Yellow Jack

Yellow fever is a disease that plagued Louisiana for more than two hundred years after the French landed in 1699. To ward off epidemics, officials often inspected ships arriving in New Orleans to see if they carried the disease. If they did, the ship was quarantined in the Mississippi River and forced to fly a yellow flag as a warning for others to stay away. A nautical flag is known as a “jack,” so the fever became nicknamed “Yellow Jack.”

Yellow fever came on suddenly with flu-like symptoms. Most people suffered for three or four days and then recovered, but some quickly slid into a fatal spiral. Internal bleeding led to abdominal pain, kidney failure, and throwing up coagulated blood known as the “black vomit.” Eventually, the liver was damaged, and jaundice caused the victim to take on a yellowish hue.

Surviving the fever gave one life-long immunity to the dreaded disease. Many slaves in Louisiana were exposed to the fever, and their subsequent immunity gave rise to a myth that African slaves had a natural immunity.

At the time, no one knew that mosquitoes carried the fever. It usually struck during the late summer, or “fever season,” when the swamps were stagnant and foul smelling and mosquitoes were most abundant. Being ignorant of the mosquitoes’ role, many people believed the fever was caused by some type of poisonous swamp gas. During epidemics, New Orleans officials burned pots of sulfur in the streets to try to purify the air but only succeeded in creating a noxious, yellow cloud that enveloped the city.   

During the fever season, the wealthy people of New Orleans retreated to their summer homes on Lake Pontchartrain because yellow jack rarely struck there. They thought it was because sea breezes purified the air, but it was probably because the wind kept the mosquitoes at bay.

In 1832-1833, a cholera and yellow fever epidemic struck New Orleans and killed more than 5,000 people. Twenty years later, it got worse.

So many people died during the 1853-1854 epidemic that the bodies sometimes piled up because there were not enough healthy people to bury the dead. No one wanted to touch the bodies from fear they might be contagious, so slaves and convicts manned wagons and roamed the city collecting the dead and taking them out for burial.

Thousands of people fled New Orleans before authorities finally quarantined the city to prevent the epidemic from spreading. In less than a year, the death toll reached more than 11,000, or about ten percent of the city’s population. It was the worst yellow fever epidemic in American history.

Yellow jack continued to ravage the state throughout the nineteenth century. New Orleans, in fact, suffered sixty-seven summer fever outbreaks during those one hundred years, but it was not the only city to be affected.  

One of the Louisiana’s worst epidemics occurred in Shreveport in 1873. Even at that late date, doctors still did not realize that mosquitoes carried the disease. When fever broke out that summer some people believed poisonous sediments had been stirred up when workers cleared logjams that were impeding travel on the Red River. 

Shreveport eventually was quarantined in an attempt to contain the fever, but not before half the people had fled to the countryside. Five Catholic priests refused to leave and volunteered to remain behind to nurse the sick. All contracted the fever and died. Today, those brave priests are commemorated in stained glass at the city’s Holy Trinity Catholic Church.

Before cool weather finally brought the epidemic to an end, 759 out of Shreveport’s 10,000 people had died.  

In 1878, Louisiana’s second worst yellow fever epidemic occurred in New Orleans. There were more than 24,000 cases and over 4,000 people died.

Not long afterwards, doctors finally discovered that mosquitoes carried the disease, and health officials began draining pools of stagnate water or spraying oil on them to kill the dangerous insects. Afterward, cases of yellow fever dropped dramatically, and epidemics began to disappear.

The last yellow jack epidemic in the United States occurred in New Orleans in 1905. In that final spasm of death, 437 people lost their lives.   

Today, yellow fever has been eradicated in the United States, but it still exists in some tropical and sub-tropical nations in Africa and South America. 

Dr. Terry L. Jones is professor emeritus of history at the University of Louisiana at Monroe who has received numerous awards for his books and outdoor articles.