Plague Among the Magnolias: The 1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Mississippi (review)

The 1878 yellow fever epidemic in the American South stands alongside the 1918 influenza epidemic among the most important disease events in United States history. “The story of Mississippi during this pivotal epidemic,” writes historian Deanne Stephens Nuwer, “is a tale of destruction, incompetence, and failing, as well as one of compassion, charity, and reaffirmation of values” (p. 136). Nuwer describes the terrible destruction of the 1878 epidemic in Mississippi, when at least four thousand people died within a few months, with the disease concentrated in the Mississippi river cities of Holly Springs, Grenada, Vicksburg and others, as well as railroad towns.

This epidemic has been well described and analyzed by other historians, but what Nuwer brings to the story is a detailed, thick description of events in one state, solidly based in archival sources and local newspaper accounts. The ways in which life was completely disrupted become clear in the revelations of letters and diaries. It was not only sickness and death that wrecked the commonplace, but a lack of normal commodities such as food and clothing as trading stopped, the pervasive fear of neighbor and stranger as potential carriers of disease, and the conflicting desires to serve others and save oneself. Few books have depicted this disruption and panic as clearly as Newer’s account.

Nuwer asks how the newly “redeemed” Mississippi state government performed during the epidemic and finds it wanting. It acted, though, in concert with the supposed traditional values that it was to restore to the state house. The government had been elected on a platform of “self-reliance, [which] reinforced the sense that individuals and communities were on their own” (p. 48). Although the epidemic brought forth a myriad of local responses, including charity efforts and virulent quarantines, the failure of this hodgepodge approach to create an effective and efficient response to the crisis was evident to all observers. Mississippi had created a state board of health in 1877, but it was a weak body with only advisory powers that could do little during the epidemic but provide advice on disinfectants and other ways to protect against contagion.

Mississippi had crowed at the withdrawal of the hated federal troops in the 1870s, but they had to humble themselves to accept relief from that same army in 1878, when a federal relief boat brought supplies to Mississippi River docks for towns starving from lack of provisions and desperate for ice and medicine. The Mississippi State Board of Health signed on in support of the newly created National Board of Health in the summer of 1879, even as Dr. Joseph Jones in New Orleans was recalling his Confederate roots and resisting national power. Although Stephens Nuwer closes with the claim that the epidemic “provided a fertile field for the creation of an effective system of public health that would make such catastrophes rare in the future” (p. 136), she fails to demonstrate that such a transformation took place in Mississippi itself. The state public health response had not evolved far by 1910, when the Rockefeller Foundation took on hookworm in the state and spurred the creation of local boards of health to continue work against this disease.

One senses that Nuwer wants to tell a story of progress, to see some good come out of the horror that was the 1878 epidemic. But the story instead is one of stagnation and confusion. There were individuals and organizations that behaved heroically, to be sure. The outpouring of relief from the north, bringing more than half a million dollars to the state less than two decades after Grant took Vicksburg, is impressive. One chapter is headed by a quotation from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, moaning that “It seemed as if hell had been moved up on earth,” and Nuwer’s volume amply justifies that assessment.