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Dealing with Disaster: The Politics of Catastrophe in the United States, 1789–1861

2013; Routledge; Volume: 14; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14664658.2013.768422

1743-7903

Gareth Davies,

American History and Culture

Abstract Considerable recent scholarship has focused on the activism of the early American state, undermining the old idea that it was "a midget institution in a giant land" (Murrin). This essay uses the case of disaster relief to evaluate this new literature, and suggests that scholars may now be in danger of over-compensating for the undoubted limitations of the old scholarship. While the federal government did on occasion provide relief to victims of catastrophe before the Civil War, much more commonly it did nothing. This reflected its fundamental lack of capacity in an age of limited bureaucracy, short congressional sessions, and slow communications. It also owed much to the fatalism with which Americans commonly viewed disaster. Keywords: disasterAmerican statecommunicationsCongress Acknowledgments The author thanks Bruce Baker, Brian Balogh, Richard Carwardine, Michele Landis Dauber, Max Edling, Gary Gerstle, Michael Heale, Dan Howe, Richard John, Linda Kerber, Peter Onuf, Sebastian Page, Donald Radcliffe, Jay Sexton, David Sim, James T. Patterson, and Mark Wilson for their valuable reactions to earlier versions of this essay. Notes 1. Unless otherwise stated, material on the Richmond fire is drawn from: Anon., Particular Account; Mirror of Taste and Dramatic Censor, December 1, 1811; Watson, Calamity at Richmond; The Panoplist and Missionary Magazine, January 1812; The Lady's Miscellany, January 4, 1812; Nile's Weekly Register, January 4, 1812, and January 11, 1812. 2. Sabin, Discourse. For anti-theater sentiment in nineteenth-century America, see Smith, "Politics of Theatrical Reform." 3. The report is reproduced in Watson, Calamity at Richmond, 32–40. 4. Webpage dedicated to Bishop Richard Channing Moore (bishop of Virginia), at www.historichampshire.org/moore/monumntl.htm (downloaded on September 26, 2011). 5. Murrell, "'Calamity at Richmond!'" 17. I am grateful to Amy Murrell Taylor for having supplied me with a copy of her paper, and to Peter Onuf. 6. Murrin, "Great Inversion," 425. For other examples of the old orthodoxy, see Young, Washington Community, and White, The Jeffersonians. 7. Feller, Public Lands in Jacksonian America; Rockwell, Indian Affairs and the Administrative State; John, Spreading the News; Shallat, Structures in the Stream; Paskoff, Troubled Waters; Larson, Internal Improvement; Novak, People's Welfare. 8. Balogh, A Government Out of Sight. For other outstanding overviews, see Wilson, "Law and the American State," and John, "Ruling Passions." 9. Dauber, Sympathetic State. 10. See, generally, Edling, "'A Mongrel Kind of Government'," and Hendrickson, "Bringing the State System Back In." 11. See Bradburn, "The Great Field of Human Concerns," 78. 12. Pernick, "Politics, Parties, and Pestilence," 119. 13. In the account that follows, I rely heavily on Carey, Short Account of the Malignant Fever. On possible explanations for the fever, see esp. 14–22. 14. Carey, Short Account, 24–5, 32. 15. Bremner, American Philanthropy, 30; Powell, Bring Out Your Dead. 16. Carey, Short Account, 36. 17. Carey, Short Account, 28. 18. Carey, Short Account, 34, 41. 19. See Griffith, "'A Total Dissolution of the Bonds of Society'," esp. 56. 20. Carey, Short Account, 10–11. 21. Francis McHenry, letter to the Georgia Journal, n.d., reproduced in The Halcyon Luminary and Theological Repository, June 1, 1812. 22. [Kingston], Particular Account of the Dreadful Fire at Richmond, i. 23. Rosenberg, Cholera Years, 23, 40. 24. The history of the life insurance industry provides one prism through which to view the fragility of human existence during the early nineteenth century. See Murphy, Investing in Life, chap. 1 ("Understanding Mortality in Antebellum America"), esp. 33–7, and chap. 2 ("Selecting Risks in an Anonymous World"), 50–2. 25. See Barry, Rising Tide. 26. Pabis, Daily Life Along the Mississippi, 81–2. 27. On the limits of municipal government at this time, see Warner, Private City. 28. Hoffer, Seven Fires, 72; Hensler, Crucible of Fire, 48–51; Cook, "Great Fire of Pittsburgh," 177–9. On this pattern more generally, see Rosen, Limits of Power; Greenberg, Cause for Alarm. 