Well. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to Anderson House here in washington, d. C. My name is andrew brown and im the historical programs manager for the American Revolution institute of the society of the cincinnati. The American Revolution institute promotes knowledge and appreciation for the achievement of american independence, fulfilling the aim of the Continental Army officers who founded the society of the cincinnati in 1783 to perpetuate the memory of that vast event. In addition to this evenings program, the institute fulfills this mission by supporting advanced study exhibitions and other historical programs and tours, advocating Historic Preservation and providing resource ideas to classrooms nationwide that benefit teachers, students and scholars alike. Since since 1938, the society of the cincinnati has done all of this work from right here at its headquarters, Anderson House, a National Historic landmark that was completed in 1905 as the winter residence of lars and isabel anderson. Tonights authors talk a program made possible in part by a generous gift from the massachusetts arts society to the cincinnati features. Professor Andrew Wehrman discussing his recently published book, the contagion of liberty the politics of smallpox in the American Revolution. With the smallpox epidemic raging during the revolutionary war, general George Washington was forced to order the mandatory inoculation of the Continental Army. Washington, however, did not have to convince fearful colonists to protect themselves against smallpox, as they were the ones demanding. Tonight, professor warman offers a new dimension to our understanding of both the American Revolution and the origins of Public Health in the united states. Through a discussion of how inoculation became one of the most sought after medical procedures of the 18th century, and how freedom from disease ultimately helped american colonists achieve independence from great britain. Andrew wehrman is an associate professor of history at Central Michigan university. He received his ph. D. From Northwestern University and has previously taught at Marietta College in ohio. His research and teaching focuses on colonial, revolutionary america and the history of medicine, disease and Public Health. In addition to his newest book on which he will focus tonight on tonight, he has written several articles for the washington post, the boston globe and the new england quarterly for which he was awarded the Walter Muir Whitehill prize in early american history, an annual award given for a distinguished essay in early american history. His new book has received has beeneviewed and received high praises from other wellknown historians on the subject of 18th century medicine, including gene abrams and the Pulitzer Prize winner and former society of the cincinnati book prize honoree elizabeth fenn. So with all of these asked accolades and without further delay, please join me in welcoming to Anderson House professor Andrew Wehrman. Wow. Thank you for that. Welcome. Andrew. Thank you to everyone at the society of the cincinnati and the American Revolution institute for inviting me to come and speak. Its such a wonderful place and great time to be in washington. Im thankful for everyone who put this together. Now, when i told my kids to kids, charles and walter, 11 and eight years old, when i told them that i would be speaking in washington, d. C. , this is the first book talk that ive given. The book came out a week ago. Its its ink still wet and when i told my kids that id be going to washington and giving a talk, theyre very excited. And my son charles asked me and he said, hey, dad, do you think President Biden might be might come to your talk . And i said, how . Probably not. Hes busy. You know, he just signed a bill today and at the white house. But i said no. Im sure hed be interested in the topic, but hes probably too busy and my son looked at me with a smile and he said, so itll probably just be Kamala Harris then. So im told. Do you see crowds arrive a little late, so leave a couple seats open just in case the Vice President arrives. So as andrew said and he introduced, introduce my book. Very well. I thought my book, the contagion of liberty, argues that the man before inoculation not anger against inoculation, not anti inoculation but mand pro inoculation for quarantine and for other Public Solutions during smallpox epidemic. Infected revolutionary politics in inspired riots over equal access and change. The way americans thought about and understood the their governments response ability to protect their health. Now im going to talk today. Ill give a kind of general overview of my book, but im going to zoom in on washingtons decision to inoculate the Continental Army. Its something that has come up a lot recently. When i started writing the book, i did not know that it would have topical interest. It was sort of distress saying that that it did. I thought it was maybe an esoteric topic when i started researching it. A 12 or 15 years ago, it was a originated as a as a dissertation topic that ive developed over the years and kept finding more evidence and examples. Lets its going here. I started the research in the project simply by wanting to know more about how ordinary americans experienced the revolution. It wasnt about smallpox at first. I wanted to know how ordinary people navigated the tensions, how they how they felt when they were listening to debates and town meetings. And i really wanted to know how regular people, blacksmiths, sailors, how they felt, how they acted during these debates. And its a its a subject that scholars always strive for. Many of them do, but its hard to achieve. You know, our our ordinary people reading john locke, are they reading montesquieu . Are they are they