Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry

Explores how disease and human responses to it influenced the South and the United States.

Peter McCandless (Author)

9781107656185, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 30 January 2014

324 pages, 6 b/w illus. 4 maps
23.4 x 15.6 x 1.9 cm, 0.5 kg

'McCandless nicely balances attention to rural plantations and their urban entrepôt, demonstrating how the spector of yellow fever and other afflictions strained and recast Charlestonians' lifestyles, customs, and commercial aspirations.' Michael D. Thompson, The South Carolina Historical Magazine

On the eve of the Revolution, the Carolina lowcountry was the wealthiest and unhealthiest region in British North America. Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry argues that the two were intimately connected: both resulted largely from the dominance of rice cultivation on plantations using imported African slave labor. This development began in the coastal lands near Charleston, South Carolina, around the end of the seventeenth century. Rice plantations spread north to the Cape Fear region of North Carolina and south to Georgia and northeast Florida in the late colonial period. The book examines perceptions and realities of the lowcountry disease environment; how the lowcountry became notorious for its 'tropical' fevers, notably malaria and yellow fever; how people combated, avoided or perversely denied the suffering they caused; and how diseases and human responses to them influenced not only the lowcountry and the South, but the United States, even helping to secure American independence.

Part I. Talk about Suffering: 1. Rhetoric and reality
2. From paradise to hospital
3. 'A scene of diseases'
4. Wooden horse
5. Revolutionary fever
6. Stranger's disease
7. 'A merciful provision of the creator'
Part II. Combating Pestilence: 8. 'I wish that I had studied physick'
9. 'I know nothing of this disease'
10. Providence, prudence, and patience
11. Buying the smallpox
12. Commerce, contagion, and cleanliness
13. A migratory species
14. Melancholy.

Subject Areas: Slavery & abolition of slavery [HBTS], History of the Americas [HBJK]