The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our Nation (3 page)

The 1878 yellow fever epidemic, the worst in history, started with the rains in West Africa. February, the wet season, arrived, the mosquitoes hatched, the monkeys grew ill, the loggers stared up at the silent tree canopy. This time, the ships moored off the coast would not carry slaves across the Atlantic; they would carry ivory, gold, copper, salt—and mosquitoes.

But this year would be different for two reasons: Nature had afforded the virus with the perfect environment. An El Niño cycle turned the American South that winter into a tropical region with warm temperatures and rainfall 150 percent above normal. Insects, usually deterred by the winter freeze, proliferated. The significance of the weather phenomenon meant nothing to nineteenth-century observers, but 100 years later, scientists would link El Niño to most major outbreaks of yellow fever. As southerners cut hyacinth blooms in January and waded through waterlogged streets, they complained about the number of mosquitoes beginning to swarm.

American progress was the virus’s other ally. A great influx of immigrants—Irish, German, eastern European—had been migrating south since the Civil War. Just like the white Europeans descending upon Nigeria and other parts of West Africa, they served as fuel for a fever fire, a fresh source of nonimmune blood for the virus.

Transportation had paved the way for these immigrants. Trains connected every corner of America for the first time—east to west, north to south. And paddleboats and steamers snaked their way north from the Gulf of Mexico up the Mississippi River. At the center of this web sat a city 400 miles inland from the Gulf, ready to take its place as one of the largest, most successful cities in the South.

Memphis, Tennessee, was poised for greatness in 1878. By the end of that year, it would suffer losses greater than the Chicago fire, San Francisco earthquake and Johnstown flood combined. The devastation to the Mississippi Valley would cost over $350 million by today’s standards. And the U.S. government would create the National Board of Health, which would report: “To no other great nation of the earth is yellow fever so calamitous as to the United States of America.”

As the southwest monsoon pelted the Niger Delta in February 1878, hatching mosquito eggs and giving birth to a virus, people on the other side of the world could not have known what awaited them. In Memphis, Tennessee, their attention was turned not toward disease or death, but just the opposite: a carnival.

Memphis, 1878

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.

—EDGAR ALLAN POE, “The Masque of the Red Death”

Carnival

The bell sounded.

A servant wearing a white jacket, with all the trimmings of formality, stood outside the door, a gilded envelope in his gloved hand. It was the most coveted invitation of the year.

The envelope was exquisite, large and square, with golden calligraphy. Inside, it took the shape of a scroll on powder-blue parchment with a regal crown framing the top where CARNIVAL: MEMPHIS MARDI GRAS was engraved. Fanning out of an Egyptian pyramid, the secret order of the Memphi and Ulks invited
you and your household to attend his pageants March 4 and 5, 1878.

Over 10,000 people would answer this invitation to Memphis including, one year, the president of the United States. As many as 40,000 revelers would stand shoulder to shoulder along the downtown streets of Memphis.
Harper’s
would reserve front-page coverage, sending their best illustrator. The glitter and glamour of the event was known across the country, and it was widely whispered that New Orleans had sent scouts to Memphis to study the parade.

And so began Carnival.

Memphis had been chosen as a bluff city, literally poised on the precipice of the American South and an immense, new frontier. The only thing separating the two was the treacherous Mississippi River, a huge gash in the American landscape. Murky, ochre-colored and unpredictable, the river pushed against levees, dividing the river town from the dense forests and willow thickets of Arkansas. It was the last stop for the likes of David Crockett and Sam Houston making their way to Texas, a place for flatboats to purchase firearms before heading west, and it was the point of entry back into the civilized world of the Old South. But it wasn’t just the topography that gave Memphis a startling sense of contrast; it was the people. All classes of society, all colors of skin, all manner of accents migrated to a fault line carved between the past and the future, the Old South and the new frontier.

As the latticework of American transportation and expansion spread westward in the 1850s, Memphis remained at the cross-roads; steamboats joined the city to a massive trade line between the Gulf of Mexico through the Ohio Valley, and railroads connected it to the burgeoning ports of Charleston and New Orleans. Surrounded by rural states and plantations, Memphis became a hub: the largest inland cotton market, at its peak, handling 360,000 bales of cotton per year. As the bluff city sloped toward the Mississippi River, levees and thoroughfares piled high with crates of tufted white, Memphis looked like a town literally built upon cotton. But cotton was not the only business booming. At the center of a vast web of plantations, railroad lines and port towns, Memphis profited from the slave market as well. The Bolton, Dickens & Co. held what could only be called “yard sales” for slaves, while Hill, Byrd & Sons and Nathan Bedford Forrest opened slave showrooms on Adams Street. Said to have kept his business fair and his slave pens clean, Forrest prospered as one of the South’s largest slave traders, selling up to 1,000 slaves per year. Forrest, a vehement Confederate, took up arms during the Civil War and, in spite of near illiteracy, rose in rank to become one of the greatest military tacticians in American history. His surprise attacks on northern troops in Memphis would later inspire the German blitzkrieg. Long after the Civil War, Forrest’s name would live in infamy for founding the Ku Klux Klan.

Even as northern troops marched through Memphis in the 1860s, they recognized it as a center for trade and transportation, contraband or otherwise. It was spared Sherman’s flames, and a strange coexistence emerged between the occupying army and its Confederate residents. The North looked the other way as illegal southern shipments slipped through northern quarantine. As a result, despite four years of Civil War, Memphis business and shipping never ceased, and a number of those northern troops never left. The Civil War put an end to slavery once and for all, but the slave trade would have a lasting legacy not yet realized.

By 1870, Memphis’s population of 40,000 was almost double that of Nashville and Atlanta, ranking it second only to New Orleans as the largest city in the South. As its population grew, so did its diversity. It was a city built upon clashes, of river against land and people against people.

