The Summer of Pestilence - Pages 131-192



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LETTER IX.
FAMILY AFFLICTIONS.

Saturday, Sept. 29, 1855.

You will probably have heard, ere this letter reaches you, of the sore 
affliction which has befallen me. My house is now to be numbered among the 
many in this our city made desolate by this terrible pestilence. I know 
not what to compare the sudden withering of all my earthly happiness to, 
save the withering of Jonah's gourd "destroyed in a night;" and never, as 
now, have I understood that prophet's words--"It is better for me to die 
than to live." God has taken four out of seven from my little household; 
and the death of the last three--Mary, our eldest-born, Hatty Porter, my 
wife's sister, who had lived with us for so many years that she seemed 
like my own child, and, last of all,

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my dear wife also--has come so suddenly, so unexpectedly upon me, that at 
times I can hardly believe that they are all gone. Yet it is even so. God 
help me to say--"Thy will be done."

When I last wrote you, we were all packing up to leave for Hampton the 
next morning. About dusk, a letter was brought me from Richmond, 
containing the information that Mary had been prostrated by a return of 
the fever, and that this second attack seemed then to threaten a fatal 
termination. When she left home, on Thursday of last week, we thought her 
so far recovered that she might safely leave; and our friends in Richmond 
having written us, begging us to send her to them, we determined that she 
should go. For two days after reaching her destination she seemed to be 
doing well; so treacherous is this disease, especially during what may be 
called the stage of convalescence; but on Sabbath the fever returned upon 
her, slightly at first, but making steady

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progress, until, on the day on which the letter was written, she had begun 
to throw up "black vomit." So soon as I read this letter, I at once gave 
up all hope of her recovery; not because I considered the "black vomit" a 
fatal symptom in the case of a child of her age,--for I have seen many 
such here recover,--but because hers was a case of relapse, always more 
unmanageable than a first attack, and because I knew that she had a 
shattered constitution with which to combat the disease. I gave up all 
hope of her recovery. Not so her mother. The strong love of a mother's 
heart made her cling to the idea that, if she could but reach her child, 
and nurse her with her own hands, as she had through her first attack, she 
might yet live. And at once it was determined that, while the rest of the 
family should stop with me in Hampton(*) for a day or two, her mother 
should proceed at once

(* Hampton is in the neigbourhood of Norfolk.)

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to Richmond; and with this expectation we retired to our beds.

Such were our plans. The plans of our Heavenly Father were very different. 
Awaking about midnight, I was conscious of that peculiar feeling which, to 
a person with a disordered nervous system, is the premonition of an 
approaching northeasterly storm; and, knowing how terrible these storms 
had been in the spread of the pestilence, the fear was at once awakened 
that the sickness of some other member of the family would, in our case, 
as in that of many families which I could mention, stop our going upon the 
very eve of departure. This fear prevented my getting to sleep again; and 
before daylight it was realized. Cornelia, the next to the youngest of our 
children, was sleeping in the room with her aunt Hatty; and when, about 
three o'clock, I heard the door of that room opened, it seemed to me that 
I knew what was coming as well as I did after the

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announcement was made that Cornelia was sick with all the symptoms of the 
fever. All thought of going was of course at an end. About sunrise the 
storm reached us; and by ten o'clock Hatty also was in bed with the fever.

In consequence of the derangement of all our means of communication with 
other places, and the necessarily irregular transmission of the mails, we 
did not hear again from Mary until, on Sabbath morning, we received the 
intelligence of her death on the Thursday before. She was but a child 
twelve years old; and yet, I trust, she had been taught of the Spirit to 
know and love Him who hath revealed himself to our faith--blessed be his 
name!--as "the Good Shepherd" who "gathereth the lambs in his arms and 
carrieth them in his bosom." More than a year ago, during a revival of 
religion in our church,--much of the precious fruit of which God has 
already gathered into his heavenly garner,-- she was deeply

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impressed with religious truth, and, before the fever first attacked her, 
had given pleasing evidence of a change of heart. During her last 
sickness, as I learn from letters from friends who were with her, there 
was much to encourage the hope that she now sleeps in Jesus. She was the 
child of many prayers,--given to God and sealed with the seal of his 
precious covenant; and why should I rebel, when He has only taken that 
which, before heaven and earth, I had acknowledged to be his?

On Friday, Hatty's fever took a turn for the worse, her brain becoming 
affected, and an irresistible tendency manifested itself to that state of 
partial and troubled stupor so common in this disease. On Sabbath morning 
she breathed her last. She too, I trust, was one of the precious fruits of 
the revival in our church a little more than a year ago; although, for 
particular reasons, she had never publicly connected herself with the 
Church of Christ. From the

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peculiar turn her disease took, she hardly spoke at all after we knew that 
she was in especial danger. I have learned, however, in my experience as a 
pastor, to look far more to the living than to the dying experience of 
those taken away, when I would know whether I might or might not have hope 
in their death; and, from what I know of her religious exercises, I 
believe that, although it may be said of her, in the language of the 
prophet, "her sun hath gone down while it was yet day," her sun has not 
gone down before the great work of life was done.

On Sabbath morning, my dear wife--the main earthly dependence of us all in 
our sickness--was attacked by the fever; and Grace, our youngest,--
originally taken at the same time I was, but who had recovered so far as 
to be about again,--having no one to check her, had overplayed herself the 
day before, and so brought on a relapse; and thus were we all sick 
together. That Sabbath-day was to me certainly the darkest

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day of my life. We had just received the intelligence of Mary's death; 
Hatty was dying; Cornelia and Grace--the only children left me--so ill 
that I had almost given up the hope of their recovery; and now she who had 
been our main earthly stay,--for I believe it is often the case that in 
such seasons of overwhelming trial the pious wife and mother exhibits more 
true Christian fortitude than the father, (certainly it was so in our
case,) and I should do injustice to the memory of the dead did I speak of
her in any other terms than as our main earthly stay,--she too was
prostrated by the fever.

