The British Evacuate Charleston, December, 1782

On December 14, 1782, British forces evacuated Charleston, South Carolina after an occupation that had lasted two and a half years. The day later became a local holiday: Victory Day. 

Sir Henry Clinton's capture of the city two and a half years before was the greatest British victory of the War for American Independence.  [Image: Siege of Charleston, 1780, by Alonzo Chappel, 1862]

The British and their Loyalist allies had gone on to gain nearly complete control of the state. Lord Cornwallis' decisive victory at the Battle of Camden in August seemed to solidify their conquest. [Image: Battle of Camden, by Granger]

At the height of their success, things began to sour for the British. In fact, the seeds of their ultimate defeat had already been sown. The army's strength was depleted by malarial fevers, dysentery, and possibly yellow fever. A smallpox epidemic was raging as well, although that hurt both sides. 

South Carolinians had an advantage over the British when it came to the local fevers: differential immunity. People who had been born in or lived in the state for years had often developed some immunity or resistance to the fevers. They might get ill, but they were less likely to be prostrated or die than the "unseasoned" British soldiers, and they would generally recover the ability to function more quickly. 

The British commanders knew that the lowcountry was an unhealthy place. But they expected to find relief from the fevers as they moved farther inland. The upcountry had was reputedly much healthier than the lowcountry. 

That may have been true before the region become thickly settled. But it had filled rapidly with white and enslaved black settlers following the French and Indian War (1754-1763). Lowcountry fevers migrated along with them, in their bodies. The British were caught by surprise. 

The consequences were dire. The fate of the 71st Highlanders provides an example. Cornwallis had posted them to Cheraw in June because he had been informed that it was a healthy location. By late July, fevers had incapacitated two-thirds of the regiment. Their commander removed them to another location. The Patriots  interpreted the move as a retreat, and they soon received many new recruits to their ranks.

When Cornwallis arrived at Camden to confront the approaching army of General Gates, he found that a third of his army was too ill to fight. Overall, he had only 2000 effectives, and the Patriot army numbered at least 3000. In spite of this, the British achieved a crushing victory.

But Cornwallis' problems had just begun. He moved his healthy men from Camden to the Waxhaws because it was reputedly healthy, only to find that it was just as sickly. Everywhere he went, fevers followed him. 

Cornwallis himself succumbed, and was virtually incapacitated during the crucial time in early October when the "Over Mountain Men" annihilated Major Patrick Ferguson's Loyalist detachment at King's Mountain. 

The experience of the summer and autumn weighed heavily on Cornwallis. In the spring of 1781, he decided to march his army north to Virginia, and gave as one of his reasons that it was the only way "to preserve the troops, from the fatal sickness, which so nearly ruined the army last autumn." Thus began the fatal road that would end at Yorktown in October. 

From many histories of the Revolutionary War, one could easily conclude that Cornwallis' surrender to Washington and the French at Yorktown ended the conflict. That was true for many parts of the old thirteen colonies, but in South Carolina it was far from the case.

Although the British now recognized the need to make peace, negotiations in Paris dragged on for more than a year. In the meantime, the war in South Carolina continued. 

Local resistance to British control had strengthened after Camden. Partisan bands constantly harassed isolated British detachments and posts, then vanished into the swamps and forests.

When Cornwallis marched North in April 1781, the Southern Continental Army under General Nathanael Greene moved into South Carolina. In September, they fought a British force to a standstill at Eutaw Springs. Both sides claimed victory, but the British retreated to Charleston and soon abandoned nearly all their posts outside of the city. [Image: Battle of Eutaw Springs, by Granger]

Eutaw Springs was the last major battle of the war in South Carolina, although skirmishes continued for nearly a year. In August, 1782, Colonel John Laurens, a firm opponent of slavery, was killed in a skirmish at the Combahee. 

Greene moved his army ever closer to Charleston. The British expected an attack, but Greene waited. At his camps along the Ashley River, his men, especially those from the North, suffered terribly from malaria and other diseases.      

At the end of November 1782, British and American negotiators in Paris agreed on preliminary articles of peace. The British commanders in Charleston did not yet know that, but they had been preparing for an evacuation for some time. The British had already evacuated Savannah, which they had seized in December 1778. 

