You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington

by Alexis Coe

The British and the Hessians brought smallpox with them when they arrived to quell the Revolution, and though Washington had been immune since contracting the disease in Barbados in 1751, he quickly learned that almost everyone around him was vulnerable. “I am very much afraid that all the Troops on their march from the Southward will be infected with the small pox, and that instead of having an Army here, we shall have an Hospital,” he wrote to General Horatio Gates in early 1777.11 The Virginia legislature, worried that inoculation would spread rather than contain the disease, made inoculation illegal. But the epidemic, which Washington called “this most dangerous enemy,” threatened to defeat the patriots; by 1776, 20 percent of his army had suffered or died from smallpox.12 Variolation, a new technique, was risky; at best, it put soldiers out of commission for weeks at a time. Still, Washington decided to move ahead with compulsory mass inoculations. Smallpox-related fatalities of soldiers and recruits dropped by 17 percent as soon as inoculation was introduced; by the end of the war, it had reached 1 percent.