Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, American leaders have considered the pros and cons of vaccine mandates. Washington’s order turned out to be one the most consequential decisions of the Revolutionary War. If smallpox were allowed to “infect the Army in the natural way and rage with its usual virulence,” he wrote, “we should have more to dread from it than from the Sword of the Enemy.” A mandate went into effect, and cases of smallpox plummeted. Still, on February 6, 1777, he sent a letter to William Shippen, Jr., one of the Army’s chief physicians. The mandate was sure to meet resistance, and could signal to the British how beset the Americans were by illness.
General George Washington weighed an Army-wide mandate for smallpox inoculation-a procedure with a mortality rate of around two per cent. Smallpox was especially devastating: nearly a third of those infected died. At the start of the American Revolution, ninety per cent of the deaths in the Continental Army were due to disease.
