Fighting Illness and the British in Colonial Boston
By: Nina Sankovitch
Tags: American Revolution, My Books, Epidemics, Vaccination, History

In December of 1774, Edmund Quincy, merchant and justice of the peace in Boston, wrote to his daughter Katy (sister to Dorothy and future sister-in-law to John Hancock) about the most threatening evil among us…small pox.” Edmund urged Katy to get herself inoculated. Quoting scripture, he advised her to take care of her “Vineyard…and [follow] the Truth of Righteousness.”

Inoculations against smallpox had been going on since the early 1700s, started in large part through the efforts of Cotton Mather, better known today for his role in fomenting the hysteria leading to the Salem Witch Trials than for his efforts at stemming smallpox.

Mather had initially learned about the treatment from a slave named Onesimus, who explained to him how the process had been used in Africa as a safeguard against smallpox. Dr. Zabdiel Boylston assisted Mather in his vaccination campaign, inoculating first his own son, and then a slave, and then moving on to successfully treat hundreds.

John Adams had himself inoculated in the spring of 1764. Following treatment with the live virus, he had to self-quarantine in a room in a room in Boston for three weeks. The forced separation from his beloved Abigail Smith made him miserable. He wrote her long letters in his isolation, expressing his feelings verbosely: “the dear Partner of all my Joys and sorrows, in whose Affections, and Friendship I glory, more than in all other Emoluments under Heaven, comes into my Mind very often and makes me sigh…”

His letters to Abigail had to be fumigated before she could receive them, and even then, Abigail’s parents hesitated at allowing her to handle them (although their hesitation might have been more directed at John himself, and not the smallpox disease with which he had volunteered to dose himself). When John was finally released from the quarantine, he galloped his way back to Abigail and in the fall, they were married.

Despite the proven effectiveness of the smallpox inoculation, there was no widespread adoption of the practice in the colonies. Perhaps the sharing of anecdotal evidence as to its potential ill effects (Oxenbridge Thacher, a prominent New England lawyer, was widely believed to have fallen ill and died due to the inoculation he received) led to a shying away from the practice.

But in 1775, when a smallpox epidemic once again threatened the town of Boston and its environs, the patriots who had been focusing so intently on the oppressions of the British now had to face up to the realities of smallpox. It was a disease that took no political side but attacked both redcoats and patriots with the same intensity, leaving its victims at best scarred for life, and at worst, dead. Americans finally began to take seriously all options available to protect themselves against the disease.

The 1775 epidemic began amidst the British troops stationed in Boston but then quickly spread to the civilian population. The selectmen of Boston, still meeting regularly despite Parliament’s prohibition against it, did what they could to contain the illness. Stricken colonists, along with British soldiers, were sent to a special smallpox hospital to recuperate or die. For those who refused to move from their homes, a fence was erected around their dwelling to enforce a quarantine and special flags were prominently displayed to indicate the contamination within.

By early February 1775, Boston’s town clerk William Cooper announced that “after Strict Enquiry no person is found to have small pox in this town.” It seemed as if the scourge had been routed. Relieved, the townspeople shifted their vigilance elsewhere, their fear of contagion forgotten in the daily drama of confrontations, stand-offs, and hostilities between them and the British forces, as well as with Loyalists and Crown Officers.

Relief over smallpox containment was short-lived. Already by early March, cases of smallpox were once again being reported, both in private homes and in the British barracks. The disease also appeared in surrounding villages. The town selectmen, led by John Hancock, now not only supervised the removal of smallpox sufferers to special buildings and imposed quarantines; they also required that all affected homes were to be treated by a thorough smoking out of the interiors in an effort to disinfect and cleanse.

Both colonial leaders and Royal Governor Gage were intent on keeping the number of cases down — and worked, if not together, in tandem to contain the illness. While working to contain smallpox in Boston, however, the British were also planning an attack against the rebel colonists holding secret meetings in Concord. Late on the evening of April 18th, Paul Revere took his fated ride to warn of the attack, and the next day the Battle of Lexington and Concord unspooled, leaving scores dead and wounded, and handing the British a solid — and unexpected — defeat.