There was no lack of kind attention on the part of friends. During all the 
earlier stages of the pestilence, and indeed until its greatest violence 
was passed, God had given me strength to render aid to others; and now his 
promise was literally fulfilled: "Give, and it shall be given unto you;--
good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall 
men give

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into your bosom." The members of my own church who were able to be about, 
and the members of the Howard Association, left nothing undone which they 
could do for us. Dr. Wm. H. Freeman, of Philadelphia, one of the first 
physicians from abroad to come to our aid,--who had laboured among us 
during all the long dreary weeks of the pestilence, and who, in connection 
with Dr. Wm. J. Moore, our family physician, had attended all the cases in 
my household,--was unwearied in his attentions, coming always twice and 
sometimes three and four times a day, and staying all night with us on 
Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Dr. Moore was himself taken with the disease 
on Monday, and of course could not come after that day. All that medical 
science and skill could do was done; yet all in vain. On Monday night Mrs. 
Armstrong began to throw up "black vomit."

Up to this time, although she appeared ill, she had not seemed so ill as 
to awaken any

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special apprehension in my mind of a fatal termination of her disease. 
After that, however, I could have but little hope; for, in the case of 
persons over twenty-five years of age, very few indeed have recovered 
after the appearance of this fatal symptom. Through God's mercy, she had 
the perfect use of reason throughout the whole of Tuesday and Wednesday, 
until toward night on the last-mentioned day, when her mind began to 
wander; and she was spared the terrible bodily sufferings which I have 
seen some endure. Throughout these days God was with her of a truth. I 
have sat by many a death-bedside in days that are passed; indeed, during 
the last six or seven weeks it seems to me I have been standing upon some 
"land's-end" of this nether world, with little else to do but to give the 
last "God speed you" to one after another of those I have known and loved, 
as the fastenings have been cast loose and they pushed out into the 
stream, and the current has

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swept them forever beyond the range of mortal sight; but never have I 
witnessed a parting in more perfect peace, on the part of the one that was 
to go, than this. On Wednesday morning she had her two remaining children 
brought to her bedside, and, after giving them certain little mementos of 
herself, told them, as her parting wish, that when in coming years they 
should think and speak of their mother, it should be not of that mother as 
in the grave, but of their mother with Christ in heaven. And when, a 
little later, as I was sitting with her, I said, "It will be pleasant to 
meet again with your mother, and our dear little ones, who have been taken 
before to our Father's house," she lay for a moment as if reflecting, and 
then replied, "Yes, it will be pleasant to meet with loved ones again; but 
a pleasanter prospect than that, as it now appears to me, is that I shall 
soon 'see Jesus as he is and love him as I ought.'" Surely he who can 
doubt the truth of our Christian faith has

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never felt its power in such an hour as this. "The fool hath said in his 
heart, No God," writes David. A fool--yes, a "thrice-sodden fool"--is he 
who can say "no God." On Thursday, about eleven o'clock, the willing 
spirit passed away; and late in the evening we laid the body beside her 
sister's.

And now, as I recall the scenes of the last few days, and memory brings up 
one little incident after another of our parting, there is no gloomy 
shade--blessed be God!--in the whole picture; there is no painful 
recollection to cast its shadow upon the scene. It does seem as if the sun 
of "the better land" had shed its own mellow light upon the darkness of 
earth, where we travelled together during those days, and where we parted. 
But, as I look forward,--God help me, make me faithful and humble, teach 
me to serve him, and, above all, to trust him, "all the days of my 
appointed time, till my change come."



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LETTER X.
MORTALITY AMONG THE CLERGY AND PHYSICIANS--REMARKABLE RECOVERY--YELLOW 
FEVER A DISEASE NOT TO BE TRIFLED WITH--LETTERS FROM ABROAD--"A CITY OF 
CONVALESCENTS,"

Tuesday, Oct. 2, 1855.

I have just returned from the funeral of Rev. Wm. Jackson, pastor of St. 
Paul's Church, in this city. "A good man" he was, "and full of faith." I 
recollect meeting him shortly after the fever first appeared, and his then 
speaking to me of the purpose he had entertained of leaving the city 
during the months of August and September to recruit; "but this purpose," 
said he, "I have now given up, for, should this fever spread, as there 
seems reason to fear that it will, we will all be needed." Since then I 
have met him frequently, going about to visit the sick, to comfort the 
heart-stricken,

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to bury the dead; and I have been struck with the cheerful countenance and 
tone of conversation he has maintained. Surely, none but the "good man and 
full of faith" could have lived as he has during this trying summer; and 
his peaceful end was fitting part and parcel of his life.

Wm. Jackson is the fourth of the Protestant ministers who remained, 
engaged in the active discharge of ministerial duty, that has fallen. 
First, Anthony Dibbrell, pastor of the Granby Street Methodist Church; 
then Stephen Jones, pastor of the African Methodist Church; then Wm. 
Cadogan Bagnall, a young minister of the Baptist Church, who died during 
the period of my sickness; and now, Wm. Jackson. Three yet remain, all 
having had the fever, but now, through God's good providence, 
convalescent. Four out of seven is a frightful mortality. When I wrote 
you, as I did some weeks ago, that unless a miracle preserved us there 
would be more graves than

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one in our cemetery, when the pestilence was passed, to bear witness that 
the Protestant clergy had not forsaken their posts in the time of danger, 
I wrote just as I felt; but I did not think there would be so many 
witnesses to this truth then as our cemetery now contains. And the 
mortality among our resident physicians who remained is as great as among 
the Protestant clergy. Eleven out of eighteen have died, and not one, I 
believe, has escaped an attack of the fever. The mortality among the white 
population, although not so great as among these two classes, yet does 
not, I think, fall very far short of it. As nearly as I can learn, about 
five thousand of our white population remained, and of this number, I 
believe, two thousand are now in the grave. Doubtless, He at whose bidding 
the pestilence has come has his own wise purposes to accomplish in all 
this; and we shall yet say, in heaven if not on earth, "Thou hast done all 
things well." Yet by us, and at

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this time, must God be worshipped as He that "maketh darkness his secret 
place; his pavilion round about him, dark waters and thick clouds of the 
sky."

