1760 — Smallpox Epidemic, Charleston, SC (as well as undocumented Native deaths)–730-940

–730-940  Blanchard.[1]

–730-940  Grob. The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America. 2002, p. 74.

—     <900  McCandless. “Epidemics.” South Carolina Encyclopedia. 5-17-2016; 8-1-2017 update.

—     <730  South Carolina Department of Health & Environment.[2]

—       720  Hopkins. The Greatest Killer: Smallpox in History.  1983 and 2003, p. 244.[3]

—       710  Duffy. Epidemics in Colonial America. 1953, p. 93.[4]

 

Narrative Information

 

Grob: “Although sporadic epidemics ere common, smallpox was less significant in the Chesapeake and the South. A more dispersed population, an agricultural rather than a commercial economy, and the absence of port towns inhibited the introduction and spread of epidemics. South Carolina was an exception, since Charleston was an important seaport and commercial center with trade links to areas where smallpox was endemic. Like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, it served as a port of entry for infectious diseases….

 

“In 1760 no less than 6,000 out of a total population of 8,000 were infected, and the estimates of mortality ranged from a low of 730 to a high of 940. Over 90 percent of all deaths in Charleston that year were due to smallpox.”[5] (Grob, Gerald N. The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America. 2002, p. 74.)

 

Hopkins: “Twenty-one years later [in 1738 smallpox was passed from Charleston to the Cherokee], smallpox spread from the Cherokees to Charleston, when soldiers returned from an expedition against the Indians in the late fall of 1759 after Governor Lyttleton of South Carolina concluded the Treaty of Fort St. George. The disease was rampant among Indians in Georgia and South Carolina that Year, having first been noted in August.  It erupted in the governor’s camp almost as soon as he had concluded his treaty. According to one contemporary historian [Duffy 1953, 93],

 

As few of {Governor Lyttleton’s} little army had ever gone through that distemper, and as the surgeons were totally unprovided for such an accident, his men were struck with terror, and in great hast returned to the settlements, cautiously, avoiding all intercourse with one another and suffering much from hunger and fatigue by the way.

 

“One of the ‘settlements’ to which Governor Lyttleton’s soldiers fled was Charleston, where the disease was epidemic by January 1760. By April, about three-fourths of Charleston’s eight thousand inhabitants had had smallpox, and one out of every eleven citizens had died of it.  In March that year, a newspaper correspondent wrote that:

 

What few escape the Indians, no sooner arrive in Town, than they are seized with Small-Pox, which generally carries them off; and from the Numbers, already dead, you may judge the Fatality of the Disease. Of the white Inhabitants 95; Acadians 115; Negroes 500, were dead two days ago, by the Sexton’s Account. (Duffy 1953, 93)”  (Hopkins 1983 and 2003, p. 244.)

 

(Hopkins, Donald R. The Greatest Killer: Smallpox in History. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983.)

 

McCandless: “Unlike most smallpox epidemics, which arrived via ships, the epidemic of 1760 most likely came from the upcountry. It was apparently spread throughout the colony by soldiers returning to Charleston in December 1759 from Governor William Lyttleton’s expedition against the Cherokees. Precise statistics are impossible, but in Charleston alone about one-half to three-fourths of the population of about eight thousand were infected naturally or by inoculation and perhaps as many as nine hundred died. Mortality was especially high among Africans and French Arcadian refugees.” (McCandless, Peter. “Epidemics.” South Carolina Encyclopedia. 5-17-2016; updated 8-1-2017.)

 

Thornton: Speaking of the mortality associated with the 1738-39 smallpox epidemic or epidemics amongst the Cherokee, Thornton writes: “Perhaps the Cherokee population had recovered somewhat by the second smallpox epidemic, about 1760…. (p. 31)

 

“In 1759-60, smallpox struck the Cherokees again. Early in 1760 an Augusta, Georgia, correspondent wrote with reference to the Cherokee town of Keowee (on the Keowee River in north-western South Carolina (see Smith 1979:48, map 2, 49, map 3, 50, map 4, 51, table I, 52):[6] ‘The late accounts from Keowee are that the Small-Pox has destroyed a great many Indians there; that those who remained alive, and have not yet had that Distemper, were gone into the Woods, where many of them must perish as the Catawbas did,’ and the August 13, 1760, Pennsylvania Gazette reported that ‘we learn from Cherokee country, that the People of the Lower Towns have carried smallpox into the Middle Settlement and Valley, where that disease rages with great violence, and that the People of the Upper Towns are in such Dread of the Infection, that they will not allow a single Person from the above named Places to come amongst them’ (quoted in Duffy 1951:338).”[7] (Thornton, Russell. “Smallpox and Other Diseases,” Chapter 2: “Pathogens and Wars: The 1700s,” The Cherokees: A Population History. 1990, p33.)

 

Sources

 

Duffy, John. Epidemics in Colonial America. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1953.

 

Grob, Gerald N. The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America. Cambridge, MA: President and Fellows of Harvard College, Harvard University Press, 2002. Partially Google digitized at: http://books.google.com/books?id=U1H5rq3IQUAC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

Hopkins, Donald R. The Greatest Killer: Smallpox in History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1^st Edition, 1983, with new Introduction, 2003. Google preview accessed 1-9-2018 at:  http://books.google.com/books?id=z2zMKsc1Sn0C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

McCandless, Peter. “Epidemics.” South Carolina Encyclopedia. 5-17-2016; updated 8-1-2017. Accessed 1-10-2018 at: http://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/epidemics/

 

South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control. Public Health History (website). “A Chronology of the History of Public Health in South Carolina.” Accessed 10-9-2008 at: http://www.scdhec.net/administration/history/timeline.htm

 

Thornton, Russell. The Cherokees: A Population History. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. Google preview accessed 1-10-2018 at: https://books.google.com/books?id=3Cgr4fPfAZQC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

 

 

[1] Though we cite two sources noting 710 and 720 fatalities in Charleston we choose to use 730 deaths as the low-end of our fatality range because (1) it is the number used by the SC Dept. of Health and Environment, and (2) the numbers cited refer only to Charleston, whereas surely smallpox was carried from there elsewhere in the colony. And, as Hopkins notes, the Smallpox was epidemic among the Cherokees. We have not seen fatality numbers but we speculate the number was large.

[2] Both SC DHEC and Hopkins cite Duffy 1953, pp. 93-95,  as the source of their information.  SC DHEC notes, as well, that 9% of the population died.

[3] Derived by taking 9% (1 of 11) of 8,000 inhabitants.

[4] The total of numbers noted by the “newspaper correspondent” in Duffy 1953; cited by Hopkins.

[5] Cites: Duffy, Epidemics in Colonial America, pp. 7, 82-83, 92-95, 99-100; Dana P. Arneman, “The Medical History of Colonial South Carolina,” 1996), pp. 141-148, 163-168.

[6] Betty Anderson Smith. “Distribution of eighteenth-century Cherokee settlements .” In The Cherokee Indian Nation: A Troubled History, Duane H. King (ed.). Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979, pp. 46-60.

[7] John Duffy. “Smallpox and the Indians in the American colonies.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 25, 1951, pp. 324-341.