Variola is nearly extinct now, but once it roamed the world. Unlike most species, variola did not have specific hunting grounds, and climates or oceans did not contain it. Variola was the consummate hunter; it stalked its victims for up to ten days after it first attacked them before it emerged into plain sight and engaged its prey in a life-or-death struggle that it frequently won. For hundreds of years, across nearly every continent on Earth, variola was an apex predator, a species to fear and avoid at all costs. Then, only two hundred years ago, humankind struck back and the hunter became the prey. Now variola is almost extinct, surviving in only two laboratories where scientists prepare to combat it should it ever resurface. It remains one of the most feared creatures on Earth yet its scientific name is rarely used; most people know it as a highly contagious disease. Variola is the virus that causes smallpox.Footnote ¹

Throughout the Revolutionary era in the American colonies, smallpox was a feared disease. In eighteenth-century Europe, smallpox was endemic in most major cities, constantly present at a time when urbanization was beginning to grip the nations of that continent because of the Industrial Revolution and the dissolution of the Commons in Britain. As a result, most of the population of the British Isles met with variola at an early age, with the survivors gaining a lifelong immunity to smallpox. The American colonies had no such endemic smallpox. The very real fear of an epidemic, especially in urban areas, gripped the provinces frequently.

The black slaves of the Americas often found themselves as susceptible to smallpox as their white owners. By the Revolutionary era, most slaves lacked an acquired immunity to the illness. Before the Revolution, the geographical isolation of most plantations from urban areas would have meant that few slaves would have had the misfortune of encountering the pox. However, increased contact with various groups of people, in particular military forces, during the revolution led to a catastrophic outbreak of smallpox that claimed the lives of thousands of runaways.Footnote ²

The British, with a relatively small army, needed colonial troops during the Revolutionary War; that meant that the recruitment of the slave population in America was a logical military step.Footnote ³ However, it had been one that the British had avoided in North America, with the War of Jenkins’ Ear marking the last time slaves in the southern colonies had been armed to any great extent.Footnote ⁴ In the Caribbean, however, the practice of arming slaves was widespread among the British colonists. There, with disease felling many regulars and with a huge slave majority present on all their islands, the British depended on slave recruitment into both the army and navy during times of war.Footnote ⁵ The white majority present in the colonies of British North America, and the perceived threat of the slave insurrections that would ensue from arming slaves, meant that the practice was largely ignored in the generation before the Revolutionary War in all places except on the frontier fringes of the colonies.

The move to arm slaves during the Revolutionary War was not through a Parliamentary edict. Instead, individual commanders adjusted to their local conditions when it came to the recruitment of slaves. Those who had served in the Caribbean, where arming slaves was a common practice, often saw bondsmen as a valuable military asset. Others simply wanted to try to hit the rebelling colonists in their pockets by enticing their property to flee by extending promises of freedom. However, the lack of any formal policy for slave recruitment being issued by the British Parliament meant that a haphazard military policy towards slaves developed throughout the colonies, depending more on local conditions than on a set agenda. It was into this uniquely localized situation that smallpox became an active agent throughout the Revolutionary War.

The subject of African American participation in the American Revolution is one that has become active in recent years. Indeed, as studies of African American history have become more visible in colonial and early republican historiography, the trend towards viewing black participation in America's founding conflict has increased exponentially. An often forgotten group within this already marginalized section of society was the many thousands of slaves who fought against America's founding, supporting Britain with its promise of emancipation. Often ignored by historians driven more by patriotism than by historical accuracy, this group of loyalists were truly explored for the first time by Benjamin Quarles in The Negro in the American Revolution (1961). In recent years, Quarles's research has been extended by numerous other authors, including Sylvia Frey, Alan Gilbert, Simon Schama, Gary Nash, and Cassandra Pybus (to name but a few), who have studied the role of African Americans in the war.Footnote ⁶ Despite this increase in scholarship, however, the focus of all of these works has been similar. Following a trend towards slave-centered narratives, all of these works look at the reasons and actions of the slaves themselves whilst largely neglecting the British policies that caused the mass exodus in the first place.