One of the results of the defeat was the decision of the English commanders to entirely blockade Boston (and more importantly, its port) and fortify it as a British stronghold against the rest of Massachusetts. In an accord reached between the British and the Americans, those patriots wishing to leave Boston would be allowed to do so, once having given up any weapons they owned.

Abigail Quincy, wife to patriot pamphleteer, lawyer, and diplomat Josiah Quincy, joined the crowds streaming to Boston Neck to flee the city. Before traveling beyond the checkpoints at the Neck (the thin strip of land connecting Boston to the mainland), all travelers were required to undergo a peculiar treatment designed to prevent the further spread of smallpox. As Abigail’s son (future United States congressman, mayor of Boston, president of Harvard, and the namesake of Quincy market), described it years later, every person seeking to flee was made to:

“enter the sentry-box … On each side of the box was a small platform, round which each of [us] . . . was compelled to walk, and remain until our clothes were thoroughly fumigated with the fumes of brimstone cast upon a body of coals in the centre of the box…. [t]his operation was required to prevent infection.”

Thoroughly fumigated, Abigail Quincy, her son, and the rest of their party were allowed to travel on, to leave Boston and get as far away as they could.

Over the ensuing months, smallpox and other communicable illnesses (such as dysentery) took hundreds of lives in the colonies, not only among the soldiers — the illnesses spreading quickly due to the squalid conditions in which they lived — but also among civilians who caught the horrible viruses from contact with the soldiers and passed it then along to others.

In the fall of 1775, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John, away at the Continental Congress, “18 have been buried since you left us. . . . [There have been] 4, 3 and 2 funerals in a day for many days. . . . Mrs. Randle Randall has one child that is not expected to live out the night, Mrs. Belcher has another, Joseph Bracket another. . . . Mr. Wibird lies bad. Major Miller is dangerous. Revd. Mr. Gay is not expected to live. . . . So sickly and so Mortal a time the oldest Man does not remember.”

Writing again two weeks later, Abigail described the ongoing tragedies: “Some poor parents are mourning the loss of 3, 4 and 5 children, and some families are wholly striped of every Member.”

She turned her home into a hospital and nursed her patients as best she could: “such is the distress of the neighborhood that I can scarcely find a well person to assist me in looking after the sick.” The only help she had was from her mother, who traveled every day from Weymouth to do what she could for her daughter and for the household. And then her mother herself fell ill.

The fall of 1775 was a terrible one in so many ways, and for many of the colonists, the concerns of a pending war with England took backseat to the illnesses suffered at home. As Abigail wrote to John, “the desolation of War is not so distressing as the Havoc made by this pestilence.”

It was not until the spring of 1776, when Boston was once again firmly in American hands, that the colony of Massachusetts was able to organize large-scale inoculations against smallpox. Treatment centers were set up in the town and colonists came from all across Massachusetts to be treated. Abigail Adams arrived with a group of thirty fellow villagers from Braintree, bringing her children with her.

On July 18th, 1776, Abigail made her way to King Street. Despite feeling ill from her inoculation, she was eager to join the crowds in front of the state house waiting to hear proclamation of the Declaration of Independence, signed just two weeks earlier in Washington DC. Abigail was hopeful now that she would enjoy both her independence from England, and freedom from smallpox.

But for Katy Quincy, who had received her father’s warning to inoculate herself back in December of 1774, it was too late. She was afflicted with the disease sometime during 1775 and although she survived, she was forever scarred by the severe facial pockmarking left in its wake.

This post is an adapted excerpt from American Rebels: How the Hancock, Adams, and Quincy Families Fanned the Flames of Revolution, and all quotes are footnoted therein. Please contact Nina with any questions.