Abstract

Antebellum New Orleans sat at the heart of America’s slave and cotton kingdoms. But it was also the nation’s “necropolis,” with yellow fever routinely killing about 8 percent of its population. With little epidemiological understanding of mosquito-borne viruses—and meager public health infrastructure—a person’s only protection against the scourge was to “get acclimated”: fall sick with, and survive, yellow fever. About half of all people died in the acclimating process. Repeated epidemics generated a hierarchy of immunocapital whereby “acclimated citizens” (survivors) leveraged their immunity for social, economic, and political power and “unacclimated strangers” (poor recent immigrants) languished in social and professional purgatory. For whites, acclimation was the quintessential demonstration of calculated risk-taking: that people had paid their biological dues, were worthy of investment, and could now justifiably pursue economic advancement in slave racial capitalism. For black slaves, who were embodied capital, immunity enhanced the value and safety of that capital for their white owners, strengthening the set of racialized assumptions about the black body bolstering racial slavery. By fusing health with capitalism, this article presents a new model—beyond the toxic fusion of white supremacy with the flows of global capitalism—for how power operated in nineteenth-century Atlantic society.

Figure 1:

Plate 4 of four plates showing the development of yellow fever. From MM. Pariset et Mazet, Observations sur la fièvre jaune, faites à Cadix, en 1819 (Paris, 1820). Wellcome Collection. CC BY.

During the first decades of the nineteenth century, the German immigrant Vincent Nolte reigned as one of the largest cotton merchants in New Orleans. By 1819, his Barings-backed commercial house was worth millions, responsible for shipping about a quarter of the cotton that passed through New Orleans—4 to 8 percent of U.S. exports—on its way around the world. As historian Edward Baptist described it, no man did more to transform the New Orleans cotton market into a global behemoth than Nolte, who in the process accumulated a level of power that “few who were not absolute monarchs had ever felt before.” Nolte and other Orleanian powerbrokers like him—men such as William Kenner, Stephen Henderson, and John McDonogh—were internationally renowned capitalists: they had uncanny business acumen, drive, and “the luck of being born white, male, in the right place, and to the right family.” Collectively leveraging their various forms of capital, these men transformed the Deep South from a French colonial backwater into the heart of America’s slave and cotton kingdoms.1

But Nolte cherished one form of capital above all. In 1806, three months after his arrival in New Orleans, he was bitten by a tiny mosquito and fell sick with yellow fever, the most terrifying disease in the Atlantic World. Unlike up to 50 percent of nineteenth-century yellow fever victims, Nolte survived his “acclimation.” And now what had made him sick made him strong. He possessed “immunocapital”: socially acknowledged lifelong immunity to a highly lethal virus, providing access to previously inaccessible realms of economic, political, and social power.2

Historians of Atlantic empires and slavery have long considered New Orleans an outlier among American cities, characterized by its Caribbean-esque tripartite social system of whites, gens de couleur libres, and slaves.3 But there was another rigid, if invisible, hierarchy at work: Orleanians were either yellow fever survivors, in a probationary period awaiting acclimation, or dead. As British traveler Alexander Mackay described it in 1849, no Orleanian could avoid a brush with this disease, which reached epidemic levels nearly every third summer. But unlike other American cities where yellow fever occasionally struck—including Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York—in New Orleans a person would not necessarily want to avoid it. Here, the “necessities” and “temptations” of business—wealth through cotton, sugar, and slaves—made risking death and gaining immunity to yellow fever indispensable for whites wishing to gain wealth, prestige, and power.4

Assured of his acclimation, Nolte could leverage his existing capital—whiteness, maleness, business acumen—to acquire economic capital—cash, credit, slaves—with far more certainty. He could gamble ever-greater sums, restart after frequent financial panics, and command the labor of increasing numbers of other people, both black and white. Now confident that Nolte would not drop dead in October, bankers were happier to extend him credit. He could remain in town year-round or travel safely to other tropical ports when epidemics raged. Like immune men in Havana, Pensacola, Tampico, and Whydah, Nolte found his social position improved: he could now marry advantageously, father multiple children, and rub elbows with the political elite.5 And he said that he could do all these things because he had made the rational choice to survive, having “not at all fe[lt] like dying,” and that his acclimation was proof that God and nature had sanctioned his entrepreneurship.6 Though he officially became an American around 1811, with immunity this immigrant became “of a different country”—a creolized citizen, naturalized to the Atlantic’s torrid zone.7

In The Reaper’s Garden, historian Vincent Brown argued that mass mortality was the great social leveler of the eighteenth-century Caribbean; that the unrelenting attrition of fevers—malarial, bilious, and yellow—ultimately undermined the privileges accorded to whiteness in a slave society; that all were equal in the face of death. But the “inscrutable and unpredictable” force of mass death generated meaning, and consequences, for the living.8 In antebellum New Orleans, alleged imperviousness or vulnerability to epidemic disease evolved into an explanatory tool for success or failure in commodity capitalism, and a defense for a race- and ethnicity-based social hierarchy in which certain people were decidedly less equal than others. Disease justified highly asymmetrical social and labor relationships, produced politicians apathetic about the welfare of their poor or recently immigrated constituents, and accentuated the population’s xenophobic, racist, and individualist proclivities. Alongside skin color, acclimation status played a major role in determining a person’s position, success, and sense of belonging in America’s “necropolis.”9 By fusing health with capitalism, we can produce a new model—beyond the toxic fusion of white supremacy with the flows of global capitalism—for how power operated in Atlantic society. It was through successfully performing acclimation that white Orleanians could access previously inaccessible realms of social and economic capital: entry into civic society’s upper echelons and newfound access to credit, specie, and slaves. A white person did not have to be wealthy to be acclimated. But, to a man, the richest and most powerful Orleanians presented themselves to the world as immune.

Recently, historians have situated New Orleans at the heart of “slave racial capitalism,” a system based on the violent commodification of enslaved black people.10 Despite its fixation on human bodies and environmental manipulation, this new historiography has largely ignored infectious disease, though sickness and death permeate the primary source record. And though it has explored the numerous capitalist calculations made by white Deep Southerners—when, whom, and what to buy and sell; when, whom, and what to borrow against, insure, or collateralize—it has not explored the myriad calculations Deep Southerners made as a direct result of epidemic disease: when to quit the city; when to sell products to minimize disease exposure; how to project confidence to clients, creditors, and vendors during epidemics; who was “safe” to employ, buy from, or partner with.11 By ignoring disease’s pervasiveness and the randomness of the biological draw, these historians ultimately present an oddly linear vision of capitalist success: that with resolve, intelligence, ruthlessness, and a pinch of luck, all whites possessed the potential for success in slave racial capitalism, and that white people entered a fraught but fundamentally level playing field.12

Disease confounds this narrative. Over 550,000 whites immigrated to New Orleans between 1803 and 1860, hoping to make their fortunes, mostly through the ferocious exploitation of black people, hundreds of thousands of whom were sold at auction.13 The Louisiana Purchase triggered rapid demographic change: the city’s population doubled to 18,000 in 1809 with the influx of Haitian refugees; swelled to 102,000 by 1840 through European, American, and forced black migration; and surpassed 168,000 on the eve of the Civil War. But with mass immigration came crowd diseases—cholera, plague, influenza, consumption, and typhoid. “Yellow Jack” proved to be New Orleans’ most lethal tyrant, routinely eclipsing all other causes of death when it struck, doubling or even tripling the city’s (already high) average death rate.14 Some whites would become acclimated to yellow fever and accumulate wealth and power. But a large percentage—engulfed by a new microbial reality—ended up in a coffin. White Orleanians understood that social and economic ascent did not depend solely on hard work or black enslavement; first it depended on surviving yellow fever in a region plagued by death.

Immunity to yellow fever, ill-understood in the nineteenth century, was euphemized with phrases like “acclimation,” “seasoning,” and “creolization.” Acclimation meant surviving yellow fever, but to have immunocapital, Orleanians had to convince others of their immunity. Immunity was (and is) an objective, biological reality. But before vaccination or diagnostic blood testing, it was invisible and impossible to verify. It was thus subjective and performative, a matter of faith as much as fact.15 In a city where people routinely classified others based on physical appearance—as a quadroon, griffe, Irishman, bozale—Orleanians were socialized to recognize immunity cues. If a man was creole or had lived in the tropics for multiple years, society generally gave him the benefit of the doubt—he could pass as immune. If he was a newcomer, poor, foreign-born, or a drunk, he was assumed to be “unacclimated” until proven otherwise. As the Irish immigrant and former Georgia congressman Richard Henry Wilde aptly described it shortly before he died from yellow fever in 1847, “no one is regarded an Inhabitant or any thing but a mere Squatter, who has not passed a summer.”16

Immunity, whether real or imagined, had serious implications. It affected where people worked, what they earned, where they lived, and with whom they dealt. It affected white people’s ability to invest capital in slaves and create more capital through slaves. It decisively impacted a person’s ability to find stability, social acceptance, and a political voice. Considering all the impediments faced by the unacclimated, even Dr. Edward Hall Barton, president of New Orleans’ 1841 Board of Health, suggested that “the VALUE OF ACCLIMATION IS WORTH THE RISK!”17 Most newcomers quickly heeded this wisdom, not avoiding but actively seeking illness as a pathway to profits and respectability. As Connecticut immigrant Ralph Roanoke boasted while convalescent, “Victory had perched upon my banner; I was an acclimated citizen, and as such, received into full favor in the good city of New-Orleans, where they distrust every body, and call them non-residents, until they become endorsed by the yellow fever.”18

But “victory” through acclimation was reserved for whites only. Though black immunity and white immunity were (and are) biologically identical, pro-slavery theorists argued that black people’s alleged natural resistance to this disease made their freedom, and independent capitalist participation, “scientifically” untenable.19 Rather, racial slavery was natural, even humanitarian, distancing whites from labor and spaces that would kill them. For whites, immunity was a prerequisite for citizenship and social advancement; for blacks, immunity increased their monetary value to their owners and strengthened the cycle of racialized assumptions about the black body that bolstered racial slavery. Black people could thus possess immunity, but not immunocapital, an expedient feint of logic that whites used to enrich themselves and reinforce their social and political dominance over blacks.

Antebellum New Orleans was the supercharged center of nineteenth-century yellow fever immunocapital, a major port on the great microbial highway circumnavigating the Atlantic Ocean.20 During the fever season (roughly July to November), it was a place so shockingly lethal by American standards that people obsessively documented their health, fixated on mortality, swapped tales of their acclimations, and constantly justified their attitudes toward the non-immune. Here, illness took on the trappings of metaphor.21 But New Orleans was far from unique. For many nineteenth-century tropical dwellers, it was impossible to disentangle health from identity, with most conceiving of acclimation expressly in Bourdieusian terms, as a form of social and cultural capital transferable across a disease diaspora.22 From Cayenne to Buenos Aires, acclimation was the ultimate mark of the criollo—the environmentally sanctioned insider. Those who described themselves as acclimated in Kingston or Lima implied that they were “naturalized” to tropical life, of steady habits, and worthy of investment.23 A slave described as seasoned or acclimated sold for a higher price in Cuba and Jamaica.24 In Louisiana, a creole person, like “[a] creole clerk, a creole slave, a creole horse, cow, chicken, egg . . . , ha[d] a commercial value, always higher (often one-fourth) beyond others.”25 From Liberia to Rio de Janeiro, migrants agreed that their prospects improved after passing through the tiempo muerto. One Bogotán even considered acclimation a, if not the, “momento critico” of a European transplant’s life.26 Every major language in the nineteenth-century Atlantic had words to describe the Hippocratic process of adapting to tropical climates, specifically to yellow fever; every Atlantic society privileged those claiming to be immune.27 The relocation costs of moving to the nineteenth-century Greater Caribbean were perilous, but the potential benefits could be extraordinary.28 One 1858 editorial described it best: for the brave man who had “incurred the perils of the epidemic” and proved victorious, “[h]is acclimation is his capital, which will not avail him elsewhere.”29

Immunocapital is not specific to New Orleans and its hinterlands, nor to the nineteenth century or to yellow fever. Any disease to which humans can gain immunity or resistance through exposure or vaccination can open new pathways for thinking about hierarchy, power, and capital across diverse eras and regions.30 Edmund Morgan, for example, showed how resistance to “seasoning” diseases (malaria and typhoid) had tangible value in the marriage and tobacco markets of seventeenth-century Jamestown.31 Immunocapital also applies outside American contexts. How, for example, did selective smallpox variolation reinforce the social status of the elite in late imperial China?32 How did all players in the African slave trade—captains, insurers, and slaves themselves—leverage smallpox and yaws scars for more money or preference?33 What impact did epidemics of measles and whooping cough have on the flows of people and capital to and from Hawaiʻi in the 1840s and 1850s?34 How has exposure to hepatitis C affected professional trajectories in Egypt since the anti-schistosomiasis campaigns of the 1960s?35 Can ukuhlolwa (virginity testing) in KwaZulu-Natal be viewed as sacred, patriarchal, and unscientific, but also as evidence that people living through a terrible HIV/AIDS epidemic equate health with social and economic capital?36 In other spaces, immunity (through exposure or vaccination) to viruses like dengue, Zika, influenza, polio, smallpox, and Ebola has powerfully shaped the contours of citizenship, conferred or eroded social power, exacerbated poverty and wealth, and substantially affected economic prosperity.37 Yellow fever immunocapital was pan-tropical in the nineteenth-century Atlantic, but a disease-agnostic version can be developed for other locales in the wider global past.

