The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [53]
The next day a controversy erupted over how to treat the smallpox victims. There were more each day and soon infected men would total nearly two thousand in medical wards at Sorel and nearby in the towns of St. John and Chambly. At the time, there were inoculations, but the “ten days rest and diet” procedure for inoculation was slow and men came down with the disease before the inoculation could take effect.
Doctors urged high ranking officers to authorize inoculations upon arrival so that the men could be treated quickly and their lives saved. It seemed like an obvious decision. Benedict Arnold, who had been watching his men die of the pox since December, understood the need for the inoculations and ordered all of the men in Sorel to undergo them. The first regiment, Colonel Porter’s, was inoculated that day. The doctors made plans to inoculate everyone else within the next week or so. But then General John Thomas, who had seen men and women die of smallpox in Boston earlier in the year, disagreed and upon his arrival at Sorel the following day, May 16, ordered a halt to the inoculations that Arnold had just approved. Not only did Thomas override Arnold, but said that any soldier who received an inoculation would be shot. Thomas had decided that mass inoculations, and the recovery period, would render too many soldiers unable to fight should the British catch up to the Americans. Despite his reasons, the doctors in camp were astonished that a former physician would bar inoculations, especially since this was an obvious emergency.
So was everyone else. After Thomas’s orders halting all inoculations, men who did not want to be shot but wanted to survive smallpox secretly inoculated themselves between their toes, so there would be no physical evidence of cuts in their skin. Officers even told the men to do so and suggested areas of the body where cuts could not be easily detected. Everyone was scared. “The smallpox strikes terror into our troops,” wrote Rev. Robbins, who had seen the ravages of the disease in hundreds of men in Sorel, a place, he added, that had poor leadership and was in a daily state of confusion. (It is not known whether Robbins was immune to the disease).
On the following Tuesday, Dr. Beebe was visited by an aide to General Thomas who told him that the commanding general wanted to see him right away; the general did not feel well. The physician, uncertain what the general wanted, accompanied the officer to Thomas’s large command tent. Beebe was taken aback by the deteriorating condition of the man standing in front of him. Beebe knew what Thomas’s problem was right away. “He evidently had the smallpox,” a startled Beebe wrote, wondering how someone ill with the pox would prevent others from being inoculated. It made no sense.
Beebe’s own life would now be put in danger because Thomas, who knew he was sick and needed expert medical care, ordered the doctor to travel with him and treat him in Chambly, fifty miles away, where he planned to recuperate from his illness while continuing to run the army from a different base of operations as it withdrew south.
The two men, accompanied by a few soldiers, left Sorel on Tuesday and throughout their two-day journey down river to Chambly encountered many troops who were in flight from the Quebec