Given the concerns over the recent outbreak of Ebola, I'm taking a quick sidestep from writing about East Cooper plantations to share some insight on some of the rather radical steps taken in the 18th and 19th centuries to halt the spread of infectious diseases. For the early colonists, disease was their No. 1 fear, dreaded more than enemy invasion or killing hurricanes.
The colonists' horror of disease was founded on harsh experience. In 1698, a smallpox epidemic was so disastrous that the Reverend Hugh Adams, a recently arrived Congregationalist minister from New England, wrote, “The dead were carried in carts, being heaped one upon another. Worse by far than the Great Plague of London, considering the smallness of the town. Shops shut up for six weeks; nothing but carrying medicines, digging graves, carting the dead.” It is thought that this epidemic also entirely eradicated the Wando Indian tribe.
In 1706, it was yellow fever that ravaged the city. Described as “pestilential Fever very mortal especially to Fresh Europeans,” this often fatal disease, colloquially known as “black vomit” for its symptoms, was carried by the Anopheles aegypti mosquito from Africa, brought in both in virulent form and likely with the larva of the A. aegypti mosquito transported in water casks aboard the ships. Physicians of the early 1700s were not yet aware of this as the cause, but hard experience had shown that outbreaks often occurred following the arrival of ships from certain countries, particularly those arriving with African slaves.
Thus, in 1707 an act was passed, ordering that a brick lazaretto, commonly called a pest house (short for pestilence), be built on Sullivan's Island as a quarantine station. Described as being 16-by-30-feet in size, like others in ensuing decades it was located at the lower end of the island, just below present-day Fort Moultrie. Where was it exactly? My best guess is that it was located in the area of today's Stella Maris parking lot.
In the early 1700s, Charles Town was growing at an astonishing rate. The tide of white immigrants almost all shared the same goal — owning land suitable for the cultivation of rice and indigo, a plant from which a much sought-after blue dye was made. With this booming rise in plantation settlement came an unprecedented period of importation of slaves, the majority of whom came from the Senegambia region on the West African area known as the Rice, or Grain Coast. As these slaves had experience with growing both rice and indigo, it did not take long for Carolina plantation owners to specifically request slaves from this area for their knowledge. Of all the slaves brought into the Lowcountry during the 1700s, some 40 percent were from Sierra Leone and 42 percent from the neighboring country of Angola.
An act passed on May 29, 1744, for “further preventing the Spreading of Contagious or Malignant Distempers in the Province,” perhaps best explains the need for quarantine. It begins: “Whereas, it hath been found by experience, that since the importation of negroes and slaves from the coasts of Africa into this Province hath been prohibited, this Province in general and Charlestown in Particular, hath been much more healthy than heretofore it hath been ... be it enacted ... that no ship or vessel ... shall arrive or come into this province over the bar of the harbour of Charlestown, with negroes from the coasts of Africa or elsewhere ... before all the negroes imported or brought in such ship or vessel shall have been landed and put on shore on Sullivan's Island aforesaid, and there shall have remained for the space of 10 days.”
In other words, no ship could even enter the harbor before the slaves were offloaded onto the island and kept until the port physician pronounced them healthy. The ship itself was also cleaned, aired and inspected before it could make port. At one point, even commodities imported from some countries were ordered quarantined in a warehouse on the island to “air” before they were allowed into the city.
In 1753, Swiss émigré John Tobler wrote a “Description of Carolina” that further describes the issue of disease. Wrote Tobler, “In the middle of summer (are) severe and dangerous contagious fevers which occasionally bring many people to the grave. ... The blame is placed on the many ships which land there, coming from almost all parts of the world, especially from Africa with blackamoor slaves, on whose arrival often Fever, Smallpox and other diseases follow, just as if they had brought them along. But so that the spread of such diseases may be prevented as far as possible, a house has been built on a small island in the harbor, in which infected persons must stay, who, until they are well, are not permitted to come into the city. No one else lives on this island, except those needed to take care of the patients.”
One of the most harrowing experiences ever for the inhabitants of the pest house came during the Hurricane of 1752, one of the strongest ever to hit the Carolina coast with a storm surge that inundated the island. The South-Carolina Gazette reported, “At Sullivan's Island, the pest-house was carried away, and of 15 people who were there nine are lost, the rest saved themselves by adhering strongly to some of the rafters of the house when it fell, upon which they were driven some miles beyond the island, to Hobcaw.”
This report does not state whether the inhabitants were African slaves, white immigrants performing quarantine, or both. For indeed, some white immigrants also performed quarantine on Sullivan's Island. In 1767, when Peletiah Webster visited the island he wrote of seeing, “... 300 negroes performing quarantine with the small pox ... there is a pest-house here with pretty good conveniences: the most moving sight was a poor white man performing quarantine alone in a boat at anchor 10 rods from shore with an awning and pretty poor accommodations.”
The pest house remained sadly necessary as epidemics continued to ravage the colony. In 1759 and 1760, an estimated 6,000 people contracted smallpox in Charles Town and over 700 people died.
Because of the astounding number of African slaves who performed quarantine at the island's lazaretto — an estimated 200,000 total — Sullivan's Island has since been dubbed the “Ellis Island of slavery.” In 1796, the Sullivan's Island pest house was ordered sold and the lazaretto was moved to Fort Johnson on James Island. For a time, the quarantine station was on Morris Island. Well into the 20th century, like at Ellis Island in New York, quarantine was still required for immigrants as a matter of public health. Luckily, we now have vaccines for yellow fever and smallpox. We can but pray that the vaccine for Ebola is just around the corner.
One last ironic note: After the Sullivan's Island Pest House was closed, the building was purchased by the Episcopal diocese and eventually became the island's first house of worship. It was aptly named Grace Church.
Suzannah Smith Miles is a writer and Lowcountry and Civil War historian.
