Colonial germ warfare

CML Army Chemical Review, Oct, 2004 by Harold B. Gill, Jr.

"The humanizing of War! You might as well talk of the humanizing of Hell ... As if war could be civilized! If I'm in command when war breaks out I shall issue my order--'The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility. Hit first, hit hard, and hit everywhere.'" (1)

--Sir Reginald Bacon

********** When armies get in desperate situations, the usual civilized rules of warfare are often thrown out the window. In the 1520s, Italian politician and author Niccolo Machiavelli wrote that when speaking of the safety of one's country, there must be no consideration of just or unjust, merciful or cruel, or praiseworthy or disgraceful; instead, setting aside every scruple, one must follow to the utmost any plan that will save her life and keep her liberty.

During Chief Pontiac's uprising in 1763, the Indians besieged Fort Pitt and burned nearby houses, forcing the inhabitants to take refuge in the well-protected fort. (2) The British officer in charge of the fort, Captain Simeon Ecuyer, reported to Colonel Henry Bouquet in Philadelphia that smallpox had already broken out and that he feared the crowded conditions would result in the spread of the virus. On 24 June 1763, William Trent, a local trader, recorded in his journal that two Indian chiefs visited the fort and urged the British to abandon the fight, but the British refused. Instead, when the chiefs departed, they were given blankets and a handkerchief out of the smallpox hospital.

It is not known who conceived the plan, but there is no doubt that it met with the approval of the British military and may have been common practice. After the incident at Fort Pitt, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander of British forces in North America, wrote that the event was contrived to send the virus among the Indians. Sir Jeffrey ordered the extirpation of the Indians (without taking prisoners). About a week later, he wrote to Colonel Bouquet and recommended the additional inoculation of Indians with smallpox-infected blankets, in addition to every other method used to extirpate the "execrable race."

Though a connection cannot be proven, a smallpox epidemic erupted in the Ohio Valley that may have been the result of distributing infected articles at Fort Pitt. Whatever its origin, the outbreak devastated the Indians. Although modern readers may find such tactics atrocious and barbaric, these methods were acceptable during this time period. And all-out war was not foreign to the Indians. During Pontiac's rebellion, Indian warriors killed about 2,000 civilian settlers and 400 soldiers in an attempt to extirpate the enemy.

The Fort Pitt incident is the best-documented case of deliberately spreading smallpox among unsuspecting populations, but it was likely not the first time such a stratagem was employed by military forces. It appears that both Captain Ecuyer and Sir Jeffrey proposed the same idea independently at about the same time, suggesting that the practice was not unusual. The spread of sickness and disease among enemy forces has a long history. The ancient Assyrians and Greeks poisoned enemy water supplies; the Greeks used the herb hellebore to cause violent diarrhea. In 1340, attackers used a catapult to throw dead animals over the walls of the castle of Thun L 'Eveque in Hainault (now northern France), causing such a foul, unendurable odor that the defenders negotiated a truce.

In 1623, Dr. John Pott, a physician at Jamestown, Virginia, was said to have poisoned Indians in retaliation for a Powhatan uprising in which 350 English died. On 22 May 1623, Captain William Tucker and 12 other men went to the Potomac River to secure the release of English prisoners held by Indians. To conclude the peace treaty, the English invited the chief and his men to drink a sack prepared for the occasion. But the Indians demanded that the English interpreter take the first drink, which he did from a different container. Afterward, a group of Indians, including two chiefs, were walking with the interpreter when the interpreter suddenly dropped to the ground while the English soldiers discharged a volley of shots into his Indian companions. The English estimated that about 200 Indians died of poison and 50 from gunshot wounds; however, Chief Opechancanough, the mastermind of the uprising, was not found among the dead. (3) Some Englishmen expressed reservations about using such tactics, even against the Indians, and Dr. Pott was later criticized for his actions.

By the 17th century, European military leaders were becoming conscious of ethics in warfare and rules for carrying out civilized war slowly developed. In 1625, a Dutch legal scholar, Hugo Grotius, published his codification of accepted rules of peace and war. Grotius departed from the classical view of war and did not regard the entire population of the antagonist state as the enemy. Other writers also made attempts to better define the term enemy, believing that a distinction between military forces and civilians needed to be established.