Did the British try to Spread Smallpox to Indians Using Infected Blankets?

[caption id="attachment_1019" align="aligncenter" width="510"] Joshua Reynolds was the artist for this 1766 painting of Jeffery Amherst. Amherst is the villain in this blogpost.[/caption]

There's a piece of history that gets talked about online sometimes and - the way things normally happen on the internet - claims are made but evidence is not given to back up those claims.

In this blogpost I'm going to deal with the question of whether or not the British intentionally spread smallpox to Native Americans with infected blankets.

The shortest and most "fair" answer to that question - as it often is - is that we don't know for sure.

We do know for sure, however, that spreading smallpox was discussed among the highest officers in the British army. More about that later in this post.

But the question of whether they really tried to pull off such a genocidal scheme is different from discussing it as a possibility.

In one chapter of The Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814, Matthew C. Ward deals with our question. According to Ward

There is little direct evidence that the British army ever consciously used "germ warfare." In the eighteenth century, the process of disease transmission remained a mystery and while the Fort Pitt garrison may have redistributed a few blankets from the smallpox hospital... most of the Indian headmen who would have accepted such gifts would have been pro-British, the group whom Amherst and other commanders would not have wanted to undermine (page 64).

In Ward's chapter, "The Microbes of War: The British Army and Epidemic Disease among the Ohio Indians, 1758-1765," he also points out how some of the logistics of primitive germ warfare make it unlikely that the idea was "successfully" carried out - at least given the context of when and where it was proposed.

The smallpox virus Variola Major can, under certain conditions, exist in a dried state. However, it prefers cool and dry conditions, hardly those of mid-summer in the Ohio Valley. Although the chances of its long-term survival are slight, its transmission via infected blankets is thus at least potentially feasible.

So there may have actually been an atttempt to distribute infected blankets at one point and it is even possible that Indians contracted smallpox and even died from blankets distributed by the British, but possible is the keyword. The claim cannot be made with any degree of certainty that the British attempted or managed to kill Indians by distributing blankets that were infected with smallpox.

Nevertheless, Jeffery Amherst, the Commander in Chief of the British forces in North America, did propose the genocidal, eighteenth century germ warfare scheme that we've been discussing here. And Ward quotes two letters written by Amherst to Colonel Henry Bouquet, who was stationed in the Ohio Valley, where Pontiac's War (sometimes known as "Pontiac's Rebellion") had broken out. Amherst wrote the first letter in July of 1763.

[C]ould it not be contrived to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, Use Every Strategem in our power to Reduce them.

The second letter was written only a week later.

You will Do well to try to Innoculate the Indians, by means of Blankets, as well as to Try every other Method, that can Serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race (both of these quotes are on page 64).

Historians are generally in agreement that more Indians died from diseases imported from Europe than from the wars that went on during the same period of time. Although Matthew Ward was able to write a whole chapter about the interplay between germs and the British military in the Sixty Years' War, the idea of killing Indians with infected blankets is only discussed in the first two pages of the chapter. Amherst's statements as quoted above, are very remarkable in their own right, even if it is unlikely that anybody followed through with his proposal.

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