“Negros Are Very Scarce”: A Study of Race, Cholera, and Comparative Disease Susceptibility in the Urban Old South

For both black and white workers struggling mightily and sometimes violently against one another for employment along Charleston’s antebellum waterfront, the specter of epidemic diseases rivaled the threat of even their most hostile labor competitors.  To the benefit of blacks striving to retain the many relative perks of urban waterfront employment, yellow fever overwhelmingly targeted recently arrived and “unacclimated” white immigrants.  But cholera’s disproportionate impact upon black Charlestonians quickly established the malady’s reputation as another “Negro disease,” to the morbid advantage of white job seekers.  With the etiologies and epidemiologies of these diseases yet undiscovered, local medical authorities and municipal officials failed to agree whether sanitation measures or a strict maritime quarantine would most effectively secure the well-being and lives of the city’s inhabitants.  Rendered collateral damage in a perennial feud between the rival interests of human health and commercial wealth were Charleston’s dock workers.  Paternalistic white slaveowners and employers—the very elements of the master class who maneuvered to preserve the expediencies and profits of the slave hiring system against the onslaught and protests of white immigrant workingmen—could do little to shield their urban hirelings from cholera’s deadly grasp.  Not merely passive observers, however, black waterfront workers boldly navigated the narrow path between making ends meet and surviving to toil another day.  Scholars long have considered the intersection of comparative disease susceptibility and race to elucidate slaveowners’ preference for black plantation laborers in the South Carolina lowcountry and beyond.  But the influx of unskilled white immigrants during the mid-nineteenth century reignited a debate over disease and race throughout the urban South.  This paper employs epidemic diseases, especially cholera, to complicate existing interpretations of labor competition and how and why the racial and ethnic makeup of the Old South’s urban workforce changed over time.