1831

by Louis P. Masur

  It carried many names: Indian cholera, epidemic cholera, spasmodic cholera, malignant cholera, cholera morbus. Russian peasants called it the black illness. Physicians tried to categorize various forms of the disease, but whatever it was called, it attacked the body with the rapidity and fury of a tornado. One would be walking or working and suddenly feel cramps in the stomach. Severe vomiting and diarrhea would ensue. As dehydration set in, the skin turned cold and damp, its color darkening to a leaden purple or blue. The tongue whitened and flattened, like a piece of dead flesh, and the voice of the stricken diminished to an empty whisper. The eyes shrank in their sockets. In a matter of hours, the early symptoms of “violent vertigo, sick stomach, [and] nervous agitation,” gave way to freezing-cold skin, faint pulse, and greenish-brown discharges. Insensibility and death usually followed. At the height of the epidemic, one citizen found it “appalling to the boldest heart” that he could “see individuals well in the morning & buried before night.”45

  Despite the evidence before them, as late as December, even with the news that the cholera had reached England, some Americans continued to believe that the United States would remain immune to the disease. Reports from Europe indicated that cholera mainly struck those who were filthy, hungry, and impoverished. No one at the time realized that the disease was transmitted through polluted water supplies and that the laboring poor in urban areas were therefore most susceptible to contamination. The wealthy, who drank spring water and fled the cities for the country, avoided sickness. Americans initially thought that they had nothing to fear. The epidemic was a foreign phenomenon, a judgment on the decrepitude of European societies. One writer reasoned, “Poverty is nearly unknown in the United States; and as nearly the whole population are well clothed and fed, cholera will be less likely to attack us.” But the writer had it backward. Prosperity did not protect the nation—on the contrary, it made Americans vulnerable. The country’s love of trade and wealth and mobility led to unchecked growth and limitless interaction. Either Americans must be willing to “forego some of the benefits of commerce” by imposing quarantines and equalizing conditions or, one writer warned, “we must expect soon to find, that the Cholera has commenced its ravages among us.”46

  The epidemic hit the United States with force in 1832. Thousands died in New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Cincinnati. All the port cities issued quarantines for both goods and passengers, but too late. Disease was upon the land. Some, like George Catlin, believed that the unsettled areas along the upper Missouri River, where “the atmosphere is so light and pure that nothing like fevers or epidemics has ever been known to prevail here,” would provide a “delightful refuge … if the Cholera, should ever cross the Atlantic.” But Catlin was mistaken. The troops traveling west to battle Black Hawk carried the disease with them to unspoiled land.47

  Physicians debated methods of treatment, but most relied on the same regimen used during the yellow-fever epidemic of the 1790s: bloodletting. One physician exclaimed that he had drawn “blood enough to float the General Jackson steamboat.” They also prescribed calomel, which contained mercury, and laudanum, which contained opium. Though the disease was months away from striking, one settler in Newport, Kentucky, copied a formula for treatment into his diary: “The moment any of the usual symptoms such as coolness and change of colour at the finger ends or sickness and sudden debility are perceived lose no time in resorting to the following receipt. From 20 to 30 drops of laudanum and the same quantity of aether to be taken in camphor, julep, or peppermint water.” The treatments did nothing to help the afflicted, and in all likelihood further weakened those who might have recovered from the bacterium on their own. Recommendations offered by boards of health may have done more good: they advised citizens not to drink fetid water and to avoid raw fruits and vegetables.48

  Pleas for Christian benevolence went forth. One writer prayed that among the unafflicted “the lovely charities of the human heart” would “expand and grow out into the fruits of sympathy for the sick and the dying.” The ill, he hoped, would not be left to face their end in desolation and terror. But those with financial resources ignored the call for community action and abandoned the cities. Isaac Fidler, a missionary traveling in the United States, thought that Americans shared no social bond “sufficiently close to connect the different members of the politic, so as to insure assistance from one another in seasons of general distress. ‘Every man for himself,’ is perhaps more fully and regularly acted on in America than elsewhere.” On July 3, 1832, the New-York Evening Post described the roads as lined in all directions with “well-filled stage coaches, livery coaches, private vehicles and equestrians, all panic struck, fleeing from the city.” On their way, they hurled blame at the immigrants, the poor, the prostitutes, the free blacks, and the intemperate for instigating the epidemic. Disdaining any celebration of the United States as a “refuge for the poor of other countries,” Philip Hone declared simply that foreigners “have brought the cholera this year and they will always bring wretchedness and want.”49