Similarly, in recent years the study of epidemiology in the Revolutionary Atlantic world has progressed significantly. Most relevant for this study is Elizabeth Fenn's Pox Americana (2002), a fantastic chronology of the smallpox epidemic that spread throughout North America between 1775 and 1782 – which is incidentally the same epidemic that will be appear in this article. Similar studies to Fenn's work on smallpox have looked at yellow fever and the regional effects of disease in the colonial world.Footnote ⁷ These works skillfully weave contemporary sources with modern science in order to create narratives that are historically and scientifically accurate. Being products of the cultural turn, these modern studies of epidemiology have incorporated the groups that were previously on the periphery of Revolutionary War studies, including slaves. The study of disease in slave communities has shown the susceptibility of the group to certain diseases, such as smallpox, and their partial immunity to others, such as yellow fever. Fenn and Peter McCandless have also showed that the smallpox badly affected runaway slaves during the Revolutionary War. However, due to their focus on broader topics, these historians and others have failed to see the broad military impact of disease on British military policy towards fugitive slaves who reached their lines.

This paper forms a junction between recent studies in the field of slave participation and disease during the Revolutionary War. Using examples of the changing policies of the British in Virginia and South Carolina, the colonies with the densest slave populations during the Revolutionary War, this study will show how smallpox affected British military policy towards runaway slaves during the conflict. It will expand the recent scholarship on slave loyalists by showing how, regardless of their own initiative, conditions on the ground in the form of infectious disease affected runaway slaves’ chances of freedom in a much greater way than previously thought. In particular, it will fill a glaring omission in recent scholarship on the topic by showing how British commanders were both cognizant of, and concerned enough by, disease to move from using slaves as soldiers in 1775 to actively discouraging their flight by 1781. In this way, this paper will also extend recent epidemiological studies by showing not only the effects of smallpox on slaves but also the similarly disastrous effects it had on the minds of some of the most senior British commanders in the American theatre. Overall, it will show that smallpox played a much greater role in the British perception of runaway slaves and their eventual military policies than previous scholarship has suggested.

In order to draw comparisons in this study, the paper will focus on three main areas. The first will look at cultural and societal reactions to smallpox in both Virginia and South Carolina in the colonial era. Looking at these perceptions of the disease, this study will show how white attitudes affected black slaves, leaving them vulnerable to major outbreaks of smallpox. The second part of the study examines the British emancipation proclamations of 1775 and 1779, detailing the reasons for their creation as well as what they actually accomplished. This section will also show the specific use of these proclamations in Virginia and South Carolina, explaining their evolution and the impact of their changes on the slaves that sought liberty with the British. The final part will detail how the effects of smallpox influenced British strategy towards the use of runaways and how this caused a fundamental shift in British policy away from black participation to black exclusion from the army. This section will also show how the British eventually created a process of quarantining runaway slaves with smallpox, a process that would eventually lead to their total exclusion from the British lines at Yorktown in 1781. With this structure in place, this study will show how British policy towards runaway slaves changed throughout the Revolutionary War due to the effects of smallpox.

By the summer of 1775, things looked increasingly desperate for John Murray, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia. In June, Dunmore fled from the very territory he was supposed to govern, taking refuge on a ship in the James river. While he had a small flotilla of ships, he did not have the necessary manpower needed to quell the rebellion that had seized the colony. He needed men, but lacked adequate numbers of loyal or royalist troops. In Arming Slaves, Phillip Morgan and Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy suggest that the British only resorted to the arming of slaves in British North America at times of military desperation.Footnote ⁸ In the case of Dunmore, this was certainly correct. He was short on men and knew that slaves were willing to fight for him for their freedom. However, it is important to note that his policy of arming slaves was not British government policy. In fact, it would be Dunmore's arming of slaves in 1775 that would open an entire Pandora's box on the question of slave recruitment that would hang over the British throughout the rest of the Revolutionary War.

Dunmore was no stranger to the idea of arming slaves. In 1773, two years before his flight to HMS Fowey, Dunmore had written to Lord Dartmouth, British Secretary of State for the Colonies, in an attempt to stop the further importation of slaves to Virginia. Fearful of the number of slaves already present in the colony, Dunmore exaggerated the fears of the slaveholding population in his letter to Dartmouth: Virginians “trembled at the facility that an enemy would find in procuring such a body of men,” he argued.Footnote ⁹ Now, forced to view the colony he once ruled from aboard a ship, Dunmore planned his reconquest of Virginia by employing the very fear of slave insurrection that he had once railed against.Footnote ¹⁰

