The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [116]
That yellow fever was directly linked to the slave trade can be traced as far back as the mid-nineteenth century. In her article, “Yellow Fever: Scourge of the South,” published in Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South, Jo Ann Carrigan writes: “Some abolitionists suggested that yellow fever was not only the result of slavery, having been introduced by the African slave trade, but that the disease served as a penalty or punishment, afflicting those areas where the institution prevailed.” It was in Carrigan’s article where I found the statement that yellow fever ceased in the North about the same time that slavery was abolished there. Henry Rose Carter, a friend and colleague of Walter Reed, also traced the history of yellow fever to West Africa and was one of the first to suggest that it made its way to North America through the slave trade in his 1931 book, Yellow Fever: An Epidemiological and Historical Study of Its Place of Origin.
The theory that yellow fever seemed divinely directed is based on some of the beliefs at the time. It was not uncommon for people to attach greater meaning to epidemics of disease—it still happens today. Even the word plague implies punishment in biblical terms.
According to the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, “the Village” in New York enjoyed a certain amount of seclusion until epidemics of yellow fever and cholera hit the city in 1799, 1803, 1805 and 1821. Temporary housing and businesses sprang up. The 1822 fever epidemic was an especially virulent one, and many New Yorker’s settled in “the Village” for good, finally adjoining it to New York City.
The fact that Napoleon lost 23,000 troops to yellow fever in Haiti and sold his Louisiana holdings to Thomas Jefferson, wanting to abandon conquests in this pestilent place, is taken from Desowitz’s book.
The reference to yellow fever as one of the country’s first forms of biological warfare comes from a Washington Post article by Jane Singer, “The Fiend in Gray,” about Dr. Louis Blackburn. I also used information from a 2002 article in The Canadian Journal of Diagnosis entitled “The Yellow Fever Plot: Germ Warfare during the Civil War.”
The impact of yellow fever on the Spanish-American War comes from a number of sources, including the Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Collection, held at the University of Virginia; G.J.A. O’Toole’s book The Spanish War and Hugh Thomas’s Cuba or The Pursuit of Freedom, as well as personal correspondence of the surgeon general, Theodore Roosevelt and William McKinley, among others.
The timeline of yellow fever in North America—its prevalence in the northeast and its long reign in the South—comes from Desowitz.
Theories about why the 1878 yellow fever epidemic proved so deadly have appeared in a variety of publications. Many historians have simply responded that we don’t know why it was such a deadly epidemic. In this book, I put forth the idea that it was the combination of an El Niño cycle, an increase in new immigration and transportation and the theory that the virus may have arrived on ships directly from Africa rather than making its way from endemic areas in South America.
Information about yellow fever and El Niño came from an article, “A Possible Connection between the 1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic in the Southern United States and the 1877-78 El Niño Episode,” published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in 1999. The article includes a timeline of El Niño cycles during the nineteenth century; nearly all coincide with major outbreaks of yellow fever. The World Health Organization also considers El Niño weather cycles a factor in the spread of yellow fever (WHO report Yellow Fever, 1998).
The reference to hyacinth blooms in January comes from Bloom’s book, as well as personal observation. I know that Memphians began complaining about mosquitoes based on newspaper clippings from January 1878.
The theory that Memphis was poised for greatness before the 1878 epidemic is cited in several Memphis history books. It was second only to New Orleans