Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom

by Kathryn Olivarius

Disease is thought to be a great leveler of humanity, but in antebellum New Orleans acquiring immunity from the scourge of yellow fever magnified the brutal inequities of slave-powered capitalism.



Antebellum New Orleans sat at the heart of America's slave and cotton kingdoms. It was also where yellow fever epidemics killed as many as 150,000 people during the nineteenth century. With little understanding of mosquito-borne viruses--and meager public health infrastructure--a person's only protection against the scourge was to "get acclimated" by surviving the disease. About half of those who contracted yellow fever died.

Repeated epidemics bolstered New Orleans's strict racial hierarchy by introducing another hierarchy, what Kathryn Olivarius terms "immunocapital." As this highly original analysis shows, white survivors could leverage their immunity as evidence that they had paid their biological dues and could then pursue economic and political advancement. For enslaved Blacks, the story was different. Immunity protected them from yellow fever, but as embodied capital, they saw the social and monetary value of their acclimation accrue to their white owners. Whereas immunity conferred opportunity and privilege on whites, it relegated enslaved people to the most grueling labor.

The question of good health--who has it, who doesn't, and why--is always in part political. Necropolis shows how powerful nineteenth-century white Orleanians--all allegedly immune--pushed this politics to the extreme. They constructed a society that capitalized mortal risk and equated perceived immunity with creditworthiness and reliability. Instead of trying to curb yellow fever through sanitation or quarantines, immune white Orleanians took advantage of the chaos disease caused. Immunological discrimination therefore became one more form of bias in a society premised on inequality, one more channel by which capital disciplined and divided the population.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, American History, Health, Medical, Medicine

352 pages, Hardcover

First published April 19, 2022

Reviews

[Barry Nalebuff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was listening to the Slate Political Gabfest, and John Dickerson recommended this book. He said it was “incredibly engrossing, grisly, but really well-written. And it’s one of those books that transports you to a time that is at, on the one hand, extremely different, and on the other hand, you read sentences and you feel like you read them in the paper today.”

Thank you John for the recommendation and Kathryn for the ten-year project of writing Necropolis. The history of New Orleans is inextricably entangled will the tale of Yellow Fever. Here are some of the many things I learned. A staggering: 40% of those not “compromised” were infected in a bad year, and half of them died! (They died of an even worse form of a cytokine storm that is responsible for death from Covid19.) As a result, if you wanted to get married, get hired, or borrow money, you had to show you were “acclimated”—surviving yellow fever provided lifelong immunity. Actually, the financial benefits of acclimation only accrued if you were white. People falsely believed that all enslaved blacks had immunity. (Many from Africa had immunity, but not those enslaved who were born in the United States.) Yellow fever was even used to limit voting. Elections were held in July (peak pandemic season) and you had to have lived continuously there for two years (or own a billiards table) in order to vote. In effect, this meant you had to have survived yellow fever.

Yellow fever created what Olivarius calls immunocapitalism. Just as Covid19 exacerbates inequality, yellow fever perpetuated slavery and exacerbated inequality. And the whites who survived it thought that it was a sign they were somehow more deserving. Yellow fever was god’s tool for separating the wheat from the chaff.

Absent yellow fever, New Orleans might still be part of France. Yellow fever killed some 40,000 of Napoleon’s soldiers who were sent to Saint-Domingue (Haiti) to recover the island after the slave rebellion. That was the second deadliest Napoleonic campaign, only bested by the 1812 invasion of Russia. It is what led Napoleon to sell Louisiana to the United States.

Olivarius writes about our history, how people took advantage of the epidemic, how we made terrible medical decisions, how the union army civil war beat yellow fever (rather than the other way round), but why that was too late to save New Orleans. Dickerson was totally right: a fascinating, gruesome, and well-told history that is all too relevant to today’s world.

[Eavan · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best nonfiction reads in a while. Olivarius synthesizes a century's worth of New Orleans newspapers, periodicals, and books to paint a picture of life in the city amidst "yellow jack," the deadly yellow fever that levelled populations and created a whole stratified society based on acclimation.

