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by Harold B. Gill Jr.

Sir Reginald Bacon, The Life of Lord Fisherof Kilverstone, Admiral of the Fleet

British Captain Simeon Ecuyer, portrayed by Ken Treese,second from right, offered blankets infected with smallpox to the Indiansbesieging Fort Pitt. From left, interpreters ChristopherJones, Ted Boscana, Treese, and Patrick Andrews.

When armies get into desperate situations, the usual"civilized" rules of warfare often are thrown out the window. In the 1520sMachiavelli wrote: "When it is absolutely a question of the safety of one'scountry, there must be no consideration of just or unjust, of merciful orcruel, of praiseworthy or disgraceful; instead, setting aside every scruple,one must follow to the utmost any plan that will save her life and keep herliberty."

During Pontiac's uprising in 1763,the Indians besieged Fort Pitt. They burned nearby houses, forcing the inhabitantsto take refuge in the well-protected fort. The British officer in charge,Captain Simeon Ecuyer, reported to Colonel Henry Bouquet in Philadelphia thathe feared the crowded conditions would result in disease. Smallpox had alreadybroken out. On June 24, 1763, William Trent, a local trader, recorded in hisjournal that two Indian chiefs had visited the fort, urging the British toabandon the fight, but the British refused. Instead, when the Indians wereready to leave, Trent wrote: "Out of our regard for them, we gave them twoBlankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will havethe desired effect."

English translation of Grotius on peace and war.

It is not known who conceived theplan, but there's no doubt it met with the approval of the British military inAmerica and may have been common practice. Sir Jeffery Amherst, commander ofBritish forces in North America, wrote July 7, 1763, probably unaware of theevents 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 orderedthe extirpation of the Indians and said no prisoners should be taken. About aweek later, he wrote to Bouquet: "You will Do well to try to Innoculate theIndians by means of Blanketts as well as to try Every other method that canserve to Extirpate this Execrable Race."

Though a connection cannot beproven, a smallpox epidemic erupted in the Ohio Valley that may have been theresult of the distribution of the infected articles at Fort Pitt. Whatever itsorigins, the outbreak devastated the Indians. Such tactics appear atrocious andbarbaric 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'sRebellion the Indian warriors killed about 2,000 civilian settlers and about400 soldiers. They, too, tried to "extirpate" the enemy.

The Fort Pitt incident is the best documented case ofdeliberately spreading smallpox among unsuspecting populations, but it likelywas not the first time such a stratagem was employed by military forces. Itappears that Ecuyer and Amherst proposed the same idea independently at aboutthe same time, suggesting that the practice was not unusual.

Attempts to spread sickness anddisease among enemy forces has a long history. The ancient Assyrians poisonedtheir enemy's water supply, and ancient Greeks poisoned the water supply oftheir enemy with the herb hellebore, which caused violent diarrhea. In 1340attackers used a catapult to throw dead animals over the walls of the castle ofThun L'Evque, causing such a stink that the air was so unendurable thedefenders negotiated a truce.

Engraving of Benjamin West's portrait of Henry Bouquet. - Beinecke Library, Yale

Sir Jeffrey Amherst, shown here in Joseph Blackburn's 1758painting, suggested Bouquet infect the Indians with smallpox. -Mead Gallery, Amherst

In Virginia Dr. John Pott, thephysician at Jamestown, was said to have poisoned Indians in 1623, during around of retaliation for a Powhatan uprising in which 350 English died. On May22, Captain William Tucker with twelve men went to the Potomac River to securethe release of English prisoners held by Indians. When the party arrived, itinvited the Indians' leader and his men to conclude a treaty of peace with adrink or two of sack that Pott had prepared for the occasion. The Indiansdemanded that the English interpreter take the first drink, which he did, butout of a different container. Afterward a group of Indians, including twochiefs, were walking with an English interpreter. At a given signal theinterpreter dropped to the ground and the English discharged a volley of shotinto his Indian companions. The English said that about 200 savages died ofpoison and fifty from wounds. The colonists had invited the Indian leaderOpechancanough, the mastermind of the uprising, to attend the party and weredisappointed by not finding him among the dead.

Some people had reservations aboutusing such tactics, even against savages. It was reported that Pott was "verymuch blamed" for his actions.

By the seventeenth century European military leaders werebecoming conscious of ethics in warfare, and rules to follow in "civilized war"were slowly being developed. Hugo Grotius published his codification ofaccepted rules of war in 1625. Grotius departed from the classical view, anddid not regard the entire population of the antagonist state as the enemy andsubject to enslavement or extermination. Other writers were making attempts tobetter define "enemy." Some thought distinction should be made between thosewho were part of the military force and those who were not.

The next significant work on therules of war was Emmerich de Vattel's Law of Nations, published in 1758. De Vattel thought "the enemy maybe deprived of his property and of whatever may add to his strength and put himin a position to make war," and further, "a belligerent lays waste to a countryand destroys food and provender in order that the enemy may not be able tosubsist there...Such measures are taken in order to attain the object ofthe war, but they should be used with moderation and only when necessary."

Grotius and de Vattel thoughtwomen and children, as well as the elderly and infirm, should not be consideredthe "enemy." They thought it was an improper practice to use poison weapons andto contaminate drinking water. Neither specifically condemned the intentionalspread of disease among the enemy, most likely because, with the exception ofsmallpox and syphilis, it was not known how diseases spread. What impact thesewriters and other philosophers made on the military leaders is not known, butit appears that they were aware public opinion regarded it as immoral, and theyattempted to hide evidence that they engaged in spreading disease among theenemy.