With the exception of slave revolts, nothing scared white Orleanians more than yellow fever. Remembering his time in Louisiana, Unitarian minister Theodore Clapp wrote that there was no death “more shocking and repulsive to the beholder”; “the distorted faces, the shrieks, the convulsions, [and] the groans” still haunted his dreams thirty-five years later. Victims experienced a sudden onset of intense headaches, muscle pains, jaundice, nausea, and chills. Within days, they oozed blood through their external orifices and vomited up partly coagulated blood. Eventually, patients lapsed into a coma, then died. It was so painful that even pious victims screamed profanities as the end neared. The luckiest people contracted milder, flu-like cases in childhood. Overall, nineteenth-century victims had around a 50 percent chance of succumbing to their illness.38

In this densely packed subtropical port, it was nearly impossible to avoid yellow fever.39 But the disease’s epidemiology and mosquito vector remained enigmatic until the twentieth century.40 Heeding the prevailing concepts of disease communicability, most antebellum physicians argued that yellow fever, unlike smallpox or syphilis, was “non-contagious,” as it did not spread directly from human to human. Rather, it was “miasmatic,” the organic result of the city’s heat and filth.41 Observers classified yellow fever as a “stranger’s disease,” strongly associating it with recent white immigrants from the North and Europe, especially poor ones.42 As Dr. Charles Caldwell theorized, epidemics were triggered by “the extraordinary assemblage of ignorant and intemperate, unacclimated and reckless inhabitants.” Conversely, “native, acclimated, and orderly citizens” would “enjoy . . . sound and uninterrupted health.”43

Juan Manuel Blanes, Yellow Fever in Buenos Aires. Oil on canvas, 1871. Wellcome Collection. CC BY.

Yellow fever was incredibly deadly for foreigners.44 Modern statisticians have determined that white American migrants died from yellow fever at four times the rate of native-born creoles, British and French migrants at ten times the creole rate, and Irish and German migrants at twenty times the creole rate. Overall, yellow fever accounted for between 75 and 90 percent of all migrant deaths.45 Thus, while as many as eight Orleanians per hundred died annually—making it America’s deadliest city by far, surpassing even Havana—deaths could reach 20 percent in certain immigrant neighborhoods.46 Of the 60,000 Germans who entered New Orleans between 1848 and 1858 and took up permanent residence, for example, about half died from yellow fever and cholera.47 One life insurance company singled out Irishmen as fifty-seven times more likely to die from yellow fever than native-born Louisianans, and Dutchmen and Belgians over ninety-one times more likely.48 If the seventeenth-century Caribbean was, as historian Richard Dunn called it, “the white man’s grave—and the black man’s, too,” statistics suggest that New Orleans was nineteenth-century America’s equivalent—for strangers, at least.49

White southerners took as axiomatic that black people were less affected by yellow fever. The evidence is mixed.50 Most historical data suggests that whites died overwhelmingly more often from the disease.51 Indeed, in 1820, when there were equal numbers of “white” and “black” people in New Orleans (total population 27,176), at least 84 percent of the 863 recorded yellow fever victims were described as white.52 Modern epidemiologists, however, have discovered no mechanism for hereditary resistance to yellow fever as they have for malaria (vivax and falciparum), suggesting that immunity did not pass from African-born parents to American-born children.53 But at the time, almost the entire medical community agreed with Samuel Cartwright that black people were “perfect non-conductors of yellow fever.”54 With respect to New Orleans, however, it matters little whether hereditary immunity actually existed. What matters is that contemporaries believed it did, and thought they had sufficient evidence to construe resistance in a racially specific manner.

Statistics can only hint at how people experienced living in such a deathscape.55 Thousands fled upon the slightest rumor of fever. Those lacking funds, opportunity, or freedom had no choice but to remain. Canal Street—the city’s busiest thoroughfare—emptied. The editors of the True American lamented in August 1839 that with so many reporters sick, it was “exceedingly difficult to get our paper out.” A month later, the Louisiana Supreme Court adjourned sine die on the second day of its session as judges fled the scourge.56 At night, an eerie silence descended over the streets, broken only by the screams of sufferers in shuttered houses. Everyone knew someone who had died. Survivors remained in houses that triggered memories of dead loved ones, slept in beds once shared, and dined at tables where empty chairs memorialized the departed.57

The only protection against yellow fever was to survive it. But it was not always clear what exactly a sufferer had survived. Unlike smallpox, yellow fever does not leave physical scars. Not everyone experienced the telltale symptom of black vomit. Even leading physicians did not agree that yellow fever was a discrete illness, and debates about the disease’s etiology remained heated across the European and American medical communities until the twentieth century.58 The larger epidemiological context of this region—plagued by malaria (“remittent/intermittent fever”), hookworm, pellagra, and dengue (“breakbone fever”)—complicated matters. Malaria, a so-called “country” disease, was particularly problematic. Symptomatically similar to yellow fever, it was considered by many to be a different manifestation of the same illness. Some suggested that yellow fever was simply the dire end of the fever spectrum: “some seasons,” physician Andrew Ellicott wrote in 1814, the fevers “are little more than the common intermittents, and remittents, which prevail in the middle states; but in others they are highly malignant,” approaching “the genuine yellow fever of the West Indies.”59 By the 1850s, most Orleanians understood yellow fever to be an urban phenomenon distinct from malaria, and were aware that surviving one disease had no bearing on the other.60 As Dr. Warren Stone warned, “Creoles living on the coast, not having been acclimated in New-Orleans, are just as liable to the fever as Northern people.”61 And though physician Bennet Dowler believed that “city creolism”—gained in Norfolk, Mobile, Savannah, or Charleston—was “probably identical” and “mutually protective,” he cautioned “country creoles” not to feel confident about their safety in New Orleans.62 Many questioned acclimation’s transmissibility—was a “Gibraltar seasoning” to the vómito negro sufficient in New Orleans or Jamaica? Would a Louisiana acclimation protect against a Panamanian or “African” fever? Did creoles acclimated in Cuba retain that protection if they spent long periods away in temperate climates?63

There was also no consensus about what constituted true acclimation. Some believed that acclimation was simply the body’s reconciliation to a tropical climate (which might include yellow fever). Others insisted that surviving yellow fever alone conferred actual acclimation. Some followed the advice of specialist Philip Tidyman, who claimed that white immigrants could be “generally considered safe after a residence of six years.”64 Dowler agreed, arguing, “Long urban residence (with or without having had yellow fever) is, in a sanitary sense, an equivalent to nativity . . . a kind of naturalization, or rather creolization.”65 By 1850, most agreed with Barton that “perfect acclimation is only to be derived from once having had the disease.”66 But within such a stew of contradictory information, people remained nervous. As Elizabeth Trist, a friend of Thomas Jefferson who lost her husband and son to yellow fever, wrote, “I hope that my constitution has become creolized as they term it here, having had very substantial seasoning.” Still, she closed, “I can’t help being afraid as the summer approaches.”67

The difficulty of verifying acclimation—based on precarious science, anecdotal declaration, and idiosyncratic experience—proved a conundrum for life insurance companies.68 South of Virginia, one New York–based mutual surcharged those medically verified as “acclimated” by 0.5 to 1 percentage point; “unacclimated” policy holders were allowed to live in or travel to the South only between November and June, or they were required to pay an extra “climate premium” of about 5 percentage points. By 1834, these supplements doubled, with some mutuals refusing insurance to those residing year-round in “unhealthy places” like New Orleans. Those few companies that would still insure “acclimated lives,” like New England Mutual, asked policy-seekers of the “Southern class” detailed follow-up questions: When had they encountered yellow fever? How many summers had they spent in the South? Could a doctor verify their claim?69 By the late 1850s, most underwriters routinely denied applicants from cities where yellow fever was prevalent if they could not prove that they had lived there for more than two years.70

Many immigrants sought acclimation sooner rather than later. Ironically, facing yellow fever was the only guaranteed way to survive and prosper long-term, especially for young white men seeking professional advancement in cotton factories, merchant houses, and wholesaling—jobs considered springboards to slave and land ownership.71 As lawyer Charles Watts related to his family on Long Island in 1825, ambitious men in Louisiana “submit themselves to the Yellow Fever,” committing to “changing their constitution by the shock.”72 Shock-seeking paid off for some. One immigrant named Isaac Charles boasted in September 1847 that he was “certain” that “both [brother] Dick & I are acclimated.” Expecting to “reside here altogether,” Charles figured it was better to get acclimation over with “at once.”73

Delaying the inevitable—by fleeing the city—was expensive and posed long-term financial impediments like diminished access to well-paid, steady employment.74 Moreover, in a place where risk-taking was embedded in the value system, postponing or eschewing acclimation—a very public demonstration of risk avoidance—impeded social and civic acceptance. As the Picayune argued in 1841, “If a man intends to make himself a citizen of New Orleans, his first duty is to become acclimated. He owes it to himself and to society.”75 The wisest plan, therefore, was to “look the evil boldly in the face, view it in all its magnitude, and then manfully and wisely adopt the best protective system human skill and experience can suggest”—live prudently, contract yellow fever, and survive.76

New Orleans’ business schedule, however, made “responsible” acclimation essentially impossible. City authorities implored unacclimated immigrants to stay away until the first frost, worried that their arrival would prolong epidemics, causing “[c]itizens, as well as strangers” to suffer.77 But by November, when “Frosty Jack” had expelled “Yellow Jack,” all the well-paid, upwardly mobile positions were already filled. Even then it was considered foolhardy “to suppose that any vacancy that may occur is not instantly filled by some acclimated resident of the city.” With floods of applications—about fifty per job—employers preferred bilingual “acclimated young men of the first character and qualifications.” As one editorialist concluded, “There is no chance for any kind of a clerkship here at any season, for young men from other places.” In New Orleans, opportunity existed for acclimated men only.78

Despite the risks, the “universal rule” remained to “rush here early, to get ahead of the crowd.” If newcomers waited, they languished in social and professional purgatory. Rents in “healthy,” convenient neighborhoods, affordable in September, were extortionate by December. Unable to afford the return trip to Maine or Munich and with few good options, the unacclimated huddled in crowded, tenement-like quarters adjacent to the docks or set up just outside the city, frantically scanning newspapers to determine exactly when the weather had become “Octoberish”—just safe enough from disease for them to stage their appearance.79

Such hedging was easier said than done. As rumors of yellow fever swirled in autumn, Connecticut immigrant Ralph Roanoke ceded all his “chances of preferment in a staunch commission-house, and fled the city.” Upon his return in November, Roanoke was fired. He again had to search for a job, “with my chances materially lessened by the very knowledge that I had not the courage to face the danger.” Roanoke asserted that good qualifications and references were “insufficient without the ‘sine qua non’ of an acclimated citizen.” His savings dwindled. Soon he determined that he could either retreat into his “former insignificance in Connecticut, or risk all upon the chances of acclimation.” Following a promise to his former employer that he would remain “the entire year, or perish in the attempt,” the firm rehired him. “Terribly frightened” but determined, he fell ill with yellow fever, but this time he “passed the Rubicon.” Now acclimated, Roanoke “stood before the world with all [his] doubts and misgivings at an end.”80

Orleanians described acclimation as like being reborn. As the Daily Delta declared in 1853, the acclimated man walked the streets with a “tremendously bold swagger,” sneering at the unacclimated, who darted about “timidly and nervously.” The acclimated “pooh pooh[ed]” yellow fever and called it a “mere nothing”; rather, it was a “pleasure” to have it, as it resulted “in such a splendid appetite when you get over it.” The Picayune described convalescents who “only a week or two ago [were] glad to be able . . . to take gruel and lemonade” and now were supposedly going “to the lake for a fish dinner . . . quarrel[ling] about what brand of claret is best.” This “spunky set of fellows” now bragged, “What do I care for the yellow fever?”81 Later, Orleanians would boast of the year of their acclimation—’17, ’33, ’49—like a membership badge in an invisible fraternity of survivors. Some would even celebrate their acclimations like an anniversary with a yearly feast.82 Above all, as Barton put it, newly acclimated men relished that they could now expect “additional compensation, for the additional risk run!”83

Seeking to capitalize on their hard-earned immunity, jobseekers filled newspapers with implicit or explicit declarations of immunity. One clerk enumerated his credentials in this order: “well acclimated, well educated, speaking five languages,” with “the best of references,” notable integrity, and business capacities.84 A grocer from Philadelphia promoted himself as “acclimated” and “willing to remain in this city during the Summer.”85 One “fully acclimated” man reassured his potential employer that he had lived in the Greater Caribbean for eighteen years, and New Orleans for the last several without interruption.86 A middle-aged man claimed that he was “well acquainted with this city” and also “well acclimated between the latitudes of 32° and the Tropics.”87 Employers often demanded parental residency, proof of local birth, or a physician’s letter certifying acclimation.88 References were generally useless unless provided by a former tropically based employer. From the boss’s perspective, it was a waste of resources to train someone for a detail-oriented job only to see him stricken or dead by autumn. As the unemployed German immigrant Gustav Dresel lamented in the 1830s, “I looked around in vain for a position as bookkeeper,” but “[t]o engage a young man who was not acclimated would be a bad speculation.”89

Amid the fatal churn, acclimated men could parlay immunity into raises and greater responsibility with the managerial class of merchant houses, wholesalers, and groceries, composed almost entirely of white men claiming immunity. Cotton clerk H. J. Masson remarked that the 1837 epidemic was the worst in memory, ravaging the unacclimated and “thin[ning] the counting houses.” Consequently, there was “considerable demand” for entry-level clerks. After a competing cotton factor, Mr. Stringer, lost his clerk to fever, he was “very anxious” for the acclimated Masson to quit and join him.90 George Fennell, an English grocer, also noted that the 1837 epidemic had been “truly awful.” When Fennell’s boss, Mr. Hawley, and three fellow bookkeepers died from fever, Hawley’s competitors moved to shut down his grocery. Fennell—the last man standing—had his choice of remunerative jobs among the surviving competition.91