I had no idea about this deeply held and once understood slice of history in the American South, and Olivarius charts it with an even (if sometimes leading, but undeniably strong) tone. We as the readers are meant to connect these epidemics to the area's Covid measures, and any time I wanted to roll my eyes, the author had a thorough array of sources to back her claims up.

I don't know how widely read this will be by non-lefty people, especially in the South, with phrases like "imunocapitalism" and digs at laissez-faire economies, but the material here is incredibly important and undeniably worth digesting. It reminded me of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, another earth-shattering look at the realities of slavery and race in the country that simply cannot be denied. Both books were difficult to get through at times though: we're reading the words of some of the worst racists in American history, and even me, with a strong stomach, was emotionally exhausted by the end of it.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tour de force of the systematic privatization of public health for personal profit in antebellum New Orleans. It seems there really is nothing new under the sun.

[Angie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can’t learn from the past if we don’t bother to actually read about the past.

This is a very interesting book about how powerful and wealthy people in New Orleans used a virus to shape policies to their benefit.

[ELK · Rating 5 out of 5]

A quick, fascinating and important read that does an incredible job of linking present-day pandemic denialism to 19th century New Orleans, slavery, "immunocapitalism," and ruling class greed. These legacies of slave-era necropolitics remain sadly and starkly resonant and relevant today, and while Olivarius does not make any explicit comparisons between the yellow fever denialism of yore and present day covid denialism (something I honestly wish she had done to emphasize the connection for present-day deniers who may not so willfully see these connections), the parallels are at times almost comically clear, and thus indisputable, and offer truly sobering insight into the framework, philosophy, greed, inhumanity and hubris that informs present-day disease denialism and a growing culture of anti-public health sentiment, as well as what is to come (utter collapse, ruin) the longer ruling elites hold us hostage to denialism for the sake of their own wealth accumulation.

Such examples of similarities/overlaps between then and now are: a culture of fierce denialism; rampant doublespeak; cognitive dissonance; thorough use of propaganda to minimize disease (e.g., "it's mild," "cases are low/being blown out of proportion"); eugenics masquerading as science ("only the weak/abolitionists die of yellow fever," "yellow fever is not contagious," "enslaved Black people are biologically immune," the very concept of immunocapital itself, etc.); a white ruling class barbarously capitalizing on the sickness and death of poor and working class people (e.g. doctors, lawyers, etc. seeing opportunities for wealth in a culture of unending illness, an elite class that grew obscenely wealthy as a direct result of rampant disease and no public health infrastructure); elites systematically obstructing public health measures because it would have been bad for business; collapse of healthcare; government abandonment; and, of course, white ruling elites hedging the impact of rampant disease to disenfranchise poor people - free Blacks, immigrants and others on the lower rungs of society - in order to gain and maintain a stranglehold on political and encomonic control of the region.

I highly recommend this to anyone interested in better contextualizing this current moment in time, whether from a position of historical, sociological, political or epidemiological interest. Olivarius has done a great job of assembling a ton of disparate information spanning decades into a cohesive narrative arc that lays bare how truly stuck in a horrific and barbaric past the united states (and sadly, due to our power and influence, so much of the world) remains.

[Jeffrey Bostick · Rating 5 out of 5]

New Orleans's history has been shaped by its intimate relationship with repeated epidemics of Yellow Fever throughout the 19th Century. Anyone baffled by American reactions to COVID will find roots of it here. "Adapting" to Yellow Fever was mostly a matter of denying it was a problem and/or shoving its costs onto the most vulnerable and the enslaved in order to maintain profits. Business and government leaders downplayed the health threat in order to protect their bottom lines. Newspaper editorialists admonished teachers to get back in the classroom even at the risk of becoming "martyrs for the sake of the children." Questions of who lives and who dies in a pandemic are not addressed as a collective matter of public health but are seen through the hyper-individualist perspective of what Olivarius calls "Immunocapitalism." Although another word for it might be eugenics. For example,