Dunmore's eventual proclamation was a rushed document that exhibited as much desperation as it did rational military logic. However, the proclamation was not a document hashed by a man under pressure in the heat of the moment. The document exudes political rhetoric proclaiming that the measures within it had been forced on Dunmore “by a Body of armed Men unlawfully assembled, firing on His MAJESTY'S Tenders.”Footnote ¹¹ To Dunmore, the rebellion was a temporary anomaly. The Patriot rebels in Virginia would have ignored the document as a piece of imperial rhetoric from an embattled royal governor with no true authority if Dunmore had not included his now infamous servile call to arms. Towards the end of the document, Dunmore declared “all indented Servants, Negroes, or others, appertaining to Rebels, free that are able and willing to bear Arms, they joining His MAJESTY'S Troops as soon as may be, for the more speedily reducing this Colony to a proper Sense of their Duty.”Footnote ¹² Word of the proclamation spread between plantations and towns rapidly, with both free white and enslaved black Virginians astonished by Dunmore's brash tactics.

Dunmore's proclamation, preceding Abraham Lincoln's proclamation by four score and seven years, became the first government-issued emancipation document in the continental US. Despite this, Dunmore was no great emancipator. Playing on the perceived fears of the colonists, and aiming directly at the economic heart of Virginia's rebellious planter class, Dunmore cared much more about preserving his own royal prerogative than the rights of slaves. The diplomatic tightrope act that Dunmore was walking – trying to bring rebels to heel, whilst not alienating those in the colony with loyalist sympathies – is evident in the careful wording of his proclamation. Dunmore freed only those slaves and servants “appertaining to Rebels,” while leaving those in loyalist hands in bondage, hardly the act of a diehard abolitionist. Dunmore was also careful to ensure that his proclamation was a military document, insisting that it applied only to those “willing to bear arms.” By adding the military-service stipulation to his proclamation, Dunmore further restricted his emancipation to male slaves capable of fighting for his governorship. Even with these restrictions, the proclamation proved to be a success; within only a week some five hundred fugitive slaves had escaped their Patriot masters, and made their way to the banks of the James river.Footnote ¹³ Seeing his black army forming on the banks of the James, Dunmore equipped the runaways, and began the training of his new “Ethiopian Regiment.”

Dunmore's plan did not fail because of a lack of ambition but instead because of an illness that was common throughout Europe. Smallpox was endemic in Great Britain, being so widespread that nearly all of the British troops in the Americas had caught it as children. The majority of those royal troops who had not caught smallpox naturally were inoculated against the disease before they embarked for the New World.Footnote ¹⁴ This meant that the vast majority of British regular troops carried an immunity to smallpox, and so had nothing to fear from outbreaks in New England and Virginia during the winter of 1775–76 that were ravaging the coastal settlements in these regions. The slaves who flocked to Dunmore's banner, however, had no such protection. Interactions with the white colonial population along the James River and with the British troops, some of whom carried the disease, meant that smallpox was quickly epidemic amongst the runaways. The Ethiopian Regiment suffered especially from the distemper, and despite thousands of blacks running to the British lines, the unit could never muster more than about three hundred active members.Footnote ¹⁵

It was in large part due to the number of his black troops who were afflicted with smallpox that Dunmore made the fateful, and ultimately disastrous, decision to move his forces to his small flotilla of ships. In the confined quarters of the ships, the pox spread rapidly. The commander of the flotilla, Captain Andrew Hamond, wrote of the suffering of the blacks on board his ships, describing that his “squadron did not amount to more than 200 effective men so great had been the mortality among the Negroes.”Footnote ¹⁶ The smallpox spreading through his black troops thwarted Dunmore's plan for raiding coastal Virginia, and so the flotilla made their way to Gwynn's Island in the Chesapeake Bay. It was on this small land mass that the Ethiopian Regiment met its end. Dunmore, Hamond and the small contingent of British servicemen could only watch as their black allies succumbed to smallpox. The British had left the James river to escape the pox; however, their ships had merely incubated the illness, allowing it to spread.

The British situation on Gwynn's Island became worse as another disease emerged amongst the runaway slaves. Camp fever, an umbrella illness that described typhoid as well as many other ailments, also broke out amongst the blacks who were fighting with Dunmore. Andrew Hamond mentioned the illness in a later letter to Hans Stanley: “the Fever which had been so fatal to them … followed them to the island … the mortality among them was so great, that they did not now amount to above 150 effective men.”Footnote ¹⁷ Alongside smallpox, camp fever would decimate not only Dunmore's regiment but also great numbers of runaways later in the war. As they lay dying of disease on Gwynn's Island in the summer of 1776, the Ethiopian Regiment, the great fear of George Washington, had only been in existence for six months. It had fought two battles, winning one and performing ably in the other, yet it died, not from battle attrition but from a much more silent killer. The irony was that even as Jefferson wrote of Dunmore's servile insurrection in Philadelphia the Ethiopian Regiment was in its death throes on an island off Virginia.

