Reading Rick Atkinson’s The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (2018) struck me in many ways. First, how extraordinarily little I knew about the military campaigns of the Revolutionary War*. Second, this war though small in terms of the size of the military engagements, was no less bloody and full of inhumane acts. These transgressions ranged from the slaughter of slaves who were punished for joining the British in hopes of earning their freedom, to the cruel treatment of American prisoners who surrendered at Fort Washington on Manhattan Island. In a sense it was a civil war, since the combatants at some time were all subjects of Mother England.
But the odd historical fact that resonates in our pandemic times was the role smallpox played in the War for Independence. American troops suffered terribly from outbreaks, which could thin their ranks by as much 50 percent as infected persons often would succumb to the disease. Since the symptoms left heavy rashes on the face and body, survivors were left with noticeable scars (including George Washington) and immunity for life. “Pocked young men” writes Atkinson “were much prized by military recruiters.”
Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccine was still decades away (smallpox was declared totally eradicated in 1980 ), but some early colonists and the British military experimented with making their own effective vaccinations by taking pus from a smallpox sore and making “an open incision into a healthy patient’s arm or thigh. The consequent interruption was usually milder and far less lethal…”
It is this kind of historical perspective helps limit my own frustration while waiting in my car for a vaccine. It also underlines that even the colonists 250 years ago understood the live-and-death importance of getting vaccinated.
More Atkinson
This is my fourth Atkinson book I have read. The first three were his Liberation Trilogy about the United States fighting in North Africa, Italy, and Western Europe. Atkinson has an amazing ability to weave stories of individuals into the big picture. He once said at an author reading in 2013 that I attended that one of the historians he most admired was Shelby Foote author of the three volume The Civil War: A Narrative. Atkinson and Foote’s books are lengthy, but reading them is almost effortless, a tribute to their talent, research prowess and perseverance.
* One example of my ignorance is that the battle of Trenton when Washington crossed the icy Delaware River to defeat the British-Hessian mercenaries in a surprise attack, was followed a few days later by a second battle of Trenton/Princeton. In the second engagement, Washington's army drove the British out of New Jersey, thereby protecting the young nation's then capital of Philadelphia.
