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CW Journal
: Spring 04 : Colonial Germ Warfare
by Harold B. Gill Jr.
The humanizing of War! You might as well talk
of the humanizing of Hell...As if war could be
civilized! If I'm in command when war breaks
out I shall issue my order—"The essence of war
is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility.
Hit first, hit hard, and hit everywhere!"
—Sir Reginald Bacon, The Life of Lord Fisher
of Kilverstone, Admiral of the Fleet
British Captain Simeon Ecuyer, portrayed by Ken Treese,
second from right, offered blankets infected with smallpox to the Indians
besieging Fort Pitt. From left, interpreters Patrick Simmonds, Christopher
Jones, Ted Boscana, Treese, and Patrick Andrews.
Click image to enlarge |
When armies get into desperate situations, the usual
"civilized" rules of warfare often are thrown out the window. In the 1520s
Machiavelli wrote: "When it is absolutely a question of the safety of one's
country, there must be no consideration of just or unjust, of merciful or
cruel, of praiseworthy or disgraceful; instead, setting aside every scruple,
one must follow to the utmost any plan that will save her life and keep her
liberty."
During Pontiac's uprising in 1763,
the Indians besieged Fort Pitt. They burned nearby houses, forcing the inhabitants
to take refuge in the well-protected fort. The British officer in charge,
Captain Simeon Ecuyer, reported to Colonel Henry Bouquet in Philadelphia that
he feared the crowded conditions would result in disease. Smallpox had already
broken out. On June 24, 1763, William Trent, a local trader, recorded in his
journal that two Indian chiefs had visited the fort, urging the British to
abandon the fight, but the British refused. Instead, when the Indians were
ready to leave, Trent wrote: "Out of our regard for them, we gave them two
Blankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have
the desired effect."
English translation of Grotius on peace and war.
Click image to enlarge |
It is not known who conceived the
plan, but there's no doubt it met with the approval of the British military in
America and may have been common practice. Sir Jeffery Amherst, commander of
British forces in North America, wrote July 7, 1763, probably unaware of the
events at Fort Pitt: "Could it not be contrived to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians? We must,
on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them." He ordered
the extirpation of the Indians and said no prisoners should be taken. About a
week later, he wrote to Bouquet: "You will Do well to try to Innoculate the
Indians by means of Blanketts as well as to try Every other method that can
serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race."
Though a connection cannot be
proven, a smallpox epidemic erupted in the Ohio Valley that may have been the
result of the distribution of the infected articles at Fort Pitt. Whatever its
origins, the outbreak devastated the Indians. Such tactics appear atrocious and
barbaric to modern readers, but at the time anything was alright to use against
"savages." Nor was all-out war foreign to the Indians. During Pontiac's
Rebellion the Indian warriors killed about 2,000 civilian settlers and about
400 soldiers. They, too, tried to "extirpate" the enemy.
The Fort Pitt incident is the best documented case of
deliberately spreading smallpox among unsuspecting populations, but it likely
was not the first time such a stratagem was employed by military forces. It
appears that Ecuyer and Amherst proposed the same idea independently at about
the same time, suggesting that the practice was not unusual.
Attempts to spread sickness and
disease among enemy forces has a long history. The ancient Assyrians poisoned
their enemy's water supply, and ancient Greeks poisoned the water supply of
their enemy with the herb hellebore, which caused violent diarrhea. In 1340
attackers used a catapult to throw dead animals over the walls of the castle of
Thun L'Evêque, causing such a stink that the air was so unendurable the
defenders negotiated a truce.
