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For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the LORD.
Passover traditional
No one knew where it came from. "Epidemiological thought in the United States had been conditioned by experience with yellow fever, and the black vomit seemed obviously non-contagious. As was the case with yellow fever, so it was with cholera: there could never be found any pattern within the cases that would support a contagionist argument." It struck down its victims in the street, and they would be dead by nightfall. Symptoms were multiform and terrifying: muscular cramps, spasmodic vomiting, fever, a constant stream of rice-water diarrhea. It was known, alternately, as Asiatic cholera, pestilential cholera, spasmodic cholera, and the blue pest. In 1832, in the days before germ theory, it was an affliction without cause or logic. The only comfort, perhaps, was that "It is the intemperate and vicious, especially the vicious poor, who have most to fear from it, and it is among them the greatest panic prevails." Visiting destruction where it wished, a plague on the filthy and unregenerate, cholera seemed nothing less than the finger of God.1
The United States, if unready for such a visitation medically, was more than prepared religiously. The cholera made landfall barely a year after Charles Finney closed his Rochester revivals, and in the same Burned-Over District where his New Measures had flourished. At such a time and in such a place, cholera was ideally situated to become understood as a religious event-and from there, to enter politics.
The antebellum cohabitation between religion and politics has received considerable scholarly attention in recent years; interpretations have shifted from a paradigm of early republican religion as a kind of decaying, reactionary Puritanism to an understanding of republican religion as a vibrant Christianity galvanized by frenetic competition, where radical ideas of liberty merged with Arminian impulse and Calvinist tradition to create Christianities that embraced egalitarianism, popular culture, and the needs of everyday people.2
Also reflecting the needs of the people, of course, were the nascent political parties of Jacksonian America, and scholars have not missed the...