(To the left is Court Square in downtown Memphis, "the epicenter of the Memphis relief effort" during the 1878 yellow fever epidemic.)
MEMPHIS, Tenn. – This city was a “Casablanca on the
Mississippi” during the Civil War, occupied by federal troops and full of intrigue
with a thriving black market. By 1878 the rough river town boasted 50,000
residents in an area two-and-a-half miles long and one mile wide, a dense
population of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and Italy, Jews from Central
and Eastern Europe, white cotton traders, scalawags and carpetbaggers, and
former slaves up from the plantations farther south.
It was a city of sharp contrasts—bars and brothels from its
waterfront to its eastern edge, “a dangerous, dirty place” with pigs roaming
the streets, but also churches, opera, French cuisine at the finer restaurants,
and the ever-present Peabody Hotel.
Then came the yellow fever epidemic of the summer and early
fall of 1878. More than half the population fled. Of the 20,000 who remained, 17,000
got sick and 5,000 died. It was a plague of biblical dimensions, and it exposed
an even deeper dissonance in the city--the bravery and selflessness of those
who stayed to fight, and the corrupt and cowardly leaders who fled after long
refusing to fund the basic city services that might have lessened the
suffering.
Memphis in 1878 became the city of the dead—people hiding
behind shuttered windows and locked doors, the clickety-clack of wagons
carrying the corpses to waiting gravediggers. Even the “rats, cats (and) dogs”
were gone.
This is the story that unfolds in Jeanette Keith’s new book Fever Season: The Story of a Terrifying
Epidemic and the People Who Saved the City. A historian who teaches at
Bloomsburg University in Bloomsburg, Pa., Keith offers an amazing tale that
hits close to home, not only to Mississippians and Louisianians who remember
all too well a different kind of disaster, Hurricane Katrina, but also to the
nation’s East Coast, still reeling from the effects of Superstorm Sandy.
It’s a human tale of untold suffering and amazing courage
that also makes you question whether we’ve really progressed that much in our
understanding of public and private life, the role of government, and the
limits of charity.
“Yellow Jack”, as it was known, is a horrific disease. The
victim’s temperature tops 105, delirium sets in, the skin “turns bronze”, and the
destruction of the body’s organs produces the telltale “black vomit” and the
stink of impending death. It is caused by infected mosquitoes—mosquitoes that
originally came from Africa on slave ships--but people didn’t know this in
1878. They wouldn’t know until Major Walter Reed and others made that
determination in Havana, Cuba, decades later.
The 1878 epidemic wreaked havoc in neighboring Mississippi, too. Some
3,000 died. Towns were decimated, some losing half their population. Despite a
skinflint Mississippi government “that favored the rich” and largely left the
poor and sick to charities and relatives, a state Board of Health was created
the year before that helped fight the fever, according to historians James W.
Loewen and Charles Sallis.
In Memphis people looking for causes pointed to the city’s
filth and squalor. Cotton traders in Memphis grew rich, but as a municipality
the city “was a failure,” Keith writes. Only the well-to-do had any kind of
water or sewage system. Garbage went uncollected, streets turned to mud after
heavy rains, and crime ran rampant while political leaders enjoyed mint juleps
with cotton traders at the Peabody.
Of course, people
blamed the poor, particularly the Irish workers who populated the teeming warren
of shanties along the river levees.
Race complicated things. Memphis largely escaped the ravages
of the Civil War, spending much of it occupied by Union troops. White
bitterness after the “Lost Cause”, however, led to one of the nation’s worst
race riots in 1866. Newly enfranchised black voters aligned with the city’s
Irish and Italian immigrants in the mid-1870s and put a half-dozen blacks on
the city council and an Irishman in the mayor’s office. Reconstruction ended in
1877, however, and white rule soon reasserted itself—with a vengeance.
As horrible as it was, the 1878 epidemic provided an
opportunity for a major Southern city to point the way to a truly “New South”
where people of all stripes could work together. Among the heroes who stayed in
Memphis to fight the scourge were Catholic priests and nuns, Episcopalian nuns,
the brothel madam Annie Cook, doctors, nurses, journalists, and a host of
former slaves who as soldiers, police officers, relief workers and nurses used
their newfound freedom to help others.
They were celebrated for a while, then attitudes on race and
even class hardened. Banquets held after the plague would exclude not only
blacks but also working-class Irish and women. “The very fact that white
Memphians (and white Memphis) would not have survived without the aid of blacks
was something that whites had to deny and hide,” Keith says.
Memphis was a changed city after 1878, even losing its
charter for a while. From a city of European immigrants it became a city of
poor Southern black and white immigrants. Modern Memphis is a city of 650,000,
famed for the music that those poor Southerners made its legacy, plagued by
poverty and crime still, and one, like the South as a whole, working even today
on those old issues of race and class that seem never to go away completely.
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