  Physicians concluded that “the sensual, the vicious, the intemperate” were most likely to be afflicted by the disease, but they disagreed over how cholera was transmitted. It was unclear whether or not the illness was contagious upon contact. Some argued that cholera could not be contracted merely by exposure to someone who had it, but others insisted that the disease was both infectious and highly contagious. If cholera was not spread by contact, then citizens might be encouraged to bestow charitable care upon the sick. But, given evidence that was inconclusive, most Americans acted on the assumption that exposure meant contamination.

  Some physicians offered an alternative explanation as to how it spread. Noting that the disease erupted simultaneously at different times and in different locations, they argued that the atmosphere rather than contagion served as the mechanism of dissemination. James Kennedy, who wrote one of the first histories of the epidemic, concluded that the disease was “propagated through the atmosphere … . When cholera was most virulent, the weather was close and sultry, and during the day the sun was obscured by whitish clouds.” Isaac Fidler offered this observation: “It was borne along on the wings of the wind.” One analyst concluded that cholera migrated “from place to place, in consequence of a cause existing in the air, and derived from some exhalations from the surface of the earth, or some intemperies of the atmosphere.” Another expressed it more simply: “All pestilence is essentially of the atmosphere.”50

  If that were the case, Americans knew they had much to fear. The year leading to the cholera epidemic had been filled with atmospheric phenomena: an eclipse, the aurora borealis, comets, meteors, severe blizzards, and raging thunderstorms. These had been seen as signs of coming evils, but now Americans learned that the atmosphere itself could turn poisonous. Everyone knew the disease was especially fatal to “the poor, the squalid, the ill-fed, and the intemperate,” and Christian moralists used the epidemic as an occasion to attack those who consumed alcohol. The cholera, warned Francis Wayland, “is the curse of God going forth over all the earth, entering into every house, and unfolding the doom of every family, sparing neither age nor sex, rank nor station, parent nor child, but marking every intemperate man and woman for instant, agonizing, strange, and horrible death.”

  But the disease struck the redeemers as well as the unredeemed. No less a figure than Charles G. Finney contracted and survived the cholera. For all the reports compiled by physicians, ministers offered as compelling an explanation of the cholera epidemic as anyone: “All Christians must regard it in the light of a pestilence sent forth by the Lord of the whole earth as one of God’s sore judgments inflicted upon idolatrous nations, upon an adulterous and apostate race of professed christians. We must regard it as a prelude to the woes which are fast coming upon all the earth.”51

  MOUNT AUBURN CEMETERY AND FRANCES TROLLOPE

  As the cholera plague was bearing down on the United States, a new cemetery opened outside of Boston
. Disturbed by overcrowding in the city, dismayed by the condition of urban burial grounds, and anxious over their own final resting place, leading citizens in Boston planned a rural cemetery and garden on seventy-two acres of land that adjoined the road from Cambridge to Watertown. A meeting held on June 8, 1831, was chaired by Justice Joseph Story, who appointed Daniel Webster and Edward Everett to the cemetery committee. Within weeks, these men managed to maneuver through the state legislature an act incorporating the Massachusetts Horticultural Society and authorizing the organization to establish a “rural cemetery.” Three-hundred-square-foot lots were sold for sixty dollars each; within weeks, more than a hundred lots were assigned.52

  Various addresses laid bare the feelings that led to the creation of this “garden of graves.” Edward Everett spoke of the need for a place of burial that citizens “may contemplate without dread or disgust; one that is secure from the danger of being encroached upon, as in the graveyards of the city, secluded from every species of uncongenial intrusion; surrounded with everything that can fill the heart with tender and respectful emotion; beneath the shade of a venerable tree, on the slope of a verdant lawn, and within the seclusion of the forest; removed from all the discordant scenes of life.” Jacob Bigelow, a physician who led the rural-cemetery movement, urged that burial must take place “amidst the quiet verdure of the field, under the road and cheerful light of heaven, where the harmonious and ever-changing face of nature reminds us, by its resuscitating influence, that to die is but to live again.”

