The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy Book 1)

by Rick Atkinson

Some died even before the battle was joined, for summer diseases had lacerated the army. “I am extremely sorry to inform Congress our troops are very sickly,” Washington wrote Hancock in early August. Of his 17,225 privates, only 10,514 were present and fit for duty; many were unfit, as an ensign informed his diary, because “a dysentery prevails considerable in the army at this time.” Typhoid and typhus also prevailed; the diseases, respectively spread by fecal contamination and by lice, would not be distinguishable until the next century. Malaria grew common, too. “The air of the whole city seems infected,” an American doctor wrote. “In almost every street there is a horrid smell.” Camp filth and fetid water—some ponds were used for both drinking and washing—contributed to a third of the army falling sick in the summer of 1776.