By July, the shattered remains of Dunmore's force sailed northward to New York, and it was not long before the advancing rebels came across the grisly scenes of the Ethiopian Regiment's demise. Bodies littered the coastline around which Dunmore's flotilla had sailed as sailors threw smallpox victims overboard in a desperate attempt to keep the disease from spreading.Footnote ¹⁸ An even worse sight greeted the Patriot militia who arrived on Gwynn's Island on 8 July; an eyewitness stated, “The deplorable condition of the miserable wretches left behind is beyond description … It is suppose they buried 500 Negroes while on the island, which was only seven weeks.”Footnote ¹⁹ Dunmore had failed in his attempt to conquer Virginia with a black force, but it would not be the last time that the British attempted to use black troops as a tactic to turn the tide of the Revolution. He was undone in his plans for the most part by a microbe over which he had no control. Later commanders would learn from Dunmore, correcting old mistakes while concurrently making new ones. It would also not be the last time that smallpox would play a role in the Independence narrative.

After the fall of New York City in the summer of 1776, William Howe had promised protection to all loyalists, white or black, who were within his lines. Unlike Dunmore, Howe did not offer to arm slaves, although he had no problem allowing irregular units, such as Colonel Tye's black brigade, from operating on the British behalf in the vicinity of the city. By 1777, however, Howe had reversed his policy and expelled blacks from the city. Some historians have suggested that it was the anger of white loyalists towards their black counterparts that facilitated Howe's decision.Footnote ²⁰ While Howe keeping white loyalists on his side was certainly a reason, smallpox also had a role to play in his decision making. In a cruel irony, the same blacks who had escaped Virginia with Dunmore carried smallpox to New York City. There it spread rapidly among the black camp north of the main town, killing many of the slaves who had sought freedom with Howe.Footnote ²¹ Howe's decision to ban slaves from New York City, therefore, was no doubt at least partly an attempt to keep the disease out of city itself.

By 1779, the British high command had turned their attention to the southern colonies, which had been relatively ignored to this point. In the north, the British stood fast in coastal enclaves, controlling cities but not the vast areas of countryside in these regions. The southern strategy of the British would entail recapturing the economically valuable southern plantation colonies, beginning in the most southern: Georgia. Key to the strategy would be the capture and control of South Carolina, one of the richest colonies on the American continent and home to the major city of Charlestown.Footnote ²² In order to ensure the success of the venture, Henry Clinton, the commander in chief of the royal forces in the Americas, decided to take personal charge of the campaign. It was clear that the slave situation in the south, where the vast majority of American slaves lived, would play an important role in the upcoming campaign for the British. A proclamation passed by Clinton in June 1779, designed to deal with slaves in the northern colonies, would follow the British south. The Phillipsburg Proclamation, so called due to the location of Clinton's headquarters in Phillipsburg, New York, would be a beacon of hope for the slaves of the southern colonies, but would work to disrupt British policy even more than Dunmore's had.

Ever since Dunmore's proclamation, the British had had a very confused approach to the arming of slaves in the colonies. In 1778, Edmund Burke had denounced the use of slaves in the military, and yet the entry of France into the Revolutionary War meant that many officers turned a blind eye to the moral objections regarding the arming of bondsmen. In fact, it was from London that Clinton was advised to pass the Phillipsburg Proclamation. Lord George Germain, wanting to hit northern slaveholders in their pockets, advised Clinton to give freedom to the slaves of these rebels. Thus the policy at least had some degree of British Parliamentary support, unlike that of Dunmore's four years prior.