  The terror of death had given way to romance. The fate of all humans was to be met not with dread but with quietude. Planted in nature and surrounded by the peaceful solitude of nature, the city of the dead became a city of eternal life. “We are glad,” thought one mourner, “when we see a sunbeam on the green roof of their narrow mansion, as if we could light up the darkness below; and if we see a tree or a flower planted above them, we feel as if they must revive and rejoice in the pledge that their memory is still treasured by some who loved them.” At the new cemetery, remarked one observer, “Nature throws an air of cheerfulness over the labors of Death.”53

  On Saturday, September 24, Mount Auburn Cemetery was consecrated. Two thousand people filled a “natural amphitheatre” formed within a slight valley surrounded by trees. The sky was cloudless and the atmosphere clear, cleansed by thunderstorms that had passed through during the night. The ceremonies began with instrumental music. A prayer offered by Henry Ware followed. Justice Joseph Story then stepped forth to deliver a dedication address. Story at first had difficulty containing his emotions and at times paused to wipe his eyes. Five months earlier, his youngest child, Louisa, had died at age ten of the scarlet fever. “Sunk in utter desolation and despair,” Story had admitted that “life would be to me a burden, a grievous burden, if it were not for the belief in another and better state of existence.” Still, thoughts of her returned him to a state of “settled and miserable gloom.”

  Story began by reminding his listeners of “the duty of the living to provide for the dead” and the universal concern with “the time and place and manner of our death.” Religion might teach that we are all dust, but “dust as we are, the frail tenements, which enclose our spirits but for a season, are dear, are inexpressibly dear to us.” Story spoke of the spiritual impulse to be buried in one’s homeland with one’s family and friends, and of the importance for mourners to be near the burial ground of the dead: “As we sit down by their graves, we seem to hear the tones of their affection, whispering in our ears. We listen to the voice of their wisdom, speaking in the depths of our souls. We shed our tears; but they are no longer the burning tears of agony. They relieve our drooping spirit, and come no longer over us with a deathly faintness. We return to the world, and we feel ourselves purer, and better, and wiser, from this communion with the dead.”

  Story went on to review the burial practices of ancient civilizations and reminded listeners that the word “cemetery” meant “place of sleep or repose.” He denounced the tradition of depositing “the remains of our friends in loathsome vaults, or beneath the gloomy crypts and cells of our churches, where the human foot is never heard.” He despaired over city burial grounds that were “crowded on all sides” and left neglected and vandalized. No wonder graveyards carried with them feelings of terror.

  But, located in nature, surrounded by beauty, the rural cemetery allowed mourners to banish the belief that the grave “is to be the abode of gloom, which will haunt the imagination by its terrors, or chill the heart by its solitude.” To stand at the grave was to stand “upon the borders of two worlds”; the gravesite served as boundary “beyond which the living cannot go nor the dead return.” Yet, by placing us within nature and furnishing a location for meditation and solitude, cemeteries such as Mount Auburn, Story predicted, would “tranquilize human fears” and “cast a cheerful light over the darkness of the grave.”54

  Mount Auburn was dedicated at the beginning of the fall, a season associated with miasma. One English traveler, Frances Trollope, left America in July so as to avoid another bout with “the noxious influence of an American autumn.” Weak and feverish through the fall and winter of 1830–31, Trollope “felt persuaded that I shall never recover” from “the sickliness of the American autumn.” While recuperating in Alexandria, Virginia, Trollope continued writing an account of her travels in America. Published a year after her return to England, Domestic Manners of the Americans became a publishing sensation. One observer reported, “The commotion it created amongst the good citizens is truly inconceivable. The Tariff and Bank Bill were alike forgotten, and the tug of war was hard whether the ‘Domestic Manners,’ or the cholera, which burst upon them simultaneously, should be the more engrossing topic of conversation.”

