The Contagion of Liberty

As war with Great Britain erupted, Americans were already entrenched in a different kind of battle. Brought from Europe during the 17th century, smallpox ravaged communities in all 13 colonies. No other disease was as feared as smallpox. Smallpox’s ability to run rampant through the colonies and its high mortality rate created an atmosphere of constant unease. Inoculation, or immunization through introducing smallpox matter to a small cut on the arm, became an effective way of creating immunity and decreasing the mortality rate. Although not originally a supporter of inoculation, George Washington quickly understood that a mandated inoculation was the only way to protect the Continental Army from losing troops to smallpox.

In The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution, historian Andrew M. Wehrman details the history of smallpox outbreaks in the colonies and the struggles to stop the disease from destroying the Continental Army. While many historians paint George Washington as a hero in the fight against smallpox, Wehrman’s book states that it was everyday people demanding public health measures who swayed Washington to institute a mandate of inoculation for the Continental Army. Wehrman calls the push for inoculation a revolution inside a revolution and shows that the fight for equitable and accessible healthcare in America has been ongoing since the beginning of the country.

Read an excerpt from The Contagion of Liberty about the challenges of inoculating communities in the South and the inequitable access to inoculation for both free and enslaved people of African descent.

Excerpt

In November 1779, cases of smallpox appeared in Charleston for the first time in sixteen years and at a moment of crisis. General William Moultrie lamented to General Benjamin Lincoln, the commander of the Continental Army’s Southern Department, that “New discoveries are made every day of the small-pox; the persons are immediately removed to the pest house.” Moultrie reported that militias that would otherwise come to Charleston to defend against the British siege were staying away out of fear of smallpox. Lincoln roared back that smallpox could be contained, and these militiamen had little to fear. Lincoln, who was from Massachusetts, had been deeply involved in the committee of safety there and helped prevent outbreaks of smallpox among the soldiers during the siege of Boston. He explained that some of North Carolina militias had reported in defense of Charleston who had also not been inoculated. He said that they had facilities ready for isolation if needed, and that city commissioners were inspecting for new outbreaks but noted that cases were down. He once again pleaded for militia support against the British attack. Nevertheless, Lincoln did not receive the support he needed. After a months-long siege, on May 12, General Lincoln and the city of Charleston surrendered to the British general Sir Henry Clinton. 

Lincoln had probably played down the extent of smallpox in the city in his appeal for more support. When Clinton arrived, “a general inoculation took place.” Women in and around Charleston exchanged instructions on how to inoculate that they had received from Dr. Alexander Garden, who had inoculated in Charleston during the previous epidemic in 1763. Eliza Pinckney wrote that smallpox was present on every plantation for fifteen miles around and noted that one doctor had inoculated more than a thousand patients, both white and Black. Charleston’s general inoculation was not organized in the way that Boston’s inoculations were. It is likely that the British simply allowed inoculations to take place, and many residents took advantage. Others succumbed to smallpox in the natural way, including thousands of freedom-seeking African Americans, who fled to the British during the occupation. 

In May 1781, a year after the British first occupied the city, Eliza Wilkinson, a young widow who supported the patriots, wrote to a friend, “I have just got the better of the smallpox, thanks to God for the same.” She did not write whether she got the disease naturally or by inoculation, but she wrote that her face “is finely ornamented and my nose honored with thirteen spots,” one for each of the United States. She added that she hoped the pocks would not ultimately scar her face, because “as much as I revere the number, I would not choose to have so conspicuous a mark.” She wrote that she hoped “these barbarous, insulting red-coats" would soon have “their day of suffering.”

In the most ghastly tragedy of the American Revolution, because so many African Americans were not only held in bondage but also denied access to the contagion of liberty, inoculation, their pursuit of freedom required them to brave fast-spreading natural smallpox, and many thousands did not survive it. Smallpox is a disease with no animal vector. Farmers who took care of livestock like chickens, pigs, and cows had no reason to fear smallpox spreading to their animals or getting sick from them. While postmen worried about potentially catching a disease on their routes, and towns worried about postmen starting outbreaks, no one had to worry about their horses or that the disease might spread within the stables. But in a society that kept human beings as slaves and treated them like draft animals and livestock, smallpox was much more dangerous. Small, crowded, and unventilated slave quarters were incubators of disease, but no efforts were made to improve them. Regulations on smallpox facilities usually required smallpox patients to shift into clean clothes before entering and exiting a hospital. Colonists took pains to scrub, smoke, and air out their homes and their buildings to keep them free from disease. Enslavers understood that their slaves were uniquely susceptible to smallpox but were also usually unwilling to spend the money that it would take to inoculate them. Beyond the cost of an inoculator, medicines, clothes, building improvements, and attendance, inoculating one’s slaves would lead to weeks of lost work. Some white plantation owners chose to inoculate their own family members and perhaps their closest domestic slaves while being exceedingly careful not to infect the broader enslaved population. Nevertheless, lapses in quarantine happened, especially during a war in which freedom was promised to enslaved people who managed to escape to British lines. Eliza Pinckney reported that “thousands of Negroes dyed miserably with it,” in the camps of the British in Charleston.  