29. "I hear…the ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color'd lights…." Whitman, "Song of Myself" (1855), section 26, published in Leaves of Grass. On masculinity and fire-fighting, see Greenberg, Cause for Alarm. 30. See Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, and Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 159–62. 31. Holzman, "How Steam Blew the Rowdies Out," 68. 32. Christian Society, June 22, 1849. 33. For an account that places this rowdy tendency in the context of broader nineteenth-century conventions of masculinity, see Stott, Jolly Fellows, 28–9. 34. "Fire in America," Young America, April 19, 1845; Broadway Journal, April 26, 1845; McKiven, "Political Construction of a Natural Disaster." 35. See Worley, Jr., Pittsburgh's Vintage Firemen. He recounts that the fire was "a springboard to wealth and success" for the Pittsburgh banker, Thomas Mellon. "Instead of depression," Mellon later remembered, the fire "gave an impetus to every kind of business. There was ready employment at better wages, new life and increased value was infused into the real estate." 36. Hensler, Crucible of Fire, 48. 37. The Albion: A Journal of News, Politics and Literature, May 26, 1849. On "boundlessness," see John Higham's classic essay, From Boundlessness to Consolidation. 38. In a provocative book, Kevin Rozario argues that buoyant responses to disaster became quite characteristic of American life during this period. See Rozario, Culture of Calamity. 39. Boston Cultivator, April 26, 1845; Baltimore Sun, April 26, 1845 (editorial); Christian Observer, May 2, 1845. 40. Heale, "From City Fathers to Social Critics." 41. Calvinists too had favored good works, and plenty of philanthropy had flowed from a religious impulse before the Second Great Awakening. See Bremner, American Philanthropy. 42. The Missouri territorial assembly requested such relief in a resolution dated January 12, 1814, motivated by the discovery that Congress had appropriated funds for earthquake relief in Venezuela. See "Resolution for the Relief of the Citizens of New Madrid County," January 12, 1814, in Carter, Territorial Papers, 729–31. The House Committee on Public Lands approved the proposal the following month but Congress did not give its final assent until February 17, 1815, a full three years after the final New Madrid tremor. The implementation of the act was marred by fraud and poor legislative drafting, and it is not clear how much land was distributed to earthquake victims, as opposed to speculators. See Rohrbough, Land Office Business, 106–07. 43. Unless otherwise indicated, the examples cited here come from Johnson, Situation Desperate, 1–17. 44. See Register of Debates, March 8, 1836, 2704. 45. The Washington administration distributed corn to starving Creek Indians in 1792, and Congress approved aid to hungry Seminole Indians in 1826. For the first instance, see letter, James Seagrove to Governor of East Florida, June 13, 1792, and letter, Seagrove to Henry Knox [Secretary of War], Oct. 17, 1792, in American State Papers, 303–4, and 311–12. For the second, see House debate of April 12, 1826, and Senate debate of May 20, 1826, in Register of Debates, 2195, 783. For the inoculations policy, see Dollar, "High Plains Smallpox Epidemic"; Pearson, "Lewis Cass and the Politics of Vaccination"; Trimble, "1832 Inoculation Program on the Missouri River." 46. The new US consul to Caracas was instructed by Secretary of State James Monroe to emphasize that "this interposition for the relief of the distressed people of Venezuela is a strong proof of the friendship and interest which the United States takes in their welfare." See Griffin, The United States and the Disruption of the Spanish Empire, 66. See also Johnson, Situation Desperate, 7. 47. Niles' Weekly Register, March 21, 1812. For a typical example of a later catch-all narrative, collated from diverse fragments of information, see Samuel L. Mitchell, "A Detailed Narrative of the Earthquakes Which Occurred on the 16th day of December, 1811, and agitated the parts of North America that lie between the Atlantic Ocean and Louisiana," in Transactions of the Literary and Philosophical Society of New York, March 25, 1815. For a diary account, see the record kept by one George Heinrich Crist, of Nelson County, Kentucky, excerpts of which are reproduced on the "Virtual Times" website, and were downloaded on September 29, 2011, from http://hsv.com/genlintr/newmadrd/accnt3.htm. Another eyewitness account (by Lydia Roosevelt) is excerpted in Johnson, "Harbinger of Revolution," 10–11. 