The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our Nation (33 page)

Special thanks to Mark Crosby for his photographic talents. I owe a debt of gratitude to Mark for accompanying me to Cuba in search of forgotten places. The trip would not have been the same without him; the book would not have been the same without him.

I am greatly indebted to my agent, Ellen Geiger, who was willing to take a chance on an unknown author. More than simply believing in me, she persisted until this story found its rightful place. Without her loyalty and energy, this book would never have happened. I am also grateful to my editor, Natalee Rosenstein, for her confidence in me. She took a leap of faith, and I thank her for it.

I will be forever grateful to my husband and two daughters for their own sacrifices during this project. They were patient participants in a lengthy, involved and often-chaotic process. My daughter Morgen, a master of self-expression, reminds me daily of the gift of storytelling. I thank her for giving up some of her mother to this book. Keller, who was born midway through this project and learned to be lulled to sleep by the sound of typing, has been a quieter, but no less effective, source of inspiration and encouragement. Finally, my husband, Andrew, has been unfailing in his support of me since the day we met. I am forever indebted to him for believing in me—as a writer, as a wife, as a mother. Thank you.

Notes

The introductory quote is from John Edgar Wideman’s
Fever,
part of his collection first published by Henry Holt and Company in 1989.

My account of the Angevine family and their deaths from yellow fever in 1878 is based on two primary sources. One is a letter written by Ray Isbell in 1978 to the
Press-Scimitar
newspaper. Lena Angevine Warner was the great-great-aunt of Isbell. Isbell recounted family stories of how an old slave investigated the house, breaking open a window, and found the corpses of the Angevine family in their various states of decomposition. The Isbell letter also described how the slave saved Lena, who was a child at the time. Isbell’s letter is part of the Eldon Roark Papers held in the Mississippi Valley Collection at the University of Memphis.

The second source is a letter written by Lena A. Warner in 1904. She tells of her father being robbed and choked while she was too ill to help. She also describes her experience as a nurse during the Spanish-American War. The Warner letter is held in the Lena Warner file of the Memphis Library, Memphis Historical Collection.

Biographical information about Lena Angevine Warner was collected from various newspaper sources, including a 1948 obituary from the Associated Press, a 1948 obituary in the Knoxville
News Sentinel,
a 1953 story in the Memphis
Commercial Appeal
and a 1994 article by Perre Magness in the
Commercial Appeal.
Biographical information is also available in Patricia LaPointe’s
From Saddlebags to Science,
E. Diane Greenhill’s
From Diploma to Doctorate: 100 Years of Nursing
and Paul Coppock’s
Memphis Memoirs.

There were a number of discrepancies in the facts surrounding Lena Angevine Warner, especially involving her marriage and her role in the Walter Reed discoveries. One source wildly claimed that Lena Warner delivered a Cuban baby, passed her own kidney stones and performed a circumcision, a tonsillectomy and an amputation with a kitchen knife—all in one night. In this book, I adhered to the facts presented by Warner, her family or those who worked with her. When a fact could not be verified by another source, I said as much or left the material out of the book.

To recreate the path yellow fever followed out of Africa and across the Atlantic, I studied the virus’s behavior today. The process by which the mosquitoes lay eggs in the hollows of trees and how the virus was first transmitted from mosquitoes to monkeys to men entering the West African forests for logging was based on research from two main sources: Andrew Spielman and Michael D’Antonio’s book
Mosquito
and Michael Oldstone’s
Viruses, Plagues, and History.
In both Africa and South America, yellow fever follows a similar course today.

Scientists generally agree that yellow fever originated in West Africa in any number of countries—where it still exists today in its purest genetic form. I chose to focus on Nigeria because that country is currently considered the hotbed of yellow fever. Descriptions of Nigeria, its plant life, topography, trade and weather, including the southwest monsoon, are based on a series of country studies published by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress and are available on-line or in hard copy.