New markets and immigration pathways opened for the acclimated. Josiah Nott—who claimed to have treated more yellow fever patients than any American doctor—argued that acclimated “citizens of Charleston, Savannah, Pensacola, Mobile, New Orleans, [and] West India towns . . . may exchange one city for another with impunity.”92 By mid-century, the terms “acclimated citizen,” “criollo aclimatado,” and “creole acclimaté” were firmly situated in the Atlantic lexicon. As one French doctor noted in 1820, only surviving yellow fever “stamped” a person with “the seal of naturalization,” giving immigrants “the title of citizen” in their adopted homes.93 After acclimating in New Orleans in 1853, French geographer Élisée Reclus told his mother that he could now safely work as a tutor in Rio de Janeiro or Veracruz, a fact he thought would bring her comfort and him riches.94 Well into the twentieth century, a certifiably acclimated workman in Havana and Panama could demand double the standard wage.95 Doctors also leveraged personal acclimation stories for professional advantage. Christian Miltenberger, a white Haitian refugee with extensive exposure to yellow fever gained while he was employed as a surgeon for a British military garrison, quickly ascended in New Orleans’ medical and political communities.96 Edward Jenner Coxe found his professional reputation and personal fortune improved in 1839 when he published a testimonial documenting his survival from “one of the most dangerous and protracted attacks of yellow fever ever recovered from.”97

Even after rigorous acclimation screening, employees still died in droves. As one traveler noted in 1836, “Five perished out of one counting-house; another house buried their book-keeper, employed another, buried him, and employed a third before the dead season had passed.”98 Such mortality among the allegedly immune suggests that clerks either misjudged their immunity or willfully lied about it. That was high-risk: false declarations of acclimation merited termination—an unimpeachable sign of untrustworthiness. But many apparently believed the lie was worth it: they would feign ignorance, then worry later about surviving the disease.99

Declaring acclimation did more than assuage employers. It became a catchall statement of character and legitimacy. As one editorialist in the Daily Delta opined in 1854, “[a] poor man who comes here for employment, so far from avoiding, should boldly face the acclimating fever, and thus become really a citizen.” When he was “thus initiated,” he could “command much higher rates of service,” with “acclimated citizens” preferred to strangers “in all the departments of life.”100 Indeed, a successful brush with yellow fever became the quintessential demonstration of calculated risk-taking in this marketplace—that a white man had willingly gambled his life, paid his biological dues, and could now justifiably pursue economic advancement in slave racial capitalism. Successful acclimations factored into the genesis stories of almost all of New Orleans’ political and economic elite. Though he could have fled in the summer of 1801, the eighteen-year-old Irish immigrant Maunsel White remained, realizing, “Alas! there was no help for it, but to take my chance.” Reminiscing decades later, White recalled his acclimation as a major turning point in his life: with only an informal education, he progressed quickly from bookkeeping to running his own cotton factory. In 1812 he was elected city councilor, and in 1846 a state senator. He married a wealthy creole woman, Celestine de la Ronde, and then after her death he married her sister Heloise. On his largest sugar estate, Deer Range, White had enslaved 192 people by 1850. He died massively wealthy. All of this he attributed, partly, to his acclimation.101

Like Nolte, White framed his acclimation as a choice. He had decided to contract yellow fever and willed himself to survive, with only a little help from “God, a good constitution, the Doctor and Nanny” (a slave who tended to him during his illness).102 Lesser men literally chose to die because they were drunkards, effeminate, sexually deviant, cowardly, or unclean, or because they did not seek timely medical care. Indeed, when physician Samuel Cartwright fell ill with yellow fever in 1823, he attributed his survival to his upstanding morality and prudence, giving scant credit to “cleanliness, fresh air and careful nursing.”103 Distilling the randomness of life and death to a matter of individual choice fed into a myth of meritocratic capitalism: that all whites of sufficient moral and physical courage had the potential for survival and success in New Orleans, and that men like White and Cartwright were socially and economically accomplished as a direct result of their willingness to take controlled epidemiological risks.104 As Dr. William Holcombe asserted, yellow fever was like a “mean yellow dog. If you face him and defy him he will slink away, but if you recede from him he will pursue and attack you.”105 Those who succumbed to disease or fled were “worthless,” “dissipated,” and “vile” and did not possess the requisite personal characteristics for success.106

Of course, this sunny vision of yellow fever clashed with the fatal reality. But the cold facts of disease risk—that half of all victims would die—mattered little; the myth of immunological reward proved far more powerful. Thus, while epidemics raged, young men routinely touted aspirational mantras about human agency over disease, insisting that yellow fever was a mild ailment, boasting that they had never enjoyed better health, and reassuring family that they would succeed where others had failed.107 Such optimism may have been self-delusional. But most unacclimated migrants bought into immunocapital and the hierarchy it created, believing that the system would benefit them, eventually. After all, immunological discrimination was just one more form of bias in a city premised on inequality.

Beyond its business and class implications, the immunity calculus factored heavily into all interpersonal relationships. Emphatically, Orleanians argued that white men could not fulfill their patriarchal duties to their wives, children, and slaves until they were acclimated. As one editorialist asserted, “We conjure all the interesting young gentlemen, to become [acclimated] as soon as possible,” for they “ought to recollect how cruel it is to visit among Creoles, or families acclimated, before they are so themselves.” Across the tropics, creoles warned their daughters against “‘linking [their] faith’ with that of the unacclimated lover.” Not only was he more likely to die, but unacclimated men were generally poorer and less established than their acclimated counterparts. “Sincerely, as a matter of principle,” the Picayune argued, “we are opposed to the existence of any strong ties until acclimation has taken place.”108

If immunity was an essential component of Orleanian patriarchy, it was also important for white women. Only acclimated women, it was believed, could reliably survive long enough to perform the feminine rites associated with marriage. As one newspaper described it, “The acclimated girl is a treasure,” and though “[s]he may not have yellow hair,” “if she has had yellow fever she is worth a mint of money.” Men screened their potential wives, asking: “‘Miss—have you ever had the yellow fever?’ ‘Was it a typical case?’ ‘Are you certain your physician was correct in his diagnosis of your case?’” Elite yellow fever widows—assumed to be immune—held a powerful bargaining chip. Indeed, one well-to-do fever widow named Mary Trist parlayed her acclimation into a rich American second husband and an even richer creole third husband.109

Acclimated lower-class women did not have such negotiating power. Instead, their immunity often trapped them in an endless cycle of caretaking—for their sick families, employers, and neighbors, and for the city’s thousands of orphans and foundlings in the aftermath of an epidemic.110 Such constant care effectively shut many women out of independent employment, keeping them reliant on small handouts of money, wood, and food from the municipality and church. Poor yellow fever widows, especially mothers, relied heavily on the city council’s meager discretionary spending. In 1815, for example, Widow Bayon asked the council to “ameliorate her sad and miserable situation as well as that of her large family.” It gave her a lump sum of fifty dollars, mindful not to set “a precedent for the future.”111 Though some acclimated women—black and white—could demand higher pay as nurses and wet nurses, most found that the unceasing attrition of yellow fever left them overwhelmed, professionally insecure, emotionally drained, and poorer.112

Immunocapital accrued within white ethnic populations. Over decades, each wave of immigrants passed though the mortality bottleneck and became candidates to enter the economic and political elite. Acclimated immigrants enjoyed more success in connection-dependent private-sector livelihoods in factories, merchant firms, and planting and had better access to well-paid municipal jobs in city government and policing. The members of the city council, once exclusively creole, hailed from increasingly diverse backgrounds—first France, then eastern/northern America, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, and Italy.113 Acclimation en masse provided an avenue for outsiders to become insiders, for strangers to become natives, with the highly lethal environment legitimizing individuals and groups as durable players in slave racial capitalism and society at large.

Immunocapital shaped life in New Orleans through a cycle of mutually reinforcing realities specific to its climate, industries, demographics, and immigrant-heavy population. Other cities shared some, if not all, of these conditions. All nineteenth-century ports faced health problems associated with overcrowding, poor sanitation, and mass migration, including tuberculosis, influenza, smallpox, typhoid, and cholera.114 But in the early republic, as historian William Novak illustrated, local governments progressively consolidated power in pursuit of the “well-regulated society,” a large component of which was health reform. By 1800, municipalities from Boston to Savannah began reallocating certain responsibilities over public health away from budget- and reelection-conscious politicians to independent health boards comprised of trained experts.115 These bodies invested in disease prevention: instituting quarantines, collecting vital data, caring for the sick, and tending to survivors. Many such interventions were successful.116 When yellow fever was rumored in Havana in the spring of 1799, Charleston’s city council deferred to the medical society—not the merchant elite—on how to respond, funding street cleaning, quarantine, and sanitation. In 1802, David Ramsay, a prominent Charleston physician widely known for his two-volume History of the American Revolution, published a pamphlet in which he provided mortality statistics for the previous year, tracking who died from what and how often.117 Not one case of yellow fever was reported to Charleston’s sexton’s office between 1807 and 1817, even though the disease raged in the West Indies and in Louisiana.118

Public health could scarcely have been worse in New Orleans, and consequently across “the whole region dependent upon it,” especially ocean- and river-connected cities along the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi River.119 Contrary to the whiggish impulse underpinning much of the historiography on public health in nineteenth-century Louisiana—that the disease situation improved incrementally—most ordinary antebellum southerners would have argued the opposite: that disease on the Gulf Coast grew progressively worse, more destructive, more intractable, and more terrifying in the decades before the Civil War.120 Most Orleanians became habituated to the fact that “city authorities” adopted essentially “no precautions against sickness,” even though, as one reformer suggested, mortality was “at least double what it ought to be.”121 Another physician argued that one-half or even two-thirds of yellow fever victims could have been saved with some government intervention.122 Indeed, it was largely because of rampant ill health that New Orleans was more closely associated with foreign ports like Havana and Veracruz than with American cities like Philadelphia or Norfolk.

Antebellum New Orleans had few competent institutions tasked with tracking or defining disease. Boards of health came and went and were kept so impotent that one doctor joked in 1855 that New Orleans’ health authorities were “about as fully authorized to declare war against a foreign power” as they were to issue a sanitation order.123 Unpaved streets stank with stagnant water, night soil, and rotting animals. Quarantines buckled under pressure from the business community. Outside the Ursuline nunnery, Charity Hospital, and an array of benevolent societies funded through individual almsgiving or bequest (often ethnicity- or religion-specific), the city offered few resources for poor victims of disease.124 Not until the devastating epidemic of 1878, following years of postwar economic depression and stagnant immigration, did “the cupidity of commercial men” wane and a new attitude that “Public Health is Public Wealth” spur the government to reliably drain streets and implement quarantines.125 But such progress was for a later generation. Instead, as one health reformer noted in 1844, antebellum medical authorities “immolate[d] hundreds and thousands of victims annually upon the altar of a blind incredulity.”126

Even in the larger southern context—a region traditionally less willing to levy taxes to support public services—New Orleans invested significantly less money into ameliorating disease-related problems than other cities.127 While Charleston allocated 77 cents per person toward poor relief in the 1830s, New Orleans allocated only 22 cents for this purpose, less than half the national average.128 By the 1850s, New Orleans ranked last among major cities in poor relief (8 cents per person compared with $1.43 in Boston), and lagged seriously behind other cities in public health spending (about 4 cents per person compared with 69 cents in Boston, 23 cents in New York, and 19 cents in Charleston). Almost all funds earmarked for public health were spent cosmetically in the rich residential and commercial districts of the First and Second Municipalities.129 As traveler Nathanial Wyeth noted, New Orleans was “so unlike Boston, in point of neatness, order, and good government,” that it was “a dreadful place in the eyes of a New-England man.”130

Worried about the city’s international image as a great Golgotha, the New Orleans commercial-civic elite sought to suppress newspaper coverage of yellow fever, even during serious epidemics.131 Architect Benjamin Latrobe, who died from yellow fever in 1820, found this silence baffling. An editor explained that as “the principal profit” of newspapers stemmed from mercantile advertisements, their “principal customers,” the merchants, “had absolutely forbid the least notice of fever, under a threat that their custom should otherwise be withdrawn.”132 Novelist George Washington Cable agreed, arguing, “The merchants, both Creole and American, saw only the momentary inconveniences” of quarantines; thus “the . . . press, in bondage to the merchant through its advertising columns, carped and caviled in two languages” against sanitation while expanding on “the filthiness of other cities.”133

Perhaps the priorities of the commercial-civic elite would have differed had they worried that mass death would undercut their specific version of commodity and slave capitalism. But they themselves were already immune, or at least pretended to be. And in this laborer-rich city—where thousands of black bodies were auctioned each season, and every ship brought in fresh white bodies to replace the dead—there was no shortage of labor. If some politicians, like Mayor Roffignac, rallied for public health early in their careers, their dedication waned over time. Perhaps they became jaded, accepting that the fatal status quo was intractable. Likelier still, they became insulated from the disease’s devastation as their family and friends gained immunity.134 Whether defeated by disease or defiantly deaf to their constituents’ needs, most politicians came to embrace the philosophy that the only effective long-term solution for epidemic yellow fever was not public health but, paradoxically, more yellow fever: expensive water pumps and quarantines only delayed the inevitable.

