Here is the best I can share. The following storms/hurricanes hit America from 1752 to 1865, i.e. from Thirteenth Colony to the end of Civil War;

Sl. NAME APPROXIMATE DATES ESTIMATED DEATHS -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Not known 10-16 Oct 1780 >22000
2. Not known 6 Sep 1776 >6000
3. Not known 9-12 Sep 1775 4000
4. Not known 16-17 Sep 1782 >3000
5. Not known Aug 1813 >3000
6. Not known 21-22 Jun 1791 3000
7. Not known 10-11 Aug 1831 2500

There were many more. The whole list cannot be typed here. Please find the complete list in the source to this answer.
Source(s):
http://www.deadlystorms.com/xtra/deadlystorms.htm

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Yes there were hurricanes. The original 13 colonies did not extend into the main area of hurricane intensity, the furthest south of them was Georgia. There were some hurricanes that wrecked ships, leveled homes, and ruined crops including well recorded ones in 1609, 1635, 1667, 1693, 1724, 1743, 1749, 1769, 1775, 1780, 1785, 1788, 1795, 1806, 1815, 1821, and 1846.

Louisiana, Florida, and Texas in the main hurricane region would have had the normal number under the Spanish and French. The population was much smaller then and what there was of it was better protected by natural vegetation. Hurricanes don't really do much to wilderness or even farms.

New Orleans was big and urban enough to record earlier hurricanes. A major hurricane flattened many buildings in 1722. In 1794 New Orleans was hit by two hurricanes. Back then most of the city was built on the highest available ground, the rest of the city was still swamp.

In 1856, shortly before the Civil War, a major hurricane hit just west of New Orleans. Every building in Abbeville Louisiana was leveled. By that time the island called Last Island had be developed as a resort area. The island was destroyed, the highest point going 5 feet under water, and half the population were killed. But that amounted to only 200 of the 400 people there. What makes the modern hurricanes so much more damaging is that there are now so many more people and so much more infrastructure to be harmed. Worse,the most marginal and dangerous areas right on the shore and low filled-over swamps became built up.

In 1846 in the Florida Keys 594 of the island's 600 buildings were either damaged or destroyed. In 1848, two hurricanes nearly destroyed Fort Brooke, which was where Tampa is today. But towns were few in Florida until much later.

Hurricanes did not have official names until around 1950, a few of those mentioned above were named for cities particularly devastated or ships that recorded them.

To survive people just hunkered down as best they could for any bad weather, going to high ground if there was flooding. Remember there were no electric power lines to go down, no public water supplies to contaminate, few bridges to be destroyed. When a tree was downed it was cut up for firewood, when a house was flattened it was rebuilt. When people died, well, it was tragic but only one of the many hazards of life.
Source(s):
http://www.hurricaneville.com/historic.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_preparedness_for_New_Orleans
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1856_Last_Island_Hurricane
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/weather/hurricane/sfl-hc-history-1800s,0,4...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Havana_Hurricane_of_1846

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The question is comprised of a large number of questions, making a complete answer difficult.

First, of course there were hurricanes and tropical storms between the time of the 13 colonies and the Civil War. Climate has not changes so dramatically since 1860 to create this type of storm on a regular basis now without having had the same factors and storms occurring over 150 years ago. What has changed, obviously are the following.
- The size of affected populations and the extent of development.
- The systematic measurements of wind speeds and other meteorological data.

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/tracks1851to2008_atl_reanal.txt shows data of wind speeds back to 1851, about 10 years before the Civil War began. In 1851 there were 6 tropical storm or hurricane strength storms recorded, with the strongest having sustained winds of 100 mph, making it a category 3 hurricane in today's parlance.

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/gifs/DC_01_1851-1860.jpg shows the storm tracks of category 3 or higher storms making US landfall from 1851 to 1860, of which there were 6, all but one hitting the Gulf Coast.

A comprehensive historical report is available at http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/NWS-TPC-5.pdf which states among other things "No monetary estimates are available before 1900" for hurricane-caused damage. Another interesting quote from that study states "Even after accounting for inflation, the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons produced seven out of the thirteen costliest systems ever to strike the United States."

