Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans

Academic publishing increasingly demands web-based digital content in addition to (or instead of) print-based articles and reviews. More often than not, such content merely offers a digital replication of what appears in print, and the AHR is no exception.

But digital content can do more than replicate; it can supplement. This is especially true when it comes to the rich visual archive with which many historians work. A typical AHR article might include only two or three captioned illustrations. These images enhance the article, but they are rarely central to its exposition. A dedicated website associated with the journal, however, opens the possibility of creating additional material that puts the visual archive underlying an AHR article front and center. Furthermore, as an "open" feature, such a site can make the scholarship published in the journal more accessible and widely available. Those who find this digital supplement of interest may then delve further into the published version of the journal.  

We inaugurate the special online supplement to the AHR with a short visual essay prepared by Kathryn Olivarius (Stanford University), designed to accompany her article in the April 2019 issue, "Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans," and her AHR Interview. Olivarius argues that in swampy nineteenth-century New Orleans, acclimation to yellow fever—through surviving the mosquito-borne illness—stood as the quintessential demonstration of calculated risk-taking. Those whites who paid their biological dues were seen as worthy of investment, and were thus able to pursue economic advancement in slave racial capitalism. 

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During the winter of 1803, news of the Louisiana Purchase electrified the United States. With the future states of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas ceded to American control, ambitious white settlers dreamed of amassing vast Caribbean-style wealth through sugar and cotton. New Orleans was the greatest prize of all: an important military and trading port, it served as the “great western emporium” for the riches of the entire Mississippi Valley.

At least half a million whites immigrated to New Orleans between the Louisiana Purchase and the Civil War, making it the country’s second most popular immigrant destination after New York City, and one of its largest cities overall. In addition, hundreds of thousands of enslaved black people were forcibly transported to New Orleans, to be sold in the nation’s largest slave market. Picking cotton and cutting cane under a sweltering subtropical sun, they made the Deep South’s white planters, financiers, and merchants into some the richest men in antebellum America.

But soon after the Purchase, Americans encountered the problem that would plague New Orleans and its hinterlands for the entire nineteenth century: the city was a slaughterhouse, a place where nearly half of all newcomers died horrible deaths from yellow fever. Every few years, this disease reached epidemic proportions, sometimes killing about 8 percent of the Crescent City’s inhabitants and widowing and orphaning countless others. In cramped, predominantly German and Irish neighborhoods, nearly a third of the inhabitants died. In 1853, approximately 12,000 Orleanians perished (a tenth of the city’s population), while thousands more died in Mobile, Alabama; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Natchez and Vicksburg, Mississippi; and Galveston, Texas, making that year’s epidemic one of the worst natural disasters in American history. America’s imperial dreams were beset by an epidemiological nightmare.

Epidemic yellow fever requires three things to flourish: the presence of large numbers of mosquitoes; a sizable, densely packed, immunologically naïve population; and a tropical/subtropical climate. For the entire nineteenth century, yellow fever was an inescapable part of life across the Deep South and a cause of near-constant terror in New Orleans. There was no cure, no vaccine, no conclusive evidence of how the disease was transmitted, and no satisfactory explanation for why it killed some while leaving others healthy. It was, moreover, a dreadful way to die, with victims oozing blood from their eyes, noses, and ears, and vomiting up partially coagulated blood, roughly the consistency of coffee grounds. Doctors stressed that "acclimation"—falling sick and surviving yellow fever—was the only defense against the scourge. But acclimation was hardly guaranteed: while half of all yellow fever victims gained lifetime immunity, the other half died.

Facing such dire odds, why did settlers keep coming to the Deep South, the nation’s so-called “necropolis”? What was it like to live in such a deathscape? How did this city withstand the constant attrition of epidemic disease, reconcile its destruction, and build a functioning social and economic system in its fatal wake?

Through an invisible yet powerful system of “immunocapital,” surviving yellow fever stamped a newcomer as legitimate and provided him or her with a credential that granted access to previously inaccessible realms of social, political, and economic power. According to the tenets of white supremacy, all whites were placed above all blacks. But this structural racism commingled with the hierarchy of “immunocapital,” whereby “acclimated citizens”—yellow fever survivors—occupied all positions of power, and “unacclimated strangers”—poor white recent immigrants from the North or Europe—languished in social and professional purgatory, ostracized on the basis of epidemiology.

For whites, immunity translated into economic capital, with all jobs going to those who claimed to be acclimated. Merchants would not enter into a partnership with someone who could not produce an acclimation certificate, and banks would not give credit to a man unable to verify the specific year he had survived the disease. Many immigrants, especially Irish and German immigrants, who arrived in large numbers during the 1830s, figured that they should try to become acclimated sooner rather than later, so they actively tried to get sick. Ironically, facing the disease 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.

If many people died in the pursuit of immunity, it did not matter: there were shiploads of people arriving to replace the dead. And if yellow fever could not be cured or stopped through public health measures, the commercial-civic elite argued that its deadliness could be transformed into a social panacea, weeding out the weak, immoral, and unworthy. Acclimation was so important to a white migrant’s life and prospects that it was locally referred to as a “passport” to riches, a “rebirth,” or the “baptism of citizenship.”

For white women, immunocapital was valuable in the marriage market. Courting men rejected unacclimated women, worried that they would die young before having children. A creole father would not let his daughter talk to unacclimated men, lest she marry one, cede her dowry, and have to recover it through a lengthy legal process when he died. Horror stories abounded. In the WPA narratives, an ex-slave named Olivier Blanchard, from what is now St. Martin Parish, remembered a white woman named Colene Bonnier who was to marry one Sunday but fell ill on the Friday before. She died and was quickly buried. When her body was later disinterred from the underground grave to be placed in a tomb, it was discovered that she had been buried alive and had eaten “her own shoulder and hand away.” According to Blanchard, when her sweetheart saw the corpse, he went home, fell sick with yellow fever, and died.

Stories of accidental live burial during yellow fever epidemics were common among Deep Southerners. As victims often lapsed into a coma before dying, it was possible during the confusion of an epidemic to mistake a person for dead, especially as the time between death and interment was sometimes only a matter of hours. Multiple coffins in New Orleans were apparently found with scratch marks on the inside.

Though everyone faced the risks of yellow fever—first and foremost a sudden, gruesome death—the potentially vast rewards of acclimation were reserved for whites only. Proslavery theorists argued that black people were naturally resistant to yellow fever—that this innate immunological superiority but intellectual inferiority was black people's God-given birthright, consigning them to a scientific destiny of commodity cultivation in the Deep South. Only immune black bodies, the logic went, could safely cultivate this epidemiologically fraught space and make their white masters rich and powerful. Thus, 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.