Hidden Terrors

Drawing on accounts of ordinary Americans, Hidden Terrors offers the first comprehensive history of the enigmatic illness behind the 1830s cholera pandemic--and its profound consequences for the nation.

From 1832 to 1836, cholera erupted across US cities as well as in small towns, rural farms, prisons, and plantations. Its victims experienced ghastly symptoms--vomiting, explosive diarrhea, painful spasms, turning blue, and collapsing into comas--and often perished within hours of first becoming sick. They frequently woke up healthy, began to feel ill by nightfall, and did not live to see another day. Cholera killed people much more quickly than other diseases with which Americans were familiar, and its causes would not be discovered until the later development of bacteriology. It afflicted rich and poor, people of every race, religion, and region.

As Hidden Terrors reveals, many powerful people in the 1830s wanted their contemporaries to understand cholera as anything but a frightful and unknowable predator that took its prey indiscriminately. American moral reformers and medical authorities, among others, attributed the deaths of the impoverished, enslaved, and exploited to individual failings--eating rotten foods, drinking alcohol, neglecting to seek treatment, and living in filth. The experience of these victims, in their view, was a natural consequence of immorality and called for minimal sympathy. Authorities ignored and even covered up the deaths of enslaved African Americans, Indigenous peoples, and Irish immigrants. The disease particularly exploded in crowded housing, work camps, poor houses, hospitals, prisons, along the routes Indigenous people were forced to travel on the Trail of Tears, and within slave coffles. However, the universal nature of the pandemic became more apparent as deaths of supposedly respectable people became shockingly numerous, apparent, and undeniable. It was that terror--the idea of everyone being equally subject to an invisible and mysterious killer--that elites struggled most to keep hidden.

Drawing on family papers, letters, and newspaper accounts written during the pandemic, Hidden Terrors tells the comprehensive story of the first cholera pandemic in the United States. Paul Kelton humanely captures the experiences of ordinary Americans living in fear of a mysterious disease and exposes the disastrous consequences of a deadly germ intersecting with the great injustices of Jacksonian America.