“Heat, moisture, animal and vegetable matter, are said to be the elements which produce the diseases of the South, and yet the testimony in proof of the health of the banks of the lower portion of the Mississippi river is too strong to be doubted. Here is a perfectly flat alluvial country, covering several hundred miles, interspersed with interminable lakes, lagunes, and jungles, and still we are informed by Dr. Cartwright, one of the most acute observers of the day, that this country is exempt from miasmatic disorders, and is extremely healthy. His assertion has been confirmed to me by hundreds of witnesses; and we know, from our own observation, that the population presents a robust and healthy appearance.” (Statistics are given to prove a greater average length of life for the white race in the South than in the North.)—Essay on the Value of Life in the South, by Dr. J. C. Nott, of Alabama.
To the same effect is the testimony of a far more trustworthy scientific observer, Darby, the surveyor and geographer of Louisiana:—
“Between the 9th of July, 1805, to the 7th of May, 1815, incredible as it may appear to many persons, I actually travelled [in Southern Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and, what is now, Texas] twenty thousand miles, mostly on foot. During the whole of this period, I was not confined one month, put all my indispositions together, and not one moment by any malady attributable to climate. I have slept in the open air for weeks together, in the hottest summer nights, and endured this mode of life in the most matted woods, perhaps, in the world. During my survey of the Sabine river, myself, and the men that attended me, existed, for several weeks, on flesh and fish, without bread or salt, and without sickness of any kind. That nine-tenths of the distempers of warm climate may be guarded against, I do not harbour a single doubt.
“If climate operates extensively upon the actions of human beings, it is principally their amusements that are regulated by proximity to the tropics. Dancing might be called the principal amusement of both sexes, in Louisiana. Beholding the airy sweep of a Creole dance, the length of time that an assembly will preserve in the sport, at any season of the year, cold or warm, indolence would be the last charge that candour could lodge against such a people.”[49]
“Copying from Montesquieu,” elsewhere says Mr. Darby, himself a slaveholder, “climate has been called upon to account for stains on the human character, imprinted by the hand of political mistake. No country where Negro Slavery is established but must have parts in the wounds committed on nature and justice.”
The unacclimated whites on the sea coast and on the river and bayou banks of the low country, between which and the sea coast there is much inter-communication, unquestionably suffer much from certain epidemic, contagious, and infectious pestilences. This, however, only renders the fact that dense settlements of whites have been firmly established upon them, and that they are remarkably exempt from miasmatic disease, one of more value in evidence of the practicability of white occupation of the upper bottom lands. There are grounds for doubting the common opinion that the negroes at the South suffer less from local causes of disease than whites. (See “Seaboard Slave States,” p. 647.) They may be less subject to epidemic and infectious diseases, and yet be more liable to other fatal disorders, due to such influences, than whites. The worst climate for unacclimated whites of any town in the United States is that of Charleston. (This, together with the whole of the rice coast, is clearly exceptional in respect of salubrity for whites.) It happens fortunately that the most trustworthy and complete vital statistics of the South are those of Charleston. Dr. Nott, commenting upon these, says that the average mortality, during six years, has been, of blacks alone, one in forty-four; of whites alone, one in fifty-eight. “This mortality” he adds, “is perhaps not an unfair test, as the population during the last six years has been undisturbed by emigration, and acclimated in greater proportion than at any previous period.” If the comparison had been made between native negroes and native or acclimated whites alone, it would doubtless show the climate to be still more unfavourable to negroes.[50]
Upon the very district to which Mr. Russell refers, as offering an extreme case, I quote the testimony of a Mississippi statistician:—
“The cotton-planters, deserting the rolling land, are fast pouring in upon the ‘swamp.’ Indeed, the impression of the sickliness of the South generally has been rapidly losing ground [i. e. among the whites of the South] for some years back, and that blessing [health] is now sought with as much confidence on the swamp lands of the Yazoo and the Mississippi as among the hills and plains of Carolina and Virginia.”—(De Bow’s “Resources,” vol. ii., p. 43.)
Dr. Barton says:—
“In another place I have shown that the direct temperature of the sun is not near so great in the South (during the summer) as it is at the North. I shall recur to this hereafter. In fact, the climate is much more endurable, all the year round, with our refreshing breezes, and particularly in some of the more elevated parts of it, or within one hundred miles of the coast, both in and out of doors, at the South than at the North, which shows most conspicuously the folly of the annual summer migrations, to pursue an imaginary mildness of temperature, which is left at home.”