How did politicians justify such an obvious lack of interest? Contemporary science—partly—justified sclerotic public health.135 Clinging to the increasingly controversial theory of anti-contagionism (that yellow fever materialized organically and was not imported) far longer than their counterparts in other cities, New Orleans’ commercial-civic elite maintained that quarantines were “inexpedient, vexatious and oppressive” rather than life-saving.136 But the elite culture of apathetic fatalism ran deeper. Even at the height of epidemics, the city council barely discussed disease, instead preoccupying itself with finances, zoning, and bread weights. Pursuing solutions to yellow fever was considered a poor use of political capital, and there were essentially no negative consequences for politicians who avoided the disease question. Historian John Sacher estimated that in 1820, property requirements barred 57.8 percent of white men from voting in New Orleans. Excluding so many white males, while also excluding women, free blacks, slaves, recent immigrants, the “floating” population, and children, meant that only a small proportion of city residents held politicians accountable. Luckily for politicians, those inhabitants who clamored for public health infrastructure quieted over time as they accepted the filthiness of the urban condition, gained immunity, fled, or died. And as naturalization required five years of residence, there was a strong overlap between the non-acclimated, the non-propertied, and the non-citizen.137 Figuring that a large percentage would die before becoming enfranchised citizens, politicians found the unacclimated an easy bloc to ignore. After all, dead men did not vote; acclimated men did.

If the elite of any nineteenth-century city had the privilege of spatial segregation from the “filthy” poor—retreating to their uptown mansions or seaside homes—this privilege took on a distinctly seasonal flavor in Louisiana. Most acclimated merchants and planters saw no need to keep their families in town during the fever season, when business was slow and the mood was melancholy. Having already sufficiently demonstrated their immunity, the elite could instead tend to their country business—surveying cane and cotton harvests, checking accounts, and visiting creditors in New York and London—while delegating city tasks like bookkeeping and sales to their low-level clerks and agents, men who could not financially or socially afford to sojourn elsewhere.138

Demonstrating how little concern they had for their constituents, most aldermen, even those who claimed immunity and creolism like William Kenner, James Carrick, and Félix Arnaud, also fled to their vast country plantations, where they joined the business elite in playing “like truant children.”139 Political absenteeism during epidemics was the norm, and it crippled the functions of government. In the autumn of 1804—a season in which between 1,000 and 1,500 people died—seven meetings of the city council were canceled because fewer than six aldermen attended, the simple majority needed for a quorum. At the twenty-seven meetings that did take place from July to December, six aldermen attended less than half the time; future mayor Dr. John Watkins appeared just once. In the deadly autumn of 1811, four meetings of the council were delayed due to disease.140 After mass political absenteeism in 1853, the year of the city’s worst epidemic, J. D. B. De Bow wrote, “There is, perhaps, not another case on record of the authorities of a modern city” abandoning their constituents “to fly from a pestilence.”141

Yellow fever factored heavily into election scheduling. In 1812, the creole majority in the newly formed state legislature set elections for July to lessen American-born influence, precisely because Americans were more likely to flee during July. In another kind of seasonal gerrymandering, the creole majority on the city council also changed the mayor’s term from six months to one year, with elections mandated for the summer. Consequently, creoles boasted eight of the first ten mayors, as American candidates left too frequently in the summer to build and maintain electoral viability.142 In 1845, during the opening debates of the Louisiana constitutional convention, Democratic sugar planter Bernard Marigny proposed embedding acclimation tests in the state constitution, stating:

If you fix the elections in June or July, you place the result of the popular choice at the control of . . . the floating population—those birds of passage, who come to New Orleans for a limited season, and for some temporary purpose, and who are ready to quit at any moment, particularly at the period when yellow fever makes its appearance.

Come September, the “birds” had left, and the city was reduced to “the actual citizens—to those who have a real and permanent interest in . . . the preservation of our local interests.” Marigny submitted that “no good citizen” was afraid of yellow fever: rather, acclimation was “the baptism of citizenship,” offering a “guarantee of devotion to the country.” Virginia-born Whig Charles Conrad staunchly disagreed, noting that as Marigny was creole, he “has been exempted by his birth from that baptism” and “is therefore, ignorant of its tortures and its suspenses.” Had Marigny known the tortures, Conrad surmised, “he would be the last one to require so awful a proof of good citizenship.”143

With politicians intent to avoid (or exploit) the yellow fever problem, private citizens stepped in to ameliorate mass mortality’s worst social effects. New Orleans was internationally famous for its charity, with its safety net—protections for the “deserving” unacclimated, sick, and widowed—constructed and financed almost entirely by private and professional associations, foreign consulates, and the Catholic Church. In 1841, the Howard Association, the Dames de Providence, the Samaritans, and the Firemen’s Charitable Association expended $15,151 to help the “distressed unacclimated.”144 Thousands volunteered for the “Can’t-Get-Away Club” and other caregiving charities in 1853.145 The largest contributions, however, came from elite businessmen—men who claimed to have had personal experience with yellow fever. Upon his death in 1824, Julian Poydras, a St. Domingue native and pious Catholic, bequeathed over $100,000 to charity. The sugar planter, slave owner, and former president of the Louisiana Senate included $60,000 for the “Marriage Portions” of poor orphan girls (many of whose parents had died of yellow fever), an endowment for the Poydras Orphan Asylum (an institution filled with yellow fever orphans), and more property for the Charity Hospital (host to the majority of yellow fever’s victims).146

Even by nineteenth-century standards, private philanthropy—altruistic though it could be—was not a sufficient replacement for government support. And it made individuals like Poydras into gatekeepers—the ultimate authorities on who was deserving, who could access welfare, and on what terms: mostly young girls, and decidedly not their “filthy” immigrant parents. As the Picayune lamented in 1860, “Shall the entire burden of these necessary institutions fall upon individuals? Do they not reflect honor upon the State, and is it not the duty [of the citizenry] to aid in the benefaction demanded by the fatherless, the orphan, and the sick stranger found in this our commercial capital?”147 The potent combination of rampant disease and government inaction compounded society’s asymmetrical status quo: the acclimated elite gained extra social capital through honorific displays of charity (often while deriding the efficacy of quarantines or actively lying about the region’s salubrity in anonymous editorials), while the unacclimated poor came to rely on this privatized patchwork system of charity for their survival. Most people quickly accepted the harsh reality: public heath was private acclimation.148

Theoretically, immunocapital could have transected race. But if immunity helped transform whites into potential slave owners, merchants, and commodity capitalists, blacks’ alleged natural resistance to yellow fever, slavers argued, made them better, even inevitable, slaves. Physicians and sextons repeatedly emphasized the lower death rates of black people from yellow fever, suggesting, for instance, that only 3 blacks died from yellow fever in New Orleans in 1849, as compared to 766 whites.149 Increasingly, such anecdata was employed to further the social ends of white supremacy. Josiah Nott posited that “negro blood is an antidote against yellow fever, for the smallest admixture of it with the white will protect against this disease.”150 Rather than follow this argument to its next logical step—that interracial mixing saved lives—pro-slavery theorists doubled down on the utility of strict racial purity.151 Expanding on the tradition of using disease for racially expedient ends, Samuel Cartwright asserted that the Deep South’s climate “scorns . . . the aristocracy of the white skin.” As this environment was too torrid for “the master race of men,” black people should do the lion’s share of cash crop cultivation. Nature, he argued, “has issued her fiat, that here at least,” whites “shall not be hewers of wood or drawers of water . . . under pain of three fourths of their number being cut-off.”152 Cartwright indirectly captured the twisted logic of immunocapital: for whites, living there was a high-risk gamble with potentially vast rewards; for blacks, racial slavery was scientific destiny, as their innate intellectual inferiority but immunological superiority perfectly adapted them to hard labor under the tropical sun.153 Cartwright’s theories trickled down. If whites replaced slaves in the cane fields, the Weekly Delta opined, “[s]uch a mortality . . . would nearly extinguish the sugar culture in Louisiana.”154

Some free blacks, especially the richest and lightest-skinned, found ways to puncture the hollow logic of white-only immunocapital. Even as Irish and German laborers displaced free people of color in most unskilled industries by the 1830s, whites struggled to penetrate certain skilled trades. Georges Alcès, a Louisiana-born free black man, ran a cigar factory that employed two hundred people; Pierre Casenave, a St. Domingue–born commission broker and undertaker, amassed a fortune of over $100,000.155 Steamboat captains apparently preferred acclimated free black to white laborers, considering them less militant and longer-lived. Many free blacks demanded large sums for grave-digging and body-carting during epidemics.156 In 1853, the Howard Association paid two acclimated black nurses $10 per day, though the usual rate for a twenty-four-hour shift was between $2 and $3.157 All of these people probably survived yellow fever in childhood; all sought to capitalize on their acclimation, defying the pernicious ideas and fragile excuses about the black body that whites used to justify excluding blacks from full membership in this society.

But black immunocapital was the exception, not the rule, with white Orleanians finding multiple reasons to justify their anti–free black prejudice and racial slavery itself on yellow fever terms. In 1853, the Weekly Delta argued that as divine punishment, slaves lost their natural resistance to yellow fever in freedom; that of the few black victims in that year’s epidemic, almost all had been free, and therefore “slavery is the condition best suited” to blacks, saving a bondsman “from a destructive disease, to which [he] would render himself liable by the exercise of his freedom.”158 A later article maintained that three-quarters of all deaths from yellow fever were among abolitionists. “[S]laves and masters rarely die,” the article posited; those who did were practitioners of “abolition theory.”159

Such thinking was nothing short of alchemy. And as masters piously expounded on their belief in slave-only yellow fever resistance, they simultaneously lamented the vulnerability of their slaves to the disease. In 1837, planter James Armor related that all his slaves had fallen sick with fever, and he had personally nursed them back to health.160 Many slavers refused to buy someone without a guarantee of acclimation. Like “fancy,” “likely,” and “choice,” “acclimated” was a common descriptor in slave advertisements—a euphemism that conveniently reduced a person’s suffering to a marketable asset. Typical advertisements read, “A Choice lot of young Negroes, males and females, who have been here during the summer and therefore are partly acclimated,” or “FOR SALE—A valuable family of slaves—consisting of a GRIFFE WOMAN, of 35 years, good Cook, Washer and Ironer, acclimated, willing subject and of obedient disposition.”161 Though many Orleanian buyers preferred bilingual slaves, advertisements often conjoined language skills with acclimation and guarantees. As one read, a “superior mulatto boy, 13 years of age, acclimated, speaks French and English; fully guaranteed.”162 Acclimated or “seasoned” slaves commanded higher prices—about 25 percent more. To this end, slave trader Walter Campbell maintained a “holding pen” eighty miles outside New Orleans to hasten the acclimation of his human property so that he could sell them at a premium.163

Slave traders compensated for disease risk in their business models. As with all commodities and goods, the pace and schedule of the city’s slave industry was controlled by yellow fever. In 1830, only 2.6 percent of annual slave sales took place between July and October—to lessen the already considerable risks associated with moving enslaved people south.164 As one writer in the Argus estimated, “The loss by death in bringing slaves from a northern climate, which our planters are under the necessity of doing, is not less than TWENTY-FIVE PER CENT.”165 Such mortality probably had more to do with the brutality of the domestic slave trade and sugar culture than with yellow fever, but as one trader noted, “we may calculate upon loosing [sic] some of them in becoming acclimated.”166 Enslaved people, of course, probably did not see their immunity as an asset or a capitalist calculation in the same way whites did. Petrified of yellow fever like everyone else, slaves could not flee or afford doctors independently. As one ex-slave remembered, “Dat fever pay no ’tention to skin color. White folks go. Black folks go. Dey die so fast dey pile dem in wagons.”167 And if immunity could save their lives and constitute a key aspect of slaves’ personal self-worth and identity, it added nothing to their personal wealth or social standing.168 As slaves were embodied capital, acclimation only enhanced the value and safety of that capital—for their white owners.

