One of the most horrific diseases to plague the coastal cities of colonial America was yellow fever. Considered a common CHILDHOOD disease in Aerica, the yellow fever virus came to the New World on slave ships along with the Aedes aegypti mosquito—the insect vector required for transmission. This mosquito preferred living in urban environments, breeding in water-filled artificial containers provided for them by their human hosts. Once infected by this winged vector, patients often suffered high fevers, pains in head, back, and legs, nausea and vomiting, and acute exhaustion. The most serious cases displayed the classic signs of yellow fever: jaundice, black vomit (partially digested blood), and liver or kidney failure. Eventually, many patients slipped into comas, dying from a series of organ failures, internal bleeding, and shock. Survivors, however, enjoyed immunity for life.
Medical historians believe the first yellow fever outbreak in the colonies occurred in the summer of 1693, when the British fleet carried it from Barbados to the port city of Boston. The Aedes aegypti survived in the water barrels on board ship and kept the infection in circulation by biting nonimmune soldiers and sailors. Although colonial officials instituted a strict quarantine, yellow fever spread into the city. The Native American population, already decimated by other foreign diseases, lived well inland and were thus spared from another new deadly epidemic. Although unaware of how the disease was spread, officials noted that the fever abruptly ended with the advent of cold weather.
Other colonial cities along the eastern seaboard also suffered from yellow fever epidemics. New York City suffered epidemics in 1702 and then on three occasions in the 1740s—1743, 1745, and 1748. In the mid-Atlantic region Philadelphia lost one in six citizens in its 1699 epidemic. It again suffered in 1741, 1747, and 1762. Charleston, a semitropical port city where mosquitoes thrived, endured more epidemics than northern cities. Yellow fever attacked there at least seven times in less than 50 years. The first epidemic struck in 1699, but others followed it in 1703, 1728, 1732, 1739, 1745, and 1748. During the epidemics of the 1740s, West Indian and southern colonial physicians noted that few African slaves sickened or died. They asserted “black” immunity quite erroneously because few American-born slaves experienced yellow fever as a childhood disease, especially in northern seaport towns. After 1748 only Philadelphia in the summer of 1762 had confirmed cases of yellow fever until the 1790s. When yellow fever returned to Philadelphia in 1793, it killed more than 4,000 people and brought the nation’s capital to a standstill.
Yellow fever had political implications for the larger Atlantic world. In combination with malaria and other tropical diseases, yellow fever provided a biological shield, protecting West Africa from European invasion until the invention of tropical medicine in the 19th century. In addition, once Europeans successfully conquered and colonized an island in the Caribbean, the disease aided them in defending their colonies from nonimmune invaders from other European nations.
Further reading: John Duffy, Epidemics in Colonial America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1953, 1971); J. Worth Estes and Billy G. Smith, “A Melancholy Scene of Devastation”: The Public Response to the 1793 Philadelphia Yellow Fever Epidemic (Philadelphia: Science History Publications, 1997).
—Anita DeClue and Billy G. Smith
Youngs, John (1623-1698) politician A political agitator and power broker on Long Island, John Youngs was born in April 1623 in Southwold, England, to Joan Herrington Youngs and the Reverend John Youngs, a Puritan minister. His teen years were spent on the move as his family secretly left England, settled briefly in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and then crossed the Long Island Sound to found the town of Southold on eastern Long Island. Living on land claimed by both Dutch and English, Youngs looked for direction at first from the colony of New Haven and later from Connecticut. The New England colonies enlisted Youngs in 1655 to command a vessel of observation in the Long Island Sound that monitored a group of Narragansett who threatened to attack the Montauk on Long Island. Eight years later Youngs marched with a band of English raiders who swept Long Island “making a great uproar with colors flying, drums beating, and trumpets sounding” to inform the Dutch population that Long Island belonged to the English. Captain Youngs in particular was singled out by the Dutch as the man who threatened to burn a Dutch village to the ground. In 1664 Youngs participated in the English conquest of New Netherland.
With the Dutch obstacle eliminated, Youngs began anew his campaign to place Long Island within the colony of Connecticut, whose religious and ethnic composition and representative government were undoubtedly more appealing to Youngs and his constituents. Nevertheless, Long Island became part of the new colony of New York and remained so even after Youngs used the brief Dutch reconquest of 1673 and the Glorious Revolution of 1689 to swing the island back to Connecticut.
