Of the many prisons in Texas, the Beto Unit, located near the Trinity River has the largest outbreak in the state. Though COVID-19 is a new and terrifying disease, there is a long history of outbreaks along the Trinity River. In the antebellum period, perceptions of the healthfulness of the Trinity varied by location, whereas following the Civil War the Trinity developed a reputation as being generally unsafe for human health. William Bollaert’s report from the early 1840s singled out the Trinity below Swartout as being especially unhealthy: the fevers “common on these low alluvial lands." Ten years later another traveler across the Trinity similarly noted, “Great country here for chills." That same year a plantation mistress wrote to her son describing the fever on their Trinity plantation that quickly took the life of “poor little Flora.” With such conditions, she asked, “Who can tell what a day may bring forth?” Steamboats navigating the river not only carried cash crops but could also spread disease and devastation. In the 1840s one traveler had noted that the Trinity River town of Cincinnati “comes in for its share of agues.”As a thriving river port, Cincinnati had another vulnerability: contact with distant towns from which yellow fever could be spread. The Trinity’s use as a highway to market meant that it could also help spread yellow fever. Once yellow fever arrived in Cincinnati it spread and persisted because of the abundant mosquitos living in the bottomlands. Many, possibly hundreds, died during the epidemic and Cincinnati permanently lost even more of its residents who left and never returned to the promising, but too dangerous river town.
Well before emancipation explorers, settlers, and boosters had debated about the propensity for disease in the Trinity River bottomlands. When the naturalist arrived with Mier y Teran’s expedition at the flooding Trinity he had become so feverish that he no longer cared to study nature. As the historian Conevery Bolton Valencius has argued, nineteenth-century settlers understood, through “universal experience that disease was associated in powerful ways with moist, swampy places.” However, knowing that they were more likely to catch a fever or another illness in the bottomlands did not stop people from moving there. “Settlers confronted the irony of good situations: proximity to waterways, so necessary for economic well-being, meant proximity to miasma and deadly ills,” Valencius writes. Planters who came to the Trinity did so with a combination of wishful thinking and trial and error. If a particular location proved too sickly or too flood-prone then they might move their home. George T. Wood the second governor of Texas and a Trinity planter decided that his first home had been built too close to the river and began building a home on a hill away from the river. Furthermore, planters also came to the Trinity believing that their slaves were less likely to become sick, an idea that played into their racist justification for slavery—and these ideas about race and the environment persisted in the postwar period as well.
Because of their limited resources and minimal aid provided by the federal government, the Civil War and the immediate postwar years were particularly lethal for freedpeople throughout the South. Historian Jim Downs has shown how much suffering and death took place alongside the arrival of emancipation. With the federal government slow to offer aid in the immediate moments after emancipation, Downs writes that “tens of thousands of freed slaves became sick and died due to the unexpected problems caused by the exigencies of war and the massive dislocation triggered by emancipation.” As Downs argues, migration and displacement proved deadly, suggesting another reason why many freed slaves chose to remain on or near their plantations adjacent to the Trinity. Yet with their crops weakened or destroyed by flooding in the first two years after emancipation, freedpeople also faced potential disease with little to sustain them.
When yellow fever returned to the Trinity after the Civil War it had a particularly devastating effect on the freedpeople in the region. Not only were they suffering from failed crops and a complete lack of freedom dues, but yellow fever also hindered the ability of the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide assistance and protect their rights. In 1867 hundreds of United States soldiers died from yellow fever and that September the commander of the Bureau in Texas, Charles Griffin died from yellow fever. In Walker County, a former agent, who had been a voter registrar, died. His replacement survived the disease but found himself unable to follow through on his duties during his illness. Even further upriver in Anderson County, the agent reported on the chaos caused by the spread of the disease.
Given all of the challenges of Reconstruction, the yellow fever outbreak made it even more difficult for the Freedmen’s Bureau to accomplish its mission in a region where white residents attacked agents for doing their job. Most of the freedpeople had arrived at the Trinity before emancipation, and the floods and sickness that came with life on the river appeared as a threat to their survival. Conevery Valencius has argues that 19th century settlers understanding of their bodies and environment played an important role in the expansion of the United States. “That a stretch of land was ‘healthy’ held significance not only for the future of the household that claimed it,” she writes, “but for the future of the nation dependent on such successful settlement.” While Valencius was referring to the physical expansion of the United States, the massive expansion of the federal government and its role in citizens’ everyday life during the Civil War and Reconstruction also depended on healthy environments that would allow its officers and agents to do their work.
1 William Bollaert, William Bollaert’s Texas (Norman: Published in co-operation with the Newberry Library, Chicago, by the University of Oklahoma Press, 1956), 110.
2 Entry from May 31, 1853, Henry H, Field Diary, Box 2003-019, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
3 “Letter from S.W. Goree to Thomas J. Goree,” March 20, 1853, Newton Gresham Library, Sam Houston State University, Digital Collections, https://digital.library.shsu.edu/digital/collection/p243coll3/id/2907/rec/9.
4 Bollaert, William Bollaert’s Texas, 292.
5 D'Anne McAdams Crews, ed., Huntsville and Walker County, Texas: A Bicentennial History (Huntsville, Texas: Sam Houston State University, 1976). Heather Hornbuckle, "Cincinnati: An Early Riverport in Walker County," Texas Historian, March 1978.
6 Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country : How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 80.
7 Valencius, 140.
8 Sue Ann Hayes Cobb ed., Hayes Cemetery Patrick Hayes Texas Pioneer, unpublished manuscript 2005, Madisonville Public Library, Madisonville, Texas.
9 S. H. German, "Governor George Thomas Wood." The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 20, no. 3 (1917): 260-68. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30234712, 273.
11 Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 7.
12 Patricia Smith Prather and Jane Clements Monday, From Slave to Statesman: The Legacy of Joshua Houston, Servant to Sam Houston (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 1993), 101.
13 Christopher B. Bean, Too Great a Burden to Bear : The Struggle and Failure of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 144.
14 Valencius, The Health of the Country, 260.