By the 1820s, many whites considered New Orleans too risky for their expensive enslaved property. Even if a slave was declared acclimated, fraud was common, as traders fabricated backstories to enhance a person’s value and hasten a sale. And with thousands of poor, famine-fleeing Irishmen pouring into the docks, the labor/capital calculus shifted. As one stevedore claimed, slaves were “worth too much to be risked here”: “if the Paddies are knocked overboard, or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything!” But if a slave died, capital evaporated.169 The proportion of enslaved persons in the city dropped from 50 percent in 1806, to under 25 percent in 1840, to just 8 percent in 1860. Capitalist needs pushed acclimated bondspeople into surrounding plantations—safer, less-diseased, and more efficient sites for blacks to create capital for whites.170

Historians have understood “creole” as a cultural and racial signifier. But antebellum Orleanians used “creole” partially as a biological term: it signified that the body had adapted to the environment and diseases of the Deep South, paving the way for full membership—civic and capitalist—in this society.171 As one Orleanian said in congratulating a newly acclimated friend, he had “finally succeeded in getting out his naturalization papers. He is now in every respect a citizen of New Orleans, and long may he live to enjoy the glorious privilege.”172 But as immunity for whites became so closely linked with the concepts of citizenship and legitimacy, slavery inverted this logic for blacks, with the white elite colluding to award black people a kind of negative immunocapital: for the longer they could survive to make wealth for their masters, the more it made sense to enslave them. The professed belief in slave immunity emphasized black people’s statelessness, movability, and malleability—at once sub- and superhuman, incapable of living in freedom. Moreover, slave status was an epidemiological blessing for blacks—God’s gift to the South’s designated laborers. Mosquitoes might have been equal-opportunity vectors, but white Orleanians made sure that immunity’s workings would be anything but colorblind.173

Immunocapital provides a framework for recognizing the additional pressures—destructive and generative—exerted on society by epidemic disease and mass mortality. Indeed, betting on who was immune and who would survive past September added layers of speculation to a society essentially premised on gambling, both for pleasure and for business in commodity futures. Those at the top of New Orleans’ economic and political life, all (allegedly) survivors, obtained a de facto moral legitimacy, a tropical (if ecumenical) twist on Max Weber’s aristocracy of the elect: in their public willingness to roll the epidemiological dice and risk their lives, the immune elite had been endowed with both a practical and a moral right to thrive in slave racial capitalism, a harsh but essentially honest meritocracy.174

This was a fragile but crucial logic system, providing order to severe inequity and chaos. To admit that dumb luck rather than human agency determined who survived yellow fever could potentially challenge all manner of other tenuous “truths” of life in the Deep South—that racial slavery was violent, not scientific; that capitalist success was happenstance, not meritocratic. Equating survival with morality justified the exploitation of unacclimated whites and all black people. It also made New Orleans a miserable place to live for the majority of its inhabitants. Carl Kohn, an eighteen-year-old cotton clerk from Bohemia, summed up the foul mood engulfing the city during the 1833 epidemic in a letter to his uncle in Paris: “Is this the ‘dear Orleans’ of which you talked in your letters with such affection? Is that the place where you wish to lay now your mortal remains?” Kohn concluded, “Bye the bye [sic] that’s a good idea, for it is only a place to die at but not to live.”175

But Kohn did not leave. Instead, he faced down yellow fever and survived. Kohn became one of New Orleans’ most prominent businessmen, forming his own brokerage firm in 1842, serving as the president of the Union Bank, and marrying an acclimated woman named Clara, the daughter of Maunsel White, another yellow fever survivor and slave owner. In September 1833, Kohn had expected yellow fever to “attack with as much certainty as a condemned criminal does expect the sentence of his execution”; by year’s end, he cheerfully described his improving business prospects and plans for the future.176 Once a source of misery and anxiety, yellow fever now endowed Kohn with a future, transforming this one-time skeptic of America’s necropolis into a bona fide titan of it.

Kathryn Olivarius is an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University, where she has taught since 2017. Her research and teaching focus on slavery’s rise and fall in the American South and the wider Atlantic World, disease in the nineteenth century, the history of race and ethnicity, and the social upheaval of the Age of Revolutions. Before moving to California, she was a Past and Present postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Historical Research in London. She is currently at work on a book about disease, capitalism, and slavery in the antebellum South.

I am grateful to numerous people for their generous assistance and criticism throughout the process of writing this essay, most notably Amy Dru Stanley, Annette Gordon-Reed, Conevery Valenčius, Lawrence Goldman, Urmi Engineer Willoughby, J. R. McNeill, Jonathan Gienapp, Mara Keire, Jeffrey Glover, Jane Dinwoodie, Mark Harrison, Carol Sanger, Sveinn Jóhanneson, and Tom Cutterham. I am particularly indebted to Pekka Hämäläinen and Katherine Mooney for several rounds of very constructive criticism and years of encouragement. In addition, stimulating feedback from the American Historical Review, both its anonymous reviewers and its editorial board and staff, has demonstrably improved the content and style of this article. Finally, my thanks to colleagues at the Wellcome Unit and Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford, at the Institute of Historical Research in London, and especially at Stanford University.

Notes

1

For Nolte’s career, weekly “price current,” and eventual failure, see Thomas N. Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718–1819 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1999), 279; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism (New York, 2014), 214–215. Quotes from Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York, 2014), 89.

2

Vincent Nolte, Fifty Years in Both Hemispheres; or, Reminiscences of the Life of a Former Merchant (New York, 1854), 91–92.

3

For New Orleans’ system of racial classification, see Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769–1803 (Durham, N.C., 1997), especially chap. 2; Paul F. Lachance, “The Formation of a Three-Caste Society: Evidence from Wills in Antebellum New Orleans,” Social Science History 18, no. 2 (1994): 211–242.

4

Alexander Mackay, The Western World; or, Travels in the United States in 1846–47, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1849), 2: 88. Yellow fever periodically struck mainland North America, killing about 5,000 people in Philadelphia in 1793, at least 730 in 1795 in New York, 5,000 in 1798 in both Boston and New York, and about 1,000 in Baltimore in 1800. Epidemics largely ceased in the North by 1800. See Billy G. Smith, Ship of Death: A Voyage That Changed the Atlantic World (New Haven, Conn., 2013), 236–237. In New Orleans, yellow fever increased in frequency and ferocity during the nineteenth century. Sporadic cases appeared every summer, and particularly lethal epidemics occurred in 1796, 1799, 1804, 1809, 1811, 1817, 1819, 1821, 1824, 1833, 1839, 1847, 1849, 1853, 1854, and 1858.

5

“The History of a Cosmopolite,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine 4 (July–December 1854): 325–330. For immunity’s utility across the tropical and subtropical Atlantic, see John McLeod, A Voyage to Africa, with Some Account of the Manners and Customs of the Dahomian People (London, 1820), 84; Brantz Mayer, Captain Canot; or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver (New York, 1854), 421; Ramón Hernández Poggio, De la aclimatación en Canarias de las tropas destinadas a Ultramar (Madrid, 1867), 19–23; Kalala Ngalamulume, “Keeping the City Totally Clean: Yellow Fever and the Politics of Prevention in Colonial Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal, 1850–1914,” Journal of African History 45, no. 2 (2004): 183–202.

6

Nolte, Fifty Years in Both Hemispheres, 91.

7

Quote from Conevery Bolton Valenčius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York, 2002), 32. For antebellum financial panics, see Jessica M. Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (Cambridge, 2013), chaps. 6 and 7; Stephen Hahn, A Nation without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (New York, 2016), 79–90.

8

Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), 2–4, quote from 4. For more on disease determinism, see J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge, 2010); Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge, 1986); Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (Princeton, N.J., 2017).

9

For New Orleans’ necropolitan reputation, see Bennet Dowler, Researches upon the Necropolis of New Orleans, with Brief Allusions to Its Vital Arithmetic (New Orleans, 1850), 5; “Health of the City,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 8, no. 1 (July 1851): 135; Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley, Calif., 2003), chap. 3.

10

“Slave racial capitalism” is Walter Johnson’s term. There are too many works on capitalism and slavery to make an exhaustive list. See Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass., 2013), here 14; Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia, 2016); Beckert, Empire of Cotton; Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told; Joshua D. Rothman, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (Athens, Ga., 2012); Scott P. Marler, The Merchants’ Capital: New Orleans and the Political Economy of the Nineteenth-Century South (Cambridge, 2013).

11

Multiple layers of capitalist speculation centered on slaves, sometimes before birth or after death as a “ghost value.” See Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (New York, 2017), especially chaps. 1 and 6; Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, Mass., 2014), especially chap. 3.

12

Yellow fever’s environmental and cultural influence on the South has been richly described, though its larger socioeconomic and capitalist impacts remain less explored. See Jo Ann Carrigan, The Saffron Scourge: A History of Yellow Fever in Louisiana, 1796–1905 (Lafayette, La., 1994); John Duffy, Sword of Pestilence: The New Orleans Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853 (Baton Rouge, La., 1966); Margaret Humphreys, Yellow Fever and the South (Baltimore, 1992), chaps. 2 and 3; Benjamin Trask, Fearful Ravages: Yellow Fever in New Orleans, 1796–1905 (Lafayette, La., 2005), chaps. 1–3; John H. Ellis, Yellow Fever and Public Health in the New South (Lexington, Ky., 1992), chap. 2; Urmi Engineer Willoughby, Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (Baton Rouge, La., 2017), chaps. 2 and 3.

13

M. Mark Stolarik, Forgotten Doors: The Other Ports of Entry to the United States (Philadelphia, 1988), chap. 5; Elizabeth Fussell, “Constructing New Orleans, Constructing Race: A Population History of New Orleans,” Journal of American History 94, no. 3 (2007): 846–855; Earl F. Niehaus, The Irish in New Orleans, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge, La., 1965), chap. 3. For black migration to New Orleans, see Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (Oxford, 2006), 40–51. For Haitian migration, see Paul F. Lachance, “The 1809 Immigration of Saint-Domingue Refugees to New Orleans: Reception, Integration and Impact,” Louisiana History 29, no. 2 (1988): 109–141.

14

“Chart Exhibiting the Annual Mortality of New Orleans,” in E. H. Barton, Report of the Sanitary Commission of New Orleans on the Epidemic Yellow Fever of 1853 (New Orleans, 1854), 315.

15

While most long-term inhabitants probably were immune, some people claiming to be acclimated had no actual immunity, having been lulled into a false sense of security over time or fooled by surviving other diseases often misdiagnosed as yellow fever, especially the severe form of malaria. For mistaken or dubious acclimation, see the debates of six doctors in E. D. Fenner, “The Yellow Fever of 1853,” De Bow’s Review 17, no. 1 (July 1854): 39–42, here 41.

16

Richard Henry Wilde to John Walker Wilde, August 4, 1847, in Edward L. Tucker, ed., “Richard Henry Wilde in New Orleans: Selected Letters, 1844–1847,” Louisiana History 7, no. 4 (1966): 333–356, here 353–355.

17

For Barton’s quote, see Daily Picayune, November 26, 1841.

18

Ralph Roanoke was the penname of Edward P. Mitchell. Roanoke, “Random Leaf from the Life of Ralph Roanoke,” Knickerbocker 40, no. 3 (September 1852): 196–203, here 201.

19

For an excellent analysis of the historical connection between disease, slavery, race, and mono-/polygenism, see Mark Harrison, “‘The Tender Frame of Man’: Disease, Climate, and Racial Difference in India and the West Indies, 1760–1860,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70, no. 1 (1996): 68–93, here 73–79.

20

New Orleans’ first epidemic was not recorded until 1796, when Louisiana was a Spanish colony. Epidemics did not become regular occurrences until 1804, the year after American cession. The heyday of yellow fever—and immunocapital—in Louisiana was during the American period following mass immigration. Craig E. Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge, La., 2005), 36–38.

21

Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York, 1978), 1–10.

22

Good health and immunity fit into Pierre Bourdieu’s definitions of capital. Cultural: objective/subjective, inherited/earned, conscious/subconscious traits, convertible into economic capital; “an investment, above all of time.” Social: referring to connections and obligations, where group membership provides a person with “a ‘credential’ which entitles them to credit.” Economic: a form of capital readily converted into money. Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in John Richardson, ed., Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York, 1986), 241–258, quotes from 244, 249. While economists have explored the idea of “health capital”—where health is a “durable capital stock” that individuals inherit at birth, has tangible value that depreciates over time, and impacts decision-making—scholars have done little to explore the historical connections between health, capital, and power. See Michael Grossman, “On the Concept of Health Capital and the Demand for Health,” Journal of Political Economy 80, no. 2 (1972): 223–255, quotes from 223, 224.

23

For creolism and sobriety as defenses against yellow fever, see John Hunter, Observations on the Diseases of the Army in Jamaica (London, 1788), 21–26; Adèle Toussaint-Samson, A Parisian in Brazil: The Travel Account of a Frenchwoman in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro, ed. June E. Hahner (Wilmington, Del., 2001), 41–43.

24

Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, during the Years 1777–1804, 7 vols. (London, 1814–1829), 7: 180; Philip D. Curtin, “Epidemiology and the Slave Trade,” Political Science Quarterly 83, no. 2 (1968): 190–216, here 210–211; Brown, The Reaper’s Garden, 50.

25

Bennet Dowler, review of Daniel Drake, A Systematic Treatise, Historical, Etiological, and Practical, on the Principal Diseases of the Interior Valley of North America (Cincinnati, 1850), New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 7, no. 1 (1850): 54–67, here 67.

26

Agustín Codazzi, “Apuntamientos sobre immigracion i colonizacion,” Gaceta Oficial 1181 (Bogotá, December 21, 1850): 692–695, here 693. See also Sidney Chalhoub, “The Politics of Disease Control: Yellow Fever and Race in Nineteenth Century Rio de Janeiro,” Journal of Latin American Studies 25, no. 3 (1993): 441–463; John Masefield, On the Spanish Main; or, Some English Forays on the Isthmus of Darien (New York, 1906), 151–152.

27

For Hippocratic/Aristotelian theory and the “racial idiom,” see Joyce E. Chaplin, “Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in North America: Comparing English and Indian Bodies,” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 229–252, especially 242.

28

Philip D. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989), 37.

29

“Suffrage in Cities,” Daily Delta, November 24, 1858.

30

Some diseases fall outside this rubric. For example, the Black Death (Yersinia pestis, which killed between 30 and 60 percent of Europe’s fourteenth-century population) and the nineteenth-century cholera pandemic (Vibrio cholerae, which killed millions) were bacterial; hence a person could not become immune. Some people, however, do exhibit more resistance than others.

31

Seasoned women in Virginia’s “widowocracy” amassed wealth due to rapid husband turnover; planters able to withstand malarial agues dominated Virginia’s tobacco-planting economy. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), 166–179.

32

Variolation against smallpox was confined—by policy and poverty—to the Chinese elite, about 80–90 percent of whom were immune by 1750. The poor were not vaccinated at such levels until the early twentieth century. Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford, Calif., 1997), 63; AnElissa Lucas, Chinese Medical Modernization: Comparative Policy Continuities, 1930s–1980s (New York, 1982), 3, 74–75.

33

Brown, The Reaper’s Garden, 50.

34

Measles killed at least one-tenth of the Hawaiian population in 1848 and 1849. Sumner J. La Croix and James Roumasset, “The Evolution of Private Property in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii,” Journal of Economic History 50, no. 4 (1990): 829–852, here 835–836.

