Smallpox During the Revolution

     Smallpox killed about 130,000 people in North America during the Revolutionary War. This statistic and others can be found in the book Pox Americana by Elizabeth Anne Fenn.
     When a smallpox epidemic engulfed Boston, George Washington ordered letters received from Boston to be dipped in vinegar to kill germs. It was thought that the British were deliberately spreading smallpox, as they had at Fort Pitt in 1763. At that time the British gave blankets covered with smallpox germs "as gifts to the Indians" who had besieged the fort.
     The Pennsylvania Gazette stated that "Lord Cornwallis' attempts to spread the smallpox among the inhabitants in the vicinity of York...must render him contemptible in the eyes of every civilized nation."
     Smallpox was not endemic to North America. Native Americans and many colonists were vulnerable. Colonists and soldiers applied an early form of vaccination called variolation. A small amount of smallpox pus was inserted through a cut in the skin. The fatality rate was about one percent.
     In Private Yankee Doodle, revolutionary soldier Joseph Plumb Martin, who was stationed briefly at Peekskill in May, 1777, describes the process:
     "I was ordered off, in company with about four hundred others of the Connecticut forces, to a set of old barracks (Continental Village), a mile or two distant in the Highlands, to be inoculated with the smallpox. We arrived at and cleaned out the barracks, and after two or three days received the infection. I had the smallpox favorably, as did the rest, generally; we lost none... I left the hospital on the sixteenth day after I was inoculated, and soon after joined the regiment, when I was attacked with a severe turn of the dysentery, and immediately after recovering from that, I broke out all over with boils; good old Job could scarcely have been worse handled by them than I was. I had eleven at one time upon my arm, each as big as half a hen's egg, and the rest of my carcass was much in the same condition. I attributed it to my not having been properly physicked after the small pox... In the latter part of the month of June, I was ordered off in a detachment of about one hundred men... to the lines at King's bridge...."