Abstract

The article examines two cholera epidemics that struck Michigan in the early 1830s, arguing that the conflict generated by these crises reveals underlying social tensions between one frontier city and its rural hinterlands. Building on Charles Rosenberg's classic The Cholera Years, it contends that his study underestimates the ferocity of the debate over how cholera spread in 1832 and the conflict that uncertainty generated. In Michigan, unlike the East, a furious dispute raged over the etiology of cholera, with newspapers in the countryside insisting that the disease was contagious and those in Detroit contending that the malady did not spread through human contact. Such disagreements produced different strategies for combating cholera. Although Detroiters shunned quarantines, their counterparts in the countryside quickly established these artificial borders to protect themselves from an urban pestilence associated with poverty, crime, and disorder. Tensions exploded into violence in the summer of 1832, when Ypsilanti officials shot at two stagecoaches allegedly seeking to violate the town's quarantine; the incident transformed the conflict over cholera from a regional into a partisan political battle, with Democrats defending and Whigs attacking the individuals who fired at the travelers. In examining such questions, the essay demonstrates the vital role that those living in the emerging West assigned to defending cultural and regional boundaries and suggests that tensions along cultural borders may have played a more important role in frontier communities than historians have been able to appreciate. Although historians recently have produced a growing body of work on national and cultural borders, they have not focused as much attention on less clearly defined boundaries, such as those separating cities from the countryside. Examining such barriers, particularly in western locations, may prove fruitful in the future.

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