On the day before I was taken sick, I visited a young man, a member of my 
church, whom I left, as I thought, past all reasonable hope of recovery,--
indeed, in a dying state. Reason was gone, and the troubled stupor which 
generally precedes death in this disease had supervened; and my own 
thought was that ere the sun should set he would need his coffin. During 
my own sickness I was not allowed to inquire about the sick; and when 
enough recovered to begin again to inquire, so confident was I that he 
must be dead, that I did not even ask about him. A day or two ago, as I 
sat by the window, I was startled for the moment by the sight of this 
young man approaching my house. I do not think I could have been more 
startled by an apparition from the dead. I mention this case thus 
particularly

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because it furnishes a striking confirmation of the remark of a physician 
of long experience in the treatment of yellow fever, that it is a disease 
in which we should never utterly despair.

In contrast with this case, I have seen many in the past two months 
apparently attacked very slightly, and yet the disease, resisting all 
medical treatment, has progressed steadily to a fatal termination. And, 
what seems yet stranger to me, I have seen cases in which, up to the time 
at which the disease had almost done its work, when death was just about 
to claim its victim, the patient has presented to the eye of a non-
professional observer almost no symptom of disease at all. A lucid period 
immediately preceding the fatal termination of this fever is very common,--
so much so, that I now feel sorry to hear it reported of any one, five or 
six days after the attack commenced, "he seems a great deal better to-
day." Some three weeks ago, I was

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called to visit a young woman in the Howard Hospital. She and her mother 
were in the same room. The young woman did not seem to suffer at all, and, 
not knowing the exact stage of her disease, I thought that in a few days 
she would be well again. Her mother, an abandoned woman, had got up and 
dressed herself in spite of the nurses, and was cursing most profanely 
because her daughter would not rise and quit the hospital with her. This 
was late in the evening, and before morning they were both dead. While 
endorsing, then, the remark just quoted, that yellow fever is a disease in 
which we should never utterly despair, no matter how desperate the case 
may seem, I would add--it is a disease which should never be trifled with, 
no matter how slight the attack may appear, no matter how favourably the 
case may seem to be progressing. Yellow fever, like the mole, works 
beneath the surface, and beyond the range of human sight; and this is one 
principal reason why

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it is a disease so much to be feared, and so much dreaded by those who 
know any thing about it.

I find that during my sickness a large number of letters have come to me, 
many of them containing aid for the suffering, and all of them expressing 
the warmest sympathy with our stricken people in this their season of sore 
trial. And this not from one section of the country only, nor from old and 
tried friends alone, but from all parts of our land, and from those whose 
faces I have never seen, and who could know nothing of us save that we 
were their brethren and in deepest affliction. The money sent has been in 
part, and shall be altogether, disposed of in accordance with the wishes 
of the generous donors, and many a case of suffering will it relieve. But 
I mention these letters rather to speak of the kind words they contain. 
Perhaps some utilitarian might ask, of what use are kind words to people 
in affliction? I answer

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as I have learned by experience, that to persons situated as we have been 
and yet are, called to endure as well as to act, encountering all the 
danger of battle with little of its excitement, nothing is more cheering 
than the assurance that we are not forgotten in the hearts and in the 
prayers of those whom God has placed in happier homes. Never before have I 
understood the great principle which underlies our Saviour's promise, 
"Whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold 
water only, verily, I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward." 
"A cup of cold water only!" it is a little thing in itself, and in general 
is esteemed a thing of little worth; and yet, to the traveller in the 
desert, faltering through thirst, "a cup of cold water only" is more 
precious than gold. Just so is it with kind words. "Bear ye one another's 
burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ," is a sentiment which witnesses 
in itself that it is from heaven.

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There is another aspect of the case, too, in which I love to think of the 
sympathy with us in our afflictions manifested in all parts of this our 
broad land. The aid sent us cannot be the result of a cold calculation of 
what, in the end, will put money into the pockets of the giver. In many an 
instance there is no conceivable way in which such a return could ever be 
made. The sympathy for us is, I firmly believe, a sympathy welling up from 
the very depths of the heart, and therefore is a witness as to what is in 
the heart of "this great people." In my childhood, I recollect to have 
read an old fairy-tale, in which the murmurings of streams are represented 
as fashioning themselves into articulate sounds to the ear of those who 
stooped to drink of their waters. Methinks the fancy of the old fairy-tale 
has here its realization; and the words this flowing stream utters are, 
"We are all brethren."

Since the years of my youth I have never

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been a politician; and as a pastor I have carefully eschewed all meddling 
with the party questions of the day. I have never, under any pretext, 
introduced such questions into the pulpit; for I am no believer in what 
has been called "preaching the gospel at both ends;"--to preach the gospel 
at heaven's end is as much as the few years of ministry which God hath 
assigned me here on earth will suffice for. But I love my country, my 
whole country, and I love to pray to God for "this thy great people." As I 
have read the speeches made by angry politicians at the hustings, in our 
State legislatures, on the floor of Congress, and even from the pulpit,--
politicians who would treat our bond of union as "a thing of naught,"--I 
have sometimes feared lest in righteous judgment on the folly of our 
people God might permit the severance of our States. From time to time, 
however, incidents have occurred--and this wide-spread sympathy for us I 
look upon as one of them--which

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have shown that these noisy politicians were not the people; and, further, 
that they did not represent the people. Could I whisper a word in the ear 
of some who seem to be honestly disunionists, it would be a word of 
caution; I would tell them, "There is a power slumbering beneath the 
surface, which, if aroused, will sweep you before it as the whirlwind 
sweeps the chaff from the summer threshing-floor." And every kind word 
spoken, and every dollar sent us, from the North, the South, the East, the 
West, is a witness at once for the existence and the might of this 
slumbering power. We are one people, and I have faith to believe that, for 
his own wise purposes, God means to keep us one people.

