Inhabitants, Illness, and Interment

Given here are a few details about a handful of individuals mapped from the Return of Death records. Together they represent a small sample of the spectrum of Charleston society, enslaved, free, male, female, young, and old.

So why, among all the heightened drama taking place in Charleston during this time, do we care about the people listed here? These individuals represent only a few for whom enough information could be found to describe their lives in just slightly more detail. For many, if not most, we know very little about them besides the data reported in the city’s Return of Death records. Many of their headstones are gone or worn smooth by now, the names of their friends and spouses, parents and children perhaps forgotten. Their family alive today, if they have any, may still be in Charleston or scattered throughout the country or the world. Probably few of their descendants ever think of them. Do you know the names of your ancestors who lived or died 160 years ago?

In short, we care because their lives were very ordinary, their deaths sadly common for their time. We care about them because they were part of a whole, in the same way that you or anyone else makes up a part of a community as they deal with the routines and constants of life in a historic time of disease and unrest. Perhaps a Charlestonian in 1860 may have found that situation relatable.

Urban dwellers of the early- to mid-nineteenth century, encouraged by the need for space in newly-industrial city centers, as well as the fear of contagion from the dead, began participating in the “rural cemetery movement.”¹ Instead of the cloistered church graveyards popular up to this point, rural cemeteries located outside of town limits catered to a new visual preference: rolling hills, open fields, trees balefully arching over creeks and tranquil lakes. Sweeping disease outbreaks of the 1850s, including Charleston’s 1858 yellow fever epidemic, highlighted the push by cities to enforce burial outside of population centers.² Of the 1401 death record entries that contain burial place information, around 497, or 35%, were in rural burial grounds like Magnolia Cemetery or St. Lawrence Cemetery.³

By far the most popular single burial place was the Potter’s Field, also known as the Public Cemetery, with 212 or 15% of listed burials.⁴ In 1860 most people interred there were black, male, and an average of 26 years old (or 42 excluding those listed as “minors”).⁵ A place for “Charleston indigents, both black and white,” it was used until 1927 and currently rests under part of the Johnson Hagood Stadium.⁶

The locations of the burial places as plotted on this map are derived from The Silence of the Dead: Giving Charleston Cemeteries A Voice, a result of the extensive work of the Chicora Foundation. Many no longer exist today, victims of time and urban sprawl. Because the names of several of these burial grounds could refer to different locations, such as the ever popular “First Baptist Church,” or a single location could go by a number of different names, the locations they have been placed on the above map is based on best guess, and generally reflects the distributions of interments as far as existing information allows.³²

Even without the looming war, the mid-nineteenth century was a tumultuous time in which to live. Inhabitants of Charleston and the South as a whole, with its warm humidity and accompanying mosquitos, were particularly vulnerable to tropical diseases like dysentery, typhoid, malaria, and yellow fever, along with the usual range of infection like smallpox and tuberculosis common in this time.¹ The Charleston medical community was particularly preoccupied with yellow fever, which had killed around six hundred people in an 1854 outbreak and another seven hundred in 1858.²

The spread and deadliness of this disease and other infections were not helped by the state of medical knowledge, which still depended on the miasma theory that bad smells spread illness. In regards to yellow fever, the City Council concluded in 1859 that “The noxious emanations of hundreds of cow-yards [as well as privy vaults, burial places, sewers, and drains,] on a hot summer’s morning, which taint the surrounding atmosphere, must be prejudicial to health.”³ Professional medical care was often a luxury of the white and wealthy, though some methods (a result of often inconsistent or incomplete medical education) could involve bloodletting, leeches, induced vomiting, or medications ranging from horseradish to mercury to opium.⁴

Listed below are the top ten causes of death given in the 1860 Return of Death records. To give some perspective, Charleston County had only six cases of tuberculosis in 2019, a testament to advances in medical knowledge and treatment access.⁵ Descriptions of these diseases and others listed in the records can be found here.⁶

Although medicine has thankfully moved beyond opium for the common cold, some responses to the diseases of the 1800s will stand out to a 2020 audience. “The epidemic Yellow Fever,” reads an 1859 Charleston City Council report, “which is supposed by a respectable part of the citizens of Charleston can be prevented by Quarantine Laws; while, on the other hand, a large and intelligent portion are of opinion that this fatal enemy to the health, trade, and commerce of the city, is of local origin—dependent upon local causes—and can only be prevented or modified by the most rigid sanitary regulations of the municipal authority.”¹ A commentator in April 2020 echoed this uncertainty over the value of quarantine, saying ”Why ruin our lives to keep us safe?… Give me a three-day virus, I'm totally cool with that, just don't ruin my life to do it.”² One hopes she at least adheres to “the most rigid sanitary regulations.”

There also existed a familiar difference between the effect of illness on white and black bodies. Treatment of African Americans by predominantly white doctors was hindered by preconceptions that enslaved people were both prone to faking illness to avoid work and naturally immune or resistant to many common tropical diseases.³ Of all deaths nationally in 1860, white deaths numbered 1.21 per 100 people, free people of color 1.27 per 100, and enslaved persons 1.76 per 100.⁴ In Charleston the situation was even more dire, with deaths at 2.67 per 100 white people, 3.94 per 100 free people of color, and 3.44 per 100 enslaved persons.⁵ The 1860 census report explains, “The less mortality among whites is evidently connected with their more affluent circumstances, including the command of the highest medical skill and the requisite care and attendance in sickness.”⁶

Meanwhile in the present, cases of COVID-19 among Black Americans is 2.6 times that of white persons, with hospitalizations at 4.7 times and deaths 2.1 times the rate of white Americans.⁷ The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) attributes this to causes similar to those given in the 1860 census report, including “socioeconomic status, access to health care, and increased exposure to the virus due to occupation (e.g., frontline, essential, and critical infrastructure workers).”⁸ Clearly there is a barrier to health and wellbeing that was not solved by emancipation, and one that is more prominent than ever for those once again living in dangerous and disunifying times.

Charlestonians have always been forced to continue our daily lives while tumultuous history unfolds. Under British occupation of the city we cooked our meals, as South Carolina seceded from the Union we went to work, and as COVID-19 ravages our community we mourn our losses as always. In many ways we have grown and improved and in many ways we have not, but as always we are responsible to each other to carry on, to learn from our past, and to remember.