The crucible of disease: trauma, memory, and national reconciliation during the yellow fever epidemic of 1878.

FEW SOUTHERN WHITES WERE MORE PASSIONATE ABOUT OR MORE DEDICATED to the Confederacy and the Lost Cause than Father Abram J. Ryan, a poet and Catholic priest in New Orleans and other southern cities. During the Civil War he served as a chaplain in the Confederate army exhorting his southern brethren to drive back their northern invaders. After the war he refused to be reconstructed. He championed the Lost Cause and wrote dozens of poems that grieved over the Confederate dead, extolled southern soldiers, and generally lauded southern virtue. "Our heroes in Gray," Ryan wrote in one of his most famous poems, "C.S.A.," would never be forgotten: "Their memories e'er shall remain for us." Moreover, he continued to defend the righteousness of the South. He lionized Robert E. Lee for "Shielding the feeble, smiting the strong, / Guarding the right, avenging the wrong...." Ryan's verses brought him enormous fame. One version of his book-length collection of poems was so popular that it went through twelve editions between 1880 and 1892. By the mid-1870s Ryan had received the title "poet-priest" of the Lost Cause. (1)

Ryan's feelings toward northerners and toward the Union changed considerably after a devastating yellow fever outbreak in 1878 ravaged much of the South and was met by a massive relief effort on the part of northern whites. During the summer and fall the pestilence claimed over 20,000 lives and infected roughly 120,000 people. Northerners rushed to help the suffering South by sending funds, goods, doctors, nurses, and letters. In response, Ryan claimed that the nation had been reconciled. In the aftermath of the epidemic, he put these emotions to verse in his aptly titled "Reunited":

   For at the touch of Mercy's hand
   The North and South stood side by side:
   The Bride of Snow, the Bride of Sun,
   In Charity's espousals are made one.

It was a requital for the bitterness of war:

   "Thou givest back my sons again,"
   The Southland to the Northland cries;
   "For all my dead, on battle plain,
   Thou biddest my dying now uprise:
   I still my sobs, I cease my tears,
   And thou hast recompensed my anguished years.["] (2)

In seeking to save the South, rather than annihilate it, the North had brought about a reunification that political Reconstruction had not. The traumatic days of 1878 had both assuaged the anguish that filled Ryan's memories of the Civil War and provided him an opportunity to claim national fidelity.

While historians of post-Civil War sectional reconciliation have generally neglected the 1878 epidemic, they have paid a great deal of attention to intersections of memory and reunion. These scholars, especially Nina Silber and David W. Blight, have detailed the ways northern and southern whites reconciled at the expense of justice and equality for African Americans. Blight's award-winning Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory shows how memories of the Civil War served as powerful forces in white reconciliation and black marginalization. Indeed, a contest of memories replaced the contest of armies. Most African Americans, as Blight suggests, maintained an emancipationist vision of the Civil War, constructing it as a battle for racial liberation and civil equality. Most northern and southern whites, however, did not share this view. In the late 1860s and 1870s they increasingly centered their historical memories on the gallantry and heroism of the white combatants--regardless of regional affiliation. Memorial Day services, although initiated by African Americans, quickly became grieving rituals where Yankees and former Confederates celebrated one another's willingness to fight. At the same time northern whites "forgot" that the war was fought, in part, for racial liberation and equality. Their historical amnesia, coupled with their new view of southern Confederates as noble warriors, facilitated their reconciliation with southern whites while undermining their commitment to protect African American citizenship. As Blight, Charles Reagan Wilson, and other scholars have shown, the myth of the Lost Cause provided former Confederates and their progeny with memories of the Civil War that sacralized their battle as a holy crusade destined for defeat. Constructing the war as a sacred cause helped southern whites cope with their grief and maintain authority over blacks. The creative remembering and the selective forgetting of aspects of the fratricidal conflict were paramount factors in establishing sectional reconciliation and racial injustice, and they helped create two so-called nations within the United States: one white, one black. (3)

This study of the ways that northern and southern whites responded to one another and remembered the Civil War during the 1878 yellow fever outbreak enriches understandings of their postwar reconciliation. (4) Although understudied as an episode of the post-Reconstruction era, the outbreak provides an ideal occasion for scholars to probe issues of trauma and memory in the forging of postbellum white American nationalism. (5) Analyzing a wide array of evidence--including northern and southern periodicals, personal diaries and letters, poems, cartoons, sermons, medical pamphlets, speeches, relief agency records, and mass meetings--this essay suggests that the traumatic epidemic offered an event in which whites from both regions could experience, articulate, and perform reconciliation.

During the horrors of 1878 anxiety pervaded the lives of millions of whites in both the North and the South. The widespread nature of fear created common feelings and shared experiences. Nationwide trauma, in turn, drove many to link arms against the illness. Yellow fever evoked sympathy from thousands of northerners, and as they donated funds and prayed for southern whites, northerners reconciled with them. In the midst of the benevolence campaign northern whites consciously effaced memories of southerners as belligerent evildoers seeking to destroy the Union. Instead, southern whites became stricken, yet honorable, family members in need. At the same time southern whites reconceptualized northerners and the South's relationship to the nation during the outbreak. Rather than regarding Yankees as aggressive invaders bent on destroying their civilization, southern whites now praised them as heroic compatriots. In effect, the fever opened a way for southerners to accept national unity without rejecting their love for the South or admitting wrong over slavery. In 1878 northern generosity, not northern armies, brought them back into the nation. After decades of sectional strife the trauma supplied Yankees and former Confederates moments to proclaim national reconciliation.

Current psychological and anthropological theories on memory and trauma inform this analysis of the outbreak. Investigating traumatic moments such as child abuse and earthquakes, psychologists have demonstrated that such episodes, depending on personal and social circumstances, have the power to create, erase, and transform memories and perceptions. As Craig C. Piers has put it, "[R]emembering is an active and reconstructive process.... [W]hat we remember is influenced by a number of factors, both at the time of the experience and at the time of recalling it." Cultural anthropologists such as Paul Antze and Michael Lambek have suggested that "acts of remembering often take on performative meaning within a charged field of contested moral and political claims." (6) What people remember and what they forget during and after traumatic moments is largely determined by their social, cultural, and political milieu. Building upon these theoretical claims, this study demonstrates that the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 constituted a traumatic national moment in which Americans dampened painful memories of sectional antagonism and championed hopeful memories of national solidarity.

Although the Civil War ended in the spring of 1865 sectional distrust and hatred continued to burn throughout the 1860s and 1870s. Over six hundred thousand men and women had lost their lives during the conflict, and animosities did not die easily. J. F. Simmons, a judge and poet in Mississippi, recalled that although "[t]he bitter fratricidal war was o'er, ... it had left a rankling, galling sore" in the hearts of most southerners. Many southern and northern whites held mutual contempt for one another. Traveling through the Carolinas and Georgia in 1865, northern journalist Sidney Andrews encountered a great deal of hostility for "d--d Yankees." He even had to flee one community before a mob lynched him for offending a local citizen. In turn Andrews exuded disdain for southern culture and citizens. He repeatedly referred to southerners as lazy and described southern minds as inferior to northern ones. "The average Southern head," he contended, "doesn't show near as much intellectual force and vigor as the average Northern head...." Other northerners in the South observed sectional tensions as well. In 1867 Mary Abigail Dodge ("Gall Hamilton") noticed that northern visitors stirred southern anger either by insulting southerners with what seemed like false "sympathy and pity" or by boasting "loudly of the superiority of Northern to Southern society." According to Dodge, such northern impoliteness aroused substantial "antipathy." (7)

In the late 1860s and 1870s divisions persisted even though there were several signs of growing sectional reconciliation. As Blight, Silber, Paul Buck, and others have shown, the so-called road to reunion was a lengthy process with many critical junctures. In 1872 presidential candidates Ulysses S. Grant and Horace Greeley invoked sectional harmony during their campaigns. In his acceptance of the Liberal Republican nomination Greeley claimed that "[t]he masses of our countrymen, North and South, are eager to clasp hands across the bloody chasm which has too long divided them." (8) Greeley was right: many white Americans did desire sectional peace and reconciliation. Crowds in Boston and New York City in 1875 applauded former Confederate troops as they paraded through city streets. (9) One year later, northerners looked to the celebration of the centennial to bring national unity. Scribner's Monthly hoped "that the Centennial heals all the old wounds, reconciles all the old differences, and furnishes the occasion for such a reunion of the great American nationality." (10)

Many northern and southern whites maintained sectional doubts and grievances even after the presidential crisis of 1876 ended without rebellion and the new president, Rutherford B. Hayes, removed the last federal troops from the South and pledged his administration to a policy of pacification. (11) Some northerners continued to question southern loyalty to the Union. In June 1878, for instance, the Washington National Republican claimed that in the South "the spirit of rebellion still lives and is liable at any moment to be again entrenched in arms." (12) Southern whites likewise cherished ill feelings toward the North. Recounting the years before 1878, Father Ryan wrote that "No hand might clasp across the tears / And blood and anguish of four deathless years." (13) While many white Americans sought and desired reconciliation, sectional friction remained strong in 1878.

