Forced vaccination helped birth our nation.
As war erupted in the 1770s between American Revolutionaries and our British Imperial masters, a smallpox pandemic tore through the colonies.
The deadly disease killed by the thousands. But Supreme Commander George Washington made inoculation a decisive weapon of war.
The key insight came from a slave. In the early 1700s, an African “owned” by the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather introduced white America to the art and science of plague prevention. Stolen from his native land, Onesimus brought with him knowledge of the ancient method of inoculation.
As smallpox ravaged Calvinist Boston, Onesimus explained that injecting a small amount of infected pus under the skin of a healthy human would bring on a mild case of the disease … and then immunity. Despite intense resistance from the “civilized” white citizenry, Mather pushed the African insight.
Among those who trusted it … it worked, and countless lives were saved.
Several decades later, a 19-year-old George Washington traveled to Barbados with his brother, Lawrence. The trip was meant to cure Lawrence of tuberculosis, which later killed him.
