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health, as he searched for a suitable site to establish a pesthouse. McMillan planned to remove Johnson from his thickly settled neighborhood as soon as possible. The doctors chose a three-room house on Meares Street, amid the sandy lots in the far southeastern section of the city. The place seemed ideal. It occupied a block by itself, the nearest house being three hundred yards away, and the caretaker said his tenant would be happy to move out so he could rent it to the city. But the area was not as deserted as it looked. Unlike Johnson’s neighborhood, inhabited almost exclusively by African Americans, the blocks around the Meares Street house were overwhelmingly white. When the Wilmington Messenger announced the opening of the pesthouse, twenty or thirty armed white men assembled at the property, warning that they “meant business” if an ambulance wagon showed up carrying Stephen Johnson. Under pressure from his neighbors, the tenant decided to stay put.23

Dr. McMillan reset his sights on the northeastern corner of the city. He found a house on Nixon Street, located between the railroad tracks and one of Wilmington’s largest African American sections. The house had recently served as a barracks for a gang of convict laborers employed grading a link line for the Wilmington and New Bern Railroad. As soon as African American neighbors got wind of McMillan’s plan, they did just what the white residents of Meares Street had done. They formed a mob. But theirs was larger. Three hundred men, women, and children turned out at the property when Mayor Wright and Dr. McMillan paid it a visit. The crowd threatened to burn the house if the authorities brought Johnson there. That evening, Nixon Street teemed with men carrying pistols, shotguns, and, as one policeman commented, “some old time war muskets with muzzles big enough for rats to run into.” According to one witness, the many women in the crowd were even “more vehement” than the men. White men joined the crowd and “took a hand in the defiance.” Men and women blocked every avenue to the house; a hundred men stood guard along the railroad tracks to prevent the authorities from delivering Johnson by that route. No ambulance or train carrying Johnson materialized that night. But the crowd burned the house to the ground anyway. A smaller two-room house stood on the same property. The next day, a rumor spread that officials planned to move Johnson there. That evening a crowd set the second house on fire.24

The authorities decided to let Stephen Johnson recover or die in his own home. (He survived.) A few days later Wilmington officials discovered a second man with smallpox, an African American stevedore named James Harge. Determined to remove him from his home, they settled on a remote site three miles from the city.25

The Wilmington board of aldermen did not rush to order vaccination in the city. They debated the question for nearly two weeks. Several aldermen, including A. J. Walker, one of the body’s African American members, opposed the idea. Finally, on January 24, the board adopted an order requiring all residents to show proof of recent vaccination. Violators were subject to a $5 fine or ten days in jail. (Mayor Wright had called for stiffer penalties.) The mayor appointed five city vaccinators, including two African American physicians who were assigned to the black neighborhoods.26

On January 27, some five hundred citizens of Wilmington, including about fifty African American men, assembled at city hall to protest the vaccination ordinance. They carried a protest document that had been drawn up earlier that day outside of J. T. Smith’s store on Front and Castle streets. The men took their stand as breadwinners, acting, as their petition announced, “[o]n behalf of ourselves, our wives and our children, and the thousands of our citizens and their families, who provide their livelihood by manual labor.” Two cases of smallpox did not justify a measure that threatened the arms and livelihoods of Wilmington’s wage earners. “[C]ompulsory vaccination will inflict an unnecessary