I am now getting ready, a second time, to leave Norfolk for a few weeks, 
as soon as my two remaining children, now convalescent, are able to travel 
without danger of relapse. I find that I am recovering my strength very 
slowly here; and now there

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is but little for a minister of the gospel to do here, unless he has the 
strength to visit from house to house and comfort the afflicted. The fever 
has swept over the whole city; and now, in the words of our acting mayor, 
"we are a city of convalescents." So universally has the fever prevailed, 
that there is not a family in all my congregation which has remained in 
the city and escaped. Indeed, I know of but one family of any size which 
has escaped the fever altogether. As you know, I lived for a number of 
years in the mountainous portion of our State. In that region, when 
burning brush at "the clearings," in the early spring, the fire often 
"gets out," and whole mountains are burned over ere it can be checked. 
Travel over one of these mountains a little later in the season, when the 
forest trees are beginning to clothe themselves in the garb of summer 
again, and you cannot but be struck with the strange tinge of desolation 
which even

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the life of the forest presents. Very many of the trees have been entirely 
consumed; a little mound of ashes marks the spot where once they stood; 
and those that still live and are beginning to put forth their leaves--
their trunks are all blackened and scorched by the flames, and even the 
edges of the growing leaves have been seared, and present the appearance 
of a sort of half-life rather than of the vigorous growth proper to the 
season. I know not how better to describe our city at the present time 
than by saying that it most forcibly recalls to my mind one of these 
"burnt forests" in the mountains.



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LETTER XI.
DISAPPEARANCE OF THE FEVER--THE ORPHANS--THE PLAGUE-FLY--DESCRIPTION OF 
IT--HYPOTHESES RESPECTING ITS NATURE.

Tuesday, Nov. 13, 1855.

After an absence of Some four weeks, I am now at home again. Our city 
begins to wear a more cheerful aspect than it did at the time I left, 
though very different still from the noisy, busy Norfolk of four months 
ago. Since my return, on the sixth of this month, there have been, so far 
as I can learn, but two deaths from yellow fever, and both of these in the 
case of persons who returned to the city before the frost which occurred 
toward the last of October. Among those who have returned since that frost 
(and I suppose one-half of our refugees at the least are now at home 
again) no case of fever has occurred that I can hear of. I

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hope therefore that we may now speak of the pestilence as passed, of "the 
summer of the pestilence" as ended.

On last Sabbath, for the first time for nearly two months, I met my people 
again in the sanctuary; and I could not throw off the saddening impression 
of the scene,--presenting, as it did, so much that was calculated to 
dishearten one that has lived and laboured for our Zion. In the few months 
last past, God's own hand has thrown down the building of years. Our 
church, as to numbers, now stands pretty nearly where it did ten years 
ago,--not altogether, it is true, but in large part, owing to the ravages 
of the pestilence. In all the congregation present on last Sabbath--and 
one-half of our families at the least were represented there--I noticed 
but three families that were not clad in mourning. And in every part of 
the house there were vacant seats which, as the eye rested on them, called 
up to memory the forms of

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those accustomed to occupy them--forms which shall no more meet the eye on 
earth. Among the dead of the pestilence are reckoned some of our best 
members,--those who by their deeds and prayers upheld the hands and 
cheered the heart of their pastor, whose countenance and co-operation made 
him feel strong in every good work,--those whose godly lives were ever a 
sufficient answer to the sneer of the infidel, "What do these Christians 
more than others?" But why should we yield to despondency? The church on 
earth was never designed as any thing more than a recruiting station for 
the "sacramental host of the elect;" and all that can be said with truth 
of their removal is that the "Captain of our salvation" has found them 
worthy, through sovereign grace, of being incorporated in that host a 
little earlier than others.

In one part of the church, on Sabbath morning, sat "the orphans," now 
gathered under the protecting care of the Howard

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Association. There they sat, some sixty in number, ranging from fourteen 
to two and three years in age, all made parentless by the terrible 
pestilence. Some of them, when found, were in the house alone with the 
dead body of their last remaining parent; and they, poor little things, so 
young that they did not know their own names. And there they must have 
perished but for the mercy which He who hath revealed himself as "a father 
to the fatherless" had implanted in the hearts of those by whose kindness 
they are now sheltered. About sixty of these orphans were at church. About 
eighty in all are now under the charge of the Norfolk Howard Association; 
and--blessed be God!--through the assistance sent us from abroad, in 
connection with what we can do at home, I hope that there will be no lack 
of the means needed to provide comfortably for them all.

But it was not of these matters I purposed writing you to-day. When I had 
the pleasure

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sure of meeting you a few days ago, you made inquiry about the plague-fly, 
as it is called, which had appeared in our city, and about which you 
desired to know what could be learned. To answer your inquiries respecting 
this fly was my purpose to-day.

The plague-fly has received its name from the belief that its appearance 
marks the crisis in the prevalence of epidemic yellow fever. So uniformly 
is this true in Southern cities, that I have been told the negroes in 
those cities believe that this fly consumes--actually eats up--the 
morbific matter which constitutes the immediate cause of the disease. 
Certain it is that its appearance in our city marked the crisis of the 
epidemic, in so far as my observation goes. I noticed it first on the last 
day of August; on the third, fourth, and fifth days of September it was 
seen in its greatest numbers; and by the time I was taken down with the 
fever (September 13) it had almost entirely disappeared. During my sickness

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a letter came to me from a physician in a distant city, asking me, if 
possible, to send him some specimens of the fly; and after my recovery, 
for the purpose of complying with this request, I made careful search 
throughout my house, that, if possible, I might find some; but in vain. 
About the 4th of September I caught some of them, and, as their bodies did 
not seem elastic, like those of the common house-fly, but soft to the 
touch, in order that I might make sure of preserving them I placed them in 
a vial, corking it as tightly as I could, and putting it away in a safe 
place. This vial I now brought out again, when, to my surprise, I found 
that the flies had entirely disappeared, nothing but a little dark-
coloured dust remaining in their stead. In one of the rooms of the house 
which had not been used after about the 5th of September, I noticed spots 
covered with a similar dust in the window-sills and on the floor in the 
corners of the room,--apparently the places

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where the bodies of the flies had fallen and subsequently rotted. All this 
seemed the more strange to me, since, in all my previous experience in 
preserving insects, (and I have preserved many in years gone by,) I never 
found any difficulty in keeping insects of this class.