Clinton's proclamation, unlike Dunmore's, was not an act of military desperation and thus goes against the ideas of Morgan and O'Shaughnessy. Clinton had a large British–Hessian army at his disposal in the northern colonies and did not need manpower to the extent that Dunmore had. Rather, Clinton was responding to the Patriot policy of recruiting black troops to fight against the British in the northern colonies.Footnote ²³ Clinton's response to these black troops was more reminiscent of the Virginia Assembly's response to Dunmore's proclamation than the original British document. In it Clinton threatened “that all Negroes taken in Arms or upon any military Duty, shall be purchased for the public service at a stated price; the money to be paid to the Captors.”Footnote ²⁴ While this threat of re-enslavement was a warning to black Patriots, Clinton also sought to expand his own ranks. However, Clinton lacked the diplomatic touch of Dunmore and the Phillipsburg Proclamation lacked the tactical positioning of Dunmore's earlier document. Clinton expanded the emancipation aspect of Dunmore's proclamation in his own without realizing the consequences of his actions. In his proclamation, Clinton followed Dunmore's earlier stance of not freeing loyalist-owned slaves, but failed to add any provision about military service as a prerequisite for freedom. Instead, Clinton's simplistic proclamation stated, “I do promise to every NEGROE who shall desert the Rebel Standard, full security to follow within these Lines, any Occupation which he shall think proper.”Footnote ²⁵ Indeed, rather than follow Dunmore's military policy, Clinton simply freed all rebel-owned slaves who could make it to the lines of the British. In the north, where few slaves lived, the proclamation was largely ineffectual. However, in the heavily slave-populated southern colonies, Clinton's document caused chaos.

When Clinton set sail for Georgia in 1779, his proclamation followed him southward, and soon became a huge problem for the British army. In Savannah, the only major southern settlement under British rule at the time, the influx of blacks to the British lines was a bureaucratic nightmare. The British officers were forced to “publish a Proclamation relative to Negroes; ordering all such as may come in to give their Names, together with their Masters Names, and Former Places of abode … where they must receive a Certificate [of freedom] thereof.”Footnote ²⁶ Whilst certificates of freedom were supplied to those runaways who had rebel masters, those who escaped loyalist owners were imprisoned before being re-enslaved. The sheer number of runaways reaching the British lines tied up hundreds of troops who could otherwise have performed other duties. Once he had arrived, Clinton began to see the seriousness of the situation. To make matters worse for Clinton's army, smallpox soon struck the thousands of slaves who ran to the British lines in Georgia.

After the war, David George, a runaway slave who escaped to Savannah, Georgia with his family wrote a memoir of his experiences during the Revolutionary War. It is telling that George's account, one of only few written by the runaway slaves, ties together in a monologue the struggle of slaves to deal with changing British emancipation policy and epidemic smallpox. Like the majority of the runaways, George had never been exposed to smallpox before and fell victim to the distemper. During the failed Patriot siege of the city in 1779, George became grievously ill. He later wrote, “Not long after the siege was raised, I caught the smallpox in the fall of the year and thought I should have died … I wished my wife to escape, and to take care of herself and of the children to let me die there.”Footnote ²⁷ George experienced almost total neglect at the hands of the British once he became afflicted with smallpox. However, he fortuitously survived his bout of illness and, making the most of the clause in Clinton's proclamation that freedmen could be employed in “any occupation which he shall think proper,” George became a butcher and eventually bartered his way onto a ship to Nova Scotia at the end of the war. The smallpox in the British camp experienced by George was beginning to have an effect on the mind-set of the British commanders in the South, however.

After a brief and successful campaign to capture Charlestown, which fell in May 1780, the situation only worsened as thousands of South Carolina slaves sought the same refuge as their Georgia brethren. Clinton wrote his successor, Lord Charles Cornwallis, a letter on the slave situation in which he assured him that he would “leave such orders as I hope will prevent the Confusion that would arise from a further desertion of them to us, and I will consider of some Scheme for pleasing those we have on Abandoned Plantations, on which they may subsist.”Footnote ²⁸ Clinton's negative attitude towards black refugees increased as more reached his lines. He even advised Cornwallis to “make such Arrangements as will discourage their joining us.”Footnote ²⁹ Going against his own proclamation, which was less than a year old, Clinton now advocated a policy of dissuading slaves from escaping to the British lines.