As Dr. E.H. Barton put it after the devastating 1853 epidemic, "New Orleans is one of the dirtiest and... consequently the sickliest city in the Union, and scarcely anything has been done to remedy it." What Barton failed to acknowledge was that this neglect was by design. Government officials saw their sole responsibility as protecting the market. They refused to spend tax money to protect lives -- especially of the poor and newly arrived -- by sanitizing and draining immigrant neighborhoods. The commercial-civic elite argued that health was personally established through acclimation, not publicly upheld. Despite evidence that public health measures had value against yellow fever in other cities, New Orleans leaders righteously insisted those examples were irrelevant. Instead, their best solution to yellow fever was not public health, but paradoxically, more yellow fever. In this view, water pumps and quarantines only delayed the inevitable sorting of human wheat from chaff. While some protested this system, most newcomers came to accept it. As unacclimated non-citizens as yet unable to vote, their practical choices were to embrace the filthiness of the urban condition and gain immunity, or flee, or die.

This whole book is a chilling reminder of the churning carnage on which so much of this city's (and nation's) hoarded wealth is built upon. We will be living with its ghosts for some time.

[Stacy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked it. Chronological read of the history of New Orleans and Yellow Fever. Fascinating ties to capitalism and many white people feigning immunity for jobs and status. Despite it being about death, was a fascinating and fast read.

[Sadie McLish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who literally knew

[Maria Beltrami · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting text about yellow fever and its 'use' in the south of the USA before the civil war, especially New Orleans. What particularly struck me, apart from the in-depth scientific, racial, political and epidemiological investigation, is the analogy between the behaviour and statements of the 'acclimatised', those who had survived the yellow fever and had become part of the city's elite, and what was said and done by some characters during the current pandemic. I'm talking, for example, about the 'muscular' attitude (I didn't get better and survive because of pure luck or because I adopted rational behaviour, but because I'm a superior being); the continuous putting economy before health; the shifting of blame onto the newcomers (immigrants et similia), etc. An interesting read, as I was saying, because, as always, by delving into attitudes of the past we can understand today. The sheer volume of information offered makes it a bit of an awkward read, although the author has done her best to make it flow.

[Trvlr Greer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting insights into the history of New Orleans and it's long standing coexistence with Yellow Fever. The book could have benefited from greater editing of material to remove a considerable amount of repetitive information.

[DW Rowlands · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was terrific, in the "inspires terror" sense of the word...it always amazes me the degree to which Southern elites in the 19th Century turn out to be horrifying in additional ways I wouldn't have imagined.

Essentially, yellow fever killed roughly half of people infected with it as adults in the 19th Century, though people infected as children had a higher survival rate. No one appears to have inherited immunity. As a result, Northern and even many Southern cities took substantial public health measures to try to reduce their susceptibility, and quarantined incoming ships to avoid importing the disease and getting epidemics that way.

New Orleans elites, however, took a different approach: since they were largely immune—"acclimated"—having had the disease as children or recent migrants and having survived, they chose to see yellow fever epidemics as a positive good. Their "acclimated" status, Kathryn Olivarius argues, gave them "immunocapital," being able to safely reside in the city year-round, while depending on the labor of an underclass of recent migrants from Europe, the North, and the rural South who had obscenely high death rates, since nearly all of them eventually got yellow fever, usually within a few years of arriving.

Taking a yellow-fever-denialist approach, along with a general desire not to do anything that would cost tax money or negatively impact trade, New Orleans refused to quarantine ships and to take any sanitary measures within the city, resulting in regular epidemics that spread to neighboring areas of the South regularly. Only after the Civil War—during which Gen. Benjamin Butler's occupation government had essentially eliminated yellow fever—did this strategy stop working, as New Orleans lost the trade dominance and inflows of immigrants that made it sustainable. Cotton trade routes shifted to rely on railroads instead of rivers and other, less-diseased, ports came to dominate. Finally, around the end of the 19th Century, New Orleans elites finally began to accept sanitary measures and quarantines, but it was too late, and the city's dominance as the metropolis of the South was lost forever.

