Reviews of Books

Continental Contagion

Reviewed by Ben Mutschler, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture

Of the many epidemics that coursed through eighteenth-century North America, perhaps none was as costly as the smallpox pandemic of 1775–1782—and until now, we did not know it existed. Contemporaries left records of local episodes; historians have followed isolated (if significant) events. But it took Elizabeth Fenn to ferret out and piece together this disparate material. The genius of her study lies not in seeing something that has been sitting idly waiting for viewing, but rather in reconstituting the pandemic for us to behold through a meticulous and imaginative assembly of fragmentary sources. Like John Duffy's early work on the subject in the colonial period, Fenn is concerned with documenting when and where outbreaks occurred and who became infected.1 She finds that epidemic smallpox raged in pockets along the eastern seaboard from Quebec to Pensacola, and she suggests that it swept from Mexico City through the Great Plains and then divided in two branches, west over the Rockies to the Pacific Northwest and north into Hudson Bay. Thanks to Fenn's energetic and engaging book, the broad outlines of the pandemic are on the map.

1

The book is more than an exercise in mapping, however. By scrutinizing the ways in which variola, the virus that causes smallpox, spread from one person to another, Fenn has found a way to illuminate the structure of human connections binding North America together through warfare, trade, travel, and communication. She has attempted, in effect, to provide a social history of a continent integrated by the medium and experience of disease. By the time the pox subsided in 1782, the dead included urban dwellers in Boston and Mexico City, militiamen and regulars, black loyalists in Virginia and South Carolina, Moravians in North Carolina, and Indians throughout the continent. "With the exception of the war itself," Fenn writes, "epidemic smallpox was the greatest upheaval to afflict the continent in these years" (p. 9).

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