The lack of a stipulation on military service in Clinton's proclamation hindered Cornwallis's southern campaign. Seeing the failure of Dunmore in 1776, and neglecting the fact that without smallpox his enterprise might have been successful, the British government never pursued an official policy of recruiting black soldiers.Footnote ³⁰ While some runaways served as scouts or cavalrymen for the British during the southern campaign, no black regiments reminiscent of the ill-fated Ethiopian Regiment were raised by Cornwallis. The majority of those blacks employed by Clinton in a military capacity became laborers, a role he was comfortable with their occupying after seeing the Patriot forces employing blacks in the same way during the siege of Charlestown.Footnote ³¹

That is not to suggest that no slaves fought for the British during the southern campaign. While Cornwallis refused to arm any of the slaves who ran to him, other commanders were more willing to do so. Many runaways, barred from joining the regular British army units, formed their own ranger units or joined loyalist militia companies.Footnote ³² This was particularly true outside the major British enclaves of Charlestown and Savannah. Here, ranger units comprising ex-slaves roamed the countryside and laid waste to the plantations of their former masters. Black pilots were also crucial to the Royal Navy, guiding British ships into the treacherous harbors of the Sea Island region.Footnote ³³ Before the Phillipsburg proclamation, some officers even allowed blacks into the regular army, but this practice quickly ceased when Clinton arrived in the south.Footnote ³⁴

As well as fighting for the British, runaway slaves also provided essential services for the redcoats within their lines. The lack of a military stipulation in Clinton's proclamation also meant that many runaways continued to live in roles that they were used to from years of slavery; many men became body servants to British officers, while laundress or cook were common roles for women. As well as this, slaves often fulfilled the roles of white Patriots who had fled British-controlled areas, for example David George, the slave from Savannah, worked as a butcher within the British lines. Also, slaves often provided extremely important noncombat roles within the British army. Slaves built fortifications, guided troops, and foraged for food, freeing up white troops to partake in actual combat roles.Footnote ³⁵ Unfortunately, others, including those who sought British protection with their marching armies, often found themselves left to fend for themselves without means to do so. It was in this situation that Johann Von Ewald noted, “Behind the baggage followed well over four thousand Negroes of both sexes and all ages. Any place this horde approached was eaten clean, like an acre invaded by a swarm of locusts.”Footnote ³⁶

To make matters worse for Cornwallis and his thinly stretched army, Clinton's proclamation led to numerous slave uprisings on loyalist plantations, which the British needed to suppress. One such incident recorded by the Charlestown Board of Police explained, “a party of soldiers under a sergeant to be sent to Mr. Isard's plantation to inflict such punishment upon the principle offenders in the insurrection as may be adequate to their crimes.”Footnote ³⁷ Cornwallis had a shortage of men, but he did have a vast manpower resource in the Patriot-owned slaves who reached his lines. However, as fast as the runaways reached the British lines they fell ill with disease, which was proving disastrous to the British military policy regarding blacks. Smallpox had followed the British to Charlestown and was playing havoc with those slaves who reached the redcoat lines.

The smallpox which struck the runaway slaves who sought liberty in Charlestown was similar to that which had destroyed Dunmore's plans; it had been in the region even before the British arrived and the effect it had on the runaways was catastrophic. Following a similar model to William Howe at New York City in 1776, Cornwallis directed that the runaways who made it to the British lines stay in a camp on the outskirts. With no fresh water or adequate shelter, the conditions in the black camp soon became squalid. To make matters worse, the more runaways arrived, the more cramped the camp became. When the smallpox arrived in the camp it spread rapidly. Smallpox is a condition that requires virgin hosts in order to spread. A person who has had previous contact with variola and survived will acquire immunity to the disorder for the rest of their life. Tragically, few of the runaways inhabiting the camp outside Charlestown had ever encountered the pox before the Revolution and so the disease found an abundance of hosts to prey on. Soon the dead became too many to bury and so corpses were left unburied in nearby woods.Footnote ³⁸ The white inhabitants of the city, afraid to approach the camp for fear of contagion, watched and commented on the suffering of the blacks they observed. Eliza Pinckney lamented, “As the smallpox was in the British camp thousands of Negroes dyed miserably of it.”Footnote ³⁹

The differences between Dunmore and Cornwallis when it came to the issue of smallpox and slaves are clear in the two differing approaches the men took to the problem; Dunmore inoculated while Cornwallis quarantined. These differences were as much logistical as they were a product of any British commander's racial discrimination. The slaves who reached Dunmore in 1775 received better treatment due to their active military use. Not only did Dunmore form the runaways into a fighting regiment, but he also took active steps to save as many of these men as possible once the smallpox started to decimate their ranks. In a letter, Captain Hamond mentioned in passing the “Negroe troops, which had been inoculated at Norfolk.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The fact that Dunmore took the time, labor and expense of inoculating at least some of his black troops proves that he saw them as a viable long-term source of military labor, as patients who experienced smallpox through inoculation experienced a much higher chance of survival than those who caught the distemper naturally.Footnote ⁴¹ Hamond noticed the disparity in his letter, explaining that those inoculated “got thro’ the disorder with great success.”Footnote ⁴² Unfortunately, the limited number of blacks inoculated by Dunmore would not be enough to save his regiment.