In early December they began loading transport ships for departure from Charleston. This was not an ordinary military evacuation. In addition to the British soldiers, the fleet removed over three thousand Loyalists and their families. The transports were also loaded with  five thousand Africans who had fled to British lines in return for promises of freedom from General Clinton. 

Some of the ships were bound for the West Indies or St. Augustine in British Florida. Some were headed directly to England. The rest, especially those carrying the liberated Africans, were to the last British stronghold in the former thirteen colonies, New York. 

The evacuation was remarkably peaceful, even dignified. By prior agreement between the commanders on both sides, Greene's soldiers did not enter the city  until the ships were ready to depart. The last to board the transports were British and Loyalist soldiers, who marched from their lines at Boundary Street (now Calhoun) to the wharves, closely followed by Greene's men. The two forces were separated by only a few hundred yards, but not a shot was fired. 

The whites who remained cheered the entering American army as heroes. Many of them had also cheered the British when they arrived two and half years before. Such is war. 

The definitive peace treaty was signed in Paris in September 1783. The British evacuated New York two months later. Most of the Africans there were taken to Nova Scotia. Some of them later helped to found the British freedmen's colony of Sierra Leone in the 1790s. [See History and Other Stuff: Boston King: Black Loyalist, Minister, African Colonial Leader (mycandles.blogspot.com)]

[Image: The Evacuation of Charleston by the British, by Howard Pyle, 1898, Delaware Art Museum]

 

Most of the sources for this post come from Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011/2014.

Dying in Paradise: Colonial South Carolina

South Carolina was the wealthiest colony in British North America at the time of the Revolution. It was also the unhealthiest. It was long notorious for its deadly fevers, notably malaria and yellow fever, both transmitted by mosquitoes. 

Dysentery was another major hazard, transmitted by amoebas or bacteria in water. The “bloody flux” subjected many to enormous suffering and in many cases, an early grave. Smallpox and other periodical contagions added to the grisly toll.

Wealth and unhealth were intimately connected. Both arose largely from the cultivation of rice with enslaved Africans, the majority of South Carolina’s population from 1708 until the early 20^th century. [Image: Africans hoeing in the rice fields]

 It is widely known that whites suffered terribly from disease in the lowcountry plantation areas. In Christ Church Parish [now Mount Pleasant] in the early 18th century, the parish register records that 86% of baptized children died before age 20. 

Between 1750 and 1779, planter Henry Ravenel and his wife had 16 children. Eight died before age 5. Only six survived past 21. Of their seven daughters, none lived to be 20. Elias Ball and Mary Delamere, who married in 1721, had six children. All died before age 20. Many other families fared the same or worse. The death rate for whites in early 18^th century Charleston was roughly twice that of the average parish in England or New England at the time. 

Less well known is that Africans also died in large numbers from these diseases and many others. This is due to the staying power of pro-slavery arguments of the 19th century, which claimed that Africans were virtually immune to the “tropical” fevers that killed so many whites. A benevolent God had “designed” African constitutions for this work. 

Gov. John Drayton summed up this argument in 1802: “these situations are particularly unhealthy, and unsuitable to the constitutions of white persons … that of a Negro is perfectly adapted to its cultivation.” In 1850, the Lutheran minister and naturalist John Bachman claimed that Africans were perfectly designed for laboring in the lowcountry environment. [Images: John Drayton and John Bachman] 

In stark contrast, some 18th century observers commented on the heavy mortality of the enslaved. An example is Alexander Garden, a Charleston physician and naturalist for whom the gardenia is named.  Garden served for several years as port physician in the 1750s. In this capacity he inspected arriving ships for signs of contagious diseases. This included slave ships. 