35

Egypt still has the highest prevalence of hepatitis C in the world. Mohammed Yahia, “Global Health: A Uniquely Egyptian Epidemic,” Nature 474 (June 2011): S12–S13.

36

Virginity testing was deemed unconstitutional in South Africa in 2006. HIV prevalence in KwaZulu-Natal is about 36.3 percent overall but 44.1 percent for women. Fiona Scorgie, “Virginity Testing and the Politics of Sexual Responsibility: Implications for AIDS Intervention,” African Studies 61, no. 1 (2002): 55–75; Ayesha B. M. Kharsany, Cherie Cawood, David Khanyile, Lara Lewis, Anneke Grobler, et al., “Community-Based HIV Prevalence in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa: Results of a Cross-Sectional Household Survey,” The Lancet 5, no. 8 (2018): 427–437.

37

For how Ebola survival eroded social power in West Africa, see Helene Cooper, “They Helped Erase Ebola in Liberia. Now Liberia Is Erasing Them,” New York Times, December 9, 2015. A small portion of humans have an “advantageous allele,” CCR5 Delta32, which provides resistance against HIV, though it is so rare that its social and economic utility is likely negligible. See John Novembre, Alison P. Galvani, and Montgomery Slatkin, “The Geographic Spread of the CCR5 Δ32 HIV-Resistance Allele,” PLoS Biology 3, no. 11 (2005), https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0030339. Immunocapital also applies outside human contexts. In the late nineteenth century, South African farmers used various methods to convince colonial officials that their cattle were “salted” (resistant to rinderpest) and should be spared culling. C. van Onselen, “Reactions to Rinderpest in Southern Africa, 1896–97,” Journal of African History 13, no. 3 (1972): 473–488, here 484.

38

Theodore Clapp, Autobiographical Sketches and Recollections, during a Thirty-Five Years’ Residence in New Orleans (Boston, 1857), 189. For yellow fever symptoms, see K. David Patterson, “Yellow Fever Epidemics and Mortality in the United States, 1693–1905,” Social Science & Medicine 34, no. 8 (1992): 855–865; R. La Roche, Yellow Fever, Considered in Its Historical, Pathological, Etiological, and Therapeutical Relations, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1855), 1: chap. 3. McNeill suggested that historical mortality ranged between 38 and 69 percent. Jean Slosek’s estimated range was 50 to 94.5 percent. Modern mortality is significantly lower. McNeill, Mosquito Empires, 33–40, especially 37; Slosek, “Aedes Aegypti Mosquitoes in the Americas: A Review of Their Interactions with the Human Population,” Social Science & Medicine 23, no. 3 (1986): 249–257, here 249.

39

Yellow fever’s vector is the female Aedes aegypti mosquito. Native to Central West Africa, this species was continually reintroduced to New Orleans by ships moving goods and people around the Atlantic. Historians largely agree that New Orleans experienced its first epidemic in 1796, coinciding with Louisiana’s first successful sugar harvest. See James D. Goodyear, “The Sugar Connection: A New Perspective on the History of Yellow Fever,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 52, no. 1 (1978): 5–21.

40

Cuban doctor Carlos Finlay discovered the mosquito vector in 1881. American military doctor Walter Reed and his team confirmed Finlay’s findings by 1900. See Mariola Espinosa, Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878–1930 (Chicago, 2009). Unlike the swamp-dwelling, malaria-carrying Anopheles, Aedes aegypti prefer to breed in clean water vessels typical of cities—wells, cisterns, and open barrels. Epidemic yellow fever (in non-endemic regions) requires a large mosquito population, a warm, humid climate, and a densely packed, immunologically naïve human population, or the virus will not spread fast enough. For yellow fever’s epidemiology, see P. D. Curtin, “‘The White Man’s Grave’: Image and Reality, 1780–1850,” Journal of British Studies 1, no. 1 (1961): 94–110, here 96–98.

41

Contemporary debates about the origin and contagiousness of yellow fever were fraught, especially as they related to the efficacy of quarantine. See Thomas O’Halloran, Remarks on the Yellow Fever of the South and East Coasts of Spain (London, 1823), 84–103; “New Orleans: Its Relative Salubrity and the Sources of Its Diseases,” Eclectic Journal of Medicine 1, no. 7 (1837): 247–250; 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, 1854), 16, 26, 48–57.

42

For yellow fever’s particular impact on immigrants, see H. Didimus, New Orleans as I Found It (New York, 1845), 43–45; “History and Incidents of the Plague in New Orleans,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 7, no. 42 (November 1853): 797–806; Henry Tudor, Narrative of a Tour in North America; Comprising Mexico, the Mines of Real del Monte, the United States, and the British Colonies, 2 vols. (London, 1834), 2: 64–65.

43

Charles Caldwell, Thoughts on Hygiène, as Applicable to Hot Climates, More Especially to the Mississippi Region, and to New Orleans (New Orleans, 1836), 86.

44

Names like Wetzel, Mahoney, and Schmidt checkered the city’s burial records. See Records of Deaths, Interments, Lafayette Cemetery, 1841–1843, September 1841, roll 906364, 3–21, Lafayette Cemetery Records, 1836–1968, II LM430, New Orleans Public Library [hereafter NOPL].

45

Jonathan Pritchett and İnsan Tunali based their findings on the 1853 epidemic. Earlier epidemics follow similar trends. Pritchett and Tunali, “Strangers’ Disease: Determinants of Yellow Fever Mortality during the New Orleans Epidemic of 1853,” Explorations in Economic History 32, no. 4 (1995): 517–539, here 518–520.

46

While the national mortality rate was 2.247 percent, E. H. Barton suggested that “natural mortality” in New Orleans was about 6.75 percent, conceding that this was probably an underestimate, being derived from “official published sources.” Barton, Report of the Sanitary Commission of New Orleans on the Epidemic Yellow Fever of 1853, 223. For other contemporary/comparative estimates of mortality, see “The Mortality of New Orleans,” De Bow’s Review 9, no. 2 (August 1850): 245–246; J. C. Simonds, An Address on the Sanitary Condition of New Orleans (New Orleans, 1851), 14–17. Havana’s mortality rate in the nineteenth century hovered around 3 percent. S. Díaz-Briquets, “Determinants of Mortality Transition in Developing Countries before and after the Second World War: Some Evidence from Cuba,” Population Studies 35, no. 3 (1981): 399–411, here 400.

47

According to John Fredrick Nau, 227,247 Germans entered the U.S. through the port of New Orleans between 1848 and 1858, but most emigrated upriver and west. Nau, The German People of New Orleans, 1850–1900 (Leiden, 1958), 7 n. 1, 15–16.

48

J. Smith Homans, ed., A Cyclopedia of Commerce and Commercial Navigation (New York, 1858), 1066; Dowler, Researches upon the Necropolis of New Orleans, 13–15.

49

Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972), 302.

50

Historians have long debated hereditary resistance. Kenneth F. Kiple and Virginia Himmelsteib King argued that black people were “able to resist yellow fever to an extraordinary degree.” Todd L. Savitt agreed that black people “experienced much milder cases with fewer fatalities than their light-skinned neighbors.” McNeill wrote that some heritable immunity “probably does exist.” Kiple and King, Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora: Diet, Disease, and Racism (Cambridge, 1981), 39; Savitt, Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia (Urbana, Ill., 1978), 241; McNeill, Mosquito Empires, 46. Espinosa, however, believes that “there is no evidence” to support passive immunity, and “it is time for historians to discard it.” Watts entirely rejects hereditary immunity. Mariola Espinosa, “The Question of Racial Immunity to Yellow Fever in History and Historiography,” Social Science History 38, no. 3–4 (2014): 437–453, here 437; Sheldon Watts, “Yellow Fever Immunities in West Africa and the Americas in the Age of Slavery and Beyond: A Reappraisal,” Journal of Social History 34, no. 4 (2001): 955–967; Watts, “Response to Kenneth Kiple,” ibid., 975–976.

51

One recent study suggests that a nineteenth-century Caucasian patient was 14.6 times more likely to succumb to yellow fever than a non-Caucasian patient, controlling for socioeconomic status, cultural bias, and healthcare access. Lauren E. Blake and Mariano A. Garcia-Blanco, “Human Genetic Variation and Yellow Fever Mortality during 19th Century U.S. Epidemics,” mBio 5, no. 3 (2014): 1–6, here 2.

52

Historical mortality data is imperfect: contemporaries rarely provided for categories of people outside “black” or “white” like mixed-race or indigenous. And as it was widely believed that black people could not die from yellow fever, physicians and coroners were unlikely to list it as the cause of death. This confirmation bias is evident in Report of the Committee of the Physico-Medical Society of New-Orleans, on the Epidemic of 1820 (New Orleans, 1821), table I; Kiple and King, Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora, 42.

53

Some African-born slaves would/could have developed immunity to yellow fever in parts of West Africa where the disease was (and still is) endemic. Many West Africans (and North Africans and Sicilians) had some innate resistance to various forms of malaria due to the sickle cell trait. See Willoughby, Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans, 28–29.

54

Samuel Cartwright, “Prevention of Yellow Fever,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 10 (September 1853): 292–317, here 316.

55

Patterson estimated that yellow fever killed 40,171 Orleanians between 1817 and 1905, over ten times more than in Charleston, another yellow fever hotspot. I estimate that yellow fever killed at least 150,000 Orleanians in the nineteenth century, and probably many more. This number likely doubles if cities in New Orleans’ suburbs and hinterlands are included—Natchez, Vicksburg, Baton Rouge, Biloxi, Mobile, Galveston, and Pensacola. Most historians base their mortality estimates on George Augustin’s History of Yellow Fever and the city’s official Board of Health reports. But this data is flawed. When a board existed, it perennially downplayed mortality, lacked the infrastructure to track the deaths of the indigent, poor, and recently arrived, arbitrarily omitted certain faubourgs, and certainly undercounted black mortality. My estimate is based on thousands of interment tables, immigration and hospital ledgers, city council and mayoral minutes, tax rolls, contemporary observations, newspapers, and doctors’ accounts. Patterson, “Yellow Fever Epidemics and Mortality in the United States,” 860; “New Orleans,” in Augustin, History of Yellow Fever (New Orleans, 1909), 861–893. For more reliable contemporary accounts of yellow fever mortality, see E. D. Fenner, The Epidemic of 1847; or, Brief Accounts of the Yellow Fever, That Prevailed at New-Orleans, Vicksburg, Rodney, Natchez, Houston and Covington (New Orleans, 1848), 189–206; Simonds, An Address on the Sanitary Condition of New Orleans, 5–36.

56

“The Sickness,” True American, August 29 and October 5, 1839.

57

Contemporaries painted frightening descriptions of the city during epidemics. See George Fennell to his brother Samuel Fennell, March 1838, George Fennell Letters, MSS 152, Williams Research Center, The Historic New Orleans Collection [hereafter HNOC]; Joseph Holt Ingraham, The South-West, by a Yankee, 2 vols. (New York, 1835), 1: 164; Irene S. Di Maio, ed. and trans., Gerstäcker’s Louisiana: Fiction and Travel Sketches from Antebellum Times through Reconstruction (Baton Rouge, La., 2006), 55–61, 252–253; Maria Inskeep to Fanny G. Hampton, October 29, 1832, box 1, folder 13, Fanny Leverich Eshleman Craig Collection, Manuscripts Collection 225, Louisiana Research Collection, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library Special Collections, Tulane University, New Orleans [hereafter LRC].

58

For an in-depth analysis of national debates surrounding yellow fever’s etiology, see Thomas A. Apel, Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds: Science and the Yellow Fever Controversy in the Early American Republic (Stanford, Calif., 2016), 3–25; William Coleman, Yellow Fever in the North: The Methods of Early Epidemiology (Madison, Wis., 1987), 121–134, chap. 7.

59

Andrew Ellicott, The Journal of Andrew Ellicott (Philadelphia, 1814), 288. Lay residents also understood fevers as a spectrum, with “remittent,” “Spanish,” “bilious,” and “yellow” each having a specific meaning. See A. Perlu to David Porter, July 3, 1828, Mss. 2979, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Louisiana State University Libraries, Baton Rouge [hereafter LSU].

60

Resistance to malaria, a great killer in its own right, was difficult to measure, especially as malarial symptoms came and went according to the life cycle of the parasite. For more on the confusion in differentiating malaria from yellow fever and acclimation’s instability, see John Duffy, “The Impact of Malaria on the South,” in Todd L. Savitt and James Harvey Young, eds., Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South (Knoxville, Tenn., 1988), 29–54, here 33–35; Joseph Jones, “Comparative Pathology of Malarial and Yellow Fevers,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 32 (July 1879): 106–217; Samuel Henry Dickson, “On the Blending and Conversion of Types in Fever,” Transactions of the American Medical Association 5 (1852): 127–161, here 148.

61

“False Alarm about the Yellow Fever—Anecdotes—Theatricals, &c.,” New York Times, December 19, 1853.

62

Dowler, Tableau of the Yellow Fever of 1853, 34–38, quotes from 36, 37.

63

African, Panamanian, and Congo fever were alleged to be particularly virulent manifestations of yellow fever. “Panama Fever,” Daily Picayune (Evening Edition), September 22, 1853; H., “The Fever,” Daily Picayune, August 6, 1853. The “yellow fever zone” spanned roughly 42 degrees of latitude north and south of the equator. Though two viral strains of yellow fever existed in the nineteenth-century Atlantic, they were genetically very similar, and immunity was transferable. Smith, Ship of Death, 164–165. For the fear of losing acclimation, see “Some Peculiarities of Yellow Jack,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 58 (December 1878–May 1879): 126–130. For adaption to cold climates or “northern acclimatization,” see Anya Zilberstein, A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America (Oxford, 2016), chap. 3.