The yellow fever outbreak of 1878, however, offered a traumatic national moment during which thousands of northerners and southerners could reconcile. There had been yellow fever outbreaks before, but none were as devastating as the one that began in New Orleans in late May, likely with the arrival of a sailor infected in Havana. While the disease spread slowly in and around New Orleans during June, the number of victims began to multiply in late July. Cities were hit the hardest. Memphis lost over five thousand of its more than forty thousand residents; authorities estimated that over forty-six hundred died in New Orleans. By December yellow fever (also known as "yellow jack" or "the saffron scourge") struck large parts of Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Ohio, and Missouri. After traveling from New York City to New Orleans in September 1878 one dry goods merchant expressed astonishment at the extensive reach of the fever: "[T]he country between Louisville, Kentucky and New Orleans is one entire scene of desolation and woe." (14)

Yellow fever was a horrible disease. In mild cases infected persons would feel muscular pain, probably vomit for several days, and swing from intense chills to intense fevers. In severe cases the skin would turn yellow as the disease incapacitated the liver, kidneys, and heart. The infected victims would then vomit digested blood that had turned black. Finally, they would become delirious, convulse, shake, and perish. Usually, death occurred seven to twelve days after the onset of symptoms. (15) One survivor detailed his horrific experience in a letter to the Detroit Evening News. Headache and intense muscular pain, he remembered, were followed by "an overpowering nausea in my stomach, and my mouth filled. My nurse said not a word, but turned deadly pale. As I saw an inky substance before me in the basin I said lightly: 'This is the black vomit, isn't it?'" This writer described his "indescribable torture": "My stomach and bowels have a burning heat, as though scalded by boiling water or scorched by coals of fire." He eventually collapsed after seeing his bloodshot eyes and swollen lips in a mirror: "[T]his is the face of a demon!" (16)

The outbreak primarily took the lives of southerners, especially along the lower Mississippi River basin, but it quickly became a national catastrophe due to the economic havoc and emotional terror it wrought. As the fever spread, businesses closed, people fled from major cities, and dread descended on the populace. Illness and mass exoduses from southern cities put thousands of southerners out of work. Many found it impossible to obtain life's basic necessities. As the Washington Post reported, "The unprecedented spread and fatality of yellow fever, causing an entire suspension of business, has left several thousand poor people in this city who are destitute of means of subsistence and unable to procure work." On October 6 a New Orleans relief association lamented that "[h]unger and want claim many whom the pestilence spares." (17) One woman who had fled from Vicksburg, Mississippi, poignantly detailed the travails of many southerners. "[F]ood was painfully scarce," she cried. "For over a week I had eaten only bread." The North American Review commented on the widespread ramifications of the epidemic: "The paralysis of commercial interests in that vast region is felt far and wide." (18) By January 1879 some contemporary businessmen and economists observed that the financial loss due to the fever totaled "hundred millions of dollars"--a substantial blow given that the federal treasury expended less than $237 million in 1878. (19)

Illness and poverty led to widespread fear and panic throughout the South. When word came to the small town of Holly Springs, Mississippi, that yellow fever infections were on the rise, "[t]he very air, which seemed so health giving, was filled with a solemn awe, and dread and un-named fears possessed every heart." One Mississippi reporter observed that townspeople could not stop discussing the disease: "Whenever you see two or three of our citizens talking on the street you may bet your bottom dollar they are discussing either the quarantine or yellow fever." (20) Amid the terror, residents of Jackson, Tennessee, placed detectives and armed guards on incoming roads to turn away anyone attempting to enter. Towns in Texas refused trains, mail, and people from New Orleans lest they be tainted with the fever. "Shot-gun quarantines," the editor of the Memphis Appeal reported later, "were by this time (the 26th of August) established at nearly all points" in the Mississippi Valley. (21) The Washington Post noted "a first-class panic in ... small towns and villages" surrounding New Orleans, while southern poet James Randall claimed that the pestilence had turned all "men's lives to horror and to dread." As the McMinnville (Tenn.) New Era simply put it, feelings of fear and panic were widespread: "Our experience is one we will never forget, and it is a common one." (22)

Randall and the New Era were right, if extant diaries and personal letters are reliable guides. A Memphis physician who sacrificed his life fighting the pestilence wrote regularly to his wife about the city's depression. "The outlook grows more gloomy each day," he penned on August 24. The horrors wrought by the illness left indelible images in his mind and indescribable odors in his nostrils. "Some of the bodies," he lamented, "lie three and four days unburied and produce horrid smells in the locality." (23) In Jackson, Tennessee, a sixty-three-year-old teacher expressed his concern over the epidemic in his diary. "The yellow fever is still on the increase," he wrote in late August. "How dreadful the scourge! and what suffering are induced! Lord our God pity those cities and stay the ravages of the disease." Throughout September and October he continued to record the progress of the outbreak. "The fever still rages on.... O Lord my God have mercy upon us and save us." (24) Reverend Samuel Agnew of North Carolina regularly recorded news about the outbreak and commented on the moods of southerners in his diary. Every new case of the fever, he observed, led to "quite a panic...." In several entries Agnew acknowledged his own deep sadness and fear regarding the pestilence: "[E]ach day it gets worse.... Memphis is about depopulated. Vicksburg is suffering terribly. Oh it is fearful! fearful." (25)

Terror knew no sectional bounds. Indeed, fear went national. From New York to California, Maine to Florida, Americans fretted over the possibility of infection in their regions. "We are thinking a great deal about the poor fever-stricken cities of the South," Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote southern poet Paul Hamilton Hayne. "Every morning as the paper comes, the first question is 'What is the last account from Memphis, Grenada, and New Orleans.'" (26) On August 17 the Washington Post reported that northerners were anxious about the disease in their region: "Considerable alarm has been felt in some of the more Northern cities along the Atlantic seaboard, lest the pestilence now raging in the South should be brought among them." (27) A New York doctor warned northerners that "there is reason to fear that one of these eruptions is now marshalling its forces" to attack the North. (28) In San Francisco officials quarantined a ship that supposedly carried the disease. (29) There were numerous reports--some real, some false--of yellow fever cases in New York City, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., Cairo, Illinois, and other northern locations. (30) The New York Times best summed up the national mood: "No one feels safe." (31)

Contemporaries believed that the yellow fever outbreak constituted the worst epidemic and medical trauma in American history. "The disease from the first moved with a celerity and violence never known before," claimed Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper of New York. (32) A Tennessee physician concurred: "Surely the United States never witnessed such a thing before." (33) Harper's New Monthly Magazine grieved that "[t]he pestilence of yellow fever which has desolated the Southern cities this year will be known as one of the most fearful in their annals." (34) The epidemic was so powerful that time appeared to slow. "Every day seemed a week, every week a month, and every month a year," remembered J. L. Power of Jackson, Mississippi. "Verily, we knew not what a day might bring forth." (35) This event, in short, produced national trauma.

