When the British surrendered on October 19, 1781, the battlefield was littered with the rotting corpses of soldiers and their horses, which polluted the water and the air, spreading “camp fever,” or typhus. Jack quickly fell ill, but Washington wouldn’t have him treated in an overcrowded, malaria-infested makeshift hospital; he ordered Jack be spirited by carriage to his aunt’s home in Eltham, Virginia, thirty miles away,