The problem with inoculation for a military unit is twofold, however. First, the procedure does not stop the patient from experiencing the distemper, meaning that for between a month and six weeks the inoculated black troops would not have been able to fight as their bodies fought the illness. The second problem, which proved fatal to Dunmore's plans, is that the inoculated soldiers were contagious to all of those who met them while in the midst of their suffering. This was bad enough while Dunmore's troops had a foothold on land, but once at sea those runaways not inoculated or previously exposed to smallpox were incredibly vulnerable. Thus by trying to fight the pox through inoculation, Dunmore almost certainly ensured its spread within his camp. Despite this, the black troops who made it to Dunmore did not receive a bad deal. They were clothed, fed, and armed, and in some cases inoculated against a disease that they were likely to catch anyway due to their close contact with the British. It is also worth remembering that Dunmore evacuated those slaves who survived the distemper to British-held New York and from there many found their way to freedom in Nova Scotia at the war's conclusion.

The slaves who made their way to Cornwallis's lines during the southern campaign did not experience the positive treatment that those who served with Dunmore had done, and once they contracted smallpox their plight only worsened. Cornwallis followed Clinton's policy of discouraging blacks from fighting for the British, instead using them mainly as laborers for his forces. They were barely fed, rarely clothed and never inoculated. Thus, when smallpox arrived amongst them, their neglected state meant that the results were murderous.Footnote ⁴³ Cornwallis implemented a policy of quarantine as soon as the runaways became contagious, which generally occurred within twelve days of contracting the virus. Those unfortunates did not receive food, water or medical care, often dying in the awful conditions described by Eliza Pinckney.

Despite the risks, first of repercussions from their masters and then of disease, thousands of slaves sought their liberty with the British around Charlestown.Footnote ⁴⁴ Boston King provides a narrative from the perspective of those seeking to flee bondage and reveals the treatment he received once he had reached the British lines. Leaving a South Carolina plantation soon after the fall of Charlestown, King reached the British lines safely but almost immediately contracted smallpox. His experience after becoming ill is representative of British policy throughout the southern campaign:

Luckily for King, a British officer with whom he had become familiar in the days before his illness took pity on him and provided enough supplies for King to survive the disease. Most other runaways were not so lucky. From the British standpoint, blacks with smallpox were at best expendable and at worst a liability, as hosts for an incredibly contagious disease. With supply difficulties mounting due to partisan raids on British convoys, it is no surprise that the first to suffer from the shortages were the fugitive slaves who made it to Charlestown. King's memoir also confirms Cornwallis's steadfast belief in not arming blacks for, despite being a healthy male immune to smallpox after surviving the contagion, the ex-slave did not fight in the British army, but instead became the manservant of the officer who had saved his life.Footnote ⁴⁶

The British policy towards runaways suffering from smallpox was not universal and many officers balked at the treatment that the blacks received. In 1781, Cornwallis's army found itself in the same area of Virginia as Dunmore had five years earlier. Cornwallis found himself north of the James river with the main body of British troops, but separated by the James from Charles O'Hara in Norfolk. Cornwallis wrote to his friend and subordinate, O'Hara, to evacuate Norfolk and the hundreds of smallpox-ridden slaves who had joined the British forces there. Showing some sympathy, but not straying from his earlier policy seen at Charlestown, Cornwallis wrote, “It is shocking to think about the state of the Negroes, but we cannot bring a number of sick & useless ones to this place; some flour must be left for them & some person of the County appointed to take charge of them.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Shocked at the suggestion, O'Hara quickly wrote back in protest to his commanding officer:

Yet Cornwallis was unmoved. He again ordered that O'Hara leave the sick runaways and evacuate his regular force immediately. Furthermore, Cornwallis finished his final letter to O'Hara with the concern that at Yorktown “we must adopt some plan to prevent an Evil which not only destroys a great quantity of Provisions, but will certainly produce some fatal distemper in the Army.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Cornwallis's policy would eventually involve the armed removal or repulsion of blacks trying to reach the British lines. The Patriot troops who advanced on the Yorktown siege lines saw many examples of slaves dying of smallpox littering the countryside.Footnote ⁵⁰

