The Mosquito

by Timothy C. Winegard

  During the 1820s, the economy of the expansionist and westward-craving country needed an overhaul. Its commercial mainstay of tobacco, which had been kick-started by John Rolfe in Jamestown, was no longer producing the profits of the past. The tobacco market was flooded, demand had leveled out, and cheaper and higher-quality tobacco was being pumped out closer to Europe by Turkey and other foreign markets. With acquisitive American eyes sharply focused on the southwest, a complete plantation renovation from tobacco to cotton would jump-start the economy and drive it forward. Cotton, which was in high demand as a replacement for wool, could be grown only in the American south. This cotton country, sweeping westward from northern Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas along the Gulf Coast and the interior Mississippi River delta to eastern Texas, was inhabited by populous indigenous nations, specifically the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole, referred to as the Five Civilized Tribes. These indigenous occupants were viewed as an obstruction to American cotton-based capitalist expansion. President Jackson, who prided himself on being a passionate “Indian fighter,” fastened his personal opinions to federal policy with the passage of the 1830 Indian Removal Act.

  The choice for indigenous peoples was simple: Voluntarily pack a bag and start walking to a predetermined allotment in Indian Territory or be forcefully and brutally removed and relocated to a predetermined allotment in Indian Territory. “You have but one remedy within your reach; and that is, to remove to the West,” the firebrand Jackson demanded of the Cherokee in 1835. “The fate of your women and children, the fate of your people, to the remotest generation, depend on the issue. Deceive yourselves no longer.” Throughout Jackson’s evil but successful wars of ethnic cleansing against the Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, roughly 15% of American soldiers died of mosquito-borne disease.

  During the Seminole Wars fought intermittently between 1816 and 1858 in Florida’s austere, unforgiving alligator alley and mosquito-crawling sawgrass Everglades, roughly 48,000 US soldiers squared off against no more than 1,600 Seminole and Creek warriors. This conflict was the longest and most expensive “Indian War,” in both money and lives, in American history.* The notorious punitive campaigns of the US Cavalry against Geronimo and his Apache, and the Sioux led by Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse in the lingering shadows of the Civil War pale in comparison.

  For the average American soldier, the futile and resoundingly unpopular Seminole campaigns were a miserable, rotten, mosquito-ruled hell on earth. “The vegetation was so dense in most parts that the sun’s rays seldom penetrated the earth’s surface,” a malaria-ridden soldier stated. “Water stood year round with little movement, and a thick layer of green slime covered most of the area. When the surface was disturbed, foul toxic vapors arose which caused the men to retch.” Endemic malaria and yellow fever added to the psychological trauma and the combat fatigue of already edgy, brittle-nerved American troops. “The war against the Seminole Indians is one of unmitigated privation and suffering,” conceded campaign commander General Winfield Scott, “without the least possible expectation of fame or glory to individuals.” The Seminoles’ methodical and successful use of innovative guerrilla warfare and sporadic ambush strikes, the relentless pursuit of mosquitoes and alligators, and the toxic mixture of malaria, yellow fever, and dysentery created a constant state of fear.

  With quinine stores stretched thin, medical records reveal soldiers dying of “a fit of insanity produced by brain fever,” “great distress in his head,” or “in a fit of derangement,” “mania,” or “raving madness.” Medical officer Jacob Motte was both bewildered and horrified that priggish, arrogant politicians were willing to sacrifice American soldiers for worthless, squalid Indian swampland, or in his estimation “the poorest country two people ever quarreled over. It is a most hideous region to live in, a perfect paradise for Indians, alligators, serpents, frogs, and every other kind of loathsome reptile.” And, of course, mosquitoes. The journals and letters of combatants and military medical records portray a grizzly, fevered, paranoid, and frightened sketch of the conflict. With the straggling Seminole survivors confined to their swampy settlements in Florida (deemed valueless by American authorities) and the renegade Chief Osceola dying of malaria, however, Jackson accomplished his strategic goal of Indian Removal east of the Mississippi River.

  In one of the darkest chapters in American history, as many as 100,000 indigenous peoples were force-marched to Indian Territory along what was dubbed the “Trails of Tears.” It is estimated that 25,000 died during the wars of removal and on the somber journey, from starvation, disease, hypothermia, murder, and general neglect. Their former homelands, however, were now open for the businesses of cotton, slavery, and mosquito-borne disease.

  Cotton production and slavery were inseparable in the South. The global demand for American cotton was literally infinite. Northern American and British textile mills, and other foreign markets, would take as much raw cotton as slave labor could produce, which fostered a skyrocketing demand for slaves. In 1793, the US produced 5 million pounds of cotton. Thirty years later, thanks to Eli Whitney’s cotton gin and the proliferation of slave labor, this output rose to 180 million pounds. On the eve of the Civil War, the South produced 85% of the world’s raw cotton, and “King Cotton” in some form accounted for 50% of the total American economy. A full 80% of the southern economy was cotton driven, while the North manufactured 90% of all American goods. The two halves of the country, sundered by the Mason-Dixon Line, were so different that they were masquerading as one nation in name only.

