CW-1:

THE FIRST CIVIL WAR, 1830-1842

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CONTROL NETWORKS: 
Siege & Contagion

1. Commerce, long familiar in all its senses, had spread smallpox and syphilis to indigenous peoples who had no previous experience of such disease.  The major culprit in this spread was human contact itself.  (Helped by some attempts at genocide, though it is hard to know whether the culprits were competent enough to make much difference, in comparison to the ruthless work of commerce itself.)  Only occasionally did this danger lead victim peoples to reject commerce outright, though they did often blame the traders and missionaries who carried infection.  Europeans, on their side, understood perfectly well that such diseases were part of the culture of international commerce.  As late as the early 18th century, this danger was still one from diseases that could strike any individuals exposed to the outside world, no matter what their class or race, and no matter where they lived.  For many centuries, large-scale movements of soldiers, settlers, or merchants, from one region to another, had transmitted disease organisms that could infect any people who lacked previous immunity.  Fatalism about this process was a hidden part of sophisticated thought:  locals, presumably, lacked a "global vision" of the sacrifices necessary to achieve civilization.
2. But campaigns were also being waged, in widely-separated parts of the world, not so much to limit people's mobility, as to assemble or move people in compact groups, vulnerable to low wages and lively preaching -- and eventually to "urban" diseases like cholera.  Cholera was not spread person-to-person, but through bad water supplies (though a sick individual could travel, infecting the water in a new place).  In the Americas, these campaigns went back many generations, to the efforts that Europeans made to "reduce" Indians to communities under outside control. In time, "reduction" would take the form of plantation slave communities or Indian "reservations."   Santa Anna's policy of subjection for peasant communities near Veracruz, when he was a young officer in the Spanish army, was just one more example.  Another wave in this strategy came to a focus in 1830, in the Indian Removal Act in the United States, and the war against Vicente Guerrero in Mexico -- coinciding with efforts by planters to repress autonomous slave religious leaders.

There were times, such as the 1830s, when the push of speculation and migration outran any barriers that society could set against contamination.  Growing cities became sinks of poor water supply, through which cholera could spread. Military units, which were themselves like small cities without adequate sanitary discipline, moved from one area to another, carrying disease. Cholera disabled some U.S. units, headed to fight Indians in 1832, just as it did some Mexican units, headed against conservative rebels in 1833.  The result was the outbreak of diseases that, though "infectious," were fostered by poverty, crowding, and mobilization. And that included industrial mobilization as well as military.
 
Smallpox, which moved in waves and had been fairly quiet for a generation, was also on the rise in this decade.  The threat to biological survival was one reason to impose some discipline on the liberal energies at work in politics, and in military life. "Police" was a buzz-word of the period, and that included sanitary police.

Whether in the cities or in the countryside, a world of "mere" commerce was making a drastic shift toward one of urban and military controls.  But none of this discipline was yet doing much for public sanitation and water supplies, either in city slums or in the armies of the period.

Nowhere in the world was there the kind of scientific understanding that "all" could accept.  Everywhere, even when people agreed that they needed to impose some controls, there was confusion and controversy about what kind of control.  Should it be the old controls of church and paternalistic tradition, or should it be some new, post-liberal controls, with bureaucratic regulations to impose limits on commerce and defecation?

All these problems imposed themselves too on the decisions made by famous men.

Andrew Jackson resented the censorious attitudes (toward him) of old-line politicians who supported military values and a disciplined army.  Santa Anna had resented the prestige of the more conservative officers who made the transition from the Spanish to the Mexican Army.  Both of them, as individuals, were among the outsiders who were riding on the world-wide wave of "liberal" politics at the beginning of the 1830s.  But their armies were vulnerable both to the dangers of population movement, and to the dangers of unscientific crowding. Their armies, if they moved out to deal with provincial challenges, would carry with them any epidemic diseases that were circulating through international commerce and bad water supplies.  In 1832, that meant cholera.

Jackson discovered it when he tried to react to a problem in the area west of Lake Michigan.  When citizens of northern Illinois were frightened by a migrating band of Indians, under their chief Black Hawk, Jackson decided to help out the poor locals by sending in army units under General Winfield Scott.  On their way to the scene of the "campaign," the troops discovered that they were carrying cholera.  His little army was itself a moving city, with its own bad sanitation. Many died, and Scott had to keep the rest away from the civilian population.  They never made it into battle.  Instead, soldiers already in the area had to depend on help from state militia in their campaign to push Black Hawk back away from the white settlements.  This was the balance that existed between state and national force in late 1832, at the time when Jackson put Scott in charge of Army arrangements in the confrontation with South Carolina.

Santa Anna discovered the problem when he tried to move against conservative rebels in Guanajuato.

Peoples engaged in civil war did it, whenever they declined to throw larger, compact coalition armies into the fray.  Large-scale civil wars would not be "safe," at least not until governments made some stab at scientific sanitary measures.
 

The long-term strain, between two types of disease horizon, applied also to the Missouri Country and the Plains.

The Mandan-Hidatsa villages, which had been centers of trade long before Europeans entered the Plains, were now receiving white traders and outside influences coming up from St. Louis.  In the same area, and very much in competition, the Lakotas wanted to control trade along more direct east-west lines, and resented the "middle-man" position of the villages.  There the decision came quickly, in 1837.

The annual steamboat came up the Missouri River, with trade goods and supplies.  A steamboat was itself a small town, with all the vulnerabilities of city life.  One of the workers on the boat came down sick.  The captain had his voyage to make.  At first he would not believe that the illness was smallpox.  When he had to admit that he knew, he kept going anyway, to do business at the villages, only sending messages ahead to warn those Indians out hunting, whether they were Lakotas or Mandans, not to come in from the plains.  The infection swept through the Mandans, who had not been exposed to it for many years.  All but about 200 died.  The remainder tried to recoup, but at a time when Lakota attacks were continuing.

Villages afire, on the bluffs over the Missouri River, marked the end of an old local people, caught between the "conservative" mobility of the plains nomads and the "liberal" mobility of the white traders.

References:

• C. A. Hutchinson, "The Asiatic Cholera Epidemic of 1833 in Mexico," Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1958)
• Clyde D. Dollar, "The High Plains Smallpox Epidemic of 1837-38," Western Historical Quarterly (1977)
• J.N.B. Hewitt, ed., Journal of Rudolph Friedrich Kurz: An Account of His Experiences among Fur Traders on the Mississippi and Upper Missouri Rivers During the Years 1846 to 1852 (1937)
• Roy Willard Meyer, The Village Indians of the Upper Missouri: the Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras (1977)
• Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival; A Population History since 1492 (1987).
• John C. Ewers, "The Influence of Epidemics on the Indian Populations and Cultures of Texas," Plains Anthropologist (1973)
• Robert H. Jackson, Indian Population Decline: the Missions of Northwestern New Spain, 1687-1840 (1994)
• J. S. Chambers, The Conquest of Cholera (1938)
• G.F. Pyle, "The Diffusion of Cholera in the United States in the Nineteenth Century," Geographical Analysis (1969)
• Peter Harstad, "Disease and Sickness on the Wisconsin Frontier: Cholera," Wisconsin Magazine of History (1960)

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