The Parallel Lives

George Washington was from Virginia, born February 22, 1732, noted last Sunday.

     Only once during Washington’s life, did he leave the North American continent, and that was in 1751, when he was 19, when he sailed to Barbados, an island in the south Caribbean Sea, with his half-brother Lawrence Washington, who was suffering from tuberculosis.

     Lawrence believed the island’s warmer climate would ease his difficulty breathing. 

     The brothers departed Virginia in September 1751 and returned in early 1752. While there, George contracted smallpox. Fortunate he was that he survived his days or even weeks of illness, but the numerous poxes left his face scarred. Yet, he gained permanent immunity thereafter.

     In 1775, war erupted between the thirteen colonies and Great Britain. Not only did George Washington face a powerful military force, but in 1776, an epidemic of smallpox of severe proportion broke out among his troops. It threatened to destroy his entire Continental army.

     He knew the disease caused scarring, blindness, and had a high mortality rate.

     In May of that year, Washington stood firm against inoculation because it would mean weeks of recovery for his soldiers, but the following year, “after seven months of endless sickness and death,” Washington relented.

     He said, “Smallpox has made such headway in every quarter that I find it impossible to keep it from spreading through the whole army. I shall order the doctors to inoculate the recruits as fast as possible as they come in.” Although controversial at the time, his decision was right.

     Infection rates plummeted. Survival rates increased. The historian Joseph Ellis said, “It’s probably the single-most important military decision that Washington ever made.”

     During the American Revolution, between 5000 and 9000 black soldiers, both free and enslaved, fought for the Patriot side, as front-line soldiers, laborers, or waiters. “It would be the first and last time that the army was fully integrated until the 1950’s.”

     What is astonishing is that an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 joined the British. The reason for the larger numbers is because of Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation, dated November 7, 1775.

     John Murray, Earl of Dunmore and Virginia’s royal governor, published the following that day, “I do hereby declare all indented servants, Negroes, or others (appertaining to rebels), free, that are able and willing to bear arms, they joining his Majesty’s troops.”

     Thus, the British governor promised black slaves their freedom if they fought for the British. Some 1600 African-American slaves fled from their owners and signed up for Dunmore’s “Royal Ethiopian Regiment.” Their uniforms read “Liberty to Slaves.”

     Then, calamity struck the former slaves. Smallpox and typhus swept through the regiment’s camps and ships, due to over-crowded and unsanitary conditions. Casualties were staggering.

     In July of 1776, Dunmore departed Gwynn’s Island on the Chesapeake Bay, leaving behind hundreds of sick and dying black people. The next month Dunmore abandoned Virginia and sailed away to New York, taking with him about 300 to 500 black soldiers and civilians.

     Dunmore wrote, “Had it not been for this horrid disorder, I should have had two thousand blacks; with whom I should have had no doubt of penetrating into the heart of this Colony.”

     Patriot forces recaptured those who remained behind and lived, but some were re-enslaved.

     The above is a tragic chapter from Black History, a history we observe during February.

     A note: During this month of February, an epidemic of measles has broken out in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, 973 infections thus far. 

     A majority of those ill, 879 cases, are children, and of those, many are unvaccinated. It is also most probable that some of those infected are black children, given that 20% of the county’s population is African-American.