[Dag Spicer · Rating 5 out of 5]

From BJIN on Amazon: (No energy to summarize it myself, sorry!)

"The history of New Orleans is inextricably entangled will the tale of Yellow Fever. Here are some of the many things I learned. A staggering: 40% of those not “compromised” were infected in a bad year, and half of them died! (They died of an even worse form of a cytokine storm that is responsible for death from Covid19.)

As a result, if you wanted to get married, get hired, or borrow money, you had to show you were “acclimated”—surviving yellow fever provided lifelong immunity. Actually, the financial benefits of acclimation only accrued if you were white. People falsely believed that all enslaved blacks had immunity. (Many from Africa had immunity, but not those enslaved who were born in the United States.) Yellow fever was even used to limit voting.

Elections were held in July (peak pandemic season) and you had to have lived continuously there for two years (or own a billiards table) in order to vote. In effect, this meant you had to have survived yellow fever.

Yellow fever created what Olivarius calls immunocapitalism. Just as Covid19 exacerbates inequality, yellow fever perpetuated slavery and exacerbated inequality. And the whites who survived it thought that it was a sign they were somehow more deserving. Yellow fever was god’s tool for separating the wheat from the chaff.

Absent yellow fever, New Orleans might still be part of France. Yellow fever killed some 40,000 of Napoleon’s soldiers who were sent to Saint-Domingue (Haiti) to recover the island after the slave rebellion. That was the second deadliest Napoleonic campaign, only bested by the 1812 invasion of Russia. It is what led Napoleon to sell Louisiana to the United States.

Olivarius writes about our history, how people took advantage of the epidemic, how we made terrible medical decisions, how the union army civil war beat yellow fever (rather than the other way round), but why that was too late to save New Orleans. Dickerson was totally right: a fascinating, gruesome, and well-told history that is all too relevant to today’s world."

[Annika · Rating 5 out of 5]

Necropolis is an utterly fascinating book about how capitalism, public health, immigration, slavery, politics, and culture were intertwined in nineteenth-century New Orleans. Anyone who has read much about the history of disease and medicine has come across the trope that plagues are great equalizers that reduce social stratification, but Olivarius convincingly shows that yellow fever was just the opposite: elites used it to reinforce social hierarchies of all kinds and to maintain their political and economic power.

Although other American cities implemented public health measures that ended epidemic levels of yellow fever, New Orleans politicians did nothing because doing nothing benefitted them. They created a system that Olivarius calls "climate gerrymandering"--holding elections when yellow fever was at its peak to reduce the chances that unacclimated (non-immune) people would vote. Yellow fever also killed off many immigrants before they could naturalize, ensuring that those suffering from the epidemic wouldn't be able to vote apathetic local government officials out of office. A culture developed in which acclimation (surviving yellow fever) was portrayed as a patriotic duty that turned a person into a true citizen of New Orleans and surviving yellow fever was seen as a choice that proved a person's willpower and moral worth. Acclimation raised a person's social and economic standing in the community, which Olivarius terms "immunocapitalism." As sectionalism increased in the years before the Civil War, denying the unhealthiness of the city and claiming that Black people could not die of yellow fever and were therefore intended by God to be slaves became part of white supremacist and pro-slavery ideology.

Olivarius also combines her powerful argument with great storytelling. She has a knack for telling compelling stories to reinforce her arguments, and she paints a vivid picture of what it was like to live in a filthy city where eight percent of the population--most of them recent immigrants to the city--died every year.