Garden was shocked by what he found. Many of them had lost as much as one-third to three-fourths of their "cargoes" during the voyage from West Africa. The ships on arrival were "so filthy and foul it is a wonder any escape with life.” (Image: JMW Turner, Slave Ship, showing sick slaves being thrown overboard, alive, based on the infamous Zong Case 1783)

Many Africans also died on the slave ships in harbor waiting to be sold. Their bodies were often thrown overboard into the Cooper River to save the cost of burial. In 1769, the royal governor published the following proclamation in the South Carolina Gazette:

"A large number of dead Negroes have been thrown into the river … the noisome smell arising from their putrefaction may become dangerous to the health of the inhabitants." The governor offered a reward to be paid on the conviction of those responsible  in hopes of ending this "inhuman and unchristian practice." [Image: Charleston harbor, c. 1770] 

It did not end. In 1807, the last year that the slave trade was legal, traders brought almost 16,000 Africans to Charleston in the last four months of the year alone. The local economy could not absorb so much "labor" in such a short time. Hundreds died of disease on the filthy ships while waiting to be sold.

In April 1807, The Courier reported on an inquest on the body of an African woman found floating in the harbor. The jury concluded that she died as a result of "a visitation of God," shifting responsibility to the Almighty. They "supposed her to belong to some of the slave ships in this harbour, and thrown into the river, to save expence of burial."

This was hardly an isolated incident. The newspaper's editor noted that such "burials" had become so common that something ought to be done to stop it. His great concern was the unpleasant thought that Charleston's citizens [whites] might eat fish from the harbor that had "fattened on the carcasses of dead Negroes."

Alexander Garden also treated many sick and injured Africans, of whom he wrote: "Masters often pay dear for their barbarity, by the loss of many valuable Negroes, and how can it well be otherwise -- the poor wretches are obliged to labor so hard ... and often overheat themselves, then exposing themselves to the bad air ... The result was pneumonia and other respiratory disorders, "which soon rid them of cruel masters, or more cruel overseers, and end their wretched being."

Further Reading: Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011, PB, 2014) Winner of the SHEAR Prize for Best Book on the early American Republic, 2012.

If you liked this post, please follow my blog by clicking on the "Follow" button at the top right of the opening page of the post. Thanks! 

Mission Impossible: Reverend Francis LeJau in South Carolina

"There is one thing wherein I find the people here generally like those in the West Indies, they are so well persuaded that what they do is well, as to be very angry when their mistakes are shown to them and they will find cunning arguments to oppose truth itself." Francis Le Jau, 1709

Francis Le Jau was a French Huguenot who fled to England c. 1685 to escape religious persecution under Louis XIV. After his arrival, he was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, earning a doctorate. He then became an Anglican minister. 

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), founded in 1701, sent him to St. Christopher in the West Indies and then to South Carolina as a missionary. (Image: portrait of Le Jau, by Henrietta Johnston)

Le Jau arrived in Charleston (then Charles Town) in 1706. He was 41 years old and in good health. The colony, slightly younger, was not. The colonists had just driven off a combined French and Spanish attack, and were expecting another soon. Anglicans and Protestant Dissenters were feuding with one another over an act making the Church of England the established religion in the Carolina colony, which then included what is now North Carolina. [Image: A View of Charleston in 1773]. 

In addition, Charleston was suffering from a deadly epidemic of yellow fever. Samuel Thomas, the first and thus far only SPG missionary to have come to the colony, was among the hundreds of dead. Local officials whisked Le Jau away to his rural parish, St. James, Goose Creek, to escape the pestilence. 

Despite this grim beginning, Le Jau was optimistic. People had told them new arrivals commonly experienced a bout of sickness during the warm season of their first year of residence. They called it the "seasoning," as if one was being preserved like a piece of meat. 

"When I am seasoned to the country, I hope I'll do well," he wrote his SPG superiors in London. In the winter months, he proclaimed, the climate was the finest he had ever experienced, pleasant and productive. The people were prosperous and generous.

With the advance of summer, the tone of his reports to London began to alter. He suffered his first bout of fever, probably malaria. His family arrived that summer and all became sick. 

At first, he blamed the seasoning, and anticipated a speedy recovery of health. Instead, he remained seriously ill for more than a year with fevers and fluxes (dysentery or severe diarrhea). For months he was unable to perform his clerical duties.

Notes of disillusionment crept into his letters. His disappointment extended to his neighbors. They were not the good Christian folk he had at first thought, but consumed by greed. They would "do any thing for money." They treated their  enslaved Africans and "Indians" (many of whom they had also enslaved) barbarously. The colonists fomented conflicts among the various tribes and then bought war captives as slaves. 

