On smallpox blankets

A slight ding on Philip Jenkins’s History of the United States, which I’m still reading and still enjoying. In a chapter on the Indian prehistory of North America, Jenkins points out the role of virgin soil epidemics in massive demographic change across the continent, well beyond any areas of initial European settlement (thanks to networks of preexisting trade routes and exacerbated by endemic inter-Indian warfare) and far before any “deliberate policy of Indian Removal” by any modern European-descended state.

All well and good—I’m often at pains in class to point out these early disasters, occurring in an age before germ theory, were accidental. But that paragraph ends with this passage:

Sometimes destruction by biological means was deliberate: in the 1760s, the British ransacked smallpox hospitals for contaminated bedding to offer as gifts to the Ottawa people.

On a strict technical level, most of that sentence is true—although the word ransacked is a bit much, as we’ll see. The problem is that Jenkins accidentally implies a widespread policy (“the British ransacked . . . hospitals”) over a long period (“the 1760s”) when this occurred exactly one time in one specific place.

The root of the smallpox blankets legend is the 1763 siege of Fort Pitt (formerly Fort Duquesne, later Pittsburgh) during Pontiac’s War, one of the aftershocks of the French and Indian War. Well-coordinated attacks on overextended British outposts in the far-flung new reaches of the Empire overwhelmed or came close to overwhelming several forts. Fort Pitt held out, but the siege conditions and overcrowding led to an outbreak of smallpox.

The precise details are unclear (here’s a good longer explanation) but in a letter to British Commander-in-Chief Jeffrey Amherst, the commander of Fort Pitt’s garrison mooted the idea of giving contaminated blankets from smallpox patients in the fort (n.b: from the fort hospital, not hospitals plural) to a diplomatic party as part of the customary exchange of gifts during negotiations. Amherst apparently approved on the basis that the situation at the fort was desperate. Based on fort records, it appears two blankets and a handkerchief were used (by someone, possibly a trader on his own initiative rather than the fort’s commander) and their previous owners reimbursed.

But here’s the most important part of the incident: it didn’t work.

Smallpox, per the CDC, can theoretically spread through bedding contaminated with pus and bodily fluids but is unlikely to, especially if the fluids dry and age. It is much more often transmitted “by direct and fairly prolonged face-to-face contact between people.” Beyond the mechanics of how smallpox spreads most effectively, other contextual factors further complicate the story. Here’s Fred Anderson in The War that Made America, which I recently recommended:

There is no evidence that Amherst’s genocidal intentions and [Fort Pitt commander] Ecuyer’s abominable act actually succeeded in spreading smallpox among the Shawnees and Delawares who besieged Fort Pitt, for smallpox was already endemic in both groups at the time.

Another historian has pointed out that the smallpox outbreak at Fort Pitt arrived with the Indians in the first place.

Again, we are dealing with a single failed attempt a biological warfare in a desperate situation. So while that sentence in Jenkins’s book, a sort of tossed-off aside, is in some sense correct, it falls apart at the detail level.

The bigger problem is precisely that tossed-off quality and the impression it creates. The smallpox blankets are legendary—mythic. Even students who don’t know much about the colonial era or the complex history of European and Indian relations usually recognize this story. That’s because it has escaped its original context and all its bothersome details and, having thus escaped, the attempt to spread smallpox is assumed to have been successful.

So it’s become a story too good to check and, as proof of white perfidy, can be transplanted to the European villain of choice. I’ve seen Cortes and the Pilgrims accused of it, or “Europeans” generally, as if it happened many times.

This is an unfortunate single sentence in a book that is otherwise excellent so far, but the mere fact of its appearing in a good book by a careful historian points toward its prominence as easy shorthand for the evils of European and Indian interaction. But that very ease should raise our suspicions, especially since the story is so often used as a one-size-fits-all cudgel. Any story that handy for the purpose needs to be checked.