Outbreak! Plagues That Changed History Read Online Free PDF Page B

mystifying.
     
    Almost as mysterious as yellow fever itself was the fact that enslaved Africans seemed invulnerable to the illness. This was a powerful advantage. When white slavers sickened, blacks could revolt. The famous slave mutiny aboard the ship
Amistad,
for example, was probably made possible by yellow fever. Later, when the disease ravaged Europeans running the plantations of the New World, Africans had multiple opportunities to escape, resist, or attack their tormentors.
    How to explain this difference between the races? Whites didn’t understand that blacks, having survived yellow fever in Africa as children, now enjoyed life-long immunity to the disease. Instead, the same people who had once concluded that Native Americans were inferior because they died from European disease now assured themselves that blacks were suited to slavery because they were immune to yellow fever. The logic of bigotry is a marvelously malleable thing.

Sweet vengeance
    Yellow fever repeatedly harassed European efforts to exploit the Americas. The illness effectively closed the Amazonian basin to European exploitation and repeatedly devastated the plantation economy of the southern United States. (Remarkably, though ships also traveled from Africa to Asia, yellow fever never took hold there.)
    One of the earliest New World yellow fever outbreaks was on the British Caribbean island of Barbados. This efficient sugar machine was ravaged by yellow fever from 1647 to 1650 and again in 1690, with over 10,000 people killed.
    Even more profitable and more deadly was the French slave colony of Haiti (then called Saint Domingue) on the island of Hispaniola. It is hard to believe that what is now the poorest, most environmentally devastated place in the Western Hemisphere was once the most lucrative colony in the world. Haiti produced more sugar than all the other Caribbean islands combined. It made more money for France than England’s revenues from all thirteen American colonies. But in 1789, the French Revolution toppled the monarchy. Ideas of “Liberté! Fraternité! Egalité!” filtered to Haiti. By this time, so many Africans had been imported to the island that slaves now outnumbered their white masters fifteen to one. In 1791, Haiti’s slaves revolted. Hundreds of thousands rose up, torched cities, burned plantations, and massacred whites. In 1794, France’s revolutionary government abolished slavery throughout the colonies. In 1802, however, France’s new ruler, Napoleon Bonaparte, tried to reassert control of Haiti and reestablish slavery. He envisioned an even more profitable colony, supplied with food from France’s Louisiana Territory. Napoleon sent a massive amphibious force commanded by his brother-in-law, General Charles leClerc. The soldiers managed to kill over 150,000 slaves. But 50,000 French soldiers also died (including leClerc), mostly from yellow fever.
    Imagine trying to fight an enemy impervious to an invisible force that made your comrades become feverish and jaundiced, spew black vomit, and die. The French could sustain neither their morale nor theinvasion. Napoleon went on to acknowledge an independent Haiti, and in 1803 sold France’s claim to the now apparently useless Louisiana Territory to the United States.

     
    After the African slaves of Haiti revolted and massacred their French masters, Napoleon Bonaparte tried to reassert control. In 1803, his massive amphibious force was defeated. Some 50,000 French soldiers died, mostly from yellow fever.
     
    In 1804, Haiti declared itself a republic. In 1816, the new nation helped the South American general Simón Bolívar mount the invasion that ultimately ended the Spanish empire in the Americas. In return, Bolívar promised to free his own slaves and outlaw slavery in the lands he liberated.
    Elsewhere in the Caribbean and the southern United States, slave revolts increased. So did repressive legislation designed to keep slaves in their place, and an