Youngs served his community as magistrate, deputy, high sheriff, boundary commissioner, and colonel of the militia. He was a member of the panel of judges that convicted Jacob Leisler of treason. Youngs spent his last 12 years on the governor’s council and died in 1698.
—Judy VanBuskirk
Zeisberger, David (1721-1808) missionary, scholar Born in Moravia, David Zeisberger joined the Pennsylvania Moravian community in 1739 and trained as a missionary. He spent most of his life as a missionary to Native Americans. Blessed with extraordinary linguistic skills, he learned to speak many Indian languages, including Mohawk, Onondaga, and Delaware, and was adopted into the Onondaga Iroquois nation. Zeisberger served as an interpreter for Moravian church officials during their visits to the Indian nations of Pennsylvania and New York. In 1763 he accompanied 125 Delaware converts who had been ordered to Philadelphia by the governor. One convert had been accused of murder, and the Paxton Boys had threatened to kill all the converts. The accused was acquitted in 1764, and the surviving Moravian Delaware and their missionaries were released from protective custody in 1765.
As a missionary Zeisberger followed the Moravian Church’s guidelines. Male and female converts, in the role of assistants, helped run the missions, approving new residents and new candidates for baptism and communion. Women assistants were responsible for ministering to female converts. Zeisberger made it very clear that race was not important, culture was. There were “white Indians” (white Americans who had been captured, usually as children, by Native Americans) at his missions, and he always referred to them and treated them as Indians. One of his own white Moravian assistants married an Indian convert, was adopted into her nation, and consequently “became” an Indian to Zeisberger. Zeisberger’s only requirement for conversion was religious conversion; he left all other social constructs alone. Zeisberger’s greatest accomplishments occurred after the Revolution, when he founded several villages in Ohio.
Further reading: Earl P. Olmstead, David Zeisberger: A Life among the Indians (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997).
Zenger, John Peter (1 697-1 746) journalist, printer John Peter Zenger, a journalist and printer, was involved in an important political court case that had implications for freedom of the press in early America. He was born in the German Palatinate and came to North America in 1710 with a group of refugees sponsored by New York’s incoming governor, Robert Hunter. Zenger was apprenticed to New York printer William Bradford. In 1719 he set up a printing shop in Maryland, but by 1723 he was back in New York working for Bradford. After 1726 he tried, with little success, to compete with his former master. In 1732 and 1733 he joined with Lewis Morris and a group of dissident New York politicians who were trying to end the tenure of that colony’s new governor, William Cosby. In 1733 Zenger became the printer and publisher of the New-York Weekly Journal, which competed with Bradford’s New-York Gazette and which featured political satire and criticism of Cosby. James Alexander, a lawyer and ally of Morris’s, was the real editor of the newspaper. Zenger printed furiously critical essays of Alexander, Morris, and their associates as well as texts borrowed from English “opposition” authors opposed to the Whig hegemony of Robert Walpole. This development illustrates the increasing attractiveness to American political thinkers of “Commonwealth” or republican political ideas, a phenomenon that continued into the Revolutionary era. Cosby and his allies at first tried to ignore Zenger’s jibes, then to ridicule and intimidate their authors, and finally to suppress them. Issues of the Weekly Journal were publicly burned, and in late 1734 Zenger was charged with seditious libel against the government. When the case came to trial in 1735 Cosby and New York’s chief justice, James DeLancey, tried to rig the proceedings by disbarring Zenger’s attorney, Alexander, and by manipulating the jury selection process. They were frustrated by Alexander’s old friend Andrew Hamilton, a Philadelphia lawyer, who persuaded a jury—over the state’s strong objections and to the dismay of DeLancey—that public statements that were “true” could not be libelous. Zenger was acquitted, and, after a brief period as a symbolic hero, he spent the rest of his life as a relatively obscure printer and publisher. For a long time it was believed that his trial was a landmark in the evolution of American libel and free speech jurisprudence, but scholars have largely abandoned that interpretation. Instead, they recognize the Zenger case as an early and important example of the “political trial” in America.
Further reading: Stanley N. Katz, ed., A Brief Narrative of the Case and Trial of John Peter Zenger: Printer of the New York Weekly Journal (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972); Leonard W. Levy, Emergence of a Free Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
—Wayne Bodle
World History