  Over this same thirty-year period between 1793 and 1823, the total number of slaves increased from 700,000 to 1.7 million. Over the next forty years, 2.5 million slaves would be bought and sold in the South. Given that many were relocated from defunct tobacco plantations in the east, the term “sold down the river” became common vernacular, as it literally meant that slaves were sold and shipped down the Mississippi River to the Deep South. For these American country-born slaves, their seasoning and hereditary genetic shields against malaria and yellow fever born and bequeathed in Africa, including sickle cell, were being diluted through interracial reproduction or “miscegenation” following the prohibition of the slave trade by Congress in 1808. These captive peoples were aware of the increased threat of mosquito-borne disease that awaited them on southern cotton plantations and adapted abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1838 poem “The Farewell” into a work song: “Gone, gone, sold and gone. . . . Where the slave-whip ceaseless swings,/ Where the noisome insect stings,/ Where the fever-demon strews/ Poison with the falling dews,/ Where the sickly sunbeams glare/Through the hot and misty air.”

  This territorial push and the realignment of the American economy in the South from tobacco to cotton during the first half of the nineteenth century breathed new life into the waning institution of slavery. Southern cotton fed a northern industry-fueled economic rejuvenation. This newfound export wealth in southern cotton and northern manufactured goods required additional trading ports.

  America continued its Pacific push, declaring war on Mexico in 1846 to seize the western third of the United States, chiefly California. During the mosquito-sponsored revolutions that chiseled the Spanish-American Empire into self-governing states, Mexico had gained independence in 1821. America had long coveted California for its ports, to gain access to Asian markets. Numerous offers to purchase the territory were snubbed by Mexico. President James K. Polk declared war on Mexico in May 1846 to seize California and the rest of the west by gunboat diplomacy amid a substantial public antiwar outcry. As the US military readied its mighty expeditionary force, Mexican mosquitoes swarmed in wait for fresh American blood.

  An American force of 75,000 marched on the halls of Montezuma against an equal number of Mexicans under the command of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, a veteran of the Mexican War of Independence. An American column under General (and future presi
dent) Zachary Taylor advanced from the north, while the US Navy captured key ports in California, including San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles. Simultaneously, General Winfield Scott, commander of the US Army during the Seminole campaigns, landed the main body of troops at the port of Veracruz, taking the shortest route to the capital, Mexico City.

  With forty years of military service, Scott was a painstaking planner and an avid and accomplished student of military history. He was acutely aware of the death and defeat unleashed by mosquito-borne disease on unseasoned British, French, and Spanish soldiers across the Caribbean and South and Central America, including Mexico. His adversary, Santa Anna, was also aware of the damage and impairment his deadly mosquito ally could inflict on the invading Americans. As he had done during the Mexican revolution against Spain, Santa Anna intended to pin the American troop landings on the coast, biding time until the mosquito could roll out her bloodred carpet and deliver her infectious welcome. “The summer season will fall upon them unexpectedly, with its numerous diseases and epidemics,” he told his senior officers, “as perilous to the unecolimated [unseasoned]; and thus, without a single shot from the Mexican ranks, they will perish daily by hundreds . . . and in a short time their regiments will be decimated.”

  Determined to escape the appalling, disastrous losses (and eventual defeat) exacted by eager and thirsty mosquitoes, Scott was adamant that Veracruz needed to be taken quickly to advance inland onto higher dry ground as soon as possible, to avoid yellow fever and malaria. The landing zone possessed an enemy, as he put it, “more formidable than the defences of other countries: I allude to the vomito [yellow fever].” Upon alighting at Veracruz in March 1847, a young junior officer, Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant, shared the concern of his commander: “We will all have to get out of this part of Mexico soon or we will be caught by the yellow fever which I am ten to one more afraid of than the Mexicans.” While the true nature of mosquito-borne disease had yet to be uncovered, Scott fully understood the prevailing miasma theory of illness and planned his tactical campaign to counter this disease and death toll on his troops. By purposefully sidestepping the coastal swampy lowlands, he also inadvertently bypassed the mosquito and her deadly donations of yellow fever and malaria.

  Scott prevailed and quickly secured the port and, by early April, led his troops toward the capital, outsmarting both Santa Anna and the mosquito. She did not save Mexico from the Americans as she had done previously against Spain. For once, the mosquito was thwarted on her own turf, by Scott’s scrupulous preparations and his steadfast insistence on fleeing her miasmic coastal hunting grounds and securing safer inland positions beyond her deadly reach. Mexico City was captured in September, compelling the formal treaty of surrender in February 1848. Although the war was unpopular both in America and abroad, Mexico ceded 55% of its territory to the United States. The wars of Manifest Destiny had conveyed the soaring and coasting civilization of Columbia to the Golden Gate and the sparkling ocean waters of the Pacific.

