“Public Health as Public Wealth”: Yellow Fever and New Orleans’s Trade Economy in George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes

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most technically advanced depiction of Reconstruction and its political contexts—an aesthetically appreciable (if at times flawed) allegorical work that heralded the writer's artistic apex before encounters with recalcitrant editorial policies and a fickle audience caused his work's quality to descend from dramatic pathos to dogmatic polemics. 2 As a result critical investigations of Cable's novel have tended to cluster around two related foci: the author's views on Southern racial politics or the literary strategies Cable em- ployed while attempting to present these racial views to potentially hostile readers. Thus Barbara Ladd characterizes the text as a locus for deeply embedded cultural conflict between a nationalist principle of segregation and a colonialist principle of assimila- tion in the post-Civil War South. 3 Brian Hochman and Gavin Jones debate whether the sound of the novel's speech unifies or separates characters by racial lines 4 and Robert Allen Alexander Jr. argues that Cable's black characters are progressive because they do not fit the two stock black archetypes of nineteenth-century culture: dangerous mutineer or accommodating, cheerful servant. 5 Underlying these critiques is a pivotal assumption: when engaging with post and antebellum Southern culture, whether alleg- edly adopting an egalitarian or ethnocentric stance on issues of race—Cable's prima facie concern in The Grandissimes is the contentious relationship between the country's black and white inhabitants.