Apr

7

Washington Inoculates an Army
The Continental Army Battles an Invisible Foe

Stefan Jovanovich comments:

Washington was always a better strategist than tactician. Even though he lost more battles than he won he had command of the larger picture. In this case he scored a seemingly impossible victory against an invisible enemy.

First sentence: meaningless. Washington was never Commander-in-Chief in the way Lincoln and Roosevelt were. Congress and the French (and later Spanish) allies determined the "strategy" based entirely on their territorial ambitions. You kick the British out of Boston so they and their soldiers have to go to Halifax and then you decide the best of all possible strategic choices is to try to capture Quebec City when the smallpox has already weakened your army?

Second sentence: equally meaningless. The "larger picture" was always the one in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean, not the Atlantic colonies.

Third sentence: The only proof that they did are the Army's own records of the soldiers who reported being sick. The number of those infected with smallpox fall off dramatically in the last two years of the war (1778-1779), but the evidence that attributes this to successful inoculation rather than the accrual of natural immunity is a single case study. The Army surgeons conducted a clinical trial during the winter in Morristown (which was far worse than Valley Forge) when 6 out of 6 soldiers who were vaccinated did not die from the disease versus 5 out of 6 for those who were not vaccinated. See Smallpox in Washington's Army: Strategic Implications of the Disease During the American Revolutionary War.


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