The mistreatment of the Native Americans led to the Yamasee War in 1715, during which an alliance of several tribes nearly destroyed the young colony. They attacked Le Jau's Goose Creek parish, and he and many of his neighbors fled to safety in Charleston.

Le Jau's animosity towards his neighbors deepened when his white neighbors failed to help him in his time of need. Few had honored pledges to supplement his meager income, or to finish building him a house and a church. After six years it was still unfinished. [Image: St. James, Goose Creek]

"They deceived me more than I can dare say," he wrote to the SPG, and he urged them to inform other missionaries coming to Carolina to be warned that they "must be prepared to suffer great hardships and crosses."

For ten years, Le Jau was plagued by fevers, fluxes, and other diseases. In August 1716, he was attacked with a fever and digestive disorder that confined him to bed for months. In March 1717, he reported that he expected to die soon. His body was "worn out with labour in this sickly and desolate country." He died a few months later in the Carolina Lowcountry's cruelest month, September. 

Le Jau did not understand all of the connections between South Carolina's economic system and its deadly disease environment, particularly that between disease, enslavement of Africans, and rice production. 

Yet he sensed the root of the problem: "This would be a pleasant place if men were but willing to make themselves easy and improve the fruitful soil where anything grows without much trouble ... but they all aim at riches which are hard to be got and they neglect the peace of their conscience and life."

Sources: 

Frank J. Klingberg, ed., The Carolina Chronicle of Francis Le Jau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956)

Papers of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, London (Microfilm copies available in many academic libraries; a treasure for historians of colonial America)

Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pbk, 2014)

If you enjoyed this post and would like to become a follower of my blog, just click on the blue "FOLLOW" button on the right side of the first page. Below there you can also find my previous posts. Thanks! 

Yellow Fever and Quarantine in Charleston, South Carolina

During the Covid pandemic, countries, states, localities faced a stark choice: should they restrict human interaction by restricting commercial activity and risk harming the economy? Or should they allow businesses to continue to operate as normal, thus endangering people's lives?

In cities heavily reliant on commerce, epidemic diseases have long posed an agonising dilemma. Closing a city to trade through strict quarantine threatens people’s livelihoods. Leaving it open, even partially open, threatens their lives. As was the case with Covid, both options had their advocates and opponents. 

Charleston, South Carolina, provides an instructive case study of this dilemma. From its foundation in 1670, this southern port was dependent on global trade. At the time of the American War for Independence in the 1770s, South Carolina was the richest of the thirteen colonies. Its wealth derived mainly from exports of rice, indigo, and after 1800, cotton. All of these crops were grown on plantations worked by thousands of enslaved Africans. The reliance on this labour source required regular imports of human cargo. [Image: Charleston Harbor, early 19th century]

As a commercial port, Charleston received unwelcome imports of another sort: diseases from Europe, from Africa, from the Caribbean, and other North American colonies. Some of these imported diseases were highly contagious and deadly, notably smallpox. One, cholera, was transmitted mainly through contaminated water. But nasty as it was, cholera did not arrive until the 1830s and was only an occasional visitor thereafter.

Other imported diseases were transmitted by insect vectors, particularly mosquitoes. The most important were malaria and yellow fever. At least two types of malaria were imported: vivax malaria from Europe and the deadlier falciparum malaria from Africa. Malaria became endemic in South Carolina from the early days of the colony. It flared up every summer and lasted into the late autumn or early winter. Malaria was generally a greater problem in the countryside than in Charleston, especially after about 1750.

Unlike malaria, smallpox and yellow fever were epidemic diseases. They were not an annual problem, but when outbreaks occurred, they could produce widespread terror and high mortality rates. Until the early 19^th century and railroads, yellow fever was largely confined to Charleston and other coastal ports because its vector, the Aedes Aegypti mosquito is a poor flier. Smallpox, by contrast spread widely into the countryside, wherever infected humans travelled. But it came less often than yellow fever.

How to prevent or minimize the effects of epidemics was always a contentious issue for the city’s leaders. It was complicated in the case of yellow fever by difficulties of diagnosis and conflicting views of how it spread. One view was that it spread through the air, through miasmas, or bad air. Another was that it was contagious, passing from person to person. Neither view was correct. The role of mosquitoes in transmitting yellow fever was not established until 1900.