  General Scott’s academic mind and meticulous planning to purposefully countermand mosquito-borne disease secured for the US the territories of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, most of Colorado, smaller portions of Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma, and of course Texas. J. R. McNeill surmises that for these territorial acquisitions, America “owed everything to Scott’s determination to avoid summer in the lowlands . . . free from the yellow fever zone.” Scott’s victory, as McNeill states, led “to the US in 1848, consolidating its position as the greatest power in the American hemisphere.” Many Americans believed, however, that Mexico had been bullied and viewed the war as a cowardly act of imperialistic American aggression. Grant later declared, “I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.”

  The Mexican-American War was the training ground for many Civil War generals, most of whom were acquaintances, if not friends, including Grant and Lee. On the Union side: George McClellan, William Tecumseh Sherman, George Meade, Ambrose Burnside, and Ulysses S. Grant. For the Confederacy: Stonewall Jackson, James Longstreet, Joseph E. Johnston, Braxton Bragg, Robert E. Lee, and future Confederate president Jefferson Davis.* Grant drew a straight line from the Mexican-American War to the Civil War: “I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory. Texas was originally a state belonging to the republic of Mexico. . . . The occupation, separation and annexation were, from the inception of the movement to its final consummation, a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union.” Here, Grant enters the debate about the future spread of slavery to this vast, newly conquered territory.

  This former Mexican territory having been secured, questions arose as to the admittance of new states and territories into the Union as free or slave states. California became a free state in 1850, appeasing northerners and abolitionists alike. In return, as part of the larger 1850 Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Act was passed by Congress requiring all escaped slaves to be rebonded into slavery. Those helping or harboring runaways were fined the equivalent of $30,000. Bounty hunters were also allowed to track and apprehend slaves in free states. In summary, once a slave, always a slave. Roaming “blood-hound gangs” frequently kidnapped any African American, free or not, and “returned” them into bondage. Such is the premise for the brilliant 2013 movie 12 Years a Slave, which won the Academy Award for best picture. Fugitive slaves and free African Americans in the North now had one option—flee to Canada.

  Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad kicked into high gear, shuttling runaways and those in the north to Canada, to terminuses like Josiah Henson’s farm in southern Ontario. Between the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and the onset of the Civil War in 1861, over 60,000 African Americans found safe refuge and freedom in Canada. Henson was the basis for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential bestselling 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  Writing in response to the Fugitive Slave Act, Stowe highlighted in unadulterated, graphic prose the evils and brutality of slavery. The influence of Stowe’s book in garnering support for the abolitionist movement cannot be overstated. Uncle Tom’s Cabin cleaved a deep wound between North and South over the future of slavery. When President Lincoln met Stowe as his honored guest at the White House in 1862, he supposedly greeted her by saying, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started a great big war.”

  During the warring decades prior to the Civil War, clearing land for cotton and other agricultural pursuits in the South and West also led to an explosion of mosquitoes and a broader dissemination of malaria and yellow fever. Malaria was a monotonous fact of frontier life. “By the 1850s, malaria was extensively endemic throughout the United States,” reports epidemiologist Mark Boyd in his 1,700-page treatise Malariology, “with hyperendemic areas in the southeastern states, the Ohio River Valley, Illinois River Valley, and practically all of the Mississippi River Valley from St. Louis to the Gulf.” As population densities increased and port cities along the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi River became hubs for global trade, malaria and yellow fever flourished.

  The macabre storyteller Edgar Allan Poe captured the pervasiveness of yellow fever in his 1842 “The Masque of the Red Death”: “And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel. . . . And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.” New Orleans, Vicksburg, Memphis, Galveston, Pensacola, and Mobile were home to annual epidemics of yellow fever for three decades prior to the Civil War. The epidemic of 1853 was particularly virulent,
killing 13,000 people across the Gulf Coast, including 9,000 in New Orleans alone. “Such scenes of mass death, burial trenches, and refugees call to mind parallels with Civil War battlefields,” historian Mark Schantz reminds us. “The New Orleans death count . . . from the summer of 1853, for example, would have been far greater than the total number of Confederate dead who fell at Gettysburg in the summer of 1863.” In Mobile, Dr. Josiah Nott, who was among the early proponents of an insect-vector cause of yellow fever, reported, “Certain it is that in many villages around the Gulf States, this fearful epidemic committed ravages far beyond decimation.”

  During this thirty-year reign of yellow fever across the South, New Orleans, as usual, was hit especially hard, with 50,000 people dying of the disease. Across the United States, from its first appearance on the Atlantic coast in 1693 to its curtain call in New Orleans in 1905, when the city was at last freed from its reputation as a crypt of despondency and death, yellow fever claimed the lives of over 150,000 people.* These mosquito-dispensed epidemics and her domination of death was only a dress rehearsal for the looming clouds of war and desolation that would soon shroud the angsty nation.