Despite the relative good fortune in Memphis, the country lagged under national debt in the 1870s. The Panic of 1873 ushered in an economic depression the likes of which had never been seen before, and the South suffered most of all. The war had destroyed the vast farmlands and plantations that carried the financial success of the entire region. Even if Memphis was equipped and ready to ship cotton north, none was arriving from the south. As jobs grew scarce on farms and in small towns, poor families flocked to nearby cities, and the newly termed
tramps
moved freely along the railroads.

Soon, Memphis swelled with the underclasses. A freedman’s camp established during northern occupation propelled the black population in Memphis from 3,000 to over 15,000, nearly 40 percent of the city’s total makeup. Blacks constituted only one faction of a largely disparate and unhappy population. Irish and German immigrants struggled to free themselves from the mire of postwar poverty and racial politics. Yanks continued to live in the South to facilitate reconstruction. And the upper echelons, white aristocrats of a bygone era, were depressed by a river town less southern and far more western, full of filth, violence and rough river folk. City legislators spent money extravagantly and foolishly. Indifference from the upper classes broadened the divide, and the by-product of such disregard was filth. In all, it created an atmosphere of dissatisfaction in every sphere of Memphis life, and the resulting discontent became an anchor heaving against the city’s progress. By the 1870s, Memphis was still very much a city balanced on the edge of the Mississippi River and its future, both a coarse river town and an extension of the dying South.

General Colton Greene had an idea. With an isosceles nose and a walrus moustache, Greene had a profile like Joseph Stalin. He was a lifelong bachelor, president of the State Savings Bank, owner of an insurance company, future founder of the Tennessee Club, a man who liked to make things happen. He had traveled the world and even held a permit for admittance to private rooms of the Vatican. Greene arrived in Memphis, emerging from the war a hero with a little-known past and a hazy air of nobility. He had been on the frontlines of every battle and wounded three different times; Colton Greene liked to face a challenge head-on.

Greene enlisted the help of Memphis’s most influential business and political leaders. This was, after all, the decade in which anything could happen. Thomas Edison had established his Electric Light Company. Johns Hopkins University, the first European-style medical institute, had opened. Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. George Eastman was developing the first Kodak camera. Great men were doing great things.

Greene and others like him believed Memphis, for all its flaws, had a very bright future. Already four train lines rumbled through the city, and like the birthmark for any progressive place, the skyline ballooned with smoke from steam-powered mills. Cotton presses bellowed all hours of the day and night. Over fifteen hundred buildings were under construction, and mule cars screeched along metal tracks. The new Peabody Hotel, where whole plantations had been won or lost over a hand of cards, boasted a chef all the way from swanky Saratoga Springs in the Northeast. The grand duke of Russia had made a recent visit to the city on the bluffs. Even the former president of the Confederacy had chosen to make Memphis his home. And people strolling down Main Street literally walked among the crates of cotton, strands of the white gold catching on their clothes and hanging like a talisman. All Memphis needed was a push in the right direction to take its place among cities like St. Louis and Chicago.

There was another reason to attract some positive, national attention to Memphis: disease. Over the last decade, Memphis had earned a reputation as a medical town, in part because the north had used it as a hospital center during the war, but mostly because epidemics had recently rained upon the city. Two yellow fever epidemics, cholera and malaria had given Memphis a reputation as a sickly city and a filthy one. It was unheard of for a city with a population as large as the one in Memphis to have no waterworks—the city still relied entirely on the river and rain cisterns to collect water, and there was no way to remove sewage. While the bluffs afforded a high, beautiful vista of the river, they also sloped back into the heart of the city. Rain streamed down the backside of the bluffs into the town, and further still, into the Gayoso Bayou, which wrapped from the Wolf River in a series of stagnant pools through the entire city, north to south. With every downpour, downtown privies backed up and drained the sewage into the bayou. There was no money or organized method of removing refuse from the bustling city center, so people carted their own garbage to the Gayoso and dumped it. Horse manure and dead animals floated through the pale green scum. Corrupt politics kept city funds depleted, and anything as bland as sanitation or water management was the last thing on the minds of civic leaders. As one historian put it, “The trouble with Memphis was that it simply refused to take the time to make the sometimes painful distinction between prosperity and progress.”

To the nation at large, Memphis began to appear as a city of deplorable sanitary conditions and disease. There had to be a way to show the nation that Memphis was not just a stricken city of riverboat gambling and death carts. In 1872, General Colton Greene decided that what the depressed river town needed was an elaborate party. Greene was not the one who originally came up with the idea of Mardi Gras. David P. “Pappy” Hadden holds that distinction, but true to his nature, Greene became the one on the frontlines, and he is credited with the magnificent parades in the following decade.

Greene entreated upon the railroads to lower fares and the local merchants to discount supplies, and then he chose the date: Fat Tuesday, on the eve of Lent. Early March would enable the local cotton farmers and their families the chance to attend before planting season began. As with most other aspects of everyday Victorian life, time, seasons and even society would be directed by farming. Mardi Gras would be the grand finale to the Memphis social season, which began each winter when the harvest was over and the first frost fell, quelling the outbreak of disease.

Greene’s handful of leaders called themselves the Mystic Memphi, and their secret society served as the main body of wealth and power for the city. Their names were never revealed, and in fact, their existence never even admitted until decades later. Greene convened clandestine gatherings in a real estate office overlooking Court Square and Second Street. The night a meeting was to take place the newspaper simply published the letters UEUQ, taken from the gates of ancient Memphis, Egypt; only those who knew the meaning need answer the call. Over the next several years, the Memphi, and their younger, rowdier counterparts known as the Ulks, would organize the most lavish Mardi Gras celebrations ever seen.