While the pestilence evoked common feelings of terror throughout the United States, it also offered white Americans an occasion to sympathize with one another, work together in unprecedented ways, and reconceptualize members of the other section. As the disease spread and poorly funded southern relief associations recognized that they would not be able to combat the pestilence alone, they sought help from northerners. And the southern relief workers were not disappointed. Thousands of northerners responded with compassion and concern. Putting grievances behind them, they contributed money and goods, prayed and wrote letters, and sent scores of doctors, nurses, and telegraph operators southward. While seeking to help southern whites, northern whites also expressed views of southerners remarkably different from those articulated in the North in years preceding the outbreak. Memories of southern whites as intractable and uncivilized rebels were explicitly effaced, and new visions of southerners as honorable took priority. During and after the fever many northern whites became more intent on regarding southerners as brethren than as adversaries. (36)

In the early stages of the spread of the disease, a number of organizations in the South formed relief committees. Masons, Odd Fellows, Young Men's Christian Associations, and a host of special committees worked to ease the hardship, but the largest and most prepared society was the Howards. Named after the English philanthropist John Howard, who spent several decades in the eighteenth century tending to the needs of the sick and suffering, the Howard organization in New Orleans formed in 1837. Composed of young doctors and businessmen, the Howards dedicated themselves to care for one another and their families in times of distress. They specifically agreed to pool their resources if a disease like yellow fever or cholera struck. From the 1840s through the 1860s the organization grew to include chapters in Memphis and other urban areas. In times of widespread need, the Howards divided their cities into districts and appointed members to care for the people of specific locations. The epidemic of 1878, however, proved too great for the Howards and other relief organizations. (37)

In late August relief societies recognized that they could not handle the present crisis on their own and pleaded for assistance. One Memphis relief committee formed by chapters of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows called to members of the fraternal order around the nation, "We need your sympathy, and God alone knows how soon your aid." (38) The Howards cried out for help: "We appeal to the charitable and the good; we appeal to the ministers of God for their influence and to their congregations.... In the name of a common country and a kindred humanity we invoke for our stricken dying and starving people, the charity of those whose homes and loved ones are secure...." (39) As one Memphis editor recalled in 1879, "The cry for food, for clothing, for money, for doctors, for as many as a thousand coffins, went out by telegraph to the ends of the earth, and a prompt and generous response came back." (40)

Many northerners answered with great energy. Southern requests for aid supplied northern newspapers and magazines an opportunity not only to encourage the North to show compassion for the South, but also to describe southerners as full-fledged members of the nation. "[L]et no man ... withhold his cash sympathies from the plague-stricken people of the South," the Cincinnati Star proclaimed. (41) Leslie's Illustrated maintained that sympathy must be made tangible with direct relief: "[T]hese horrors should at least inspire a genuine sympathy with the suffering, and induce on the part of all of us generous contributions ... for the relief." To withhold aid even for a moment was a heinous sin, "a reproach upon our humanity." (42) "Sympathy ... is cheap, and of little benefit," commented the Washington Post. It justified northern action by asserting the national membership of southerners: compassion "should be accompanied by substantial aid to our suffering fellow citizens of the South." (43)

Nineteenth-century Americans generally assumed that their federal government would do little in times of medical epidemics and expected that aid would be raised primarily from private sources. Thousands of northerners joined together to assist the South. Giving cut across class and religious lines. A committee appointed by New York City's Chamber of Commerce, with banker J. P. Morgan as treasurer, raised tens of thousands of dollars in relief. Philadelphia merchants also sent sizable sums. (44) Churches and schools in Pittsburgh held special days for children to donate nickels and pennies; coal miners and ironworkers gave several hundred dollars; and "[t]eachers and pupils of [the] Iowa College for the Blind" contributed $21 to the cause. (45) Northerners from a variety of religious groups also aided the South. Several Catholic nuns traveled to southern cities to care for the sick and needy, while northern Protestant papers such as the New York Independent informed their readers that "[n]ow is the time for compassion and help." (46)

Northerners showed impressive innovation in their fund-raising and sent a substantial amount to the relief campaign. A gospel choir in Martinsburg, West Virginia, organized a benefit concert, and actors in Philadelphia planned to hold special performances and send proceeds from the ticket sales south. (47) Two baseball teams in Kalamazoo, Michigan, offered the earnings from their game, while in Crete, Illinois, a group of "Little Girls" formed an organization, "The Milton Busy Bees," to solicit and send contributions. (48) The Howards of Memphis reported that they alone received over twenty-two hundred financial donations from individuals or organizations during the crisis. Total donations to all yellow fever relief efforts rose above $4.5 million. (49) In an era when political parties rarely raised over $300,000 for presidential campaigns and when average annual incomes for nonagricultural families hovered around $380, the amount raised in only months was remarkable. (50)

Donations to the South included goods along with funds, and northerners regularly commented on the national significance of their giving. Again a wide variety of northerners showed much creativity. In New York a clothing drive raised over 4,500 cubic feet of "blankets, bedding, mattresses, worsted shawls, clothing, shoes, boots, felt hats, straw hats, high hats and low hats." (51) Ice merchants in Gardiner, Maine, planned to transport 1,000 tons of ice to the fever sufferers, while citizens of Peoria, Illinois, sent 161 bushels of potatoes, 132 bushels of onions, 475 sacks of flour, and 240 sacks of meal. (52) Other northerners sent an assortment of goods, including crackers, chickens, tea, underwear, wine, clothing, canned fruits, ginger ale, soap, deodorizer, and mustard. (53) Northern benevolence reached such heights that by the end of September the Citizens' Relief Committee of Memphis claimed that the "generous contributions ... and what is now on the way to us, has placed us beyond the reach of immediate or probable want in the future. We have enough, not only for our own needs, but to enable us to assist the people of our country, and of the villages of this and the adjoining States." Newspapers claimed that the broad coalition of contributors made the relief drive an extraordinary national moment. "The Republic," commented one Memphis editor, "to its remotest confines, was moved...." The people of the North, he continued, "have filled our sacks to overflowing, many, many times, and yet they are not done." As Leslie's Illustrated observed, "The whole country is responding with royal unanimity and generosity to the appeals from the fever-smitten South." (54)

While some northerners donated money and goods, others either traveled or offered to travel south to alleviate the pain. Dozens of northern physicians ventured into infected regions to care for the sick, and many lost their lives in the fight. (55) New York's Dr. M. T. Keating, for instance, achieved notoriety in the city for his brave commitment to battling the plague. "Not one of all the volunteer physicians more endeared himself to the people of Memphis," wrote a local newspaper writer later after Keating fell victim to the scourge, "and his untimely death cast a shadow over a community bowed down with the weight of woe." (56) Northern nurses attempted to help as well. On August 27 the New York Times reported that "[d]uring the day a number of women called at the rooms of the Chamber [of Commerce], desiring to be sent South in the capacity of nurses." The next day the Times further commented, "The Chamber of Commerce was overrun yesterday with persons desirous to be sent to the South as nurses." Although any volunteer who had not previously had the disease was barred from entering infected regions, several who had lived through previous infections traveled south. (57) In Memphis over forty nurses from places like Detroit, Indianapolis, and New York offered aid to the sufferers. (58)

Several northerners volunteered as telegraph operators in southern cities and played crucial roles in raising local morale by keeping residents connected with the outside world. "At the height of the epidemic, on a call for volunteers for the telegraphic service in the fever districts, three young men of this city tendered their services," reported the Pittsburgh Relief Committee. All "died of fever while faithfully performing their duties." (59) Southerners deeply appreciated the sacrifices made by these telegraph operators. "They stood to their posts like men," reported the Memphis Appeal, "and did their duty like heroes indeed, in whom was united the broadest humanity and the tenderest sentiments of love for their fellow-men." (60)

While northerners enacted national solidarity through gift giving and self-sacrifice, they also collectively voiced appreciation for southern whites through prayers and letters. Many northerners beseeched their God on behalf of the suffering. In Ohio, for example, Governor Richard M. Bishop called "all Christian people in the State of Ohio [to] assemble in their respective houses of worship, and offer up their united prayers to God to check the dreadful plague ... and that He in His infinite goodness will restore health, peace, and prosperity to the houses and homes which have been called upon to mourn the loss of friends and relatives." (61) On September 10 the New York Times reported that "[p]rayers are now being sent up in all the churches imploring the mercy of God." (62) Lodge membership shared across regional lines could produce special concern. A resident of Muscatine, Iowa, wrote to a white Mississippian and fellow lodge member, "There is a wide-spread feeling of sympathy [in the] North for your suffering, and prayers are ascending that the term of the pestilence may be shortened." (63)