Miasmatists and contagionists differed over the best way to limit the spread of yellow fever. Miasmatists generally believed that disease-causing bad air was generated locally. Closing the port would do little to control the fever, they insisted. Contagionists viewed yellow fever as imported, mainly from Africa or the Caribbean. The best way to control it, they argued, was through quarantine measures. Ships coming from places where yellow fever was common or known to be present should be inspected by physicians. If found to be harbouring the disease, the ships should be ordered into quarantine. Crew and passengers should remain on the ships just outside the harbour or be removed to the pest house or quarantine station until they were no longer considered a danger. 

South Carolina erected the first of several pest houses on nearby Sullivan’s Island around 1707. Quarantine measures were the dominant way of controlling yellow fever, smallpox, and other epidemic diseases in the 18^th century. They were supported by most doctors.

Opposition to quarantine measures for yellow fever increased markedly after 1800. The change was undoubtedly connected to economic decline in South Carolina and Charleston’s sagging importance as a trading port. Interruptions of commerce became a more serious problem than they were in the 18^th century. Acknowledgement that yellow fever was present in a port could greatly reduce its seaborne trade and sharply curtail visitors and potential immigrants.  

Merchants, city leaders, and most doctors in Charleston became increasingly reluctant to declare the presence of yellow fever. They would first deny that a problem existed. When the problem became obvious, they denied that the disease was yellow fever but rather something less dangerous. When forced to concede that yellow fever was epidemic, they argued that quarantine measures would be ineffective, because the disease was generated locally through bad air.

The solution, these Miasmatists believed, lay in sanitary improvements. Eliminating sources of bad odours, cleaning the streets, removing organic wastes and offal, and providing clean water. These measures could have improved health in other ways, but they would have done little to stem yellow fever. 

In any case the city’s sanitary condition did not improve much before the early 20^th century, when yellow fever had already ceased to be a problem. One reason is that sanitary improvement was expensive and often collided with personal and property rights.

A miasmatic explanation of yellow fever, combined with attempts to deny the presence of the disease, had a clear economic advantage. It reduced disruptions to seaborne commerce. Imposition of quarantine measures was delayed, limited, or altogether avoided. 

The fact that most of the victims of yellow fever were “strangers” -- visitors and immigrants, mainly Irish and German – may have made that choice more palatable. It also reduced the number of immigrants, which some locals did not much mind. Charleston's reputation as a yellow fever hotspot for foreigners is one reason why it did not receive as many immigrants as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.

In 1840, Dr Benjamin Strobel of Charleston wrote a highly controversial essay on yellow fever. He accused commercial interests, boards of health, and the medical establishment, of endangering human lives. Worse, he charged them with "exploiting public ignorance" to rouse opposition to quarantine. The very people who would benefit from a strict quarantine were among its most vociferous opponents. [Image: Benjamin Strobel, 1803-1849]

Strobel demonstrated that yellow fever usually broke out and was heavily concentrated in areas of Charleston closest to the wharves and where sailors and immigrants lodged on arrival. He avoided the thorny issue of contagion. Instead, he argued that yellow fever was somehow transmissible. And he was sure it had been transmitted to the city from ships. He was ostracized for his efforts and left town.

In the 1850s, several lethal epidemics coincided with the opening of a steamship link with Havana, Cuba, a port notorious for endemic yellow fever. In the wake of these outbreaks, support for quarantine measures grew, with a Citadel science professor, William Hume, leading the charge. Hume had been an advocate of miasma theory, but his research convinced him that yellow fever was imported, mainly from the Caribbean. His ideas did not receive a warm welcome either. 

Yellow fever was absent from Charleston during the Civil War. Probably not coincidentally, thanks to the Union blockade, so was most seaborne trade. The last documented epidemic in the city occurred in 1877. How much the retreat of yellow fever owed to stricter quarantine is difficult to say. The decline of the port’s seaborne trade after the war may have been more important. Yellow fever continued to strike busier southern ports hard, notably New Orleans, which suffered the last epidemic in North America in 1905, and the region around Memphis, scene of the worst epidemic in the USA, in 1877. 