64

P. Tidyman, “A Sketch of the Most Remarkable Diseases of the Negroes of the Southern States, with an Account of the Method of Treating Them, Accompanied by Physiological Observations,” Philadelphia Journal of the Medical and Physical Sciences 12 (May and August 1826): 306–338, here 326.

65

Dowler, “Reviews and Notices of New Works,” 67.

66

Quoted in James Wynne, Report on the Vital Statistics of the United States, Made to the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York (New York, 1857), 200, emphasis in the original.

67

Elizabeth Trist to unknown recipient, March 1, 1806, box 1, folder 8, Nicholas Philip Trist Papers, #2104, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill [hereafter UNC].

68

Josiah Nott, a medical examiner for insurance companies, had specific criteria for determining whether a party was acclimated or unacclimated. Nott, “Life Insurance at the South,” De Bow’s Review 3, no. 5 (1847): 357–376.

69

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, Mss:797 1844–1999 N532, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Cambridge, Mass.

70

For “climate premiums,” see James M. Hudnut, Semi-Centennial History of the New-York Life Insurance Company, 1845–1895 (New York, 1895), 35; Sharon Ann Murphy, Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America (Baltimore, 2010), 33–37; Levy, Freaks of Fortune, 88–97; “Invest Your Money at Home,” Times-Argus (Selma, Ala.), April 7, 1870.

71

According to one doctor, the majority of those who perished in the epidemic of 1853 were “unacclimated immigrants, chiefly from 15–40 years old.” Stanford E. Chaillé, “Acclimatisation, or Acquisition of Immunity from Yellow Fever,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 33 (August 1880): 101–136, here 132.

72

Charles Watts to Family, June 5, 1825, Charles Watts Papers, 1813–1833, New Orleans, RL.10958, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

73

Isaac H. Charles to John Edward Siddall, September 18, 1847, Isaac H. Charles Letters, Mss. 621, LSU.

74

For more on prejudice against the unacclimated, see Jo Ann Carrigan, “Privilege, Prejudice, and the Strangers’ Disease in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans,” Journal of Southern History 36, no. 4 (1970): 568–578, here 570–573.

75

Daily Picayune, November 26, 1841.

76

Living “prudently” included practicing temperance and sexual prudence, avoiding fruit, and eating a light diet. “Sketches of Character: The Anti-Panic Man,” Daily Delta, August 13, 1853.

77

“More Subjects for the Fever,” The Picayune (Evening Edition), September 14, 1837.

78

“Don’t Go to New Orleans,” Republican Banner and Nashville Whig, September 27, 1853.

79

“Editorial and Other Items,” Times-Democrat, September 27, 1866. For yellow fever’s impact on professional trajectories, see Martin Saavedra, “Early-Life Disease Exposure and Occupational Status: The Impact of Yellow Fever during the 19th Century,” Explorations in Economic History 64 (April 2017): 62–81, here 62, 78.

80

Roanoke, “Random Leaf from the Life of Ralph Roanoke,” 200, 201.

81

“Sketches of Character: The Acclimated Man,” Daily Delta, August 1, 1853; “The Convalescent,” Daily Picayune, September 18, 1853.

82

Survivors dubbed themselves “old timers.” See “The Convalescent,” Daily Picayune, September 18, 1853; “Talk about Town,” Daily Delta, November 9, 1858; “New Years,” Daily Picayune, January 1, 1858; A. Oakey Hall, The Manhattaner in New Orleans; or, Phases of “Crescent City” Life (New York, 1851), chap. 9; “History and Incidents of the Plague in New Orleans,” 803.

83

Barton, Report of the Sanitary Commission of New Orleans on the Epidemic Yellow Fever of 1853, 223.

84

“Situation Wanted,” New-Orleans Commercial Bulletin, December 18, 1844.

85

“Situation Wanted,” Daily Picayune, June 23, 1838.

86

“Wanted,” Daily Picayune, September 5, 1839.

87

“Situation Wanted,” Daily Picayune, August 13, 1840.

88

For certificates of acclimation, see “Arrival of Steamship Philadelphia,” Daily Picayune, August 15, 1857; “Health and Acclimation Certificate,” in Reports of Committees of the Senate of the United States for the Second Session of the Fifty-Second Congress (Washington, D.C., 1893), 17–18.

89

Gustav Dresel, Gustav Dresel’s Houston Journal: Adventures in North America and Texas, 1837–1841, ed. and trans. Max Freund (Austin, Tex., 1954), 21–22.

90

H. J. Masson to James Emile Armor, September 25, 1837, box 1, folder 1, James Emile Armor Papers, MS-100, NOPL.

91

Fennell eventually accepted a more prestigious job at an architectural firm. George to Samuel Fennell, March 1838, George Fennell Letters, MSS 152, HNOC.

92

Nott, “Life Insurance at the South,” 366.

93

Nicholas Gerardin, Mémoires sur la fièvre jaune: Considérée dans sa nature et dans ses rapports avec les gouvernemens (Paris, 1820), 13, 15, my translations.

94

Élisée Reclus, Correspondance, 3 vols. (Paris, 1911), 1: 78–81.

95

William Gorgas, Sanitation in Panama (New York, 1915), 25; “To the Honorable the Senate and House of Representatives of the Congress of the United States,” November 1835, United States Congressional Serial Set 294, 24th Congress, 1st session (Washington, D.C., 1835), H.R. Rep. No. 480, 27–31.

96

“Journal of Christian Miltenberger,” box 4, folder 42, Christian Miltenberger Papers, #513, UNC; Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge, La., 1988), 64–66.

97

Edward Jenner Coxe, Practical Remarks on Yellow Fever, Having Special Reference to the Treatment (New Orleans, 1859), v.

98

A Returned Emigrant, “Liberty and Slavery in America,” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 46, pt. 1 (1836): 321–334, here 326.

99

For mistaken acclimation, see Fenner, “The Yellow Fever of 1853,” 41.

100

“Spirit of the Press,” Daily Delta, October 28, 1854.

101

Maunsel White, “The Olden Time in New-Orleans and Yellow Fever,” De Bow’s Review 6, no. 2 (1848): 156–158, quote from 157. For more on White’s life, see “Maunsel White, Merchant, of New-Orleans,” De Bow’s Review 14, no. 1 (1853): 85; Marler, The Merchants’ Capital, 28; David T. Gleeson, The Irish in the South, 1815–1877 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001), 122.

102

White, “The Olden Time in New-Orleans and Yellow Fever,” 158. Barton classified acclimation as both a physical and a moral process, requiring adaption to both the climate and local customs. See E. H. Barton, Introductory Lecture on Acclimation, Delivered at the Opening of the Third Session of the Medical College of Louisiana (New Orleans, 1837), 4.

103

Mary Louise Marshall, “Samuel A. Cartwright and States’ Rights Medicine,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 93 (July 1940–June 1941): 74–78, here 75.

104

For the idea of climatic championship, see Nolte, Fifty Years in Both Hemispheres, 91; Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), 93–108; H. Roy Merrens and George D. Terry, “Dying in Paradise: Malaria, Mortality, and the Perceptual Environment in Colonial South Carolina,” Journal of Social History 50, no. 4 (1984): 533–550.

105

William Holcombe, “Queer Things about Yellow Fever,” Southwestern Christian Advocate, February 6, 1879.

106

“The Population of New Orleans and the Fever,” Tri-Weekly Commercial (Wilmington, Del.), August 23, 1853. It is unclear how elites reconciled their conviction that poverty, intemperance, and moral decrepitude caused the lower classes to die of yellow fever with the fact that elite persons were also stricken. Elite men did not blame their wives’ deaths on intemperance or adultery. Rhetorically, it was almost as if the rich and the poor died from two separate diseases. For the historical connection between poverty and disease, see Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven, Conn., 2009), 137–153.

107

For wishful thinking, see the entry for June 10, 1832, in Carl Kohn Letterbook, MSS 269, HNOC.

108

Daily Picayune, October 12, 1838.

109

Quotes from “Feverish Love,” Des Moines Register, November 20, 1879; Elizabeth to Nicholas Trist Jr., June 3, 1810, series 1.2, folder 10, Nicholas Philip Trist Papers, #2104, UNC.

110

For poor white women’s experience of yellow fever, see Rosalie B. Hart Priour, The Adventures of a Family of Emmigrants who Emmigrated to Texas in 1834: An Autobiography (Corpus Christi, Tex., 1960), chaps. 25–27, the first typed manuscript of which, catalogued as Rosalie Bridget Hart Priour Reminiscences [ca. 1867], can be found in box 2R154, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin [hereafter UTA]; “History and Incidents of the Plague in New Orleans,” 805.

111

New Orleans Conseil de Ville, Official Proceedings (translations), November 11, 1815, AB301, NOPL [hereafter CVOP]. For how lower-class women were (partially) trapped in poverty by their immunity, see the long list of “City Charities” in any nineteenth-century year—for example, New Orleans Conseil de Ville, Ordinances and Resolutions (translations), January 31, 1826; March 29, 1828; January 11, 1832; February 20, 1832, AB311, NOPL [hereafter CVOR].

112

For acclimated wet nurses, see “Wanted,” Daily Picayune, September 22, 1839.

113

For increased Irish-born presence in the police, see New Orleans City Guard, Reports of the Captain of the Guard, 1826–1836, reel 1, TKD205, NOPL; Dennis C. Rousey, Policing the Southern City: New Orleans, 1805–1889 (Baton Rouge, La., 1996); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995), 140; Hall, The Manhattaner in New Orleans, 68. The last names of city councilors grew more ethnically diverse. See November 30, 1803; May 15, 1816; September 22, 1827, CVOP.

114

Cholera outbreaks invigorated public health across Europe and America in the 1830s. In 1832, New York counted 3,500 deaths out of a population of a quarter-million; New Orleans, with a population of about 46,000, had over 5,000 fatalities. Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago, 1962), 36–38. For the government’s inaction in New Orleans, see Mayor’s Messages, New Orleans Conseil de Ville [translations], October 31 and November 1, 7, 12, and 15, 1832, AA506, NOPL.

115

The well-regulated society encompassed safety, economics, space, morals, and health. William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), 1–3 and chap. 6.

116

After deadly yellow fever epidemics in 1793 and 1797, “institutional medical authorities” in Philadelphia “constantly augmented both their powers and the physical infrastructure of quarantine.” Simon Finger, The Contagious City: The Politics of Public Health in Early Philadelphia (Ithaca, N.Y., 2012), 148. For increasingly robust public health in other American cities, see John Duffy, A History of Public Health in New York City, 1625–1866 (New York, 1968), chap. 5; Joseph I. Waring, “Charleston Medicine, 1800–1860,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 31, no. 3 (1976): 320–342; Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore, 2009), 78–81, 171–173.

117

David Ramsay, The Charleston Medical Register for the Year 1802 (Charleston, S.C., 1803), 1–22.

118

“Yellow or Stranger’s Fever,” Hazard’s United States Commercial and Statistical Register 2, no. 1 (January–July 1840): 11–12.

119

Joseph S. Copes to C. S. Knapp, October 22, 1853, box 10, folder 10, Joseph S. Copes Papers, Manuscripts Collection 733, LRC. Mobile, Vicksburg, Savannah, and Natchez often asked New Orleans to adopt strict sanitary measures. They routinely failed. Indeed, cities farther afield—from the North to the Mediterranean—changed their public health systems to account for New Orleans’ ineptitude, sometimes imposing quarantines only on ships from Louisiana and the yellow fever zone. See John W. Monette, Observations on the Epidemic Yellow Fever of Natchez, and of the South-West (Louisville, Ky., 1842), 102–111; “Health Regulations at Mobile,” Daily Picayune, July 3, 1858; “Quarantine at Genoa,” Daily Picayune, August 19, 1855; “Vessels Arriving at Liverpool,” New-Hampshire Statesman & Concord Register, December 15, 1827.

120

Many historians have characterized Louisiana as a public health leader: it was the first state to adopt a board of health and among the first to implement medical licensing exams. But most interventions appear to have been gestural only, and as Duffy notes, creoles and acclimated immigrants by mid-century adhered to a program of disease denialism—underplaying epidemics and insisting that only newcomers were impacted by yellow fever. It was only after Union occupation and the implementation of strict sanitary laws that New Orleans enjoyed its first significant decline in mortality in six decades. See Robert C. Reinders, End of an Era: New Orleans, 1850–1860 (Gretna, La., 1964), chap. 6; John Duffy, “Nineteenth Century Public Health in New York and New Orleans: A Comparison,” Louisiana History 15, no. 4 (1974): 325–337, here 333–337; Carrigan, The Saffron Scourge, chaps. 3–5; Humphreys, Yellow Fever and the South, chaps. 2 and 3; John H. Ellis, “Businessmen and Public Health in the Urban South during the Nineteenth Century: New Orleans, Memphis, and Atlanta,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 44, no. 3 (1970): 197–212; Jo Ann Carrigan, “Yankees versus Yellow Jack in New Orleans, 1862–1866,” Civil War History 9, no. 3 (1963): 248–260.

121

Fenner, The Epidemic of 1847, 197; E. H. Barton, The Annual Report of the Board of Health of the City of New Orleans, for 1849 (New Orleans, 1850), 13, emphasis in the original. For other skeptical accounts of government inaction, see “The Epidemic Yellow Fever of 1847,” in Transcripts Relating to the Medical History of Texas, vol. 8: Yellow Fever in Texas, 1839–1858, 23, Bexar Archives, Medical History of Texas Collection, box 2R345, UTA; Veritas, “For the Orleans Gazette,” Orleans Gazette, October 29, 1819.

