What's Past is Prologue: George Washington's inoculation order of 1777

The "What's Past is Prologue" series, an homage to William Shakespeare's "The Tempest," looks at events of the past that seem to reoccur later with remarkable similarities. Frank Nickell of the Kellerman Foundation for Historic Preservation, previously a longtime faculty member at Southeast Missouri State University, is primary historian for these articles, which will be carried intermittently in the Southeast Missourian.

This is the fourth in the series.

One of the most used words today, thanks to COVID-19, is vaccine. There were no vaccines during the 18th century Revolutionary War but there was a deadly disease called smallpox.

George Washington, realizing his Continental Army troops were in great danger from the malady, eventually ordered the best thing available in that era — the inoculation of Continental Army troops.

"Smallpox was probably the worst disease human beings could get at that time," said historian Nickell. "It left a sufferer with huge painful blisters often covering much of the body and left permanent scarring, making a soldier unable to function in war — if in fact he survived the illness."

The gravestone of President George Washington's second cousin, George H. Lewis (1801-1874), in Old Lorimier Cemetery in Cape Girardeau.Southeast Missourian file

Inoculation usually involved the practice of making an incision in a healthy soldier's arm and placing in the wound a half-inch long thread or string from the clothing of a smallpox sufferer.

The best case scenario was, Nickell said, a soldier would get a mild case of smallpox and recover, being thereafter permanently immune from ever contracting the disease again.

Cotton Mather, a New England Puritan clergyman, is credited with developing the technique as early as 1720.

Pushback

Mather's solution was far from scientific and some previously healthy inoculated people died — sowing fear of the contamination potential of the process, according to the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.

The Continental Congress, in fact, issued a 1776 proclamation prohibiting Army surgeons from inoculating troops.

Washington, according to the Kluge Center, feared not only smallpox ravaging his Army but also the psychological deterrent the disease had on attracting needed recruits.

After informing Congress of his plan to defy its order, Washington penned a Feb. 6, 1777, letter to physician William Shippen Jr. asking him to oversee mass inoculations in Shippen's home city of Philadelphia.

"Finding the smallpox to be spreading much and fearing no precaution can prevent it from running through the whole of our Army, I have determined that the troops shall be inoculated (and) I trust in its consequences will have the most happy effects. Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure, for should the disorder infect the Army in the natural way and rage with its usual virulence we should have more to dread from it than from the Sword of the Enemy."

By the end of the Revolutionary War, the Kluge Center reports, at least 11 hospitals were administering the crude inoculation.

"Defeating the British was impressive, but simultaneously taking on (smallpox) was a risky stroke of genius," said the center.

Resistance

The idea Washington's long-ago inoculation order or today's call for vaccine mandates is an affront to personal freedom is longstanding in U.S. history.

More than a century ago, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts rendered a decision about smallpox.

In the 1903 ruling, Commonwealth v. Pear, the court decided compulsory vaccination was "a reasonable exercise of governmental power," according to the 2011 book "Pox: An American History," by Michael Willrich.

"The rights of individuals must yield, if necessary, when the welfare of the whole community is at stake," wrote Chief Justice Marcus P. Knowlton, in the court's unanimous decision.

Washington

Nickell reports the man who would later become America's first president had personal knowledge of the disease.

"While in Barbados as a younger man, (George) Washington contracted smallpox, which left him with scars on his face and nose — and he was known to be quite sensitive about (the pockmarks)," he said.