From 1832 to 1836, cholera erupted across U.S. cities as well as in small towns, rural farms, prisons, and plantations. Its victims experienced violent symptoms and often perished within hours of becoming sick. Cholera killed people much more quickly than other diseases with which Americans were familiar, and its causes would not be discovered until the later development of bacteriology. It afflicted rich and poor, people of every race, religion, and region.
Many powerful people in the 1830s wanted cholera seen as anything but an indiscriminate and unknowable killer. Moral reformers and medical authorities, among others, attributed the deaths of enslaved African Americans, Indigenous peoples, and Irish immigrants to individual failings and they ignored and even covered up those deaths. However, the universal nature of the pandemic became increasingly apparent as the deaths of supposedly respectable people became too numerous and visible to deny. It was that terror—the idea of everyone being equally subject to an invisible and mysterious killer—that elites struggled most to keep hidden.
Drawing on family papers, letters, and newspaper accounts of the time, historian Paul Kelton tells the story of the first cholera pandemic in the United States, capturing the experiences of ordinary Americans living in fear of a mysterious disease and exposing the disastrous consequences of a deadly germ intersecting with the societal injustices of the time.
Kelton’s book Hidden Terrors: The Scourge of Cholera in Jackson's America (Oxford University Press) is available for purchase.
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