Cornwallis's actions in turning fugitive slaves away at Yorktown still appear callous even 250 years after the event. Cornwallis, however, did have a reason to fear the spread of smallpox from the newly arriving runaways to the white troops in his camp. Unlike Dunmore, whose small force of white soldiers and sailors were nearly all native to Britain and had thus acquired immunity to smallpox at an early age, Cornwallis's army in 1781 contained many loyalist troops from the American colonies. The majority of the loyalists, like the runaway slaves, had never experienced smallpox and so were vulnerable to the contagion.

Despite the negative effects of smallpox on both runaway slaves and loyalist whites, it is important to note that the British policy towards loyalists was unaffected by the contagion. In large part, this was due to the racial biases of the time. Cornwallis's southern strategy depended on the mobilization of loyalist militias to augment his numerically inferior British regulars. He was culturally more inclined to use white loyalists than the stigmatized runaway slaves; however, there was another reason: the British thought that blacks were more vulnerable to smallpox than white colonists were. As seen in Tobler's account, many in South Carolina actually attributed blacks with bringing smallpox with them from Africa and, from a British perspective, Dunmore's failure had done nothing to challenge these assumptions. It is debatable whether blacks were more prone to contagion than whites were; slaves in Carolina rice plantations and the Virginia tidewater region were exposed to diseases such as dysentery frequently and this may have lowered their immune systems to such an extent that contagion was more probable. Most likely slaves and backcountry loyalists were equally susceptible to smallpox; however, the poor treatment of blacks after contagion meant they had a higher mortality rate than whites in the British lines.

The defeat of Cornwallis at Yorktown marked the effective end of the Revolutionary War. Whilst fighting would continue around the British strongholds of Charlestown and New York until their eventual evacuation in 1783, the British would never again field a mobile army capable of subduing the rebellion in the American colonies. For those blacks and white loyalists who managed to find themselves in the final British bastions along the coast, the redcoated generals were as good as their word. The British evacuated three thousand runaway slaves to Nova Scotia alone.

The fact that British military policy towards runaway slaves changed during the course of the war is indisputable. In 1775, Dunmore used slaves as active infantry troops, but by 1779 such a course of action was incomprehensible to the British commanders of the southern campaign. This paper has sought to show how smallpox played a key role in the sea change in British military policy towards runaway slaves during the war. Dunmore, unwillingly, and Cornwallis, more than willingly, were British commanders of significant rank whose policies towards slaves changed directly because of smallpox. The effects that these changes in policies had towards slaves who ran to the British lines were enormous. Not only did they risk contagion and with it a fair chance of death, but during the southern campaign (when most slaves ran to the British lines) Cornwallis's smallpox-influenced policies of neglect, and eventually removal, meant that the chances of successfully gaining freedom even for slaves who avoided the pox were incredibly limited. In this way, smallpox can be seen not only to have changed British emancipation policy, but also to have severely hampered British chances of military victory in the colonies, depriving them of what could have been a broad recruitment base.

In relation to the existing literature on disease and black participation in the Revolutionary War, this study should prove to link the two disparate subjects categorically together. Without smallpox, black loyalists could have been more militarily involved in the war itself, particularly in the southern colonies where most lived but also where the pox had the greatest impact. Thus this study has shown how disease impacted black participation in a much greater way than previous literature on the subject has. As well as this, from an epidemiologic point of view, this paper proves that smallpox was not just a disease of the body, affecting a vulnerable black population, but also a disease of the mind, contaminating the military policies of some of Britain's most able commanders in the Americas. If nothing else, the link between disease and military policy is clear to see and should be considered more fully in relation to minorities fighting in the Revolution.

While the British did not lose the Revolutionary War due to smallpox alone, the disease certainly affected their military policy towards runaway slaves in the southern colonies. The failure of Dunmore due to variola changed the viewpoints of British commanders early in the war. Runaway slaves went from being military assets in 1776 to being a dangerous liability by 1781. For the slaves themselves, who risked so much in the pursuit of freedom, smallpox put an end to the first meaningful government-endorsed emancipation movement in the Americas. Thus variola helped defeat an empire, forge an American nation and end the possibility of widespread liberty for the enslaved peoples of the colonies.