Pandemic Injustice: Irish Immigrant, Enslaved African American, and Choctaw Experiences with Cholera in 1832

Some sought to hide the horrors. On September 2, 1832, Charles F. Mercer, president of the Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Canal Company, returned home after visiting Irish immigrant labor camps, where he had seen men "turning black and dying in twenty four hours." To the Washington, D.C., Daily National Intelligencer he anonymously told a different story: "The reports of the existence of the cholera, and of its mortality along the line of the canal, are greatly exaggerated."¹ In early December, Isaac Franklin—partner in Franklin and Armfield, the largest slave-trading company in the United States—witnessed the deaths of fifteen or sixteen African Americans in his Natchez, Mississippi, slave pen. He secretly buried their bodies in the middle of night. "[T]he way we send out dead negroes at night and keep dark is a sin," he informed a business partner. "No person in this country knows that we ever have had a case of cholera."² At about the same time, Major Francis W. Armstrong, a U.S. Indian removal agent, saw Choctaws sicken from cholera and die as he drove them across the Mississippi River toward their new homes in Indian Territory. The major informed his superiors that "we have been obliged to keep every thing to ourselves, and to browbeat the idea of the disease, although death was hourly among us, and the road lined with the sick."³

Deaths that Mercer, Franklin, and Armstrong observed must have been ghastly. Cholera victims appeared healthy one moment but then quickly experienced agonizing symptoms: vomiting and voluminous diarrhea filled with blood plasma and flakes of the small intestine that gave the stool a characteristic rice-water appearance. Within hours, a cholera victim lost so much fluid that they endured excruciating cramps and spasms. The pulse weakened, the blood thickened, and the body took on a blue appearance. Case fatality rates were high, with some victims perishing within twelve hours of first having symptoms. No one understood, in those days before germ theory, that the bacteria Vibrio cholerae caused the illness, that one contracted it by consuming sewage-contaminated water or food, and that the bacteria released one of nature's deadliest toxins into the small intestine. Some believed the disease to be contagious—a poison of some sort passed directly from a sick person to a healthy person. The fact that many doctors, nurses, and others who came in direct contact with the ill and did not become sick, however, persuaded many others—particularly learned medical professionals—that contagion was not responsible. Non-contagionists generally blamed atmospheric influences such as toxic gases that circulated with the winds that likely acted in combination with locally produced bad air, or miasma, that arose from decaying matter.

What people at the time did know was that cholera's mortality followed a similar pattern wherever it struck. A pandemic of the lethal disease had been sweeping the globe since 1817, taking much greater proportions of victims from the poorest ranks of society, whether in Asia, Europe, or North America. American explanations held that bad behaviors—intemperance, imprudence in diet, and uncleanliness—made someone predisposed to the disease. What people did not know is that the severity of the disease depended heavily on two factors: the amount of bacteria swallowed (dosage) and stomach acidity. Mild cases resulted when an individual ingested relatively few bacteria and when an individual's relatively high level of stomach acid killed significant quantities of the germs before they reached the small intestine. Even in these mild cases, an infection led to lasting acquired immunity. Affluent people protected themselves without fully knowing how they were doing so. Many fled places once an outbreak began, while those who stayed had beverage choices that spared their stomachs large doses of V. cholerae. Brewed drinks—coffee and tea—as well as spring water trucked in from afar slaked the thirst of the affluent. The poor, particularly workers whose labor in the sun increased their thirst during the heat of the summer, had no...