Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans (19 page)

During the period of Spanish domination, after 1763, when the embargo existed against all but Spanish vessels trading with New Orleans merchants, British “floating warehouses” sailed up the river on the pretext of going up to trade with British colonies at Manchac
, Baton Rouge
, and Natchez
. Instead, they docked at Lafayette City
, where they carried on a brisk commerce in cutlery, cloth, farming utensils, and slaves with New Orleanians. The Spanish turned their heads, pretending not to notice, until the American Revolution made anti-British sentiment a necessity. In 1777, Governor Galvez seized the British ships and stopped the illegal trade. But it was British trade that had established Lafayette City as a commercial center of the riverfront.

The Texas cattle trails ended at Gretna, across the river from Lafayette. Cattle boats then transported the stock across the river to slaughterhouses, where they were unloaded in a noisy, odiferous, earth-shaking herd. The riverfront was lined with the establishments of tallow renderers, soap boilers, hide tanners and merchants, bone grinders, and other spin-off industries.

Cotton was brought to the docks by steamboats, which competed for wharf space with the flatboats lining the riverfront in the 1840s. It was said that one could walk a mile on the tops of flatboats on the riverfront. By 1850, however, twenty piers had been specially constructed of thick planks to accommodate the steamers.

The earliest homes in Lafayette City were built close to the river. Gradually, however, there was a greater demand for lots “in the back part of the city,” where the wealthy built mansions a good distance from the sounds and smells of the slaughterhouses.

In 1852, the population of Lafayette City was 12,651 plus 1,539 slaves. Greek Revival mansions rose along Nayades Street (now St. Charles Avenue) and in the Magazine Street area in the 1840s and 1850s.

A conflict arose between those who demanded the removal of the slaughterhouses and tanneries from the Lafayette City riverfront (because of the offensive odors and noises) and those who claimed that the city would lose as much as $1.5 million per year in trade by such an act. The City Council finally passed measures that removed the cattle landing.

The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853

The events of the terrible yellow fever
epidemic of 1853 in New Orleans are so horrible that we read them with disbelief, equating them with the horrors of the Black Plague in Europe in the Middle Ages. Today, it is difficult to imagine the reality of death on such a grand scale. It has been called the worst single epidemic ever to hit an American city.

We know today that yellow fever
is a virus that damages the liver, preventing it from functioning. Yellow bile pigments gather in the skin; the victim’s eyes look yellow and his skin has a yellow tone. His or her temperature rises rapidly, his or her bones ache, and he or she vomits black matter, which consists of partly digested blood after hemorrhages have occurred in the stomach. Some victims go into a coma. Many die. Those who live have a lifelong immunity to the disease.

We know now that the disease is transmitted by the
Aedes aegypti
mosquito, which carries it from one victim to another. Both the disease and the mosquito almost certainly came from the Old World, probably from Africa on slave ships. The warm, humid climate and heavy rainfall of New Orleans made it susceptible to yellow fever. Open cisterns were perfect breading grounds for the mosquito, whose eggs must first dry a bit, then hatch when moistened. New Orleans was an ideal host for such a cycle.

Epidemics began with the hot weather and ended with the frosts, which killed the mosquitoes. In the 1800s, the fever was believed to be caused by poisonous vapors in the atmosphere, water contagion, or droplet infection.

The first epidemic of yellow fever
in New Orleans occurred in 1793, the last in 1905, and in the interval, twenty major epidemics struck (although the fever came every summer, to some degree). From 1793 to 1853, the epidemics grew increasingly worse and more numerous, culminating in the 1853 season. This has been attributed to a growing population of impoverished immigrants in a below-sea-level, unhealthy city that had lots of rain. From 1853 to 1905, the epidemics decreased in severity and number. The decline began during the Civil War
, when General Benjamin Butler
put the unemployed of New Orleans to work scouring the city from top to bottom.

On the morning of May 28, 1853, a New Orleans newspaper editorialized about the glorious future of a disease-free city. There had not been a yellow fever
epidemic in six years. That evening, an Irish laborer, recently landed on an emigrant vessel, was admitted to Charity Hospital
, suffering from the black vomit. He died within a few hours. The doctor hesitated to diagnose the disease so early in the season. Doctors of the period had a difficult time distinguishing between hemorrhagic malaria, yellow fever, and other diseases, especially when no epidemic was raging. Municipal officers and newspapers hushed rumors of the fever, so as not to discourage tourists and businessmen.

After a second death occurred, the doctor traced the origin of the disease to the ship
Augusta
, which had arrived from Bremen on May 17 with 230 European immigrants aboard. The
Augusta
had been in close contact with another ship, the
Camboden Castle,
on which several crew members had died of yellow fever while in Jamaica.

The public was, at that time, preoccupied with a sensational murder trial in the news. In June, rumors of a slave rebellion (which never materialized) swept through the city. No one was concerned that on June 1, an item in a New York newspaper told of a yellow fever epidemic in Jamaica, and warned that the disease was being carried by sailors and dock workers to distant ports. Today we know that the
Aedes aegypti
mosquitoes swarmed thickly in holds and cabins of ships and bred in their water barrels.

On June 22, the editor of
the Daily Crescent
commiserated with members of the “Can’t Get Away Club,” merchants and tradesmen whose business required their presence in the city. New Orleans was
a six-months-a-year town because of the heat and disease. Those who could afford to had already left the city. Those who remained settled down to wait out the unusual heat and the swarms of mosquitoes, “a barbarous horde of great, ugly, long-billed, long-
legged creatures . . .” (
New Orleans Daily Crescent
1853, “Mid Summer”).