Engraving of Benjamin West's portrait of Henry Bouquet. - Beinecke Library, Yale
Click image to enlarge |
Sir Jeffrey Amherst, shown here in Joseph Blackburn's 1758
painting, suggested Bouquet infect the Indians with smallpox. -Mead Gallery, Amherst
Click image to enlarge |
In Virginia Dr. John Pott, the
physician at Jamestown, was said to have poisoned Indians in 1623, during a
round of retaliation for a Powhatan uprising in which 350 English died. On May
22, Captain William Tucker with twelve men went to the Potomac River to secure
the release of English prisoners held by Indians. When the party arrived, it
invited the Indians' leader and his men to conclude a treaty of peace with a
drink or two of sack that Pott had prepared for the occasion. The Indians
demanded that the English interpreter take the first drink, which he did, but
out of a different container. Afterward a group of Indians, including two
chiefs, were walking with an English interpreter. At a given signal the
interpreter dropped to the ground and the English discharged a volley of shot
into his Indian companions. The English said that about 200 savages died of
poison and fifty from wounds. The colonists had invited the Indian leader
Opechancanough, the mastermind of the uprising, to attend the party and were
disappointed by not finding him among the dead.
Some people had reservations about
using such tactics, even against savages. It was reported that Pott was "very
much blamed" for his actions.
By the seventeenth century European military leaders were
becoming conscious of ethics in warfare, and rules to follow in "civilized war"
were slowly being developed. Hugo Grotius published his codification of
accepted rules of war in 1625. Grotius departed from the classical view, and
did not regard the entire population of the antagonist state as the enemy and
subject to enslavement or extermination. Other writers were making attempts to
better define "enemy." Some thought distinction should be made between those
who were part of the military force and those who were not.
The next significant work on the
rules of war was Emmerich de Vattel's Law of Nations, published in 1758. De Vattel thought "the enemy may
be deprived of his property and of whatever may add to his strength and put him
in a position to make war," and further, "a belligerent lays waste to a country
and destroys food and provender in order that the enemy may not be able to
subsist there...Such measures are taken in order to attain the object of
the war, but they should be used with moderation and only when necessary."
Grotius and de Vattel thought
women and children, as well as the elderly and infirm, should not be considered
the "enemy." They thought it was an improper practice to use poison weapons and
to contaminate drinking water. Neither specifically condemned the intentional
spread of disease among the enemy, most likely because, with the exception of
smallpox and syphilis, it was not known how diseases spread. What impact these
writers and other philosophers made on the military leaders is not known, but
it appears that they were aware public opinion regarded it as immoral, and they
attempted to hide evidence that they engaged in spreading disease among the
enemy.
There is no proof that anyone attempted to spread disease
among the enemy troops during the American Revolutionary War, but there is a
plenitude of circumstantial evidence. Almost from the beginning, Americans
suspected the British were trying to infect their army with smallpox. Just
before Virginia's last royal governor, Lord Dunmore, departed from his base at
Norfolk in 1776, the Virginia Gazette
reported that his lordship had infected two slaves who had joined his forces
and sent them ashore in order to spread smallpox, "but it was happily
prevented."
The Virginia Gazette
reported the failed smallpox plot of Lord Dunmore.
Click image to enlarge |
Most British troops had been
inoculated or had had the smallpox and were immune. In Europe smallpox was
endemic, almost always present. Nearly everyone had been exposed to the disease
from an early age, so most of the adult population had antibodies that
protected it.
Most American soldiers, on the
other hand, were susceptible. Because of less dense population, Americans often
reached adulthood without coming into contact with the smallpox virus, and had
no immunity. Some suffered inoculation, a procedure which usually produced a
milder infection, but laid low the patient for days. George Washington faced a
dilemma. If he ordered the general inoculation of the army, that would put most
of his troops in the hospital at the same time—a certain disaster if the
British learned of it.
Washington tried to get around the
problem by ordering all new recruits who had not experienced the disease to be
inoculated before they were sent to the main army. Hospitals were set up to
undertake the work. Even with his precautions, at one time about one-third of
the army was incapacitated with either the disease or the inoculation.
When the American siege of Boston
began in April 1775, smallpox was epidemic among civilians there. Most British
soldiers had been inoculated, and the British were inoculating those troops who
had not had the disease. Washington suspected some of the civilians leaving the
city had been inoculated in hopes of spreading the disease among the
Continentals. In December deserters coming to the American lines said that
"several persons are to be sent out of Boston, ...that have been inoculated with the small-pox" with the intention
of spreading the infection.