I based my description of viruses in general, as well as the specifics of the yellow fever virus, on the book
Epidemic!
, which was edited by Rob De Salle and published for the American Museum of Natural History. I also relied on virus descriptions from John M. Barry’s
The Great Influenza
and Gina Kolata’s
Flu.
Both books do an excellent job of taking a complex subject and presenting it in comprehensible terms. For the specifics of the yellow fever virus, I studied information provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. For descriptions of the way the yellow fever virus reacts to a human cell, I relied on material from the National Institutes of Health. All of the technical information aside, personification of the virus—the idea that the virus itself is evolving, thinking, trying to conquer—is obviously a creative technique of my own making. There is no scientific evidence to suggest such.

For information about the slave trade—the Middle Passage— I based my descriptions on Madeleine Burnside and Rosemarie Robotham’s book
Spirits of the Passage.
Their book not only provides general statistics about the trade but also illustrations and firsthand accounts that include some of the more disturbing details like the fact that Europeans might taste the sweat of slaves as a test for disease or that sharks trailed slave ships waiting for bodies to be thrown overboard.

The idea that yellow fever altered the history of the United States is not a new idea; after all, the virus’s moniker “the American plague” says it all. Margaret Humphreys, in her book
Yellow Fever and the South,
writes, “Tuberculosis, smallpox, or typhoid might well kill as many or more every year yet fail to stir the public from apathy . . . Yellow fever was a disease whose presence often created mass panic, a response that brought commercial interactions to a standstill.” To support my argument that it shaped our country’s history, I compiled statistics from a wealth of sources.

Basic statistics about the number of countries and states stricken with yellow fever, as well as the number of people afflicted, were taken from the
Conclusions of the Board of Experts authorized by congress to investigate the yellow fever epidemic of 1878.
The report was written in 1879 and is available in the Rare Book Collection of the Library of Congress. The report also estimates the cost of the 1878 epidemic as $200 million, which today would be calculated as over $350 million. The reason why yellow fever has never afflicted Asia despite the right climate and the right mosquito is a mystery. Robert S. Desowitz, a professor of tropical medicine and author of
Who Gave Pinta to the Santa Maria,
suggests that it may be due to the fact that the African slave trade never extended to that part of the world.

The quote about yellow fever striking the Atlantic and Gulf states with more force than the one that bombed Pearl Harbor was taken from J. L. Cloudsley-Thompson’s
Insects and History.

The suggestion that yellow fever was the most dreaded epidemic disease for 200 years comes from Khaled Bloom’s
The MississippiValley’s Great Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878.
Other historians have given similar opinions, and a number of doctors serving during the Memphis epidemic, and later in Cuba, offered the same impression.

That yellow fever was directly linked to the slave trade can be traced as far back as the mid-nineteenth century. In her article, “Yellow Fever: Scourge of the South,” published in
Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South,
Jo Ann Carrigan writes: “Some abolitionists suggested that yellow fever was not only the result of slavery, having been introduced by the African slave trade, but that the disease served as a penalty or punishment, afflicting those areas where the institution prevailed.” It was in Carrigan’s article where I found the statement that yellow fever ceased in the North about the same time that slavery was abolished there. Henry Rose Carter, a friend and colleague of Walter Reed, also traced the history of yellow fever to West Africa and was one of the first to suggest that it made its way to North America through the slave trade in his 1931 book,
Yellow Fever: An Epidemiological and Historical Study of Its Place of Origin.

The theory that yellow fever seemed divinely directed is based on some of the beliefs at the time. It was not uncommon for people to attach greater meaning to epidemics of disease—it still happens today. Even the word
plague
implies punishment in biblical terms.

According to the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, “the Village” in New York enjoyed a certain amount of seclusion until epidemics of yellow fever and cholera hit the city in 1799, 1803, 1805 and 1821. Temporary housing and businesses sprang up. The 1822 fever epidemic was an especially virulent one, and many New Yorker’s settled in “the Village” for good, finally adjoining it to New York City.

The fact that Napoleon lost 23,000 troops to yellow fever in Haiti and sold his Louisiana holdings to Thomas Jefferson, wanting to abandon conquests in this pestilent place, is taken from Desowitz’s book.

The reference to yellow fever as one of the country’s first forms of biological warfare comes from a
Washington Post
article by Jane Singer, “The Fiend in Gray,” about Dr. Louis Blackburn. I also used information from a 2002 article in
The Canadian Journal of Diagnosis
entitled “The Yellow Fever Plot: Germ Warfare during the Civil War.”