reading lawyerly pamphlets . I dont think so. So whats getting them angry . What are they interested in . And so i came upon a diary written by a sailor from marblehead, massachusetts, a town that i hadnt heard of before. But it turns out it was the second largest city in massachusetts after boston at the time of the revolution. And this ordinary sailor named Ashley Baldwin kept a voluminous diary. He kept he wrote entries in it every day, beginning in 1766 into the 17th nineties. And i thought, great, heres heres my view of the revolution from an ordinary person. So i was in the library. Theres a, theres a published version of the diary you could even read it online if you google it. And i said, okay, i want to see what he thinks about the stamp act, the tea act, sugar act. I want to, you know, see the things that are in all the textbooks about what people were angry about, about the revolution. Ashley baldwin doesnt write about any of those things. At least not much. Instead, day after day, beginning in the fall of 1773, the same time boston is having debates over tea. He was writing down the names of his neighbors who had fallen sick to smallpox. He was writing down the names of of the people who had who had died. His wife and son get sick. They have to go to the towns pest house. When when people die in his community. It was ashley bowen who had had smallpox previously who volunteered to bury the bodies. He was seething in anger about a new private hospital that would inulate people in his town. But he wasnt angry about ocate asian. He wasnt angry. He didnthk it was ineffective or some. He didnt think it was it was playing god that was against his religion. Heat worried about side effects. He wanted access to it, but he couldnt afford it. The new hospital was terribly expensive and so in his journal, hes writing about this all the time. He composes poems about the outbreak of smallpox. He paints a watercolor of the hospital that was built to stop it. This one. And if you go to marblehead, massachusetts,ouan see it for yourself. The actual watercolor is really tiny. Its on le a three by five card size blow it up here and he describes this episode in marblehead, where angry sailors like himself who were angry about the cost of inoculation, not its efficacy, went out to this hospital and burned to the ground. Then i discovered that there were these debates happening in other towns, other communities in the run up to the revolution, and a story that i thought hadnt been fully told. But were getting ahead of ourselves a little bit. Lets talk about smallpox. Lets do a little science. I took microbiology in college. We can we can do this. A little bit of smallpox basics. Now, smallpox is a viral disease. We can use the past tense, actually, and say it was a viral disease because, of course, its been eradicated. Since 1980. Officially, colonial americans called smallpox the king of terrors or the sovereign disorder. At the same time that they were angry about the king in england, smallpox was the most feared disease in an age that had a lot of disease. Smallpox virus also called very over officially ravages the body. It starts off. It has a long incubation period. So if youre near someone that has smallpox, it might take about seven days before you start feeling sick and conveniently before you start being infectious. The pox dont start first. First, its a fever, a really high fever. Backaches, terrible pain, chills, shakes and about a day after that fever begins, the pox starts rising first in the mouth and the throat on the tongue. They start burst, start rising past nerve vessels. Really painful for on the face and the hands, the extremities. It could cover the entire body. Survivors were fortunate, but they were left with scars and pitted skin. In the 18th century, smallpox epidemics had around a 15 to 20 more tabloidy rate, sometimes higher. It was much higher among native american population. Asians earlier in the century, sometimes 50 or greater. The only salvation that we have was smallpox. And you can see its a big virus, not quite as big as our friend ebola here, but a big virus scientist often describe it as a brick shaped virus. The body recognizes it pretty easily after it comes into contact the first time. So if you survive smallpox, you were immune for life and you can see the kind of relative size as heres a a corona virus, right. For in comparison to some other smaller guys. In europe and the americas were the last places to experience smallpox epidemics in the 16th and 17th centuries. And the last to learn about how to prevent it. Inoculation. The europeans would try to tell you they were the first to really discover. And of course, they were the they were the last. Lets be honest. Now, you may know this story, but before i get into it, inoculation, what were talking about tonight is a precursor to vaccination. Vaccination that is not widely known about certainly not known about by europeans until Edward Jenner publishes his study of of cowpox inoculation. Thats vaccination in 1798 so. Well after the revolution inoculation is the precursor or it is the purpose for exposure of oneself to smallpox via a small incision, usually in the in the arm, sometimes both arms, just to make sure it took a tiny amount of smallpox matters gross bit right taken from the pus of a smallpox pustules the little bit would be rubbed or dropped into a tiny scratch of an incision and then bandaged up within a few days. That fever would start. Youd start getting a few pox, but it would be a mild case compared to natural for smallpox. The mortality rate of inoculation turned out to be far lower. Now, inoculation. This process had been known about in india and africa and the middle east. Turkey for centuries, beginning around 1700 reports of inoculation started being printed by the