1878 Yellow Fever Narratives and Post-Reconstruction Southern Identity Jessica Wells University of South Florida, [email protected]
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University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School November 2017 The uS ffering South: 1878 Yellow Fever Narratives and Post-Reconstruction Southern Identity Jessica Wells University of South Florida, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the United States History Commons Scholar Commons Citation Wells, Jessica, "The uS ffering South: 1878 Yellow Fever Narratives and Post-Reconstruction Southern Identity" (2017). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/7106 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Suffering South: 1878 Yellow Fever Narratives and Post-Reconstruction Southern Identity by Jessica Wells A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: Julia Irwin, Ph.D. K. Stephen Prince, Ph.D. Brian Connolly, Ph.D. Rana Hogarth, Ph.D. Date of Approval: October 30, 2017 Keywords: Memphis, New Orleans, belonging, cultural history, Redemption Copyright © 2017, Jessica Wells DEDICATION I would never have made it through the insanity of graduate school and writing a dissertation without the consistent love and support of family and friends. I profusely thank all of you for being there for me. But I’d like to offer a special thanks to those who helped pull me through moments of insecurity, who offered me time to forget all about my dissertation and cut loose, and who assured me that I would make it. Thank you David Nauman, Sarah Junke, Alena Pirok, Joe Whall, my parents and step-parents, brothers and sisters, and of course my grandparents for letting me retreat to their farm to focus on revisions. Thank you, all of you, for being my support group and my biggest champions. Thank you to Gretchen Schmidt for all of your support during this process. And last but not least, thank you to St. Francis Society Animal Rescue for having a never-ending flow of kittens in need of a loving foster parent who, in turn, desperately needed a few furry, funny, and delightful distractions from the seriousness of grad school. This dissertation is dedicated to Doc who always believed I’d make it, even when I didn’t, and who promised to live long enough to see me graduate. I love you and couldn’t have done it without you. Your friendship, support, encouragement, and advice have been vital to my development as an adult. Thank you Meigs for reading drafts and spotting typos. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Julia Irwin for being consistently supportive and for being the kind of mentor and historian that I can aspire to emulate. She has always been so generous: with her time, her attention, her praise, and her constructive criticism. Likewise, I would like to thank Dr. K. Stephen Prince for dealing with my occasional tears of frustration and for his invaluable advice as the project morphed into something closer to his own scholarship. Thank you for all the times that you encouraged me, offering kind or stern words as the situated dictated. Thank you, Dr. Brian Connolly and Dr. Rana Hogarth, for your feedback and advice on the final draft. I am grateful to the USF history department for supporting my research and writing and for offering me so much teaching experience. I would also like to thank faculty members who read earlier drafts of ideas that may or may not have made it into the final project, especially Dr. Frasier Ottanelli and Dr. Barbara Berglund. Special thanks to my Masters’ thesis advisor, Dr. Golfo Alexopoulos for her consistent support and encouragement throughout my graduate career. Thank you to all of the wonderful librarians and archivists that aided my research. I could not have gotten here without your help and your dedication to maintaining (and often digitizing) historical primary sources for future generations. Thanks, especially, to the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane, the John P. Ische Library, the Historic New Orleans Collection, the Touro Infirmary Archives, and the New Orleans Public Library. Thank you to the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, the Special Collections at the University of Memphis, the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, the Louisiana State University Archives, the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. Also, thank you to the Special Collections at the University of South Florida, the John F. Germany Library, and the Tampa Bay History Center for providing materials on the 1887-88 yellow fever epidemics in Florida which I thought at the time would constitute the Part Two of my dissertation. (And thank you again to Dr. Irwin for deciding that I had bitten off more than I could reasonably chew.) For digitizing archival materials and making them more broadly available, I would like to thank the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, the John P. Ische library for digitizing their entire Aristedes Agramonte Collection, and Rice University, especially, for digitizing the Kezia Payne DePelchin letters. Also, thank you to the Library of Congress for their extensive digital newspapers collection and geneaologybank.com for their searchable newspaper database. Thank you to all the libraries and archives that put finding aides online. These sources were extremely helpful in the planning stages and thank you to archivegrid.org for making it easy to find them. I would also like to thank those who have offered me feedback and advice at various conferences where I have tested out some of the ideas that are explored in this dissertation, particularly comments from panel moderators Rana Hogarth and Stephen Kenny on a paper I delivered for the Southern Historical Association conference and my fellow panelists Elaine LaFay and Christopher Willoughby for their feedback and for being the best conference buddies ever! My thanks to JoAnn Carrigan and Mariola Espinosa, whom I cornered at the American Association for the History of Medicine conference, for giving me archival advice and answering my half-formed (at the time) questions. Also thank you to the organizers of the Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Medicine which allowed me my first opportunity to present my research as a graduate student. It was a wonderful experience and the enthusiastic response I received went a long way toward convincing me that this project was viable. Thank you to Katherine Arner and Julia Cummiskey for housing me. TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iii Introduction 1 Chapter One: The Epidemic Experience 16 Fear and Flight 22 Suffering and Sickness 33 Death and Desolation 43 White Supremacy 53 Suspicion of Outsiders 66 Gender Norms 74 Conclusion 89 Chapter Two: A Silver Lining to Yellow Fever 91 Antebellum Antecedents 98 Creole Immunity 109 American Migrants 117 Foreign Immigrants 124 African American Immunity 137 Conclusion 145 Chapter Three: Relief after Reconstruction 149 The National Relief Campaign 154 Rhetoric of National Reconciliation 167 Local Authority 176 Racial Disparity in Relief 188 Differential Immunity 198 Conclusion 207 Chapter Four: Memory in Memphis 210 The Aftermath 216 Political Takeover 228 New South 237 Counternarratives 250 Historical Tourism 268 Conclusion 276 i Epilogue 280 Bibliography 288 ii ABSTRACT The Suffering South offers a cultural history of a yellow fever epidemic that swept through the Mississippi Valley in 1878. It argues that the yellow fever narratives created during this epidemic constituted a discursive attempt by Southerners to renegotiate Southern identity and social hierarchy following the Civil War and Reconstruction. White Southerners, in particular, used the epidemic as an occasion to foster a return to a more traditional foundation of white supremacy and patriarchy as the basis for Southern identity and belonging. The narratives written by these Southerners, in which they described their experiences with yellow fever and the effects of its epidemic ravages, thereby illustrate an explicit attempt to culturally redeem the South following the successful political Redemption of the region. Using themes and stock characterizations of heroes and villains that would have been readily familiar to a generation of Southerners who had lived through the Civil War and Reconstruction, these narratives presented the idealized Southerner as white and male. In turn, they castigated non-native outsiders, racial and ethnic minorities, and women who went outside of the prescribed social norms of their race, class, or gender. These narratives also acted to justify the racial disparity in the distribution of the relief generated by the national humanitarian response to the epidemic’s incredible scope and severity. In doing so, Democratic Redeemers directed money, medical attention, and rations away from African American communities in the South as evidence of their belief that these iii Southerners did not deserve equal access to aid as a right of citizenship. Finally, the memory of the epidemic continues to rely on these traditional primary sources which present the experience of yellow fever in 1878 through the written memories of white Southerners. The efforts to solidify the patriarchal, white-supremacist basis for Southern identity and belonging implicit in these sources continues to effect the historical narrative presented in commemorations and official histories. Yellow fever can be understood, then, not only as a physiological disease, but as a cultural construction encompassing a set of ideas that helped to maintain hierarchies of belonging and identity in the South. This dissertation thus follows in the steps of historians who have studied epidemics and other natural disasters to illuminate social and cultural hierarchies of power.