During the epidemic, group prayer unified countless northern whites and centered their minds and hearts on caring for those in the South. Prayer brought northerners physically and spiritually together in a common crusade, and contemporary observers hoped that group prayer would lead to a new sense of national brotherhood. In a letter to the Southern Relief Committee of the New York Chamber of Commerce, poet and prominent antebellum abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier underscored the ways prayer drew the people together in a new brotherhood. "The great sorrow effaces all sectional and party lines and sweeps away all [sectional] prejudices and jealousy," he wrote. "Under its solemn shadow we are one people, fellow countrymen and brothers united in a common prayer...." (64) Through group prayer northern whites sought to demonstrate widespread feelings of sympathy and brotherhood in order to transcend sectional animosities. (65)

By writing about and displaying their benevolence, northern whites exhibited collective expressions of care, concern, and reunion. All over the nation, newspapers and relief agencies listed the names of contributors and their donations. Northerners could also watch each other give both at donation sites and in newspaper illustrations. Donation areas served as physical proof of northern generosity--to southerners as well as northerners. Leslie's Illustrated and Harper's Weekly regularly carried images of northern benevolence, allowing people to see themselves and others giving. One example from Leslie's Illustrated not only shows donation boxes placed in conspicuous public areas, but it also highlights how benevolence transcended class distinctions as "respectable ladies" and shoeless children joined in the cause. The print further reveals several layers of watching. While newspaper readers witnessed donations, characters within the engraving watch one another (see Illustration 1). Donating and witnessing donations in newspapers reinforced and promoted compassion and reconciliation.

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Renewed communication among northerners and southerners also provided a vehicle for Yankees to express feelings of national community. The Pittsburgh Relief Committee drew attention to the importance of communication in a summary of its efforts during the fever. Financial aid, it reported, was always sent with "[r]egular correspondence by mail and telegraph." (66) One newspaper editor in Mississippi, J. L. Power, collected dozens of communications and published excerpts from them in his post-outbreak history, The Epidemic of 1878. Most letters expressed sincere care for the many ill, impoverished, and frightened southerners. A Grand Rapids, Michigan, resident encouraged a white Mississippian: "I assure you [that] our hearts beat in unison with you and yours in this your hour of trial." "Our hearts bleed for you," penned a Helena, Montana, man, "and we pray devoutly that the delivering angel may come to replace the destroying angel." In their letters, northerners and southerners in response regularly referred to one another as "brethren" and expressed collective feelings with phrases like "we pray," "our hearts," and "our Union." (67) The use of "our Union" reveals a substantial rhetorical change from the 1860s. Rather than referring to southern whites as them or they, northerners now chose first-person pronouns such as us and we to express common ties. In the "imagined communities" of these letter writers, southern and northern whites were again a collective entity, one nation. (68)

As southerners battled against the disease, northerners described them much more positively than they had before. Instead of portraying southerners as unrepentant barbarians, as had some northern newspaper writers and religious figures in the late 1860s and early 1870s, northerners now characterized southerners as noble warriors and heroic martyrs. Two prints from Leslie's Illustrated in 1863 and 1878 underscore the difference. In 1863 the artist depicted southern women as uncivilized. Their riotous behavior and the coarseness of their facial skin connote social anarchy and backwardness, and the slouching woman reveals immorality as she attempts to pilfer various goods. The women in the 1878 caricature differ substantially. These women agonize, but they are not rebellious. They maintain orderliness even though they are in desperate trouble. Their faces are smooth and their demeanors honorable. Even the kneeling woman supplicates with dignity. Her upright posture evinces honor. These prints show that for some northerners the epidemic provided a moment when images of southerners as civilized and praiseworthy replaced those of southerners as barbarous and disorderly (see Illustrations 2 and 3).

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Northern newspapers also offered more positive assessments of southern whites during the outbreak. While writers for the New York Independent had denounced southerners as untrustworthy "rebels" before the outbreak, they now praised southerners as noble. In one 1878 article the editor declared, "Heroes, indeed, are the Howards and others who have left their homes and their friends--some of them forever--to go amid pestilence and give Christian care to the suffering and dying." This description and the printed depictions reveal that southerners had been transformed from sinners to saints in northern appraisals. (69)

Ultimately, many northern whites hoped and believed that their actions and the experiences of trauma would both wipe out previous memories of national division and create new feelings and memories of American unity. The New York Times predicted that the pestilence would eradicate past animosities: "The North puts aside all irritating remembrances, and heeds only the cry of anguish for help which comes from the fever-stricken districts." The editorialist elaborated, "The truth is that the experience which the two sections are now undergoing should uproot lingering animosities and demonstrate the depth and unselfishness of the feeling which regards their interests as identical." Other writers made similar points. The ways northerners responded to the deadly disease, maintained a relief committee in Pittsburg, "showed that our American brotherhood had a deeper meaning than we generally attribute it; that all distinction of section or party ... were swept away by the universal distress and want, and the whole people were merged in the common humanity, benevolence, and sympathy." Leslie's Illustrated suggested that if "[t]he spactacle of the children of the North pouring their gifts into the lap of the suffering South" did not "disarm sectional hate and point the way to a closer brotherhood," then nothing would. (70) Harper's New Monthly Magazine best summed up the sentiments of many northerners by explicitly claiming that the emotions of national love felt amid the trauma of 1878 rose above their memories of sectional antagonism at the start of the Civil War: "The whole community was stirred as in the bitter days of sixteen and seventeen years ago, but with what a different emotion! This, at least, must be one of the great consolations of so melancholy a situation. It rebukes factitious fury and confronts us with realities. It alle-viates that sectional hostility which is carefully fostered not for patriotic ends, and it tends to confirm the union of hearts, without which that of hands is fruitless." (71) The epidemic furnished a time for northerners to forget sectional grievances and remember national unity as they enacted reconciliation. At the same time, widespread illness and terror allowed them to reconceptualize southerners as honorable martyrs, worthy of trust and respect. To observers in the North, northerners were more than northerners, and southerners were more than southerners. Together they were all Americans.

The trauma of 1878 also supplied many southern whites with an occasion to reconstruct their relationship to the Union and their views of northerners, but the process differed somewhat from the evolution of attitudes in the North. Scores of southerners claimed that northern generosity alleviated their sectional grievances and reunited the nation. Doctors, businessmen, relief leaders, poets, priests, and politicians joined in praising northerners for sending funds, goods, people, and letters. At meetings and conventions dedicated to thanking the North and through poems and proclamations, southerners ceremoniously reunited with their former antagonists. They praised northern honor and claimed that their painful memories of the Civil War and civil strife had been assuaged. In the process southerners reenvisioned northern whites. Instead of describing Yankees as malicious intruders, they now considered them invited guests and compatriots. To white southerners, the trauma and northern generosity created a national rebirth in which they and northerners stood united.

Yet southern whites responded to the epidemic in ways more complicated than mere acceptance of national reconciliation. The epidemic allowed them a moment to surrender symbolically to the nation without acknowledging any past wrong or guilt. By claiming national unity as a result of the outbreak and northern benevolence, southern whites preserved their belief that the South had not been defeated during the Civil War or because of slavery. Disease and generosity were their conquerors--not Union armies. Many southern whites maintained their love for the South while at the same time announcing appreciation for national fraternity. Proclamations of national affiliation, moreover, had pragmatic benefits. Some southern politicians and businessmen used claims of reconciliation to seek greater financial aid. The epidemic served as an occasion for a wide variety of southerners to assert new memories of northerners, participate in reunion, and claim national solidarity while retaining their sense of southernness.