The plague-fly, as I recollect it, and I examined it with some care, is 
almost identical in shape with the smaller blow-fly or shad-fly, as it is 
sometimes called, the posterior segment of its body being larger and 
longer in proportion to the whole body than that of the common house-fly;--
the main difference between it and the shad-fly being in the texture and 
colour of the wings and in the colour of the body. The wings, instead of 
being transparent, are opaque, and of a glossy bluish-black colour; and 
the body, in the case of those I first saw, of an ochrey yellow;--in one I 
noticed on the morning I was taken sick, of a reddish orange. It differed 
from the common shad-fly also in

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the fact that its body and even its wings seemed to lack the elasticity 
noticeable in those of that fly; and the insect itself was exceedingly 
sluggish, hardly flying at all, and very short-lived. Within twenty-four 
hours of the time they first appeared in my house, I found numbers of them 
lying dead in the window-sills and in the corners of the rooms.

As to the origin and nature of this fly, I cannot entertain for a moment 
the idea I have heard expressed, that it is but the insect in its perfect 
state which in an animalcular state floats in the atmosphere and 
constitutes the morbific cause of the epidemic. The theory of the 
animalcular nature of the cause of yellow fever I leave to physicians to 
discuss; but the conversion of a proper animalcule so small as to be 
invisible to the naked eye (and such this animalcule must be if it exist 
at all) into an insect such as the plague-fly, is contrary to the whole 
analogy of nature; and nothing but a gross misconception of the character

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of insect-transformations could lead any person to entertain such an idea.

Of the origin of this fly either one of the following hypotheses appears 
to me in itself probable. A more careful investigation of the subject than 
I have yet had it in my power to make can alone determine which, if any 
one of them, is the true one.

1. We may suppose that this fly is a native in those countries in which 
yellow fever is an indigenous disease, and of such a habit as to multiply 
rapidly in those atmospheric conditions which accompany the rise and 
spread of yellow fever; that this insect, having been brought here, 
perhaps in the egg or larva state, in the hold of the Ben Franklin, one 
generation had lived its time, in such small numbers as not to attract 
attention; that this imported generation has produced its eggs in vast 
numbers, and that from these eggs the swarms of plague-flies which have 
been in all our dwellings have sprung. Of the production

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of insects in immense numbers from a very small stock, in just this way, 
we have many illustrations. 

2. We may suppose that the fly is one which in ordinary seasons exists in 
small numbers throughout the country, but, in consequence of its small 
numbers, or because particular attention is not turned to it, generally 
escapes observation; but that this summer, the same conditions favourable 
to the production and spread of yellow fever being favourable to its rapid 
multiplication, it has been produced in the immense numbers in which it 
appeared in our city. You are doubtless aware of the fact that in some 
parts of our State all that is necessary to cover a field with a luxuriant 
growth of white clover is just that wood-ashes be spread upon it. I 
recollect once to have heard a farmer declare his belief that white clover 
needed no seed to spring from, but was capable of being produced, by a 
sort of "equivocal generation," from mere wood-ashes. The true

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explanation of this phenomenon, and the one universally admitted by well-
informed, persons, is that white clover exists in small quantities mingled 
with other grasses at all times where wood-ashes will produce this effect; 
and that, being what is called "a potash plant," the application of the 
ashes so stimulates its growth and production that it soon overgrows and 
takes the place of the other grasses with which it had been intermixed. In 
a precisely analogous way we may suppose the multiplication of the plague-
fly to be affected by the morbific conditions which give rise to epidemic 
yellow fever. 

3. We may suppose this fly to be the shad-fly, or possibly the common 
house-fly, in a diseased condition--that diseased condition arising from 
the same causes which produce a like effect in the human race. That the 
lower orders of animals, and even insects, should be affected by the same 
epidemic influences which affect man, is by no

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means without a precedent, as every one familiar with the history of 
disease in its more terrible forms must know.

Of these three hypotheses, I confess that at the present time the latter 
seems to me the most probable one. The soft and even slimy condition of 
the fly, unlike that of other insects belonging to the same natural 
family,--its extremely sluggish habit and short life,--and especially the 
rapid decay of its body after death,--all seem to favour this idea. Either 
hypothesis will accord very well with the fact that the appearance of the 
fly marks the crisis of the epidemic, though perhaps the latter one more 
fully than either of the others; and this after all is the most important 
fact to be noted respecting it.



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LETTER XIII. RESULTS OF MATURE REFLECTION--HOW WAS THE FEVER INTRODUCED 
INTO NORFOLK?--WHY WAS IT SO FATAL? --IS YELLOW FEVER CONTAGIOUS?--
PRACTICAL INFERENCES.

Monday, Dec. 31, 1855.

In my letters, written you from time to time, I have given you a general 
account of the course of the yellow fever in this city, noting facts and 
incidents as they appeared or were credibly reported at the time. In the 
present letter I purpose to give you the results of mature reflection and 
more careful examination, especially as bearing upon certain points of 
practical importance. Of course these conclusions are based upon my 
observation of the yellow fever as it has prevailed here during the past 
summer. Whether that disease would be governed by the same laws in other 
places,

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or even here, in other seasons, I cannot tell. I shall give you, in part 
at least, the facts upon which my conclusions rest, and you can then 
attach to them just that importance which you may think they deserve. And 
let me say further, I do not purpose taking any part in the medical 
controversy respecting the nature of yellow fever. That I leave to 
physicians, as those to whom it properly belongs.

How was the yellow fever introduced among us? Was it imported in the Ben 
Franklin, or did it originate on the spot?

