Book contents
- Death and the American South
- Series page
- Death and the American South
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Introduction: Death and the American South
- 1 Mutilated Bodies, Living Specters: Scalpings and Beheadings in the Early South
- 2 The Usable Death: Evangelicals, Anglicans, and the Politics of Dying in the Late-Colonial Lowcountry
- 3 When “History Becomes Fable Instead of Fact”: The Deaths and Resurrections of Virginia’s Leading Revolutionaries
- 4 American Mourning: Catastrophe, Public Grief, and the Making of Civic Identity in the Early National South
- 5 To Claim One’s Own: Death and the Body in the Daily Politics of Antebellum Slavery
- 6 Nativists and Strangers: Yellow Fever and Immigrant Mortality in Antebellum Charleston, South Carolina
- 7 “Cumberer of the Earth”: Suffering and Suicide among the Faithful in the Civil War South
- 8 The “Translation” of Lundy Harris: Interpreting Death out of the Confusion of Sexuality, Violence, and Religion in the New South
- 9 “He’s Only Away”: Condolence Literature and the Emergence of a Modern South
- 10 “A Monument to Judge Lynch”: Racial Violence, Symbolic Death, and Black Resistance in Jim Crow Mississippi
- 11 Reframing the Indian Dead: Removal-Era Cherokee Graves and the Changing Landscape of Southern Memory
- Index
6 - Nativists and Strangers: Yellow Fever and Immigrant Mortality in Antebellum Charleston, South Carolina
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014
Book contents
- Death and the American South
- Series page
- Death and the American South
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Introduction: Death and the American South
- 1 Mutilated Bodies, Living Specters: Scalpings and Beheadings in the Early South
- 2 The Usable Death: Evangelicals, Anglicans, and the Politics of Dying in the Late-Colonial Lowcountry
- 3 When “History Becomes Fable Instead of Fact”: The Deaths and Resurrections of Virginia’s Leading Revolutionaries
- 4 American Mourning: Catastrophe, Public Grief, and the Making of Civic Identity in the Early National South
- 5 To Claim One’s Own: Death and the Body in the Daily Politics of Antebellum Slavery
- 6 Nativists and Strangers: Yellow Fever and Immigrant Mortality in Antebellum Charleston, South Carolina
- 7 “Cumberer of the Earth”: Suffering and Suicide among the Faithful in the Civil War South
- 8 The “Translation” of Lundy Harris: Interpreting Death out of the Confusion of Sexuality, Violence, and Religion in the New South
- 9 “He’s Only Away”: Condolence Literature and the Emergence of a Modern South
- 10 “A Monument to Judge Lynch”: Racial Violence, Symbolic Death, and Black Resistance in Jim Crow Mississippi
- 11 Reframing the Indian Dead: Removal-Era Cherokee Graves and the Changing Landscape of Southern Memory
- Index
Summary
Yellow fever was a regular visitor to the Old South, and Charleston had the displeasure of bearing the brunt of yellow fever mortalities, rivaled only by New Orleans and Savannah in death rates. European immigrants who settled in Charleston died at higher rates than native white Southerners for a variety of reasons, mostly related to lack of resistance to the disease but also indicative of social class and gender. Yellow fever also threatened people legally defined as property. Charleston was an urban slave society, and when slaves died of yellow fever, the monetary losses inspired slaveholding elite to support public health measures. Relations between Irish and African Americans were generally more hostile than those between Germans and black Southerners. Many immigrants had not been socialized to racism, and they were slow to react to the norms of southern society, especially as racial lines hardened in the late antebellum era.
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- Death and the American South , pp. 131 - 152Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014