122

Simonds, An Address on the Sanitary Condition of New Orleans, 42.

123

“Editorial and Miscellaneous,” New Orleans Medical News and Hospital Gazette 2, no. 4 (June 1855): 187. One court clerk described how the health board suppressed mortality and deliberately manipulated statistics. See the entries for October 17 and 26, 1846, in Abner Phelps Diaries, vol. 2: Diary, 1844–1847, Manuscripts Collection 1064, LRC.

124

New Orleans was nationally famous for its system of private charity, most of it administered through the Catholic Church. Elna C. Green, Before the New Deal: Social Welfare in the South, 1830–1930 (Athens, Ga., 1999), 81–99. For ethnic stratification in charities, see Report of the Orleans Central Relief Committee to All Those Who Have So Generously Contributed to the Yellow Fever Sufferers of New Orleans from the Great Epidemic of 1878 (New Orleans, 1879), 34–35.

125

Samuel Choppin, “History of the Importation of Yellow Fever into the United States,” in American Public Health Association, Public Health Reports and Papers, vol. 4: Presented at the Meetings of the American Public Health Association in the Years 1877–1878 (Boston, 1880), 190–206, quotes from 206. Sanitarians adopted “Public Health is Public Wealth” as their slogan in 1879. Quoted from Humphreys, Yellow Fever and the South, 91; Dennis East II, “Health and Wealth: Goals of the New Orleans Public Health Movement, 1879–84,” Louisiana History 9, no. 3 (1968): 245–275, here 248; Melanie Kiechle, “‘Health Is Wealth’: Valuing Health in the Nineteenth Century,” draft manuscript shared with me by author, July 2018.

126

W. M. Carpenter, Sketches from the History of Yellow Fever: Showing Its Origin, Together with Facts and Circumstances Disproving Its Domestic Origin, and Demonstrating Its Transmissibility (New Orleans, 1844), 4. For disinterested politicians and public health parsimony in the colonial period, see Shannon Lee Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (Chicago, 2008), 96–98; Christina Vella, Intimate Enemies: The Two Worlds of the Baroness de Pontalba (Baton Rouge, La., 1997), 9–11.

127

David R. Goldfield, “The Business of Health Planning: Disease Prevention in the Old South,” Journal of Southern History 42, no. 4 (1976): 557–570, here 559.

128

In 1820, the municipality spent $7.20 per inhabitant annually, well above the national average of $4.16. This rose to $12.00 per citizen between 1834 and 1838. But nearly a third of this expenditure ($3.86) went to servicing the city’s debts, and about $1.38 was allocated for “public safety”—mostly a euphemism for guarding against slave revolts. New Orleans had the highest bonded debt of any American city between 1847 and 1851 ($69.48 per person); virtually all of it was sold outside the state to raise liquid capital for chartered banks, and it was not used to create infrastructure, for public health or otherwise. Leonard P. Curry, The Corporate City: The American City as a Political Entity, 1800–1850 (Westport, Conn., 1997), 62–74; George D. Green, “Banking and Finance in Antebellum Louisiana: Their Influence on the Course of Economic Development,” Journal of Economic History 26, no. 4 (1966): 579–581.

129

Curry, The Corporate City, 79, table 2.33. For class or geographic bias in public health expenditure, see July 12, 1817; August 16 and 23, 1817; and June 19, 1819, CVOR; Elizabeth Wisner, Public Welfare Administration in Louisiana (1930; repr., New York, 1976), chaps. 3–5.

130

John B. Wyeth, Oregon; or, A Short History of a Long Journey from the Atlantic Ocean to the Region of the Pacific, by Land (Cambridge, Mass., 1833), 75, 74.

131

The city council banned the ringing of funeral bells between August and December in 1810, wary that the constant ringing made visitors and residents nervous. It stopped sending mortality notices to city newspapers in 1817 in order to suppress panic. May 18, 1810, CVOR; September 25 and 27, 1817, CVOP.

132

Latrobe Sr. died shortly after his son also died of yellow fever in New Orleans. Benjamin Henry Latrobe, The Journal of Latrobe; Being the Notes and Sketches of an Architect, Naturalist and Traveler in the United States from 1796 to 1820 (New York, 1905), 240–241, quotes from 241.

133

George W. Cable, “Flood and Plague in New Orleans,” Century Illustrated Magazine 26, no. 3 (July 1883): 419–431, here 430–431.

134

John Duffy argued that “because a good share of the brokers, commission merchants, shippers, and other businessmen in New Orleans were a transitory population and the local citizens were relatively immune to yellow fever, there was little interest in sanitary reform.” Duffy, The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health (Urbana, Ill., 1990), 97.

135

As etiological debates about yellow fever’s foreign or domestic origin remained unsettled, health officials in every American city were loath to implement quarantines. If yellow fever was non-contagious, non-imported, and miasmatic, epidemiologist Nicolas Chervin argued, “lazarets and quarantines which are onerous for governments and prejudicial to commerce, neither serve to prevent, nor to lessen the violence of the infection.” William Colby Rucker, “Chervin, a Pioneer Epidemiologist: An Early Study of the Contagiousness of Yellow Fever,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 8 (1925): 434–449, here 441–443. For more on the politics of quarantines, see Veritas, “For the Orleans Gazette,” Orleans Gazette, October 29, 1819. For a particularly good explanation of yellow fever’s etiology, see Humphreys, Yellow Fever and the South, chap. 1.

136

“The Quarantine,” Daily Picayune, June 7, 1857.

137

Louisiana’s 1845 constitution established universal white manhood suffrage, though in practice many people were still shut out. Only 58.5 percent of white men in New Orleans could vote by 1850. John M. Sacher, A Perfect War of Politics: Parties, Politicians, and Democracy in Louisiana, 1824–1861 (Baton Rouge, La., 2003), 205–207.

138

Politicians, merchants, and planters left town en masse. Rothschild’s agent in New Orleans, J. N. Hanau, for example, scheduled his annual European business trip—to Liverpool, London, Paris, and Frankfurt—to coincide with the fever season. J. N. Hanau to Rothschild & Sons, London, July 19, 1844, XI/38/130A, The Rothschild Archive, London.

139

Vella, Intimate Enemies, 84–86, quote from 85; “History and Incidents of the Plague in New Orleans,” 797–800. For absenteeism among the upper classes, see W. C. C. Claiborne to Thomas Jefferson, December 2, 1804, in Territorial Papers of the United States, vol. 9: The Territory of Orleans, 1803–1812, comp. and ed. Clarence Edwin Carter (Washington, D.C., 1940), 344–346.

140

Watkins died of yellow fever in 1807. Jerah Johnson, “Dr. John Watkins, New Orleans’ Lost Mayor,” Louisiana History 36, no. 2 (1995): 187–196. By March 1805, when the council expanded from thirteen to fourteen members, it resolved to maintain a six-person quorum to allow the body to continue its function. Changes to the quorum took place on March 1, 8, and 13, 1805. See August–November in 1804, 1805, 1811, CVOP.

141

“The Plague in the Southwest: The Great Yellow Fever Epidemic in 1853,” De Bow’s Review 15, no. 6 (1853): 595–635, here 611.

142

The proportion of disenfranchised white men dropped to 55.7 percent by 1830 and 41.5 percent by 1850. Sacher, A Perfect War of Politics, 194. See also Henry M. McKiven Jr., “The Political Construction of a Natural Disaster: The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853,” Journal of American History 94, no. 3 (2007): 734–742.

143

Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of Louisiana, Which Assembled at the City of New Orleans January 14, 1844 (New Orleans, 1845), 19, 32.

144

“Mortality of the Last Sickly Season, in New Orleans,” Liberty (Miss.) Advocate, December 2, 1841.

145

“The Howards’ Visit to Mobile,” Daily Picayune (Evening Edition), September 20, 1853.

146

Julien Poydras Document, 1822, Mss. 351, LSU.

147

“Public Charities,” Daily Picayune, March 2, 1860.

148

Ellis, “Businessmen and Public Health in the Urban South during the Nineteenth Century,” 202–205.

149

James Stark, “Vital Statistics of New Orleans,” Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal 75 (1851): 130–144, here 137. See also Jonathan B. Pritchett and Myeong-Su Yun, “The In-Hospital Mortality Rates of Slaves and Freemen: Evidence from Touro Infirmary, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1855–1860,” Explorations in Economic History 46, no. 2 (2009): 241–252.

150

Josiah C. Nott, “Statistics of Southern Slave Population,” De Bow’s Review 4, no. 3 (November 1847): 275–289, here 281; Nott, “Facts upon Yellow Fever—Its Progress Northward,” De Bow’s Review 19, no. 4 (October 1855): 443–445, here 444.

151

Such (illogical) biological racism was a staple of colonial medical theory. Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago, 2002), 17–21; Espinosa, Epidemic Invasions, 3–10; Chaplin, “Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in North America,” 230–231.

152

Cartwright, “Prevention of Yellow Fever,” 312, 306. See Samuel A. Cartwright, “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 7 (May 1851): 691–715, here 700–701. For more on Cartwright’s medical theories relating to black people and yellow fever, see Kelman, A River and Its City, 107–108; Chris D. E. Willoughby, “Running Away from Drapetomania: Samuel A. Cartwright, Medicine, and Race in the Antebellum South,” Journal of Southern History 84, no. 3 (2018): 579–614.

153

Such beliefs were a staple of the Atlantic pro-slavery argument from the eighteenth century. See Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (London, 1801), 2: 158–160; G. Francklyn, An Answer to the Rev. Mr. Clarkson’s Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African (London, 1789), 218–229.

154

“Yellow Fever and Slavery,” New Orleans Weekly Delta, September 25, 1853.

155

Robert C. Reinders, “The Free Negro in the New Orleans Economy, 1850–1860,” Louisiana History 6, no. 3 (1965): 273–285.

156

For free black status in New Orleans, see Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1974), chap. 4; Laura Foner, “The Free People of Color in Louisiana and St. Domingue: A Comparative Portrait of Two Three-Caste Slave Societies,” Journal of Social History 3, no. 4 (1970): 406–430, here 426–427; Paul Lachance, “The Limits of Privilege: Where Free Persons of Colour Stood in the Hierarchy of Wealth in Antebellum New Orleans,” Slavery & Abolition 17, no. 1 (1996): 65–84, here 65–67. For women, see Rashauna Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, 2016), 94–110. For the displacement of black workers by white European migrants in New Orleans, see “Labor in Louisiana,” National Era, October 20, 1853; Ira Berlin and Herbert G. Gutman, “Natives and Immigrants, Free Men and Slaves: Urban Workingmen in the Antebellum American South,” American Historical Review 88, no. 5 (December 1983): 1175–1200.

157

Black nursing has a long history in yellow fever epidemics. See Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968), 528; [William L. Robinson], The Diary of a Samaritan: By a Member of the Howard Association of New Orleans (New York, 1860), 239–240.

158

“Yellow Fever and Slavery,” New Orleans Weekly Delta, September 25, 1853.

159

Tuckahoe, “Practical Abolitionism and the Yellow Fever,” New Orleans Weekly Delta, August 11, 1853.

160

James Armor to his son James Emile Armor, October 22, 1837, box 1, folder 1, James Emile Armor Papers, MS-100, NOPL.

161

Louisiana Advertiser, October 7, 1826; “For Sale,” New Orleans Crescent, September 3, 1850.

162

“Slave for Sale,” Daily Picayune, January 21, 1854.

163

Deyle, Carry Me Back, 135–136, 159; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 139–140.

164

Herman Freudenberger and Jonathan B. Pritchett, “The Domestic United States Slave Trade: New Evidence,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 21, no. 3 (1991): 447–477, here 463–464; Laurence J. Kotlikoff, “The Structure of Slave Prices in New Orleans, 1804–1862,” Economic Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1979): 496–518, here 503–506.

165

Quoted in Theodore Weld, American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York, 1839), 162.

166

Joseph T. Hicks to Samuel Smith Downey, February 27, 1836, Downey Papers, Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations from the Revolution through the Civil War, Microfilm Edition, series F: Selections from the Manuscript Department, Duke University Library, part 3: North Carolina, Maryland, and Virginia, reel 6.

167

Testimony of Peter Ryas, Texas, Works Progress Administration, in Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938, 17 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1941), vol. 16: Texas Narratives, pt. 3, 274–277, here 277.

168

For the concept of a “soul value,” see Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, 6–7.

169

Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, 2 vols. (Bedford, Mass., 1861), 1: 276.

170

“New Orleans, La., Slavery in,” in Randall M. Miller and John David Smith, Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery (Westport, Conn., 1997), 525–528. For the white/black labor calculus, see Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820–1860 (Baton Rouge, La., 2005), 85–93.

171

Valenčius, The Health of the Country, 21. For contemporary definitions of creole, see A Physician of New Orleans, History of the Yellow Fever during the Summer of 1853 (Philadelphia, 1854), 9–10.

172

“Reveries of a Convalescent,” New Orleans Weekly Delta, September 15, 1853.

173

This challenges Walter Scheidel’s theory (built on Malthus) that epidemics and pandemics have been great levelers throughout history. Humans can socially engineer mass death for inequality. Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, N.J., 2017).

174

Sixteenth-century Calvinists believed that God chose the elect for eternal salvation, leaving the rest to be damned. Max Weber, “The Religious Foundations of Worldly Asceticism,” in Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, ed. and trans. Talcott Parsons (New York, 1958; original German ed. 1904), chap. 4.

175

See the entry for September 23, 1833, in Carl Kohn Letterbook, MSS 269, HNOC.

176

Ibid.

This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)