the "tycoons of the slave trade" in the Upper South, "responsible for the forced departures of approximately 9000 captives from Baltimore to New Orleans." Bernard and Walter were brothers.
Calvin Morgan Rutherford, generally known as C. M. Rutherford, was a 19th-century American interstate slave trader. Rutherford had a wide geographic reach, trading nationwide from the Old Dominion of Virginia to as far west as Texas. Rutherford had ties to former Franklin & Armfield associates, worked in Kentucky for several years, advertised to markets throughout Louisiana and Mississippi, and was a major figure in the New Orleans slave trade for at least 20 years. Rutherford also invested his money in steamboats and hotels.