Royal Society in london. Reports from china, greece and turkey. But this isnt how. Americans first learned of it. You may know the story of smallpox in 1721, and thats where my book really begins. We could do a whole talk on just this episode, but Cotton Mather wrote to the Royal Society after they had published some of these reports about inoculation and said, oh, thats not the place at i have heard aut inoculation. Ive heard about it before. I heard about it from my slave name on this thomas and Cotton Mather told the story atome point afr being given an islamist as a as a slave, as a gift from his congregation down there in boston. What a gift to the human, mather asked, only imus if he had ever had smallpox before, and omniscience was must have been very clever and innocent. I said. Well, yes and no, and then describes the experience. Right. He had had smallpox via inoculation, and he said it was an unknown procedure for where he came from. Mather tried to get others in boston. He prints it in the newspapers, tries to get others in boston to use inoculation during an outbreak of smallpox. He only manages to convince one doctor in boston to do it. Doctors abdul boylston. Boylston inoculates first members of his family, then then some 200 people. And in the aftermath, it turns out that the inoculated patients fared much better than those who had the disease. Naturally. Now, this was controversial. There are debates and heated arguments, even a bomb thrown into Cotton Mathers window. But over time, during subsequent outbreaks and i talk about outbreaks in different places in in my book confidence grew in that procedure. Now George Washington right are subject for today often when you hear about smallpox in this period maybe dont read about it as much as i do but often things jump from. Mather 1721. The onus this story to washington inoculating the troops. A lot happens in between but were going to do the jump also now, historians have long known about washingtons decision to inoculate the Continental Army. Now, the very first historians, the ones who wrote some of the first histories on the American Revolution, didnt mention washingtons inoculation of the troops. It only came out about 50 years after the revolution. People started writing about it among those was parson weems of the cherry tree story. He writes about washington and inoculation, as does the chief justice of the Supreme Court, john marshall, who writes a biography of of of washington. However, washington exaggerates a bit, and theres a little bit of exaggeration in in almost all accounts of washingtons inoculation, othe troops. And sometimes when you read about what happened, it ends up sounding like john marshall. Marshall said inoculation having raly been practiced in the western world by the genel washington determineto inoculate all the soldiers in the american in serce. Of course, inoculation had been pretty widely practid, not just in the western world, but in the colonies. And were going to get to that in a moment. Mo recent scholars have started tonclude smallpox in their histories, but almost always they give washington the lis share of the credit. And as were going to discuss tonight, washington was one of the last people to want to inoculate the Continental Army. There was a surge of pressure from ordinary soldiers, from officers, from doctors. From his own wife, martha, in favor of inoculation. The demand started the lowest ranks and communities across the colonies up to colonial governments. Eventually, washington submits and ill show you. So having rarely been practice in the western world, it may surprise you that Supreme Court justices and chief justices arent always accurate right now. So this is just boston, right . Boston has the publishes the statistics in their newspapers. They they send out their their government, their selectmen, to to knock on doors, to take the numbers after its over. They keep pretty careful records. Are these numbers total the exact what we know from our own covid counts and things that that exactness is is relative. So these even though they seem really precise theyre theyre still ballpark ballpark figures. Theres no quiz. Dont try to memorize the numbers. But i want you to kind of see the pattern thats developing over the decades. The numbers make clear that inoculation was far safer than getting infected naturally by 79. So starting in in 1721, so on the left, youve got natural smallpox getting the disease, natural cases, the number of people who catch it naturally and the number of people who die from it on the right, the number of people who are inoculated, who choose to be inoculated, and the number of people who die from or as a result of their inoculations. So 17, 21 the epidemic had a 14. 6 case fatality rates, 842 people die almost 6000 bostonians catch two disease, boylston. The experiment is relatively small, but only six die of his 287. And theyre doing these percentages. Theyre talking about them, writing about them. Benjamin franklin publishes them down in in philadelphia, especially after the 1730 epidemic. More and more evidence is is is is coming inoculations are being more successful. The people who die from inoculation tend to be very young children, babies and the elderly. The soldier age people who are soldiers in the Continental Army, teenage ers survive it very well. Theres tremendous demand from young adults for innocuous. And you can see by 1764, most bostonian boys are demanding and receiving inoculate. And theres a general inoculate. And in boston in 1764, the entire town shuts down. They shut down trade, shut down commerce. So the whole community can be innocuous. They sit together. The trouble with inoculation and the reason why you have to do it all at once is because after your inoculate, your infectious, youre infectious f