Yellow fever in the 19^th century South, as Margaret Humphreys has stated, “was above all, a commercial problem.” And sometimes, local authorities chose the health of commerce, as they saw it, over the health of the people. 

Further reading:

Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011)

Margaret Humphreys, Yellow Fever and the South (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)







  

Coronavirus, Quarantine, and Contagion: A Historical Perspective

The spread of Covid-19, or coronavirus, has led many countries and localities to resort to quarantine as a mechanism to contain this new disease. Medical isolation, as quarantine is often called today, has a long history, and its use owes little to modern medical science. 

Examples of isolation of the sick can be found in the Bible, in the Islamic World from the 7th century, and in medieval Europe. Interestingly, most of the quarantine measures currently being used to contain or delay the spread of coronavirus have been used for centuries or longer.

The practice of isolating people with diseases in the past, as today, was based on the belief that the sick were contagious: that they could infect the healthy. That was correct for some diseases, but not others. Even among those that were contagious, some were much less contagious than others. For this reason, contagion theory was controversial until the role of microbes in many diseases was firmly established in the late 19th century. Before then, contagionists could seldom demonstrate how diseases could be transmitted from person to person (or animal to animal).

Diseases transmitted by mosquitoes, like yellow fever, or by contaminated water, like cholera, complicated things for contagion theory. Opponents of contagionism pointed out that people in close contact with the ill often remained healthy, while people who had no such contact contracted yellow fever or cholera.

Contagionism's main competitor until the establishment of germ theory was the miasmatic theory. Miasmatists believed that most diseases were conveyed in the air, through miasmas, or "bad air" ("mal aria" in Italian). Marshes and swamps were considered to be major sources of miasmas, as was rotting organic matter, including human and animal wastes. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, the miasma theory gained many adherents, partly because the growing, unsanitary, and often polluted urban areas produced powerful, obnoxious odors. The miasma theory was wrong but it often led to draining of marshes and the implementation of sanitary reforms that reduced disease mortality.

In the 19th century, however, many traders used miasma theory to oppose quarantine, which could literally shut down ports for weeks or months. They argued that the source of the disease was not incoming ships or people, but miasmas generated locally by unsanitary conditions. 

As is the case today, a concern for health competed with a concern for the economy. As Benjamin Strobel, a Charleston, South Carolina doctor, wrote in 1840: "Truth and justice have been too often sacrificed to expediency and policy, and never more so than in reference to yellow fever. Has it not occurred, when the disease actually invaded us, that there were men who, regardless of the lives of others, and listening only to the sordid suggestions of avarice, have endeavored to conceal the fact?" (Benjamin B. Strobel, An Essay on the Subject of Yellow Fever, Intended to Prove its Transmissibility, Charleston, 1840, p. 9).

The term "quarantine" derives from the Italian phrase, quaranta giorni, meaning forty days. From the time of the Black Death in the 1340s, the Italian city-states took the lead in what we would call public health. 

During plague epidemics, 15th century Venice began to enforce forty days' isolation on ships entering the port. Passengers and crew could not disembark until that period had ended with no cases appearing. Passengers stranded on cruise ships where coronavirus has broken out will understand what a terrible prospect that was. And modern cruise ships are far more comfortable and clean than ships of the past.

Other ports imitated Venice, and quarantine was later applied to other diseases such as smallpox, yellow fever, and cholera (from the 1830s). The length of quarantine then and since has varied, and is usually shorter than 40 days.

From the 15th century on, many ports created quarantine stations for isolation. These were sometimes on ships, on islands in or near the harbor, or on the mainland at a distance from highly populated areas. Some were old leper hospitals, often know as lazar houses, after the biblical parable of the beggar Lazarus. The stations established to quarantine for plague were often called lazarettos or pest houses -- "pest" coming from the French for plague, la peste. Venice established the first lazaretto in 1403 on one of the nearby islands. (Below: one of Venice's lazarettos and that in Ancona, also in Italy).

The oldest surviving quarantine station in the United States dates from 1799. and is near Philadelphia (below). American ports began establishing pest houses about a century earlier.

Inland localities have often used a cordon sanitaire to restrict movement of people in and out of a town or region, where an epidemic was underway. The authorities close off the access points to and from the place to prevent infected people from spreading the disease. In effect, the whole population inside the cordon was quarantined.