Despite the spreading disease and with new orders for inoculation from General Washington, the American military often hesitated to inoculate in the South lest it cause further outbreaks. General Nathaniel Greene was so desperate to keep smallpox from spreading among the soldiers and civilians during the pursuit of the British in the North Carolina interior that he thought it better to dismiss nonimmune militiamen than to “think of inoculating them.” Colonel Christian Febiger proposed inoculating his 2nd Virginia Regiment in Cumberland, Virginia. He wrote that General Washington wanted his troops to march south in support of General Greene but complained that “to send them uneqip’d and with the smallpox breaking out among them daily, I thought would be madness.” Colonel Febiger faced considerable resistance, however, from the people of Cumberland. He was presented with a petition signed by thirty-two residents asking him not to inoculate there. They wrote that it would be “almost impossible” to keep the disease from spreading from the soldiers to their community, “the consequence of which will be that our slaves will from them catch the contagion in the natural way.” They were not opposed to inoculation generally but asserted that “we have not the power to Innoculate our families for want of medicine, and other conveniences—therefore it would be the hight of absurdity for any Inhabitants to attempt it.” Febiger reported that in addition to being presented with the petition, the inhabitants “spoke also of loaded guns, and in Fact made use of some very imprudent Expressions.”  

As General Charles Cornwallis and the British army marched north from the Carolinas in the summer of 1781 toward his ultimate surrender at Yorktown, the familiar rumors of a British campaign to use inoculation to unleash smallpox on Americans returned. The allegations against Cornwallis combined the fears and outrages generated in 1775 from Governor Dunmore’s proclamation promising freedom to slaves with General Howe’s release of pock-ridden refugees from Boston. As Cornwallis marched his way across the state, self-emancipated Black Virginians rushed toward the British army for the promise of liberty. The vast majority of them had not been inoculated by their American enslavers, even after it was well known that smallpox was spreading throughout the country and three years after Virginia law allowed them to do so with only the permission of their nearest neighbors. Virginians, instead of blaming themselves for the spreading of smallpox throughout Virginia by lack of prevention, again blamed the British. Likewise, soldiers such as Josiah Atkins of Connecticut and William Feltman of Pennsylvania wrote in their journals that the British inoculated slaves with smallpox and purposely released them to spread the disease. Joseph Plumb Martin, who had marched from Connecticut and had inoculated at Fishkill, New York, wrote in his memoir that at the siege of Yorktown, he witnessed “herds of Negroes which Lord Cornwallis, (after he had inveigled them from their proprietors,) in love and pity to them, had turned adrift.” The claims echoed through the ranks.

In A Military Journal of the American Revolution, army surgeon James Thacher, who would become a preeminent medical historian, wrote, “The British have sent from Yorktown a large number of Negroes sick with the smallpox, probably for the purpose of communicating the infection to our army,” calling the action “inhuman,” “barbarous,” and “cruel.” Years after the war, Benjamin Franklin repeated the theory, writing in 1786 that the British “inoculated some of the negroes they took as prisoners belonging to a number of plantations, and then let them escape, or sent them, covered with the pock, to mix with and spread the distemper among the others of their colour, as well as among the white country people; which occasioned a great mortality of both.”

The case that has been most often pointed to as direct evidence of British attempted germ warfare came not from Cornwallis but from one of his subordinates, General Alexander Leslie. In October 1780, Leslie wrote, “Above 700 Negroes are coming down the River in the Small Pox—it will ruin our Market, which was bad enough before. I shall distribute them about the Rebell Plantations.” But Leslie probably did not mean that he intended to spread smallpox to Viginia plantations because the pock-ridden slaves would not sell at market, as some have interpreted the quotation. Leslie more likely understood that area farmers would not bring food to the market in Portsmouth, where the British were encamped, if they knew smallpox was present. In desperation to keep his own soldiers fed, Leslie was willing to allow Virginia’s slaveowners to reclaim the people they considered their property. Virginia’s slaveowners were constantly trying to reclaim Black fugitives as their slaves. Here, Leslie probably made the calculation that giving these desperate souls back to their enslavers would both help his immediate situation and generate some goodwill among the local white population. For the suffering fugitives, the promise of no punishment and the return to a familiar environment may have seemed better than the alternative of being left to suffer alone. If enslavers wanted to reclaim pox-ridden fugitives, they would have known to isolate them from anyone susceptible at home.