This is a question which it is exceedingly difficult to answer; and 
although a committee of physicians, under appointment from our city 
councils, are engaged in the investigation of this subject, I doubt 
whether, after the most protracted examination, they will be able to give 
an answer which will command the assent of all. When the fever was first 
known to exist among us, in the then excited state of the public mind it

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was impossible to tell what to believe, and what not to believe, of the 
many reports respecting its origin which were passing from mouth to mouth, 
Now that this excitement has passed away, it seems to me almost as 
impossible, though for a different reason, to get at all the facts in the 
case; and this difficulty is the greater now because Drs. Trugein and 
Upshur, the former of Portsmouth, the latter of Norfolk,--the two 
physicians in whose practice most of the earlier cases occurred,--are both 
numbered with the dead.

It is now said that the first clearly-marked case in Gosport of which any 
information can be obtained was not that of a labourer employed in 
breaking up the hold of the Ben Franklin, as reported in my first letter, 
but that of a woman living very near to the point at which the Ben 
Franklin lay; her case coming under the care of the physician on the 30th 
of June, while the labourer already mentioned was not visited

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until the 3d of July. But before this, it appears that a seaman had been 
taken sick on board the steamer as early as the 15th of June, and before 
she left the quarantine; that he was taken to the Marine Hospital on the 
21st, and died with "black vomit" on the 22d of June. There was a case of 
fever, then, on board the Ben Franklin at the time she came up to Gosport, 
and a case which had originated on board that vessel; and the fever 
subsequently existing in Gosport seems very naturally referable to this 
steamer as its point of origin.

At first it was currently reported that all the earlier cases in 
Portsmouth could be clearly traced to Gosport. This, it appears, was a 
mistaken idea on the part of the public. Upon the authority of one of the 
first physicians in Portsmouth, it is now said that the first case of 
yellow fever in that place occurred in a house on Scott's Creek, a stream 
on the northwest side of Portsmouth, while Gosport lies to the south.

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This case was first visited by a physician on the 24th of June, and the 
patient died four days later. This case, then, occurred six days before 
the first case in Gosport; and, as the person was one who had been 
bedridden for months, it can in no probable way be traced to Gosport.

A few days before the commencement of his last sickness, Dr. Upshur, who 
died of the fever late in September, stated to me that the first cases in 
Norfolk, in his opinion, could not be traced to Gosport; and he called my 
attention to an inconsistency in the commonly-received account of the 
matter which had not before arrested my attention. That account, as 
reported in the Herald of July 30 and copied by me in my first letter, was 
that the yellow fever had been introduced into Barry's Row by certain 
families who had removed thither from Gosport ten days before. Now, the 
first cases reported by Dr. Upshur occurred in Barry's Row on the 16th of 
July; that is, four days

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before the removal of these families from Gosport.

These three points, in each of which the fever seems to have originated 
independently of the others,--viz.: Page and Allen's shipyard in Gosport 
on the south, the house on Scott's Creek on the northwest, and Barry's Row 
on the northeast,--are at the three angles of a nearly equilateral 
triangle, measuring not far from one and a half miles on a side; and if we 
draw a line from the southern angle, bisecting that angle, this line will 
mark the course of our prevailing winds during the summer, and will divide 
the region over which the fever prevailed into two nearly equal parts. 
Such are the ascertained facts respecting the origin of the fever; and I 
know not how better to express the only conclusion which they seem to me 
to authorize than by using the words of a physician with whom I was in 
conversation a few days ago:--"The first case in Gosport seems pretty 
clearly to

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favour the idea of the importation of the fever in the Ben Franklin; the 
first cases in Portsmouth and Norfolk seem just as clearly to favour the 
idea of its local origin." It would not be a very difficult matter, with 
the aid of a few plausible suppositions and a little torturing of these 
facts, to make them bear unequivocal testimony in favour of either theory. 
But as I have no theory to support, I will leave this work entirely to 
those who have. I have an opinion, however, and that I will frankly state. 
Taking the facts stated above in connection with other well-known facts, 
such as the coming of a French steamer into our harbour early in the 
summer of 1854, from which seventy cases of yellow fever were taken and 
treated at the Naval Hospital, (nearer by half to Norfolk than either the 
house on Scott's Creek or Page and Allen's shipyard,) and yet not one case 
originating therefrom,--the flight of our citizens with the fever in their 
blood, during the present summer, and their

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subsequent death in all the towns and cities around us, without thus 
originating a case of fever in any of those places,--the conclusion to 
which I have come is (unphilosophical as it may appear to some) that the 
yellow fever would have desolated our city even if the Ben Franklin had 
never entered our waters; that all that vessel did was simply to hasten 
the outbreak of the pestilence and locate it in its commencement; that our 
condition in the early summer may be fitly represented by that of a pile 
of smoking flax, into which the Ben Franklin cast a blazing brand, thus 
hastening a conflagration which would soon have burst out without such 
aid; that, but for our state of preparedness for the fever, that steamer 
might have come and gone as did the French steamer in 1854, and her visit 
been, ere this, forgotten. I look upon the pestilence under which we have 
suffered as, in this respect, like to the epidemic cholera, known to us 
simply as "the pestilence that

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walketh in darkness, the destruction that wasteth at noonday." God only, 
who directeth its steps, knoweth whence it came and whither it hath gone.