Southern physicians were deeply thankful for northern support and the presence of northern doctors, and they announced their gratitude in a variety of settings. J. P. Dromgoole, a doctor from Kentucky, praised the "noble sons of the North" who traveled to the South: "A noble band of Hero Martyrs indeed, to plunge into the great maelstrom of death to save a suffering brother." (72) Likewise, in a speech before the Tri-State Medical Society in Springfield, Illinois, in November 1878 Dr. J. W. Singleton of Paducah, Kentucky, contended that as "heroic medical men from the North, South, East and West" bravely attacked the disease, they helped create a new national brotherhood. "Who were the principal actors in this melancholy drama?" he asked. "Were they only Southerners? No! Were they only Northerners? No! Were they American physicians? Yes, most gloriously yes!" Singleton, whose speech was printed in the St. Louis Medical and Surgical Journal and reprinted as a pamphlet, went on to claim that a new national fraternity emerged from the war on yellow fever: "Never before has the spirit of our national brotherhood been developed to such an extent as to make us feel and know that there is ever a chord in the American heart which needs only to be touched by the magic power of sympathy to cause it to yield the most precious fruits of benevolence and charity." A new republic had been formed, he concluded, "one in common fraternity and common solidarity of mutual interests, loving dependence and brotherly protection." (73) The national implications of the epidemic were clear. American doctors worked together to heal Americans.

Businessmen and southern relief organizers also expressed new emotions of national brotherhood with white northerners during relief society meetings and in annual reports. For many of these men their proclamations of national unity were part of an emerging "New South" rhetoric and ideology that highlighted sectional reconciliation as a means to improve the southern economy. (74) In New Orleans, members of the Peabody Association inspected a shipment of clothing that had arrived from the North, and "there was not a dry eye in the throng." The chairman of the executive committee of the organization became so "completely overcome with emotion" that he "exclaimed: 'Let any man use the word "Yankee" again in my presence and I will insult him. Were the people of the North our own flesh and blood they could not be more our brothers.'" (75) Other aid society leaders made similar pronouncements. Northern generosity, the Howards of New Orleans declared in their annual report, not only "brought solace and succor," but it also created "a brotherhood wider than birthplace and a patriotic sympathy as ample as the bounds of our common country. (76) A Memphis resident wrote to a friend in Washington, D.C., that the "assistance which the generous people of the North are pouring in upon us" alleviated much distress, and the writer expressed appreciation "that you have been active in your efforts to relieve in some measure the terrors of the situation that confronts your old friends." (77) For these relief leaders and others, financial aid and relief of illness had the power to dampen sectional hostilities and provided an occasion to call for emotional (and financial) reconciliation.

As physicians and relief organizers proclaimed their appreciation to the North and to the nation as a whole, southern newspaper editors joined the outpouring of positive sentiments. J. M. Keating, head of the Memphis Appeal, praised northern doctors, nurses, and contributions for easing his city's sorrow. To him northern benevolence was most impressive because it transcended regional, class, and social standing: "From far Oregon and Montana to Vermont, from villages, towns, and cities of all the busy northern States, from the miners' camp, the newsboys' home, from the banker and the farmer, the professor and the mechanic, from all classes of that section of our country" came "the light of an enduring brotherly love." "'Blood is thicker than water,'" he continued, and northern compassion had obliterated all anger-filled memories. "[N]o memories of sectional divisions, of political animosities, or of civil war, have been allowed to stay the steady flow of the bounteous stream that has brought us ... the assurance that we are one people in fact as well as in name...." "[B]eyond the froth and fuss of politics, and the deceits and dangers of demagogues," he concluded, "the popular heart is safe, yielding only of its fullness when challenged in the cause of humanity and brothers' lives are at stake." Genuine national feelings, Keating maintained, came forth during the medical epidemic. (78)

Other newspapermen echoed Keating's sentiments. An editor of the New Orleans Daily Picayune claimed that southerners would now remember northerners as heroes: "[W]hen at last this time of trial shall have ended, may it leave with us that sense of mutual dependence and that renewed sentiment of brotherly kindness which have been its fruits." The New Orleans Times concurred: "The strong sympathy shown for the afflicted cities of the South by their more fortunate sisters of the North is something not to be easily forgotten. On every side we hear of most noble efforts being made to raise contributions in aid of the afflicted; while the North, with lavish hand, is soothing the fevered brow of Southern suffering, she is building a monument to gratitude which will be luminous forever." (79)

While southerners did not construct a physical "monument to gratitude," some southern poets immortalized the efforts of northerners in verse. Several bards claimed that the fever and the massive northern response resurrected the South and the nation. The epidemic of 1878, they asserted, stood as a mystical and spiritual moment in which the South--its living and its dead--returned to the nation in peace and harmony, (80) Their verses demonstrate that the epidemic provided southern whites an honorable means to accept national affiliation. Northern armies did not conquer the South; benevolence did. In Mississippi, Judge J. F. Simmons claimed that while the South had not surrendered in 1865 it could now submit:

   The white flag waves! Our hearts are conquered now;
   The frown of hate has fled the Southron's brow;
   Our gratitude, unclaimed, is freely giv'n,
   Our vows of love are registered in Heav'n.

After the events of 1878, he predicted, affection for the resurrected nation would continue to grow:

   And now reborn in her maturer life,
   Oblivion fling o'er bitterness and strife,--Cemented
   be in one unbroken chain,
   To stronger grow and ne'er abrade again;
   And may we ever be in deathless love
   One brotherhood on earth and one above.

Another Mississippian, Emmett L. Ross, also announced that northern benevolence brought an end to hatreds from the Civil War, but as he pledged national fraternity, Ross maintained the righteousness of the Confederate cause. Even within a poem dedicated to national unity, he extolled Confederate southerners for their virtue:

   The Southron's hand that erstwhile drew his sabre from its sheath
   And dipped its blade in brother's blood to win the patriot's wreath,
   Now presses on a throbbing breast in pledge to self and God
   That Peace and Love shall ever reign where hostile armies trod. (81)

In their poems on the epidemic, Ross and Simmons cherished both sectional affiliation and national identification. They could have their region and their nation by declaring fidelity to the Union and to the memory of the Confederacy.

While poetry supplied a literary avenue to proclaim national reunion and rebirth, mass meetings dedicated to thanking the North provided other forums for southern whites to enact reconciliation. Even some southerners who had been among the most belligerent advocates of slavery used the occasions to articulate national solidarity. In New Orleans, for instance, Presbyterian minister Benjamin Morgan Palmer suspended his disdain for northerners and lauded their efforts during the epidemic. During the Civil War Palmer--like many of his Confederate ministerial colleagues--had charged the North with having a "malignant and vindictive spirit" and had encouraged southern men to battle. Palmer also led his presbytery to secede from the Old School faction of the Presbyterian Church and to enter the Presbyterian Church of the Confederate States of America, of which he served as the first moderator. In the years following the war Palmer refused to admit that the Confederate cause was wrong, and he remained a staunch advocate of denominational separation between northern and southern churches. (82) During the chaotic days of 1878 even Palmer's antinorthern sentiments fell in favor of nationalistic claims. He offered the introductory prayer at a December 1878 mass meeting in New Orleans held "to return thanks for the succor extended to the city during the epidemic of 1878." In his prayer Palmer praised God for using the national "sorrow" to bring a new sense of nationalism. Palmer concluded by asking God to further reconcile the people: "And may it please Thee to cause those threads of sympathy woven across a continent to grow stronger and stronger--that this great Congress of States, bound together in harmony and peace, may be prepared for a blessed destiny in the generations yet to come." (83)

Appreciation for the North also found political expressions in 1878 and 1879, as southern politicians promised national reconciliation in order to acquire financial aid and commented on the influence northern generosity had on southern memories. In the midst of the outbreak Louisiana congressman Joseph Acklen at a meeting of the New York City Chamber of Commerce "utter[ed] the thanks of the South for northern benevolence." Generosity, he claimed, would "finally close the breach that the late war made between the two sections." Northern gifts "shall have gained the undying gratitude of our suffering people." Predictions of national unity, Acklen hoped, would spur northern donations. (84) Other politicians contrasted memories of military defeat at the hands of northerners with new feelings of national fraternity engendered during the trauma. At a town meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, soon-to-be Democratic congressman and former Confederate soldier John F. House commented that "[g]rander than the victory of Appomattox is the victory won by the people of the North in their noble and generous contributions to the stricken and suffering South." While the South surrendered militarily in 1865, it only rejoined the Union after the plague: "Within the shadow of the dark wing of pestilence, beside the new-made graves of her heroic sons and daughters, with bowed head and tearful eyes, she extends her hand and surrenders her heart to the generous and magnanimous North." For House the epidemic was a time of national heroes--from both the North and the South. (85)