With armies on the move throughout a region where smallpox was breaking out everywhere, it did not take a germ warfare for the deadliest infectious disease ever to find human hosts in the war-torn slave state of Virginia. The dual denial of liberty and inoculation to Blacks in the South did far more inhuman damage than any supposed efforts to spread the disease on purpose. Nonetheless, some British military officers did consider the idea of spreading smallpox among Americans. In 1777, a British officer, Robert Donkin, suggested in a footnote in a treatise on military strategy published in New York that they should “Dip arrows in matter of smallpox, and twang them at the American rebels, in order to inoculate them; this would sooner disband these stubborn, ignorant, enthusiastic savages, than any other compulsive measures.” Donkin’s vile suggestions was never implemented, but like the infamous hospital blankets ordered out of Fort Pitt by Jeffery Amherst to spread smallpox among the Indians in 1763, the method for both schemes used smallpox matter transferred directly but surreptitiously to victims to start an epidemic. On the other hand, enslavers knew that their slaves were dangerously susceptible, and they were on high alert for smallpox cases. Freedom-seeking Black people who contracted smallpox often found themselves with nowhere to go. The British, who were struggling to feed, supply, and keep well from malaria among their own troops, had little ability to nurse and attend stricken Blacks in their camps. Some Black people, in the throes of smallpox, may have struggled to return to their friends and loved ones on their former plantations for care. As their symptoms worsened, travel became impossible, and they had no choice but to beg for help from passing soldiers. Thousands died this way.

Boston King, a Black carpenter and fugitive from slavery in South Carolina, did not intend to spread smallpox but could not help but be infected after “throw[ing] myself into the hands of the English.” They took him in, but he was quickly “seized with the smallpox and taken a mile from the camp with other stricken fugitives. “We lay sometimes a whole day without any thing to eat or drink,” King wrote. When the British marched on, he was unable to go with them and was left behind. He thought he would be retaken by the rebels and returned to slavery, but “when they came, and understood that we were ill of the small-pox, they precipitavely left us for fear of infection.” Two days later the British sent wagons for the twenty-five suffering people, and they were taken to a small cottage that served as a hospital. King recovered, and eventually, with thousands of other Black Loyalists, he was taken first to Nova Scotia and then later helped establish Freetown in Sierra Leone. It is unlikely, then, that Leslie or Cornwallis was devising a dastardly scheme; rather, they were operating within a dastardly system in Virginia, where both liberty and health were kept from Black people.

When both witnesses and the first historians of the Revolutionary War wrote about its conclusion, it was difficult for them to write that Washington’s inoculation order had been critical in ending the smallpox epidemic across the country because its impact was much less in the South, where the war ended. The success of Washington’s order for immunizing the Continental Army and for bringing about general inoculations and sweeping changes to the laws in many places across the new United States often went unmentioned. Instead, early recollections of the war emphasized how General Cornwallis wantonly spread smallpox across the South in its final stages. This further demonized the British, made the American victory appear more justified and more heroic, and explained the human catastrophe left in the wake of the war. When William Gordon set out to write his history, he wrote to the generals and major political figures for their versions of the events. In 1788 Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to Gordon that Virginia lost “under Ld. Cornwallis’s hands that year [1781] about 30,000 slaves, and that of these 27,000 died of small pox and camp fever.” His numbers were wildly exaggerated. Jefferson also made Cornwallis and the British look like the ones who had been cruel to his own enslaved people at Monticello after Cornwallis’s men supposedly captured thirty of Jefferson’s slaves. Jefferson wrote—without irony, considering that he had kept them enslaved and denied them inoculation—that if Cornwallis’s object had been “to give them freedom, he would have done right” but added that instead, Cornwallis had “consign[ed] them to inevitable death from the small pox and putrid fever then raging in his camp.”

South Carolina physician and historian David Ramsay neglected to mention Washington’s inoculation effort in a draft of his History of the American Revolution. Ashbel Green, who had been inoculated with his family and a group of soldiers at Morristown in 1777, reviewed a draft copy of Ramsay’s book and “was surprised to find that in his whole work he had not even mentioned the inoculation of the army for the smallpox.” Ramsay subsequently added in a brief mention that the troops were inoculated but gave no credit to Washington and provided little context. Green remarked that it was “not as full” an account as the subject deserved. “The imperfections of history,” he quipped, “are far greater and more numerous than are commonly imagined.” Although it was little mentioned in early histories of the Revolution, the proof that Americans cherished their victories over smallpox and expected their leaders to continue to protect them from disease to the best of their abilities even in peacetime would come a decade after the war ended, when smallpox broke out anew across the United States during the presidency of George Washington. 

Andrew M. Wehrman, The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022), 242-249.