The impact of yellow fever on the Spanish-American War comes from a number of sources, including the Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Collection, held at the University of Virginia; G.J.A. O’Toole’s book
The Spanish War
and Hugh Thomas’s
Cuba or The Pursuit of Freedom,
as well as personal correspondence of the surgeon general, Theodore Roosevelt and William McKinley, among others.

The timeline of yellow fever in North America—its prevalence in the northeast and its long reign in the South—comes from Desowitz.

Theories about why the 1878 yellow fever epidemic proved so deadly have appeared in a variety of publications. Many historians have simply responded that we don’t know why it was such a deadly epidemic. In this book, I put forth the idea that it was the combination of an El Niño cycle, an increase in new immigration and transportation and the theory that the virus may have arrived on ships directly from Africa rather than making its way from endemic areas in South America.

Information about yellow fever and El Niño came from an article, “A Possible Connection between the 1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic in the Southern United States and the 1877-78 El Niño Episode,” published in the
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
in 1999. The article includes a timeline of El Niño cycles during the nineteenth century; nearly all coincide with major outbreaks of yellow fever. The World Health Organization also considers El Niño weather cycles a factor in the spread of yellow fever (WHO report
Yellow Fever,
1998).

The reference to hyacinth blooms in January comes from Bloom’s book, as well as personal observation. I know that Memphians began complaining about mosquitoes based on newspaper clippings from January 1878.

The theory that Memphis was poised for greatness before the 1878 epidemic is cited in several Memphis history books. It was second only to New Orleans in population. It had survived the Civil War with very little damage. Businesses proliferated. It was the largest inland cotton market. Even the fact that Jefferson Davis chose Memphis as his home after the Civil War seems to support that idea. Unfortunately, there were also circumstances that would make Memphis vulnerable to an epidemic: poor sanitation, no clean water supply and misguided politicians.

I found the dramatic statistic about the 1878 epidemic in Memphis taking more lives than the Chicago fire, San Francisco earthquake and Johnstown flood combined in the Memphis
Avalanche
as well as in Bloom’s book.

The quote that yellow fever is more calamitous to the United States of America above all other countries comes from the report of the Board of Experts, 1879, held at the Library of Congress.

The Edgar Allan Poe quote from “The Masque of the Red Death” is considered by some historians to be a reference to yellow fever. Poe was living during the time period when yellow fever plagued so many cities, and the red death may have alluded to the bleeding common from yellow fever, which is a hemorrhagic fever. The poem tells the story of a king who locks his people away in a castle to prevent disease. Celebrating his victory over epidemic, he throws a lavish masque, only to find that death has indeed made its way into the castle wearing a mask. I thought the allegory was a chilling and perfect introduction to Memphis and its Carnival in 1878.

The description of the Mardi Gras invitation from 1878 comes from visiting the Pink Palace Museum’s Memphis History exhibit. Though they only have a few invitations from the years that Mardi Gras took place, 1878 happens to be one of them. The museum also displays illustrations of the Mardi Gras parades from
Harper’s.
Remarks about the number of people who attended the parades, including the president of the United States, are from the Mardi Gras file held in the Memphis History Collection of the Memphis Library. The file contains various clippings, descriptions and newspaper illustrations. I also used an article entitled “History of the Memphis Cotton Carnival” in the
West Tennessee Historical Society Papers.
To recreate the 1878 parade, I read the February and March issues from 1878 of the Memphis
Appeal
(later to become the
Commercial Appeal
) and the Memphis
Avalanche.
The majority of the details that re-create the 1878 Mardi Gras for this book came from those sources. Not only did they give lengthy descriptions that today would seem trivial and heavy-handed, but in reading advertisements in the newspapers, I could piece together where shops were located on Main Street or Second Street, what sort of clothes people wore and the fact that caramels were sold at one store and kid gloves at another. The newspaper is also where I found the impressive fact that the fountain in Court Square flowed with champagne during 1878 Mardi Gras or such quaint details as the feathers escaping from ladies’ fans during the ball.