Several top-ranking southern politicians even held a special meeting in Washington, D.C., to announce their thankfulness and pledge their commitment to the Union. In December 1878 a group of southern senators and representatives, including Mississippi's Lucius Q. C. Lamar, Louisiana's E. John Ellis, Virginia's John Goode Jr., Tennessee's Isham G. Harris, and Arkansas's Augustus H. Garland, gathered to praise the "broad spirit of American patriotism." Claiming to represent "the whole southern people," the committee showered northern whites with praise and declared national solidarity. "Charity," they maintained, "has not only healed the sick, fed the hungry, clothed the naked, solaced the dying, gave hope and comfort to the widow and orphan and buried the dead. It has accomplished a work far higher and more important. It has healed the wounds of war." Benevolence had reforged the nation: "[I]t has bound our hearts to theirs; it has cemented anew the bonds between them and us; it has renewed the aspirations of all our people toward the idea of an American Union based upon affection." Love and compassion had triumphed over violence and hate. The politicians celebrated, "To-day, far above the victorious flag of Appomattox floats the banner of love and charity. Better, brighter and far more enduring are the victories of love and charity." Concluding, the committee pledged "the undying fealty of our hearts to the Constitution of our common country, and the perpetual Union of the States thereunder--not alone the physical, geographical and political Union, but a union of affection, of brotherhood, inspired by a common origin and a common destiny, ratified by the covenant of our fathers, and now cemented forever by their love and their charity to us and our people." (86)

A wide variety of southern whites joined their northern counterparts in 1878 in voicing and participating in national reconciliation. They articulated new sentiments favoring reconciliation through pronouncements, meetings, poems, editorials, pamphlets, and lectures. Throughout these activities, southerners expressed new views of northern whites. Northerners were now much-needed brethren, not condescending aggressors or vindictive, grasping conquerors. Southern whites, however, did not reject their southernness or their commitment to deceased Confederates. Indeed, there was no reason for them to do so. By "surrendering" during the epidemic, southern whites joined a nation they perceived as seeking their betterment, not their destruction. Predictions and proclamations of national unity, moreover, served as ideal ways to procure more benevolence from the North. Southerners had everything to gain from claims to national affiliation and nothing to lose. They could acquire funds and reconceptualize northerners without repudiating their beloved Lost Cause or admitting wrong. For southern whites, trauma allowed them moments to "forget" memories of sectional dissension and "remember" their common bonds as Americans. The nation, they claimed, had been reborn amid death, trauma, and benevolence.

After the fever subsided, memories of the epidemic served as powerful tools in the drive for federal legislation. As historian John H. Ellis has chronicled, the magnitude of the outbreak created widespread support for a national health agency. President Rutherford B. Hayes claimed in his annual message to Congress that many Americans desired the creation of a federal organization. "The fearful spread of this pestilence," he asserted, "has awakened a very general public sentiment in favor of national sanitary administration, which shall not only control quarantine, but have the sanitary supervision of internal commerce in times of epidemics...." (87) Several prominent politicians and businessmen who had claimed that northern generosity had reunited the nation led the battle for national health legislation. During the Forty-fifth Congress, L. Q. C. Lamar and I. G. Harris offered resolutions for the establishment of a national bureau of public health. Southern businessmen from New Orleans also lobbied for help from the federal government. One merchant justified the use of the national government to fight disease by positioning it as a natural extension of federal powers that had been expanded because of the Civil War. "As they [federal powers] have been extended by the war," he explained, "there can be no doubt that any measure necessary for the general welfare of the Union would justify any legislation to carry into effect the grandest powers so constructed." (88) In addition, some northerners continued to connect the epidemic with national issues and memories of the Civil War. In April 1879 a cartoon in Harper's Weekly asserted that "U.S." (emblazoned on the helmet, shield, and spear of "Athena Hygeia") had ended the life of "State Rights" during the epidemic. The sword of "Pestilence," the print insisted, was no match for the spear of "National Quarantine." This cartoon suggests that northern whites hoped the intensity of the 1878 fever had proved that the justification for rebellion--states' rights--was illegitimate and outdated (see Illustration 4).

[ILLUSTRATION 4 OMITTED]

Sectional ill will did not perish during or after the epidemic. It continued to flare up, especially during elections, in the 1880s and 1890s. Some politicians and leaders continued to wave the bloody shirt or invoke the Lost Cause to stir their followers. (89) Yet despite ongoing tensions, the trauma of 1878 was an important moment on the "road to reunion." Occurring at the end of Reconstruction, the massive and traumatic epidemic that riveted the attention of the entire nation was a moment when northern and southern whites began to reconcile, and they did so in myriad ways. As northerners provided funds, prayed in groups, and sent letters to the South, they expressed devotion and care for southerners. Moreover, throughout the epidemic residents of the North claimed that their feelings of national solidarity trumped divisive memories of sectional animosity. They reenvisioned southerners as valiant brethren in need of support and comfort. At the same time, the epidemic provided southerners an occasion to proclaim their fidelity to the nation without rejecting their past rebellion. Announcements of national reconciliation benefited southerners by helping to procure more aid and compassion from the North. Some southerners, too, reenvisioned members of the other section, characterizing northerners as saviors and friends. The crucible of disease had the power to melt sectional antagonism--at least for the moment--and provide northern and southern whites with a moment of national solidarity.

(1) Abram J. Ryan, Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous (12th ed.; Baltimore, 1892), 328-29 (first and second quotations) and 63-64 (third quotation). For more on Ryan see Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York and Oxford, 1987), 36-37; and Charles C. Boldrick, "Father Abram J. Ryan, "The Poet-Priest of the Confederacy,'" Filson Club History Quarterly, 46 (July 1972), 201-18. The author would like to thank Tracy Campbell, Kathi Kern, Mark Summers, Joanne Pope Melish, Joanne Meyerowitz, Ellen Furlough, Sarah Hardin, and the anonymous referees for the Journal of Southern History for their insightful and extremely helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

(2) Ryan, Poems, 78-80.

(3) David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2001); Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens, 1980); Thomas L. Connelly and Barbara L. Bellows, God and General Longstreet: The Lost Cause and the Southern Mind (Baton Rouge and London, 1982); Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy. For other works that discuss sectional reconciliation see Paul H. Buck, The Road to Reunion, 1865-1900 (Boston, 1937); C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951), esp. chap. 2; Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill and London, 1993); Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill and London, 1992); and Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991), esp. 93-296.

(4) Although this essay focuses solely on reconciliation among whites, I recognize that the price of sectional reconciliation was the abandonment of rights and justice for African Americans. Since other studies have detailed the northern abandonment of African Americans and their acceptance of southern whites, I have chosen not to replicate this crucially important point. For more on race and reunion see Blight, Race and Reunion; Silber, Romance of Reunion, 5-6, 25-26, 52-54, 125-41, 152-58; William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869-1879 (Baton Rouge and London, 1979), 115-16, 192-96, 239-78; Buck, Road to Reunion, 27, 34, 64-65, 67-70, 145-48, 283-97; Stanley P. Hirshson, Farewell to the Bloody Shirt: Northern Republicans and the Southern Negro, 1877-1893 (Bloomington, 1962); Rayford W. Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901 (New York, 1954); and Edward J. Blum, "Gilded Crosses: Postbellum Revivalism and the Reforging of American Nationalism," Journal of Presbyterian History, 79 (Winter 2001), 277-92. Some primary evidence tentatively suggests that whites systematically neglected the medical needs of African Americans during the outbreak. Several northern white missionaries in the South asserted that local blacks were denied relief. See "A Memphis Letter," American Missionary, 32 (November 1878), 332; and "Woman's Work--Relief Fund--Health Matters--Cottage Meetings--Northern Helpers," American Missionary, 33 (March 1879), 84-86. Although possibly accurate, such claims are difficult to substantiate and are generally outside the scope of this study. Further research on the experiences of African Americans during the outbreak is sorely needed. For more on African Americans during the epidemic see Dennis C. Rousey, "Yellow Fever and Black Policemen in Memphis: A Post-Reconstruction Anomaly," Journal of Southern History, 51 (August 1985), 357-74. For two studies that examine intersections of medical epidemics and race during the 1793 yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia see J. H. Powell, Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793 (Philadelphia, 1949), 94-101, 253-54; and Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840 (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1988), 121-25.

