“Public Health as Public Wealth”: Yellow Fever and New Orleans’s Trade Economy in George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes

Set in 1803 during Louisiana’s transfer from French to American rule and regarded for its coupling of quaint local color techniques with impressive historical realism, George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes (1880)¹ is largely read as the author’s most technically advanced depiction of Reconstruction and its political contexts—an aesthetically appreciable (if at times flawed) allegorical work that heralded the writer’s artistic apex before encounters with recalcitrant editorial policies and a fickle audience caused his work’s quality to descend from dramatic pathos to dogmatic polemics.² As a result critical investigations of Cable’s novel have tended to cluster around two related foci: the author’s views on Southern racial politics or the literary strategies Cable employed while attempting to present these racial views to potentially hostile readers. Thus Barbara Ladd characterizes the text as a locus for “deeply embedded cultural conflict between a nationalist principle of segregation and a colonialist principle of assimilation” in the post-Civil War South.³ Brian Hochman and Gavin Jones debate whether the sound of the novel’s “black speech” unifies or separates characters by racial lines⁴ and Robert Allen Alexander Jr. argues that Cable’s black characters are progressive because they do not fit the two stock black archetypes of nineteenth-century culture: dangerous mutineer or accommodating, cheerful servant.⁵ Underlying these critiques is a pivotal assumption: when engaging with post and antebellum Southern culture, whether allegedly adopting an egalitarian or ethnocentric stance on issues of race—Cable’s prima facie concern in The Grandissimes is the contentious relationship between the country’s black and white inhabitants.

This assumption is restricting. Race figures prominently in The Grandissimes,but questions of African American enfranchisement, white guilt, and the historical burden of slavery often resonate within and from cultural issues beyond the black/white social divide. Indeed, historian John Hope Franklin elucidates the relation between slavery and public welfare in the South when he claims the region “lagged behind the rest of the country in social reform generally because of its obsession with defending slavery and engaging in the struggle for power in national politics.”⁶ Once slavery was eradicated, the region was forced to attend to the welfare of its masses because it was now reliant upon a wage-labor system.⁷ With such connections in mind, I examine Cable’s racial depictions in The Grandissimes as one locus amongst many contributing to what I believe is the work’s preeminent focus: the South’s desperate economic situation following the Civil War and the region’s attempts to rejuvenate its mercantile prowess. Because slavery and its abolishment cannot be divorced from the Southern economy and its post-war devastation, a discussion of its eradication necessarily touches upon the region’s life-quality, public health, and governmental trade regulation—concerns which, I argue, are as central to understanding The Grandissimes as the peculiar institution itself.

Writing his novel immediately after Reconstruction, Cable found ample opportunity to observe connections between the South’s prejudice, financial state, and public health. The removal of federal troops from Louisiana, allegedly occasioned by the Compromise of 1877,⁸ furthered the political resurgence of Southern Democratic Redeemers and their platform of black disenfranchisement and states’ rights advocacy. At the same time, economic and epidemiological crisis crippled an already stunted Southern economy’s growth. In addition to debts incurred by the war and a fragile agricultural infrastructure, the national financial panic of 1873 made attempts to improve the region’s financial situation particularly difficult. Five years later, a crippling epidemic of yellow fever, believed by many to be the result of lax quarantine and port sanitation, further burdened the former Confederacy as maritime trade was disrupted and market exchange slowed due to widespread death and population dispersion. Such factors served to augment a growing sense of frustration and futility in the minds of many Southern progressives as gains made in civil rights, financial recovery, and disease prevention seemed continually undone by adherence to archaic race/class prejudice and reliance...