New Orleans was a city of 150,000 people. All told, 50,000 left the city that summer. Of the 100,000 that remained, 1 out of every 10 would die.

Gutters were filled with garbage, human waste, and refuse, which rains would turn into lakes of filth, spreading cholera and malaria. No one would drink the river water, choosing instead to use cistern water, which was a breeding ground for the yellow fever
carrier mosquito. The heat, floods, and surrounding swamps all contributed to the unhealthy conditions. Mayor A. D. Crossman
urged health measures, and the City Council agreed to end private street-cleaning contracts and establish a municipal sanitation department, but more immediate measures were needed.

As the death toll mounted, hearses rolled incessantly into the cemeteries. Streets were deserted except for carriages of physicians. Every evening, artillery was fired to “clear the atmosphere.” Flames and smoke from hundreds of tar barrels scattered throughout the city sent dense clouds up above the city and lit up the streets with an eerie glow. (This worked, accidentally, because it killed and repelled mosquitoes.)

Doctors tried the time-honored cures: bleeding and purging. Vomiting did not have to be induced. But without the knowledge of the cause, they could not cure the disease.

The worst day of the epidemic was August 20, when 269 people died. At this point, 200 people per day were dying in the city. The private and public hospitals were overflowing. Every home in the city was a hospital. In some homes, whole families died within the hour and there was no one to mourn them or make funeral arrangements.

Open wagons passed daily, the drivers calling, “Bring out your dead.” Hearses, carriages, and wagons massed near the cemeteries. Inside the cemeteries, the rotting corpses “were piled by the fifties, exposed to the heat of the sun, swollen with corruption, bursting their coffin lids . . .” (
New Orleans Daily Crescent
1853, “Down”).

The dead were buried in shallow graves in the cemetery ground, covered with no more than fourteen inches of mud. When the rains came, the soil washed away, revealing grotesque, decaying bodies.

In desperation, the mayor offered five dollars per hour for gravediggers in order to remove such signs from public view.
The New Orleans Bee,
August 9, 1853, stated:

Upon inquiry yesterday, we ascertained that the festering decaying of bodies which had been deposited in the Lafayette Cemetery had at last been consigned to mother earth. The eyes will no longer be pained and the nostrils offended by the further continuance of the horrible neglect. The Mayor . . . secured the labor of the chain gang, and set them immediately to work.

The epidemic took the lives of ten thousand people in the summer of 1853. Through the little mortuary chapel on Rampart and Conti Streets passed the bodies of thousands of Catholics who had died of the fever. Funerals in the St. Louis Cathedral
had been banned since 1827 for fear that disease would spread. The wardens of the Cathedral ordered the erection of the chapel near St. Louis Cemetery No. 1
, so that the Catholics might be properly (though speedily) blessed before burial during yellow fever
epidemics. After the Civil War
, the ban on cathedral funerals was lifted, and the mortuary chapel became a parish church, called Our Lady of Guadalupe
.

It was another half century before the cause of yellow fever
was
discovered. In 1900, in Cuba, Walter Reed of the United States Yellow
Fever Board, identified the germ and demonstrated the carrier role of the mosquito. Control measures followed, eliminating the disease as a menace in the Panama Canal Zone. In 1964, the United States began a million-dollar program to eliminate the
Aedes aegypti
mosquito.

It is astounding to relate that in the fall of 1853, the tragedy that had struck New Orleans just weeks before seemed to be forgotten. Trade and commerce was as brisk as ever on the Mississippi, filling warehouses and boardinghouses. Immigrants crowded into customs houses. Newcomers replaced those that had been lost, and the city carried on with the booming prosperity of the 1850s.

Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, near St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. Originally a mortuary chapel in which all Catholic funerals were held from 1827 to 1860.

The Emergence of Political Parties

Soon after the Louisiana Purchase, it became evident that the population of New Orleans was divided into three distinct groups, and it was within these divisions that they would organize politically: the
ancienne population,
the New French, and the Anglo-Americans. In the period between 1820 and 1850, the
ancienne population
and the New French usually joined the Whig Party. Throughout the nation, Whigs were generally aristocrats; in the South, they were also slave-owners. Anglo-Americans in New Orleans were almost all Democrats. The Democratic Party had represented the rise of the common man since the elections of Andrew Jackson in 1828 and 1832. The hero of the Battle of New Orleans
was popular in the city.

New Orleans voters operated on many levels. A presidential candidate would be supported as a Democrat or a Whig, according to Party allegiance. A gubernatorial, legislative, or mayoral candidate would win votes as a spokesman for either the Creole
or the American factions.

The influx of Irish and German immigrants in the 1830s and 1840s complicated things. The Irish were clannish, but they were quick to be naturalized and they loved involvement in politics. Since the Irish were in such great numbers in the city as early as 1830 (when they tipped the scales for mayor candidate, Denis Prieur
), both political parties began to work hard to win the Irish vote.

From 1828 until the coming of the Irish famine refugees in 1846, the arguments between the “Nativists” and the “foreigners” dragged on. The Nativists complained that the immigrants followed their party leaders blindly; that they organized into bands of foreign soldiery, armed, equipped, and bearing a foreign name; they celebrated feast days of their own country’s patron saints; and generally were considered a degraded population, men without knowledge, principle, or patriotism.