Pox Americana

While the citizen-soldier and civilian alike attempted to carve out their fates throughout the tumultuous years of the American Revolutionary War, the environment shaped their efforts in ways unseen. The smallpox virus, also known as Variola major, was one of the most feared products of the natural world in 18th-century British America. Invisible yet infamous, the ire of the virus did not discriminate across lines of race, class, or nationality. From 1775 through 1782, Americans of all sorts fought an entirely different war against this pernicious microbe, which took the lives of over 130,000 people and shaped the trajectory of political and military efforts on the North American continent.

First published in 2001, historian Elizabeth A. Fenn’s Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 remains a landmark work on the virus’s impact on the Revolutionary era and its effects on enslaved communities and Indigenous nations across North America. Contending with contested public health initiatives and the spread of the disease from New England to Mexico and from the Southern Lowcountry to the Pacific Northwest, Fenn positions smallpox as a “virus of empire.” This disease, which killed 30% of its victims and disabled many more, handsomely rewarded survivors while simultaneously determining who they would be. Variola and its management weighed heavily on the minds of leaders like George Washington, who ultimately coordinated the first mandated inoculation campaign in American history to give the Continental soldiers a fighting chance against both their human and microbial enemies.   

Excerpt

Variola’s relationship to humankind is both parasitic and paradoxical. To thrive and multiply, the virus has to have a host. But for the host species—unlucky Homo sapiens—Variola is the most unruly of guests. It inflicts unspeakable suffering upon its victims. It blinds, scars, and maims. In the end, it also confers either immunity or death. For the parasite, this presents a problem. Variola consumes its human hosts as a fire consumes its fuel, leaving spent bodies, dead or immune, behind. To survive, the virus has to find a constant supply of new victims. In a large urban population, such individuals might become available through immigration or childbirth. But elsewhere, if Variola is to succeed, it has to travel. It has to find more hosts and then, inexorably, still more.  

Variola has no animal vector. It is not transmitted by insects like malaria or by water like cholera. It passes only from one human being to another. As a result, Variola’s story is necessarily a story of connections between people. As it ravaged North America in the years 1775–82, the virus showed that a vast web of human contact spanned the continent well before Meriwether Lewis and William Clark made their famous journey to the Pacific in 1804–06. Smallpox highlighted these contacts, illuminated their nature, and added a new dimension to their consequences.  

In many regions of North America, Variola was by the late eighteenth century an old enemy with a well-established place in the annals of colonial conquest. The natives of Mexico—to choose only the most famous example—had endured a horrific epidemic of smallpox in conjunction with Hernan Cortés’s triumph over the Aztecs between 1519 and 1521. Repeated bouts of Old World pestilence occurred in the years that followed. Smallpox may have been the most deadly of these plagues, but others too earned the respect and fear of America’s indigenous peoples. Measles, influenza, mumps, typhus, cholera, plague, malaria, yellow fever, scarlet fever, whooping cough, and diphtheria all wreaked havoc in the two and a half centuries between Cortés’s conquest and the American Revolution. By the time the first shots sounded in the great anti-imperial conflict that has come to epitomize the late eighteenth century, this Pandora’s box of disease (with comparatively minor assistance from warfare and alcohol) had decimated the natives of the Western Hemisphere many times over.  

The smallpox pestilence of 1775–82 was thus a relatively late development in a region (North America including Mexico) that had already witnessed considerable depopulation thanks to a plethora of Old World diseases. Four things, however, make this huge wave of sickness worth studying. First, it may well constitute the first continental episode of disease in the history of North America. (If not, it is certainly the first that is clearly identifiable.) Second, although the smallpox scourge of 1775–82 coincided almost perfectly with the American Revolution and took many more American lives than the war with the British did, it remains almost entirely unknown and unacknowledged by scholars and laypeople alike. Third, unlike so many earlier outbreaks of contagion, this one is extensively documented in the historical record. And fourth, by directing our attention to events elsewhere on the continent in an era in which historians have previously focused largely on the eastern seaboard, the plague highlights the geographic and demographic gaps in our historical canon. While colonial independence reshaped global politics forever, the contagion was the defining and determining event of the era for many residents of North America. With the exception of the war itself, epidemic smallpox was the greatest upheaval to afflict the continent in these years.