Washington's aide-de-camp thought
the report was an "unheard-of and diabolical scheme." Washington heard the
story with disbelief. He wrote that he could "hardly give Credit to" the
information. A week later he told John Hancock:
Chad Chadwick, as the doctor, inoculates Mike Luzzi while
Dan Moore on the ground, Jay Howlett on the bed, and Sonny Tyler against the
wall suffer the effects of immunization.
Click image to enlarge |
The information I received that the
enemy intended Spreading the Small pox amongst us, I coud not Suppose them
Capable of—I now must give Some Credit to it, as it has made its appearance on
Severall of those who last came out of Boston.
A Boston physician said "that he
had effectually given the distemper among those people" who were leaving the
city. Rumors and suspicions of British efforts to spread disease in the
American troops were persistent throughout the war.
Smallpox played a role in the
failure of American forces to capture Quebec. It was rumored that General Guy
Carleton, British commander in Quebec, sent infected people to the American
camp. Thomas Jefferson was convinced the British were responsible for illness
in the lines. He later wrote: "I have been informed by officers who were on the
spot, and whom I believe myself, that this disorder was sent into our army
designedly by the commanding officer in Quebec." After the defeat at Quebec the
American troops gathered at Crown Point, where John Adams found their condition
deplorable:
Our Army at Crown Point is an object
of wretchedness to fill a humane mind with horrour; disgraced, defeated,
discontented, diseased, naked, undisciplined, eaten up with vermin; no clothes,
beds, blankets, no medicines; no victuals, but salt pork and flour.
George Washington ordered the inoculation of American troops
to prevent infection by the British.
Click image to enlarge | 
Inoculation produces a milder form of the disease, making
the patient ill for several days. Interpreter Dan Moore is the sick soldier.
Click image to enlarge |
In most cases the evidence against
the British is strong, if circumstantial, yet some evidence is quite explicit.
When the British sent an expedition to Virginia in 1781, General Alexander
Leslie revealed to Cornwallis his plan to spread disease among the Americans.
He said that "above 700 Negroes are come down the River with the Small Pox,"
whom he proposed to distribute "about the Rebell Plantations." His motive was
clear, but it is not known if he carried out his plan.
It is evident that the British had
few qualms about the tactic of infecting the general population as well as the
enemy army with smallpox. In 1777 a British officer, Robert Donkin, published
in New York a little book entitled Military Collections and Remarks. In a footnote he offered a suggestion:
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. Such is their dread and fear of that disorder!
Elizabeth A. Fenn, professor of history at George Washington
University, writes in her article "Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century
North America: Beyond Jeffery Amherst" that because the Americans were referred
to as "savages" Dunkin believed any means was justified to exterminate them.
Such attitudes were probably often talked of, but they were not the kind of
suggestions that should be put in writing. Someone must have believed that
Donkin had gone too far. The footnote survives in three copies of the book. In
all others, it has been removed.
What are considered acceptable military tactics at one time
may not be acceptable to later generations. Eighteenth-century warfare was
increasingly conducted by relatively compact armies with the result of less
loss and harassment of civilians. "Laws of war" were becoming more concerned
with the protection of noncombatants as well as unnecessary suffering of
military personnel. By the end of the nineteenth century efforts were being
made to prevent the horrors of chemical warfare.
The First Hague Peace Conference
of 1899 issued a declaration prohibiting the use of poison and materials
causing unnecessary suffering. The Geneva Protocol adopted in 1925 prohibited
the use in war of "asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases and of all analogous
liquids, materials, and devices," as well as biological methods of warfare. The
Geneva Protocol has been accepted by most countries though not always followed.
A German military maxim applies; roughly translated, it says: "To get out of a
desperate situation, you have to bend the rules."
Consulting editor Harold Gill contributed to the autumn 2003
journal an article on colonial divorce.
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Historic Triangle