Epidemics in the New World

When Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) arrived in the New World in 1492, there were between seven and fifteen million natives on the northern continent, according to estimates. By 1900, the Native American population in the United States had been reduced to just a quarter-million. The decline resulted primarily from epidemics brought to the New World by Europeans, and from wars between Native Americans and the colonists.

An epidemic occurs when a disease spreads through a population in large numbers, often resulting in a sizeable death toll. Europeans exploring the New World carried viruses in their bodies from smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, and influenza. While Europeans had developed natural defenses in their bodies to most diseases, these illnesses were new to Native Americans. When these viruses migrated from Europeans to Native Americans, the result could be an epidemic.

Florida first

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, yellow fever, smallpox, and measles severely reduced the population of Florida natives. The toll was so great that once-separate communities had to regroup together to survive, despite cultural and language barriers.

Diseases spread northward from Florida to New England. From 1613 to 1617, the Powhatan Confederacy of Virginia suffered a plague that devastated its population. When the plague reached natives in Massachusetts , many Puritans from Europe believed God had sent it to clear the land for European settlement.

Onesimus

An African American named Onesimus introduced inoculation to the New World. Inoculation is the process of injecting a small amount of disease into a person to allow the body to build natural defenses against the disease.

In 1721, a ship carrying people with smallpox entered Boston Harbor in Massachusetts Colony. The disease spread through the city. As it did, a local Puritan minister named Cotton Mather (1663–1728) learned from Onesimus, his Sudanese-born slave, how inoculation was used in Africa. Mather arranged to have Boston physicians inoculate some city residents.

Many physicians opposed inoculation. They feared it would hasten the spread of the disease in a deadly fashion. Some also thought that preventing disease was interference with God's will. Inoculation, however, worked well. During the epidemic of 1721, just two percent of those inoculated died from smallpox, while eighteen percent of Bostonians who caught the disease without inoculation died.

The colonists also suffered losses from epidemics. As populations grew, epidemics occasionally spread through cities, in which close quarters and poor sanitation allowed diseases to thrive. Smallpox was a particular problem in the eighteenth century. It was highly contagious and caused fevers, vomiting, and pustules on the body. Fear of catching smallpox in Europe prevented many wealthy American colonists from traveling to their mother countries.