In 1707, the former Carolina governor John Archdale also cast mass death as heaven-sent, writing of “the Indians” that it “pleased Almighty God to send unusual Sicknesses amongst them, as the Smallpox, etc., to lessen their Numbers; so that the English, in Comparison to the Spaniard, have but little Indian Blood to answer for.” This was not true—there was plenty of blood to answer for, and disease was only one of many killers in these waves of genocide. But the idea that pandemics are carrying out the work of a greater power—whether that power is imagined as God or as nature—is integral to the
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