[Peyton · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The notion that only Black people could physically do the labor of sugar and cotton production had persisted across the Atlantic world since the early seventeenth century. Dozens of writers—many of them physicians—insisted the torrid zone was too hot, humid, tiring, and deadly for whites to labor in. Bryan Edwards, the self-styled Jamaican gentleman who chronicled the Haitian Revolution, attributed superpower health to slaves. He observed that 'the Negroes enjoy higher health and vigour than at any other period of the year' during the high summer, when they 'are employed in the mill and boiling-houses,' often working 'very late, frequently all night.' During the era of the 'second slavery' in the United States—when the domestic slave trade was powering the physical expansion of slavery further and further west—yellow fever (and malaria) took an increasingly central role in the proslavery argument, especially the claim that Black people of any origin were uniquely immune to this disease. Philip Tidyman, the Charleston-based physician-planter, wrote in 1826, 'Nature has, with a special regard to the safety of blacks, rendered them almost proof against the insidious attacks of this terrible disease.' Even when a slave was 'assailed' by yellow fever, Tidyman claimed, they were 'buoyed up by hope, from a consciousness that few of his colour are destroyed by it.' In the Southern states, Tidyman saw enslaved people 'working with cheerfulness and alacrity,' even as white laborers would become 'languid and sink from the effects of a torrid sun.' Black people’s unique health characteristics were thus 'of great importance to the agricultural prosperity of the United States, and closely connected with the general welfare of the nation.'"

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a reason historians have unloaded numerous awards on this book. Well written and groundbreaking, Olivarius reframes the past of New Orleans to reflect the reality of a city constantly beset by yellow fever. While in many locales disease plays the work of a grand leveler, in New Orleans according to Oliverius, yellow fever heightened inequalities and racial structures in the city. An excellent book that is thought provoking.

Two critiques. First, the emphasis on capitalism driving the callous response to disease is perhaps over extended. This is not to say people did not use the economic means of capitalism to exploit other humans. Rather, I find such explanations as lacking depth. Human exploitation occurs in most human societies. So what were the deeper religious and cultural factors that led New Orleans elites to use disease to solidify their status in society. Second, Olivarius does not engage with the immigrants arriving in New Orleans. As a result she misses the chance to examine how the Irish experience was shaped by a horrendous level of death in their society prior to their emigration (think Irish Potato famine). Finally, the chronology was not as tight as it should have been. She bounced back and forth throughout the chapters which perhaps leaves obscured some important discontinuities between periods.

Overall an excellent book and worth the read!

[Ranjani Sheshadri · Rating 4 out of 5]

The idea of immunocapitalism (and immunocapital) really resonates in the era of COVID. This book marks the ways in which ordinary citizens were powerless to fight against a power structure that relied on exposure to and survival of an insidious disease. Who died? Largely the poor, free and enslaved Blacks, and immigrants, but because theirs were populations that were considered endlessly replenishable and because work and enslavement continuously drew fresh blood to the city, these deaths were seen as necessary casualties to establish the hierarchy that sustained New Orleans: white, wealthy planters and enslavers at the top, who controlled the city council and refused to mitigate the epidemic in the most basic ways, blocking sanitation measures, refusing to declare that yellow fever had broken out if it broke out before the summer months when an outbreak would be "acceptable to publicize," and endlessly publishing propaganda that yellow fever was eminently survivable and that acclimation was the only way to prosperity. They, however, fled the city during the epidemic months, leaving New Orleans reeling from the epidemic without any safeguards or protections. This hubris is, predictably, the city's undoing. As New Orleans loses its prosperity post-Civil War as it again drags its feet on common-sense disease prevention and refuses to embrace the railroad as the new gold standard of transportation, the rest of the Gulf Coast simply bypasses its city of the dead and dying.

If I deducted a star for any reason, it was because each chapter seems to loop back on previous chapters in a way that felt a little repetitive. But this book provides a window into how race, class, science, and the pseudoscience of racial immunity produces an almost insuperable specter of death that dominated the South for more than a century.

[Maggie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating look at a not well known piece of history.

Really enjoyed reading this. Especially in the current covid epidemic it's interesting to see all the mirrors: covid isn't a problem but if you get and die it must be because of your own failings.

