Biological Warfare

BIOLOGICAL WARFARE. The history of warfare provides many examples of commanders who deliberately attempted to spread infectious disease in the camps of their enemies. The sophistication and effectiveness of the biological component of warfare has ranged from the relatively simple act of polluting water sources with the carcasses of dead animals and humans to the malicious distribution of smallpox-laden clothing into a susceptible population. Because it can be spread only through human-to-human contact and produces a horrifying set of symptoms with a high mortality rate, smallpox has the potential to be both manipulated by humans and highly destructive when introduced. Long before modern science was able to explain why smallpox spread so quickly and proved so deadly, humans knew enough about the disease to be able both to protect themselves and to facilitate its spread. Early in the eighteenth century, colonial Americans became aware of the practice of inoculation, a procedure whereby a small amount of infectious agent was deliberately introduced under the skin, producing a case of the disease that, for reasons that still cannot be fully explained, was significantly less deadly than if the individual had been infected via person-to-person contact. While it cannot be conclusively proven that outbreaks of smallpox during wartime in eighteenth-century North America were caused by human agency—the infection could have traveled via trade routes and contacts that were a regular and normal part of the environment—it is possible to demonstrate that humans did intentionally want to spread smallpox among their enemies during this time.

THE CASE OF AMHERST

The best documented case of intent occurred during Pontiac's War, when Major General Sir Jeffery Amherst, the British commander in chief in North America, wrote to Colonel Henry Bouquet on 7 July 1763 to ask: "Could it not be contrived to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians [then laying siege to Fort Pitt]? We must, on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them." Bouquet agreed with Amherst's suggestion in his reply of 13 July: "I will try to inocculate [sic] the Indians by means of [smallpox-infected] Blankets that may fall in their hands, taking care however not to get the disease myself." Neither senior officer knew that Captain Simon Ecuyer, the commander of Fort Pitt, and William Trent, a trader and land speculator then resident at the fort, had already put in motion the very plan that Amherst proposed. Elizabeth A. Fenn has written, "The eruption of epidemic smallpox in the Ohio country coincided closely with the distribution of infected articles by individuals at Fort Pitt. While blame for this outbreak cannot be placed squarely in the British camp, the circumstantial evidence is nevertheless suggestive" (Biological Warfare, p. 6).

WASHINGTON AND INOCULATION

Whether or not the British were guilty of spreading smallpox in 1763, senior American commanders were alive to the reality that American-born soldiers, living their lives in a disease environment where encounters with smallpox were episodic and deadly, were at significantly greater risk of falling prey to the disease than were their European-born opponents, who—besides having more exposure to the disease—were also regularly inoculated when recruited into military service. George Washington, who had survived his own encounter with smallpox on a voyage to Barbados in 1751, wrestled with the problem from the moment he arrived at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 2 July 1775 to take command of the New England army besieging Boston. Rumors were rampant that Major General Thomas Gage, the British commander in chief in Boston, was trying to promote outbreaks of the disease in the American camps. Washington instituted measures to try to quarantine the disease but worried that, given the state of indiscipline in the army, his orders might not be followed. He considered inoculating the troops, but shrank from it because the army's medical facilities were still too primitive to manage the procedure effectively and because it would put too many men out of combat for too long in the face of an active and opportunistic enemy. He made sure that the first American troops entering Boston on 17 March 1776, after the British evacuation, were survivors of smallpox and thus had immunity against the disease.

The impact smallpox could have on an army was demonstrated vividly by the way it destroyed the American invasion of Canada in 1775–1776. American forces arrived outside the walls of Quebec in November 1775 and managed loosely to besiege the city over the ensuing winter and even to mount an unsuccessful assault on New Year's Eve, despite being at the end of a tenuous supply line that stretched all the way back to Albany, New York. But when smallpox broke out among the troops in the spring—deliberately introduced, it was rumored, by Major General Sir Guy Carleton, the British commander in Canada—American morale crumbled. Abandoning dead and dying comrades along the roadside, the survivors fled up the St. Lawrence and then south toward Lake Champlain. Major General John Thomas, himself a medical doctor, eventually authorized inoculation, but it was too late; Thomas himself succumbed to smallpox at Fort Chambly on 2 June 1776.

Washington still vacillated about inoculating the army. In a letter to Horatio Gates of 5 February 1777 he admitted, "I am much at a loss what Step to take to prevent the spreading of the smallpox; should We Innoculate generally, the Enemy, knowing it, will certainly take advantage of our situation." Literally overnight, he came to a decision. In the postscript he added the next morning, he told Gates: "Since writing the above, I have come to the Resoluto. of Innoculatg the Troops, and have given Orders to that purpose as well at Philada [Philadelphia] as here [Morristown, New Jersey]. This is the only effectual Method of putting a Period to the Disorder." Inoculation became standard practice in the army for the remainder of the war. It was one of Washington's most important decisions.

THE BRITISH AND SMALLPOX

Smallpox was epidemic across the North American continent from 1775 through 1782, so it is impossible to prove that the British deliberately used smallpox as a weapon. That some British senior officers saw smallpox as an added way to injure the rebels is beyond dispute, however. During the campaign in Virginia in 1781, thousands of African American slaves liberated themselves by joining the tail of the various British expeditions that crisscrossed the state that summer. African Americans were as likely to contract smallpox as any Americans, and soon the freedmen and freedwomen were being ravaged by disease. The British in truth did not have the resources to help them, but instead of trying, senior commanders turned them out, knowing full well that they might carry smallpox back to the rebels. From Portsmouth on 13 July, Major General Alexander Leslie told Charles Earl Cornwallis that "Above 700 Negroes are come down the River in the Small Pox; I shall distribute them about the Rebell Plantations." Cornwallis himself, as he sat his army down at Yorktown to await the relief that never came, expelled perhaps several thousand former slaves. American soldiers, at least, thought he did so to spread smallpox in the besieging army. According to the memoirs of Joseph Plumb Martin, "During the siege, we saw in the woods herds of Negroes which Lord Cornwallis (after he had inveigled them from their proprietors), in love and pity to them, had turned adrift, with no other recompense for their confidence in his humanity than the smallpox for their bounty and starvation and death for their wages."

SMALLPOX'S IMPACT

While smallpox did influence the outcome of some campaigns, most notably the invasion of Canada in 1775–1776, it did not determine the outcome of the war. What it did do was increase human suffering, not just among the soldiers and camp followers, but in the communities to which the passage of armies and the return of veterans communicated the disease. Specific evidence is lacking, but it all probability smallpox killed more people during the war than died as a result of direct military action.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cash, Philip. Medical Men at the Siege of Boston. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1973.

Fenn, Elizabeth A. "Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century North America: Beyond Jeffery Amherst." Journal of American History 86 (2000): 1-55.

???????. Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.

Scheer, George F., ed. Private Yankee Doodle: Being a Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers, and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier, Joseph Plumb Martin. Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1962.

Twohig, Dorothy, et al., eds. The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary Series. Vol. 8, January-March 1777. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998.

                              revised by Harold E. Selesky