I have lately read an essay on yellow fever from the pen of Wm. Fergusson, 
M.D., an eminent Scotch physician, of twenty years' experience in the 
treatment of yellow fever in the West India Islands; and, although there 
are some things in his essay with which my observation does not accord, 
the opinion he expresses on this point I can fully subscribe to. 
Discussing the nature of the fever, he writes: "It came from Boulam, says 
the contagionist, and is a pure contagion of negro intercourse, a 
concomitant of the old slave trade; but the blacks, as we have seen, never 
had and cannot take the disease; and long, I believe, before our slave 
trade existed, or when, if it existed at all, it must have been in 
embryo,--when Penn and Venables first subjugated Jamaica to the British 
crown,--the invaders--a most lawless

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bucanier force, by-the-by--were so handled by the tropical pestilence that 
it was believed they had become the objects of heaven's peculiar 
vengeance. Its unexpected bursts, invading where there is nothing in the 
seasons to account for such visitation, are strange and mysterious, but 
not more so than among ourselves, when diseases previously mild suddenly 
change their character and assume the most malignant aspect. We may often 
witness, even under our best temperatures, unexpected attacks of malignant 
erysipelas, puerperal fever, scarlatina, measles, &c.; while at other 
times, apparently of more unfavourable aspect, these probably cannot be 
called into existence at all, or, if they do come, are unattended with any 
malignant character. These things are beyond our ken; we can only see, and 
tremble, and wonder." And afterward he writes:--"There is much of the 
unfathomable in regard to yellow fever. Its occult sources,--its appalling 
out-breaks,

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often without preliminary warning,--the absence of gradation in the types 
of fever previous to the grand explosion,--its being restricted to the 
European races, and being confined almost entirely to the Western world,--
mark it as a disease equally strange and terrible."

Can any reason be assigned why the yellow fever was so terribly 
destructive in Norfolk during the past summer,--so much more so than it 
has ever been even in New Orleans?

As it appears to me, one principal reason why it was so terribly 
destructive in our city is to be found in the fact that there were but few 
among us protected against its attack by having previously had the 
disease. It is one of the most clearly-ascertained laws of yellow fever 
that in its attack it so exhausts the susceptibility of the system to the 
disease that it is rarely the case a person suffers from it a second time; 
or, if attacked a second time, the attack is a slight one.

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Hence, at the South, they are now resorting to inoculation for protection 
against this fever, just as formerly they resorted to similar means for 
protection against smallpox. In New Orleans, the fever prevails to a 
greater or less extent almost every season; and hence the great body of 
those who remain there during, the sickly season are those who, having 
once had it, are not liable to have it again. In Norfolk, on the contrary, 
nearly thirty years had elapsed since it had prevailed to any extent; and 
it was only here and there that one of our citizens could expect exemption 
on the ground of having once had the fever. What confirms me in this 
opinion is the fact that the difference between Norfolk and New Orleans 
was not in the ratio which the number of deaths bore to the number of 
cases,--for this ratio was nearly the same,--but in the ratio which the 
number of cases bore to the number of our people who remained in the city. 
I may say

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with almost literal truth, of our white population who remained at home we 
all had the fever.

There was nothing very peculiar in the season, unless it be in the 
frequent occurrence of the chill northeasterly storms mentioned in my 
former letters, and the frequent failure in our usual sea-breeze, 
consequent, I suppose, upon these storms. Neither drought nor unusual heat 
characterized the summer last past. Nor was there any thing in the 
condition of our city, that I saw, different from what it has been for the 
last five years--the time during which I have been a resident of Norfolk. 
There is a good deal of made land in the city; and the filling-in has been 
done in part with pine-wood and with mud from the river-bottom; but then, 
as you know, this kind of filling in has been used here for the last fifty 
years. And, besides, in Portsmouth there is little or no made land of this 
kind, and yet the fever was as

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fatal there as with us; and with us it was no more fatal in the parts of 
the city immediately adjoining this made land than it was in those parts 
where the virgin soil had never been disturbed; indeed, the only family of 
any size that, remaining throughout the summer, escaped the fever 
altogether, was a family residing near the west end of Main Street, where 
this made land stretched all along to the windward of them. There are 
filthy portions of our city, too, as there are in all places of the size 
of Norfolk; yet these places were not more filthy this summer, I think, 
than usual; and, although the fever seemed first to locate itself in them, 
when it subsequently spread to cleaner portions it was as fatal there as 
in Barry's Row.

Here again let me quote a remark or two from the essay of Dr. Fergusson. 
"It is impossible to imagine a country of purer soil than the island of 
Barbadoes. It has long been thoroughly cleared; but, as it is the

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ordinary landing-place of fresh troops from Europe, there was no place 
during the war where there existed greater mortality and suffering from 
yellow fever." "Stagnation of atmosphere accounts for much in regard to 
it, but not for all; vegetable putrefaction for little or none; nor does 
malaria for the whole, unless it be some occult malaria of the Atlantic 
shores; for, prolific as the Eastern tropic may be, and certainly is, of 
malaria in all its forms, it rarely produces the epidemic characterized by 
the leading symptom of black vomit."

Did the yellow fever, as prevailing in Norfolk during the past summer, 
appear to be a contagious disease?

In the popular sense of the term, a contagious disease is one propagated 
by contact with the sick, or through the instrumentality of the breath of 
the sick, or some subtle effluvium from the diseased or dead body, and 
consequently a disease to be avoided by keeping entirely aloof from the 
sick and

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the dead. An epidemic disease, on the other hand, is one the immediate 
cause of which appears to be in the atmosphere, and hence it is likely to 
be taken by all the people residing in a certain place or district at the 
same time, and in which there is no danger in nursing the sick or handling 
the dead, if this be done out of the district in which the epidemic 
prevails. Thus understanding these terms, I do not hesitate to express the 
opinion, and that with great confidence in its correctness, that the 
yellow fever which has prevailed among us was an epidemic and not a 
contagious disease. This opinion is at variance with the popular opinion 
heretofore prevailing in this part of the country, and at variance with 
the opinion I had always entertained myself until the experience of the 
past summer satisfied me of its correctness; and, as it is a point of 
practical importance, I will state the facts which have satisfied my own 
mind somewhat more fully than otherwise would have been the case.

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The few members of the Presbyterian church (and I speak thus particurarly 
of them because I can speak of them from my own knowledge) who, remaining 
in the city, escaped the fever altogether, were almost without exception 
those who were active in nursing the sick and ministering to their 
necessities; while the few who carefully secluded themselves, avoiding all 
such communication with the sick as would spread a contagious disease, 
almost without exception took the fever.

