August 20, 2024: NashvilleStudying: Cholera

[This past weekend, I dropped off a piece of my heart in Nashville. So instead of my annual Charlottesville series, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Nashville contexts, leading up to a post on the city in 2024!]

On how a devastating epidemic connected Nashville to the nation and world, and what it meant for this particular community.

As is the case it seems with most everyone who writes about the Nashville (and Tennessee overall) cholera epidemics of the mid-19^th century, everything I know about these public health crises I learned from one contemporary and impressively thorough book: physician William K. Bowling’s Cholera as it Appeared in Nashville in 1849, 1850, 1854, and 1866 (1866). While Bowling does indeed as his title suggests document and analyze four distinct outbreaks of the hugely fatal disease, his focus is on the 1849 and 1850 epidemics, and for good reason: the 1849 epidemic took the lives of 311 Nashvillians (out of a total population of only 10,000 or so), and the 1850 epidemic nearly 500 (with 64 people dying in just the first four days of July 1850, for example). Moreover, the 1849 outbreak produced one of the single most noteworthy epidemic fatalities in American history: outgoing President James K. Polk, who left office with the inauguration of his successor Zachary Taylor in early March 1849, toured the South with his wife Sarah for a few weeks, returned to his home in Nashville (or rather neighboring Columbia) in early April, and quite promptly fell ill with the cholera that would kill him just two months later, on June 15, 1849.

That 1849 epidemic in Nashville was part of what historians of medicine call the third global cholera pandemic, an extended outbreak that seems to have begun around 1846 (when more than 15,000 people died in the city of Mecca alone, for example) and is generally seen as having continued until at least 1860 (although some sources define the third pandemic more narrowly through its worst years, from 1852-1859). One of the most devastated cities was Liverpool, a key embarkation point for immigrants to the U.S., and it was likely through that connection that the disease spread so fully to much of America in these years (although that narrative might also be due in part to anti-Irish prejudice): thousands died in outbreaks in St. Louis, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and New York among other major cities; and the pandemic likewise apparently traveled with emigrants on the Westward Trails during this Gold Rush period, with estimates of around 10,000 people having died on those trails between 1849 and 1855. In a particularly painful way, that is, Nashville’s experiences of cholera in 1849 and 1850 represented the city’s true emergence, just a few decades after its charter as I highlighted in yesterday’s post, as a more full part of the national and global communities.

At the same time, any community’s experience of an epidemic is specific, and it’s important to think about that layer to cholera in mid-19^th century Nashville as well. The death of President Polk was one singular but symbolic example of that kind of local effect, of course. But a more telling one is what the epidemic meant for two distinct African American communities in this antebellum Southern city: the more than 3000 enslaved African Americans (a huge percentage of the city’s overall population of around 10,000); and the roughly 700 free Blacks who lived in particular neighborhoods in (especially) North Nashville. When the 1850 epidemic hit railroad workers constructing a tunnel for the Nashville and Chattanooga line in July and August 1850, for example, it was enslaved Black workers who bore the worst of that outbreak, reflecting their particularly precarious position in times of public health crisis (as at all times). Whereas we simply know far less about the epidemic’s effects on the free Black community, a demographic on which Bowling’s book remains largely silent, reflecting the difficulty of fully remembering this small but vital part of antebellum Nashville. Just a few of the many ways this global pandemic can illustrate specific Nashville histories as well.

Next Nashville context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Nashville connections you’d highlight?