  Trollope, at age forty-seven, had arrived in the United States in 1827, accompanied by a son, two daughters, a servant, a maid, and a French artist who appended himself to the entourage. Also on board was Frances Wright, the mercurial lecturer and utopian, whose talk at the moment was full of her dreams for Nashoba, an experimental community near Memphis, Tennessee, aimed at preparing slaves for freedom. Trollope was facing financial difficulty and family problems—her son had dropped out of school and was looking to improve his prospects in America. Wright’s vision thus seemed quite appealing, and together they left England, their sights set on Nashoba. But what Trollope encountered—a few flimsy cabins set near a swamp—bore no relationship to what she had imagined. Overcome by feelings of desolation, within weeks she left Wright and Nashoba behind. In February 1828, she arrived in Cincinnati, a frontier city that in a matter of years had been transformed from a remote outpost to a burgeoning metropolis of twenty thousand residents. At Cincinnati, Trollope formed her impressions of America, and lost a fortune in a failed attempt to open a bazaar that offered entertainment and a variety of goods for sale. She remained in Ohio just over two years before traveling east to Virginia, Maryland, and New York, and then leaving the country behind forever. 55

  But the country did not leave her. The publishing success of Domestic Manners of the Americans provided Trollope with the financial security that had eluded her in Cincinnati; she went on to write four novels set in America. Unlike many other travelers, however, Trollope offered neither lavish praise nor grudging admiration. She did not peer deeply into the structures of government or habits of the people. She offered impressions of the nation, impressions of slavery and religion, politics and character, and she concluded, “I do not like America … . I speak of the population generally, as seen in town and country, among the rich and the poor, in the slave states and the free states. I do not like them. I do not like their principles, I do not like their manners, I do not like their opinions.”

  Trollope highlighted the contradiction of Americans boasting of their liberty while enslaving Africans and killing Indians. “You will see them,” declared Trollope, “with one hand hoisting the cap of liberty, and with the other flogging their slaves. Y
ou will see them one hour lecturing their mob on the indefeasible rights of man, and the next driving from their homes the children of the soil, whom they have bound themselves to protect by the most solemn treaties.” But she also denounced the delusion of equality, suggesting that the slave system was “less injurious to the manners and morals of the people than the fallacious idea of equality” which allowed those with money to command the services of those without. Contemplating both slavery and equality, she threw up her hands and concluded that by some strange “political alchymy” Americans had contrived “to extract all that was most noxious both in democracy and in slavery, and had poured the strange mixture through every vein of the moral organization of their country.”

  Much as the British aristocrat was irked by the pretension to equality, manifested by an “‘I’m as good as you’” attitude that “would make of mankind an unamalgamated mass of grating atoms,” she reserved her most bitter comments for the slaveholders. It disturbed her that laws made it criminal to teach slaves how to read and shocked her that slave owners often shipped their slaves to plantations in the Deep South which “are the terror of American Negroes.” Especially galling was the lack of human sympathy accorded the enslaved, whom their masters often treated as if invisible. While Trollope was in Virginia, she boarded with a family consisting of a widow, four daughters, and several slaves. One of the slaves, an eight-year-old girl, found some biscuits in the cupboard and ate them. Unknown to her, they had been sprinkled with arsenic and placed there to kill off rats that had infested the kitchen. Trollope prepared an emetic of mustard and water and then held the girl in her lap and comforted her. The white family members started giggling. “‘My! If Mrs. Trollope has not taken her in her lap, and wiped her nasty mouth,’” one exclaimed. For Trollope, here was the tragedy of slavery: “The idea of really sympathizing in the sufferings of a slave, appeared to them as absurd as weeping over a calf that had been slaughtered by the butcher.” The institution of slavery “paralyzed … the greatest and best feelings of the human heart.”56