1774

After British Parliament announces tax on cheap India tea that would flood the colonial market, colonies’ printed protests linked the “pestilential teas” with sickness, i.e., plague and smallpox. “. . . colonists actually burned more tea than they pitched into the ocean. East India Company tea, Americans had been persuaded to believe, was a noxious pollutant, and so ordinary citizens in towns across America organized bonfires to cleanse their communities of its contagion” (Wehrman, 110-111). Salem supported Boston, though its outrage was fueled by the brief, disastrous appt. of James Latham, a disciple of Britain’s Robert Sutton and his “secret” method of inoculating – which relied on the American use of mercury at the time of inoculation , as inoculator at Salem Hospital. Latham had been the darling of Salem’s Loyalists until child deaths followed by outbreak of natural smallpox (155) led Salem to repudiate him. “Latham’s disturbing reign over Salem Hospital proved to them that the British were determined to profit from American ingenuity [re use of mercury] even at the expense of American lives (158). In summer and fall, another wave of smallpox overtakes Boston, including British troops garrisoned there. Americans blamed British for the outbreaks, holding “infected” tea responsible for its spread (164). Boston’s last town meeting before Battle of Lexington “had nothing to do with taxation, representation, tea, or gunpowder. It was about smallpox.” But Bostonians voted against a general inoculation as they had in 1764 (165), feeding the persistent rumor that the British “were trying to infect Americans with inoculation” (165). After disastrous Canadian campaign, when American troops were devastated by smallpox outside Quebec, Mass. General Court voted on July 3, 1776 to allow inoculation: “Even though Boston was teeming with the sick, the prospect that the city could conquer smallpox made it ‘a scene delightful indeed’” (184).