Sanitary cordons were a common measure used to prevent the spread of cholera in the 19th century, and are being used again to curb or slow the spread of the coronavirus. China has used them in the city of Wuhan and Province of Hubei during the current coronavirus outbreak. Italy has cordoned off some towns in the North ("lockdown"), then the North as a whole, and now the entire country.

In most cases where a cordon sanitaire has been used, communities have been isolated against their will. But in at least one famous case, in 1665, the inhabitants of a village agreed to cordon themselves off to protect neighboring towns and villages. In that case, the disease was plague. The village was Eyam in Derbyshire, England. The isolation lasted more than a year and killed at least 260 people, possibly more than half the residents who remained. But the disease did not spread beyond the parish boundaries.

During major epidemics, public facilities for quarantining and caring for the infected often became overwhelmed. Authorities often commandeered private houses or other buildings as temporary pest houses or hospitals for the specific disease, such as plague, smallpox, yellow fever, etc. The image below is of a pest house and plague pit in London's Finsbury Fields. The image dates from 1865 but depicts an earlier period, probably the Great Plague of London in 1665. The plague pit next to the pest house can hardly have been reassuring, but the case mortality rate from plague ranged from about 60-90 percent.

Today, many countries are trying to combat the spread of coronavirus by urging people who think they may be infected or are especially vulnerable, to self-isolate at home. Authorities did the same in earlier times, especially during plague epidemics from the 14th century. The isolation was seldom voluntary. Families were often forcibly shut up when one or more became infected. This could be a death sentence for all of them. Daniel Defoe provides a harrowing description of their suffering in A Journal of the Plague Year (1721), a fictionalized account of the Great Plague of London in 1665.

In conclusion, most of the quarantine measures used today have historical parallels. Just as in the past, quarantine may prove more successful in some places than others. We may have the advantage of a better understanding than our ancestors of how many contagious diseases spread, but in the case of coronavirus, we are battling a microbe that is new and somewhat mysterious.

Slavery, Disease, and Suffering

“offers an unparalleled look at the early history of Charleston and the economic region of which it was a part. Focusing on the close relationship between the pursuit of wealth and the risk of death, McCandless forces readers to reassess the economic, demographic, and moral foundations of South Carolina’s past. A riveting, if sobering, work by a masterful historian.”  
Peter Coclanis, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, author of Shadow of a Dream

“compassionate, compelling history ... Peter McCandless writes with wisdom and humanity, inspiring us not just to think differently about the past, but also to ask how similar forces are shaping the world today.”  
Elizabeth Fenn, Duke University, author of Pox Americana

“This meticulously researched and smoothly written book provides the first comprehensive history of the Carolina lowcountry’s ferocious disease environment. It navigates masterfully among social, economic, cultural, religious, demographic, military, and medical history, from the 1670s to the Civil War, exploring every aspect of the deadly struggles with malaria, yellow fever, and smallpox.” 
J. R. McNeill, Georgetown University, author of Mosquito Empires

“McCandless does more than provide sound and accessible medical history. He adds an important social and economic twist. The knot that he deftly ties between slavery, disease, and the Lowcountry environment has devastating and lasting implications that stretch far beyond South Carolina. McCandless is quick to absorb and ponder the irony that the continent’s least healthy place swiftly became its wealthiest. Rice, indigo, and then cotton yielded huge profits to a tiny minority of intermarried merchant and planter families, while “most of the population experienced pestilence without prosperity.” Peter Wood, Duke University, author of Black Majority. 

In Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry, Peter McCandless paints a startling portrait of the troubled and troubling history of disease in the South of the United States from the colonial period to the first half of the nineteenth century....Due to his impressive grasp of a variety of sources, McCandless uncovers the problematic reporting of disease and the convoluted ways that Southern physicians often misdiagnosed illness. This analytical move elevates his book from a mere survey of sickness in the South to a sophisticated evaluation of the representation of disease; Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry can thus serve as a primer on how to research the history of public health before the microbiological revolution." Jim Downs, Connecticut College, author of Sick from Freedom: African American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction 

Link: Slavery, Disease, and Suffering