Those who were active in ministering to the sick, and who did take the 
fever, did not take it, as a general thing, until as an epidemic it 
reached the part of the city in which they resided. The cases of apparent 
exception to this general rule were most, if not all of them, I believe, 
like that of my nephew, Edmund James, who spent the night in a part of the 
city to which the disease had spread. In my own case, I was for more than 
six weeks almost constantly

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during the day among the sick, the dying, and the dead; often talking and 
praying with them when their breath was so offensive (for in this disease 
the breath generally becomes very offensive before death) that I have 
quitted the room sick at the stomach--and this in parts of the city where 
the fever was raging with greatest violence; and yet I did not take the 
fever until as an epidemic it reached the part of the city in which I 
lived; and then I was one of the first to be prostrated by it. And I could 
mention many other cases similar to my own.

Those employed in burying the dead, in so far as I know, did not take the 
fever until as an epidemic it reached the part of the city in which they 
dwelt. No man could have laboured at his calling more faithfully than Mr. 
Dobs, our principal grave-digger. From early in the morning until late in 
the evening he was constantly at work in the cemeteries. I have myself 
seen him eating

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his meals there; and he laboured thus when, before the order was issued 
forbidding interment in vaults, the stench from the dead bodies was 
sickening; and yet, throughout almost the whole summer, he remained as at 
other seasons. He lived at the extreme northern end of the city--the part 
to which the fever extended latest of all. But it did extend to that part 
of the city; and then he and his wife both died of it. After having helped 
to bury almost all "the dead of the pestilence," he himself was by other 
hands laid among them.

Those who resided in the adjoining country, and came into the city during 
the day only, in no instance that I have heard of took the fever. Some in 
my own congregation there were who acted thus; and they all escaped. So 
with the country-people who attended our markets; and there were some who 
attended, throughout the season. Not one of them, that I have heard of, 
died of the fever.

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Our citizens fled in almost every direction, many of them with the poison 
in their systems; and they sickened and died in almost every place to 
which they fled,--in Philadelphia, in Baltimore, in Washington, in 
Richmond, in Petersburg, in Hampton, and on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. 
Not less than thirty died, I suppose, in Baltimore, and twenty, at the 
least, in Richmond; and yet in not one of these places did a case of 
yellow fever originate, by contagion, from these sick and dying fugitives.

That the disease spread through the atmosphere, as its medium of 
transmission, seems fairly inferable from the fact that it spread rapidly 
in the direction of the prevailing winds, and but slowly in a direction 
across the track of those winds. The direction of our prevailing winds, 
during the summer, is from the South; and it is but rarely that the wind 
blows from any other quarter. If we map down the whole region over which 
the yellow fever prevailed, and

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then draw a line in the direction of the prevailing winds, this line will 
be found to measure not much short of five miles; while a line drawn at 
right angles to this will not, at the widest point, measure more than one 
and a half miles. The morbific agent--be it of what nature it may--did not 
seem to roll forward in a well-defined wave; but, spreading first as a 
subtle miasm of feeble energy to a certain district, those most open to 
attack fell before it; then, as the poison increased in intensity, the 
stronger fell; and when it reached its height most of those remaining were 
taken down. And thus it comes, I think, that it seemed in some instances 
as if it had spread by contagion. And, besides this, the liability to take 
the disease was found to be far greater by night than by day. Indeed, in 
so far as I saw, a person might go into the parts of the city in which the 
fever prevailed with greatest violence with perfect impunity during the 
day, especially if the day were a pleasant,

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sunshiny one; but a single night spent in such a place usually proved 
fatal.

These facts, to my mind, clearly demonstrate the non-contagious character 
of the yellow fever as it has prevailed in our city during the summer 
past. And now for an inference or two, based, of course, upon the 
supposition that this disease will be governed by the same laws, in other 
places and other seasons, which it has obeyed here during the season past.

The fear of contracting the disease by visiting the sick--a fear in 
consequence of which some have died through neglect in our city, poor 
Stapleton for example--is an unreasonable fear, provided only that the 
visits be made by day. And the fear of nursing the sick or burying the 
dead, in a place to which the miasm has not spread, is a fear equally 
unreasonable.

The idea of escaping the fever by secluding oneself, while remaining in a 
city or part of a city over which the disease has

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spread itself, is an idea which will disappoint the hopes of those who 
trust to it. Exemption is to be sought in flight to some place beyond the 
range of the epidemic, and in flight alone.

Such quarantine regulations as those adopted at one time by many of the 
towns and cities, and even counties, around us--but soon, I am happy to 
add, repealed again,--are perfectly useless to those adopting them, and 
cruel to those against whom they are adopted. Such quarantine regulations 
cannot be enforced in a country like ours. Make them as strict as you 
please, and in many ways they can and will be evaded. The way in which our 
citizens passed in every direction in spite of these regulations I have 
already mentioned. And the history of every such attempt which has been 
made in our country in years gone by is in this respect the same with that 
of the attempt made during the past summer.

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Such regulations are uncalled for. As already stated, fugitives from 
Norfolk and Portsmouth sickened and died of yellow fever in all the cities 
around us, and yet not one case was thus originated in any of those 
cities;--not by contact with their bodies while sick, nor by their burial 
after death, nor from the clothes they carried with them, nor from the 
beds on which they died.

Such regulations are cruel. They often cause the fugitive to expose 
himself (as in the case of many fugitives from our city during the past 
summer) in such a way as to bring on and aggravate an attack of the 
disease,--so that he who but for this exposure might have recovered, dies. 
The utmost that can be said with truth is that yellow fever may be 
transported in the confined air of the filthy hold of a ship; but in the 
person of the sick, never. And here again let me quote a remark from the 
essay of Dr. Fergusson,--a remark which I wish to endorse in its every 
particular. "To pen up

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the inhabitants upon the infected ground is to aggravate the disease a 
thousand-fold; and is, in fact, as cruel and absurd as it would be to 
barricade the doors against the escape of the inmates of a house that had 
taken fire, on the insane pretence that they would otherwise spread the 
conflagration."

STEREOTYPED BY I. JOHNSON AND CO.
PHILADELPHIA.