Mosquito Soldiers by Andrew McIlwaine Bell

Author:Andrew McIlwaine Bell [Bell, Andrew McIlwaine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-807-13561-7
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc.
Published: 2010-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

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BIOLOGICAL WARFARE

ON A HUMID DAY in early August 1864, a clerk working in an auction house located a few blocks from the White House looked up and saw a diminutive man with a swarthy complexion dragging several trunks through the front door of his office. The man introduced himself as Mr. J. W. Harris and asked the clerk if he would be interested in auctioning off the trunks, which he claimed contained twelve dozen shirts. Assuming the man was just another northern sutler hoping to turn a quick profit while on his way home from the battlefields of the South, the clerk agreed and advanced the stranger one hundred dollars. When he later opened the trunks, he found more shirts inside than he had bargained for crammed in together with several coats. Initially skeptical that he could make a profit off the merchandise, he bundled the shirts into packages of a dozen and sold them the next day for $142.90.1

Unbeknownst to the clerk, this seemingly innocent business transaction was in fact part of a nefarious plot designed by Confederate agents to launch a biological attack against the city of Washington. The man who had identified himself as J. W. Harris was actually named Godfrey J. Hyams, and the clothing he sold had been worn by yellow fever victims before they died. The agents working with Hyams hoped the infected fabric would spread yellow jack throughout the District of Columbia and kill officials serving at the highest levels of the federal government. The science behind this attack was of course specious given that only Aedes aegypti mosquitoes can transmit the yellow fever virus. But many nineteenth-century physicians, unaware of the link between insects and disease, believed “fomites,” or infected clothing and bedding, could spark epidemics.

Hyams’s boss was a Kentucky physician and Confederate zealot named Luke Pryor Blackburn, whose work with yellow fever patients in Mississippi before the war had earned him an international reputation as an expert on the disease. Blackburn had held a variety of jobs with the Confederate government before Mississippi governor John Pettus sent him to Canada to obtain supplies for blockade-runners. While in exile, the doctor decided to disregard his Hippocratic oath and use his knowledge of the “scourge of the South” against its enemies. He found an ally in Hyams, a cobbler who had fled Helena, Arkansas, and settled in Toronto to escape the war but later decided he needed to do something to help the struggling Confederacy. The two were introduced by other southern agents headquartered in Canada, and Hyams agreed to help carry out Blackburn’s plan, which involved using trunks full of contaminated clothing as biological weapons. They met in December 1863 at the Queen’s Hotel in Toronto, where the doctor told Hyams to go home and await further instructions.2

In order for his scheme to succeed, Blackburn needed access to a yellow fever epidemic. His chance arrived in the spring of 1864 when an outbreak surfaced in Bermuda. He immediately volunteered his services to

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