48. See Annals of Congress, 12th Cong., 1st Sess., 90–91 (Senate) 588–89 (House). The fire left many Richmond families facing acute financial hardship, in part because the city had little by way of organized philanthropy. See Baker, Richmond Theater Fire, 90–8. 49. Balogh, Government Out of Sight, 218. 50. Shallat, Structures in the Stream, 140–54, 176–9; also, Colten, Unnatural Metropolis, 45. 51. Ostrom, United States Coast Guard, 14. 52. Paskoff, Troubled Waters, 19–22. 53. On the emergence of this sensibility, the development of the insurance industry is again instructive. See Murphy, Investing in Life, and – for the development of fire insurance – Tebeau, Eating Smoke. FDR spoke of protecting Americans from the "hazards and vicissitudes of life" when he signed the Social Security Act into law, in 1935. 54. This section is drawn from an unpublished paper in which I explore late nineteenth-century disaster relief in greater depth. See Davies, "How Strong was the Nineteenth Century American State?" For the best accounts of post-Civil War disaster relief, see Dauber, Sympathetic State, and Jones, American Red Cross. 55. On the spread and impact of the telegraph, see John, Network Nation. 56. Holzer, "How steam blew the rowdies"; Barry, Rising Tide. 57. T.B. Maury, "The Telegraph and the Storm, the U.S. Signal Service," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 43 (August, 1871): 405. 58. Wiebe, Search for Order. 59. Foner, Reconstruction, 496; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 859. See also Balogh, Government Out of Sight, 295. 60. Linda Kerber considers the Fourteenth Amendment's "guarantee of birthright citizenship" to be "one of the strongest founding principles of American identity." See Kerber, "Stateless as the Citizen's Other," 11 (emphasis added). 61. Galveston and Johnstown, in particular, generated torrents of highly emotive newspaper coverage, including intense competition between papers seeking the best scoops, and the plaudits for humanitarian zeal. For newspaper coverage of the Johnstown flood, see McCullough, Johnstown Flood, 220. For Galveston, see especially the coverage in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, September 11 to 22, 1900. The World sent four relief trains and two steamships, packed with supplies, to Galveston, and placed the American Red Cross's Clara Barton in charge of their distribution. 62. For Gilded Age conceptions of the public sphere, see Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work. 63. Landis, "'Let Me Next Time be Tried by Fire'," 972. See also Balogh, Government Out of Sight, 145, 147. 64. Dauber, Sympathetic State, 35, 6. 65. The first such list that Dauber has found dates from 1890. See Sympathetic State, 46. 66. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 15, 91, 97–102, 104, 111, 129. 67. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 20. As for Arkansas's conception of the public sphere, we could even go back further: in some respects it closely resembled that of medieval East Anglia, where public authority was not completely absent, in relation to floods, but was limited to outlining the responsibilities that each fenland farmer and fisherman owed to the community. See Bevis, Flooded Fens. 68. For examples, see Leech, Reveille in Washington, 6–15, including an amusing quote from Anthony Trollope at 12; and Young, Washington Community, 22–28. 69. Even so, some legislators opposed federal aid even in these cases, fearing that they would encourage broader claims for charitable relief. See Dauber, "'Let Me Next Time be Tried by Fire'," 998–1004. 70. Looking back on the quake a year later, by which time his family had escaped to Indiana, he exclaimed that "As much as I love my place in Kentucky, I never want to go back. From December to April no man, woman or animal if they could talk would dare to believe what we lived through." People in Indiana had troubles too, he acknowledged – Shawnee Indians had killed 24 settlers in his new hometown of Pigeon Roost. "But at least they could see the enemy." Crist diary.