Beyond the yellow fever itself, the absolutely sickening methods slavers went through to justify their actions. It's a hard thing to read about but important to never forget.

I grew up in the south myself and it feels strange that none of this was ever talked about in school for me. It makes me want to look at my own families death records and see what lines up with outbreak years.

Very well written and easy to read although one of the hardest subject matters to digest.

[Melissa Bonier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely fascinating journey into the history of Yellow fever in New Orleans, which seems like a pretty narrow focus until you realize the impact this virus had on so much of our history (the Louisiana Purchase!) and you see how closely reactions to the YF mimic reactions to COVID. Not gonna lie— parts of it get real dry (we’re talking about life insurance actuarial tables?) but overall it’s a compelling, fairly fast-paced narrative, and well worth reading. I couldn’t stop talking about it the whole time I was reading it, because the scale of it all is so shocking, and it’s a story I’d never heard told. (Despite the US history degree!) Would recommend.

[704graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found the sections about capitalist manipulation and exploitation of disease mortality and public health measures fascinating. Found some of the cultural commentary about acclimation to yellow fever to feel like a stretch at times. The sections on cultural cache of yellow fever acclimation came across as a little too broad. I would have preferred some more concrete examples to ground this argument (which is still done to a degree).

The last two sections are amazing and is phenomenally insightful especially with the reactionary-opportunist exploitation of COVID at the expense of those very same reactionary’s health.

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is FASCINATING. I wish that I could rate it more than five stars. The author is clear from the beginning that the project is not a simple history of yellow fever. Instead she meticulously and thoroughly exposes the period in New Orleans history where yellow fever and immunity from yellow fever were utilized for economic power, to devastating effect. This book sorts through a mountain of historical sources to expose the thousands of deaths in New Orleans and beyond caused by the conscious choices of a society to wield disease, in concert with slavery, trade, and social currency, to achieve wealth and power.

[Ducky · Rating 5 out of 5]

"is it gay to die of yellow fever?" <- real questions posed by doctors in new orleans in the 19th century. A fantastic work of medical history, fascinating and wild. I'd known about the 1793 fever outbreak in Philadelphia and how it had been endemic up and down the east coast, but did NOT know that every city besides New Orleans actually took steps to control yellow fever, whereas the ruling class of New Orleans preferred to just import literally disposable labor every summer. Grim.

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an amazing piece of research. It’s remarkable all of the information that the author has been able to piece together. Overall though, I found the book repetitive. I think it could’ve been condensed into a shorter and more powerful piece of writing. Nevertheless, I’m very glad I read the book and enjoyed in particular seeing all the parallels to the Covid response in the US. There are still many people who prefer unrestrained capitalism to life-saving public health.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just wow. 19th century NOLA was such a different place but humans have always been the same. The justification! The denialism!
This book is an incredibly well-researched look at how the New Orleans elite exploited yellow fever to further wield the power of racism and capitalism.
Thank you John Dickerson of the Political Gabfest!

[Katy Nimmons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mindblowingly good. Completely changed the way I think about public health, “states’ rights”, and racism in the US broadly, and gulf coast South in particular. I learned a ton. This book will inform and infuriate you.

[Ilya · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found myself constantly finding yellow fever and covid parallels which was equally unsurprising and depressing. What I was surprised by was how little I knew of American slavery. This was an eye opening book that, despite it's subject matter, had an energetic pace that made it hard to put down.

[Jason S · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing work of history. Argues persuasively that New Orleans intentionally allowed yellow fever to spread in order to build wealth and capital for the elites. Amazing use of sources and detailed arguments. Well written…reads like a narrative.

[Arthur · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent

[Roman]

Very interesting book about the intersection of disease, public health, economics, and race. I would recommend it to anyone interested in New Orleans (today or its history) or public policy.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really like the concept of the book: a history of yellow fever in New Orleans. However, I found the chapters really disorganized.

[Ella · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid work of modern American public health history.