According to a table in the above-cited report, the 9th deadliest hurricane in US history was a category 4 storm that hit Last Island, LA in 1857, causing a total of 600 deaths (including 200 off-shore). None of the 30 costliest hurricanes, adjusted for inflation was from the period 1851-1860, which is likely due to the relatively low development of the Gulf Coast and the southern Atlantic coast, where most hurricanes make landfall. The study states for example "Note that not all areas of the U.S. were settled before 1900 and there could be substantial gaps in landfall data coverage, especially in South Florida." This would obviously mean that such storms as were not reported, could also not have caused much damage and or loss of life. It is interesting to note that the decade 1851-1860 had 18 hurricanes, of which 6 were category 3 or higher, while the decadal average from 1851-2006 was 17.9 (all categories) and 6.2 (category 3 or higher) indicating that the severity of hurricanes and their frequency did not change significantly during the past 156 years (to 2006). To support that claim, the average for the period 1851-1900 was 19.2 (all categories) and 5.4 (category 3 or higher) per decade.

http://www.hurricaneville.com/historic.html provides an interesting list of major hurricanes and a brief description of their impacts from 1502 to 2007.

A review of Matthew Mulcahy's book "Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624–1783" by Trevor Burnard of the University of Sussex touches on several interesting aspects of how hurricanes were seen and what societal impacts they had in the "British Greater Caribbean" which extend to the American South in the pre-Civil War era. One telling passage states:

- quote -
Hurricanes, for example, reinforced the temporary nature of white existence in the tropics. Building substantial dwellings and planning for the future was a bit pointless when a great wind would blow everything that you had worked for into ruin. Mulcahy notes that hurricanes made colonists question their ability to transform the environment of the Greater Caribbean into something recognisably British ... West Indians, the historian Charles Leslie commented in 1740, were 'careless of futurity'. They were obsessed by a future in which they would be rich and powerful but doing little to plan for it. Planning made little sense when one's efforts could be thrown away by a momentary but very powerful blast of wind and rain... Hurricanes thus reinforced tendencies towards Africanisation (at least as Africanisation was defined by contemporaries as concerned about the potential destructiveness of a slave rebellion as by a hurricane) and hindered Anglicisation.

What is harder to get at is what hurricanes meant for Africans... the principal sufferers from hurricanes were slaves, thousands perishing in the devastating storms of 1780. Yet other factors might also be at work. Africans had no more experience of hurricanes than did Europeans and had to devise ways of fitting these new and terrifying events into their cosmic universe. Unsurprisingly, they tended to treat hurricanes within a religious framework... It is often been noted that African-derived religions in the New World were darker than in Africa, more focused on black magic and on devils. Did that have something to do with the mysterious power of hurricanes, a power even more destructive and inexplicable than the power of their white oppressors?
- end quote -

Another article referring to Mulcahy's book is from the Encyclopaedia Britannica (http://www.britannica.com/bps/additionalcontent/18/23695964/Hurricanes-and-Society-in-the-Greater-Caribbean-16241783 ) which states:

- quote -
Ironically, although hurricanes challenged the colonial agenda of improving the land through farming and construction, they also helped knit the British Atlantic world together. In the eighteenth century especially, charity appeals for hurricane victims swept through the mainland American colonies, Ireland, and Britain, while the burgeoning press helped English readers understand this peculiarly American meteorological threat. Hurricanes caused the prices of sugar, rice, and other plantation staples to fluctuate and this, curiously, may have led Britons to realize more fully how much they depended on the colonies of the Greater Caribbean. Mulcahy speculates that the rising tide of British charity for hurricane victims from the 1740s onward reflected the empire's increasing economic integration, while the unusual 1780 Parliamentary allocation of funds for hurricane relief in Barbados and Jamaica was "a means of quieting growing criticism … of Britain's handling of the war effort and of reaffirming (Parliament's) concern for the welfare of colonists in the islands" (p. 166).
- end quote -

In short, hurricanes have been around for far longer than colonization of the New World. They were far less destructive in history than in modern times, simply due to the lower population density and lower levels of development compared to modern times, though for the people living through them, they were as frightening, if not more-so than for people today due to the fact that they did not have any idea what caused them, when they were likely to strike and where, and had far less logistical capabilities to provide relief efforts after the storm had passed.
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