(5) For the most part, studies of the fever have focused on its importance with regard to medical issues and federal health legislation. See John H. Ellis, Yellow Fever and Public Health in the New South (Lexington, 1992); Khaled J. Bloom, The Mississippi Valley's Great Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878 (Baton Rouge and London, 1993); Margaret Humphreys, Yellow Fever and the South (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992); and Gerald M. Capers Jr., "Yellow Fever in Memphis in the 1870's," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 24 (March 1938), 483-502.

(6) Craig C. Piers, "Remembering Trauma: A Characterological Perspective," in Linda M. Williams and Victoria L. Banyard, eds., Trauma and Memory (Thousand Oaks, Calif., London, and New Delhi, 1999), 61; Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, eds., Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (New York and London, 1996), vii.

(7) Judge J. F. Simmons, The Welded Link, and Other Poems (Philadelphia, 1881), 24; Sidney Andrews, The South Since the War: As Shown By Fourteen Weeks of Travel and Observation in Georgia and the Carolinas (Boston, 1866), 40 (quotation), 292-300; Dodge quoted in Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 33. For hostilities see also Whitelaw Reid, After the War: A Southern Tour, May 1, 1865, to May 1, 1866 (Cincinnati, 1866); and J. T. Trowbridge, The South: A Tour of Its Battle-fields and Ruined Cities, A Journey through the Desolated States, and Talks with the People (Hartford, Conn., 1866).

(8) Quoted in James M. McPherson, "Grant or Greeley? The Abolitionist Dilemma in the Election of 1872," American Historical Review, 71 (October 1965), 51.

(9) Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York and other cities, 1988), 521-34; Buck, Road to Reunion, 134-36.

(10) "Topics of the Time," Scribner's Monthly: An Illustrated Magazine for the People, 10 (August 1875), 510.

(11) For more on the election and immediate aftermath of the 1876 presidential election see C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (Boston, 1951); and Keith Ian Polakoff, The Politics of Inertia: The Election of 1876 and the End of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge, 1973).

(12) Quoted in Woodward, Origins of the New South, 48.

(13) Ryan, Poems, 78.

(14) Ellis, Yellow Fever and Public Health, 39-59 (quotation on p. 53); Bloom, Mississippi Valley's Great Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878.

(15) For further descriptions of symptoms see J. M. Keating, A History of the Yellow Fever. The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878, in Memphis, Tenn. (Memphis, 1879), 306; Bloom, Mississippi Valley's Great Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878, pp. 4-11; and Jo Ann Carrigan, "Yellow Fever: Scourge of the South," in Todd L. Savitt and James Harvey Young, eds., Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South (Knoxville, 1988), 58.

(16) This report was reprinted in "Personal Experience of Yellow Fever," Hickman (Ky.) Courier, September 13, 1878, p. 1.

(17) "Agonizing Appeals," Washington Post, August 31, 1878, p. 1; Report of the Orleans Central Relief Committee (New Orleans, 1879), 81.

(18) "The Southern Scourge," Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 47 (September 14, 1878), 18 (first quotation); "The Public Health," North American Review, 127 (November-December 1878), 444.

(19) For estimates of the financial loss see Rutherford B. Hayes, "Second Annual Message," in James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789-1897 (10 vols.; New York, 1897-1903), VII, 492. For treasury expenditures see U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, 1789-1945: A Supplement to the Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1949), 300.

(20) A Chapter in the History of the Epidemic of 1878 from Private Memoranda (Holly Springs, Miss., 1879), 4 (first quotation); quoted in Deanne Love Stephens Nuwer, "The 1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Mississippi" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern Mississippi, 1996), 101 (second quotation).

(21) Keating, History of the Yellow Fever, 109 (quotation); "News of the Week," New York Independent, August 29, 1878, p. 9; "The Scourge of the South," New York Times, August 5, 1878, p. 1; Larry A. Bohn, "'An Oasis in a Desert of Woe': The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878 in Jackson, Madison County, Tennessee," West Tennessee Historical Society Papers, 50 (December 1996), 105-14, esp. 106-8.

(22) "The Awful Epidemic," Washington Post, August 14, 1878, p. 1; James Randall, Lines on the Yellow Fever Plague, Written for the Bazaar at Douglastown: "We are Doomed" (n.p., 1878); "Laughing Absentees: A Heart-Rendering Statement of the Situation in Memphis," McMinnville (Tenn.) New Era, September 19, 1878, p. 2. For another example see Keating, History of the Yellow Fever, 129-31.

(23) Marshall Wingfield, [ed.], "The Life and Letters of Dr. William J. Armstrong," West Tennessee Historical Society Papers, 4 (1950), 107 (first quotation), 109 (second quotation).

(24) Reverend Amos W. Jones Diary, August 25, 1878, p. 132 (first quotation), and October 16, 1878, p. 136 (second quotation), Amos W. Jones Papers (Lambuth University Archives, Luther L. Gobbel Library, Lambuth University, Jackson, Tenn.).

(25) Samuel Andrew Agnew Diary, August 31, 1878, p. 346 (second quotation), and September 2, 1878, p. 357 (first quotation), Samuel Andrew Agnew Diary, 1851-1902 #923 (Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), microfilm, reel 14.

(26) Quoted in Paul Hamilton Hayne, Poems of Paul Hamilton Hayne (Boston, 1882), 299.

(27) "Death's Awful March," Washington Post, August 17, 1878, p. 1.

(28) "Some Peculiarities of Yellow Jack," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 58 (December 1878), 127 (quotation); Isabella L. Bird, The Hawaiian Archipelago: Six Months Among the Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, and Volcanoes of the Sandwich Islands (London, 1875), 5. For another warning of the fever in the North see "A Physician's Experience," Chicago Tribune, August 3, 1878, p. 2.

(29) "The Fever on a British Ship," New York Times, August 27, 1878, p. 1.

(30) "A False Report of Yellow Fever," New York Times, September 1, 1878, p. 7; "A False Report of Yellow Fever," New York Timer, September 5, 1878, p. 2; "News of the Week," New York Independent, October 17, 1878, p. 13; "Editorial Notes," New York Independent, September 19, 1878, p. 18; "Reports of Fever in Washington," New York Times, August 26, 1878, p. 1.

(31) "Desolation in the South," New York Times, September 5, 1878, p. 1. Another New York writer claimed that yellow fever was "the one all-absorbing topic in this city." See "Our New York Letter," Christian Recorder, September 19, 1878, p. 2.

(32) "Plague-Smitten Grenada," Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 47 (September 7, 1878), 2-3. For another example see Report of the Special Relief Committee, I. O. O. F. [Independent Order of Odd Fellows] of Memphis, Tenn.[,] Containing Accurate Accounts of Funds on Hand, Received and Disbursed, during the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878 (Memphis, 1879), 7.

(33) Wingfield, [ed.], "Life and Letters of Dr. William J. Armstrong," 107.

(34) "Editor's Easy Chair," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 57 (November 1878), 936.

(35) J. L. Power, The Epidemic of 1878, in Mississippi: Report of the Yellow Fever Relief Work (Jackson, Miss., 1879), 3.

(36) This is not to suggest that all northerners viewed the South with compassion. Some believed that the disease proved southern social backwardness and that the North must merely protect itself from the South. This opinion, however, was clearly in the minority. See Ellis, Yellow Fever and Public Health, 60.

