This major thrust for a federal public health agency received its chief impetus, not from the APHA, however, but from the public outcry over the terrible epidemics which struck the United States during the 1870's. Cholera returned to the United States between 1873 and 1875 killing 3,000 people in the Mississippi Valley alone. There had been efforts in 1866, 1869, 1871, and 1874 to get Congress to pass a national quarantine law to protect all portions of the nation from the arrival via ships of epidemic diseases, but, interestingly, Northern business interests had blocked these bills, fearing federal interference with their lucrative overseas trade. Now it was the South, that former bastion of states rights, which was anxious for federal quarantine protection.