There is no proof that anyone attempted to spread diseaseamong the enemy troops during the American Revolutionary War, but there is aplenitude of circumstantial evidence. Almost from the beginning, Americanssuspected the British were trying to infect their army with smallpox. Justbefore Virginia's last royal governor, Lord Dunmore, departed from his base atNorfolk in 1776, the Virginia Gazettereported that his lordship had infected two slaves who had joined his forcesand sent them ashore in order to spread smallpox, "but it was happilyprevented."

The Virginia Gazettereported the failed smallpox plot of Lord Dunmore.

Most British troops had beeninoculated or had had the smallpox and were immune. In Europe smallpox wasendemic, almost always present. Nearly everyone had been exposed to the diseasefrom an early age, so most of the adult population had antibodies thatprotected it.

Most American soldiers, on theother hand, were susceptible. Because of less dense population, Americans oftenreached adulthood without coming into contact with the smallpox virus, and hadno immunity. Some suffered inoculation, a procedure which usually produced amilder infection, but laid low the patient for days. George Washington faced adilemma. If he ordered the general inoculation of the army, that would put mostof his troops in the hospital at the same timea certain disaster if theBritish learned of it.

Washington tried to get around theproblem by ordering all new recruits who had not experienced the disease to beinoculated before they were sent to the main army. Hospitals were set up toundertake the work. Even with his precautions, at one time about one-third ofthe army was incapacitated with either the disease or the inoculation.

When the American siege of Bostonbegan in April 1775, smallpox was epidemic among civilians there. Most Britishsoldiers had been inoculated, and the British were inoculating those troops whohad not had the disease. Washington suspected some of the civilians leaving thecity had been inoculated in hopes of spreading the disease among theContinentals. 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 intentionof spreading the infection.

Washington's aide-de-camp thoughtthe report was an "unheard-of and diabolical scheme." Washington heard thestory with disbelief. He wrote that he could "hardly give Credit to" theinformation. A week later he told John Hancock:

Chad Chadwick, as the doctor, inoculates Mike Luzzi whileDan Moore on the ground, Jay Howlett on the bed, and Sonny Tyler against thewall suffer the effects of immunization.

The information I received that theenemy intended Spreading the Small pox amongst us, I coud not Suppose themCapable ofI now must give Some Credit to it, as it has made its appearance onSeverall of those who last came out of Boston.

A Boston physician said "that hehad effectually given the distemper among those people" who were leaving thecity. Rumors and suspicions of British efforts to spread disease in theAmerican troops were persistent throughout the war.

Smallpox played a role in thefailure of American forces to capture Quebec. It was rumored that General GuyCarleton, British commander in Quebec, sent infected people to the Americancamp. Thomas Jefferson was convinced the British were responsible for illnessin the lines. He later wrote: "I have been informed by officers who were on thespot, and whom I believe myself, that this disorder was sent into our armydesignedly by the commanding officer in Quebec." After the defeat at Quebec theAmerican troops gathered at Crown Point, where John Adams found their conditiondeplorable:

Our Army at Crown Point is an objectof 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 troopsto prevent infection by the British.

Inoculation produces a milder form of the disease, makingthe patient ill for several days. Interpreter Dan Moore is the sick soldier.

In most cases the evidence againstthe British is strong, if circumstantial, yet some evidence is quite explicit.When the British sent an expedition to Virginia in 1781, General AlexanderLeslie 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 wasclear, but it is not known if he carried out his plan.

It is evident that the British hadfew qualms about the tactic of infecting the general population as well as theenemy army with smallpox. In 1777 a British officer, Robert Donkin, publishedin 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 wouldsooner disband these stubborn, ignorant, enthusiastic savages, than any othercompulsive measures. Such is their dread and fear of that disorder!

Elizabeth A. Fenn, professor of history at George WashingtonUniversity, writes in her article "Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-CenturyNorth America: Beyond Jeffery Amherst" that because the Americans were referredto as "savages" Dunkin believed any means was justified to exterminate them.Such attitudes were probably often talked of, but they were not the kind ofsuggestions that should be put in writing. Someone must have believed thatDonkin had gone too far. The footnote survives in three copies of the book. Inall others, it has been removed.

What are considered acceptable military tactics at one timemay not be acceptable to later generations. Eighteenth-century warfare wasincreasingly conducted by relatively compact armies with the result of lessloss and harassment of civilians. "Laws of war" were becoming more concernedwith the protection of noncombatants as well as unnecessary suffering ofmilitary personnel. By the end of the nineteenth century efforts were beingmade to prevent the horrors of chemical warfare.

The First Hague Peace Conferenceof 1899 issued a declaration prohibiting the use of poison and materialscausing unnecessary suffering. The Geneva Protocol adopted in 1925 prohibitedthe use in war of "asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases and of all analogousliquids, materials, and devices," as well as biological methods of warfare. TheGeneva Protocol has been accepted by most countries though not always followed.A German military maxim applies; roughly translated, it says: "To get out of adesperate situation, you have to bend the rules."

Consulting editor Harold Gill contributed to the autumn 2003journal an article on colonial divorce.

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