(37) Ellis, Yellow Fever and Public Health, 32-35; Report of the Howard Association, of New Orleans, of Receipts, Expenditures, and their Work in the Epidemic of 1878, with Names of Contributors, Etc. (New Orleans, 1878), 6.

(38) Report of the Special Relief Committee, I. O. O. F. of Memphis, 7.

(39) Quoted in Ellis, Yellow Fever and Public Health in the New South, 51-52. For another example see "The Panic at Jackson," New York Times, August 25, 1878, p. 2.

(40) Keating, History of the Yellow Fever, 115.

(41) Quoted in Nuwer, "1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Mississippi," 94.

(42) "Plague-Smitten Grenada," 2-3.

(43) "The Yellow Fever," Washington Post, August 20, 1878, p. 2.

(44) "New-York Subscriptions," New York Times, August 25, 1878, p. 2; "The Southern Relief Fund," New York Times, August 27, 1878, p. 2; Report of the Orleans Central Relief Committee, 73; Report of the Relief Work of the Young Men's Christian Association of New Orleans in the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878 (New Orleans, 1879), 30; Report of the Howard Association, of New Orleans, 3142, 55; Keating, History of the Yellow Fever, 349-50.

(45) Report of the Pittsburgh Relief Committee, Having in Charge the Collection and Distribution of Funds. Provisions, and Other Supplies, For the Sufferers by Yellow Fever, in the South-Western States in the Summer and Fall of 1878 (Pittsburgh, 1879), 17; Report of the Relief Work of the Young Men's Christian Association of New Orleans, 21 (quotation).

(46) "Editorial Notes," New York Independent, September 12, 1878, p. 17. For a discussion of Catholic nurses in Memphis see Randal L. Hall, "Southern Conservatism at Work: Women, Nurses, and the 1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Memphis," Tennessee Historical Quarterly, 56 (Winter 1997), 244-61.

(47) "Concert for the Benefit of the Yellow Fever Sufferers, at the M. E. Church, [Martinsburg, W. Va.] Tuesday Evening, Sept. 17th, 1878, at Eight O'Clock" (n.p., 1878); "The Actors and the Fever Fund," New York Times, September 9, 1878, p. 2.

(48) "More Hopeful," Chicago Tribune, September 17, 1878, pp. 1-2; "Woman's Work--Relief Fund--Health Matters--Cottage Meetings--Northern Helpers," 86 (quotations).

(49) Keating, History of the Yellow Fever, 337-59, 363.

(50) For expenditures on presidential campaigns see Robert D. Marcus, Grand Old Party: Political Structure in the Gilded Age, 1880-1896 (New York, 1971), 25; for the average wage see U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (2 vols.; Washington, D.C., 1975), I, 165.

(51) "Gathering Clothing for Yellow Fever Sufferers," Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 47 (October 26, 1878), 127 (quotation); "The Yellow Fever Sufferers: The National Relief Boat on the Mississippi," ibid., 134.

(52) "Aid from Abroad," New Orleans Daily Picayune, September 15, 1878, p. 1; Keating, History of the Yellow Fever, 361.

(53) Report of the Howard Association, of New Orleans, 56-57; Keating, History of the Yellow Fever, 360-62; Report of the Philadelphia Yellow Fever Committee (Philadelphia, 1879), 43-15.

(54) Keating, History of the Yellow Fever, 391 (first quotation), 115 (second quotation), 178 (third quotation); Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 47 (September 28, 1878), 51.

(55) Keating, History of the Yellow Fever, 117-18, 367-75.

(56) "The Epidemic," Hickman (Ky.) Courier, September 13, 1878, p. 3; Keating, History of the Yellow Fever, 181-82 (quotation on p. 182).

(57) "New-York Subscriptions," New York Times, August 27, 1878, p. 2 (first quotation); "New York Responding Nobly," New York Times, August 28, 1878, p. 2 (second quotation); "Mississippi's Stricken Cities," New York Times, September 7, 1878, pp. 1-2.

(58) Keating, History of the Yellow Fever, 371-75.

(59) Report of the Pittsburgh Relief Committee, 18.

(60) Keating, History of the Yellow Fever, 431-32 (quotation on p. 431).

(61) "Measures of Relief," New York Times, September 9, 1878, p. 2.

(62) "The Pest-Scourged South," New York Times, September 10, 1878, p. 1.

(63) Power, Epidemic of 1878, p. 80.

(64) Memphis Appeal, October 15, 1878, quoted in Peter William Bruton, "The National Board of Health" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 1974), 109.

(65) For a sociological interpretation of group prayer and group consciousness see Matthew P. Lawson, "The Holy Spirit as Conscience Collective," Sociology of Religion, 60 (Winter 1999), 341-61.

(66) Report of the Pittsburgh Relief Committee, 14.

(67) Power, Epidemic of 1878, p. 82 (first quotation), 84 (second, fourth, and fifth quotations), 115 (sixth quotation), 77 and 115 for "brethren."

(68) For more on nations as imagined communities see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York and London, 1983).

(69) "Editorial Notes," New York Independent, August 29, 1878, p. 18 (second quotation); "The Coming Presidential Election," New York Independent, January 4, 1872, p. 1 (first quotation). For more on northern views of southerners at the end of the Civil War see Edward J. Blum, "'Beginning a New War': Religion, Race, and Reunion after Lincoln's Assassination," Mid-America: An Historical Review, 84 (Winter/Summer/Fall 2002), 27-54.

(70) "North and South," New York Times, September 10, 1878, p. 4; Report of the Pittsburgh Relief Committee, 10; Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 47 (September 28, 1878), 51.

(71) "Editor's Easy Chair," 936.

(72) J. P. Dromgoole, Dr. Dromgoole's Yellow Fever Heroes, Honors, and Horrors of 1878 ... (Louisville, Ky., 1879), 7.

(73) J. W. Singleton, Medical Heroism of 1878 (St. Louis, 1879), 11 (first quotation), 10 (second quotation), 8 (third quotation), 9 (fourth quotation).

(74) For more on proponents of the New South see Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York, 1970).

(75) Dromgoole, Dr. Dromgoole's Yellow Fever Heroes, Honors, and Horrors, 99.

(76) Report of the Howard Association, of New Orleans, 13. For other examples see Nuwer, "1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Mississippi," 151; and the letters among members of northern and southern branches of fraternal lodges in Power, Epidemic of 1878, pp. 75-96.

(77) "Thank God for Frost!" Washington Post, October 21, 1878, p. 1.

(78) Keating, History of the Yellow Fever, 177-78 (quotations on p. 178).

(79) "Our Lesson," New Orleans Daily Picayune, September 4, 1878, p. 4; New Orleans Times quoted in "The Southern Relief Fund," New York Times, August 27, 1878, p. 2.

(80) My analysis of themes of national rebirth in these poems is strongly influenced by Jay Winter's work on poetry during World War I. See Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, Eng., New York, and Melbourne, 1995), 204-22.

(81) Simmons, Welded Link, 33; Power, Epidemic of 1878, p. 116.

(82) For information on Palmer see Thomas Cary Johnson, The Life and Letters of Benjamin Morgan Palmer (Richmond, 1906), 238.

(83) Proceedings of a Mass Meeting Held in New Orleans, December 6, to Return Thanks for the Succor Extended to the City during the Epidemic of 1878 (New Orleans, 1878), 5-6.

(84) "New-York Subscriptions," New York Times, August 30, 1878, p. 2.

(85) Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 47 (November 9, 1878), 155.

(86) Report of the Pittsburgh Relief Committee, 20-21.

(87) Ellis, Yellow Fever and Public Health, 60-82; Hayes, "Second Annual Message," 492-507 (quotation on p. 492).

(88) Ellis, Yellow Fever and Public Health, 60-82 (quotation on p. 71).

(89) See Blight, Race and Reunion; Silber, Romance of Reunion; Buck, Road to Reunion; and Mark Wahlgren Summers, Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion: The Making of a President, 1884 (Chapel Hill and London, 2000).

MR. BLUM is a postdoctoral fellow at Baylor University.