Wicazo Sa Review

Wicazo Sa Review 18.2 (2003) 9-35

Lewis Cass and the Politics of Disease
The Indian Vaccination Act of 1832

J. Diane Pearson

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On May 5, 1832, the U.S. Congress enacted the first piece of federal legislation designed to deal with a specifically American Indian health problem, epidemic smallpox. The legislation commonly known as the Indian Vaccination Act enabled the federal government to vaccinate around forty to fifty thousand American Indians. In the wake of an especially vicious smallpox epidemic savaging American Indian communities on the western frontier, various persons urged the secretary of war and the commissioner of Indian affairs to petition Congress for the money and authority to vaccinate affected Native Americans. As the largest program of its kind in the United States, protection of American Indians from a deadly disease was the ostensible goal of the program, though other federal agendas provided the real motivation. There was no input from American Indians during the conception, design, and implementation of the program, and vaccinations were used to enable Indian removal, to permit relocation of Native Americans to reservations, to consolidate and compact reservation communities, to expedite westward expansion of the United States, and to protect Indian nations viewed as friendly or economically important to the United States.

After setting spending limits, Congress granted the secretary of war absolute authority over the program. As the leader of the U.S. Army and as the person who controlled the Office of Indian Affairs, Secretary of War Lewis Cass designed and supervised every aspect of the vaccination program. He selected the tribes for vaccination, authorized the [End Page 9] hiring of all vaccination personnel, delegated limited authority to the commissioner of Indian affairs, and set the parameters that limited or denied vaccinations to Indian nations. On Cass's orders, U.S. Army surgeons and enlisted personnel administered as many of the vaccinations as possible because their services were considered less costly than those of private practitioners. However, many civilian physicians, who often viewed jobs offered by the act as political patronage, also participated in the vaccination program.

The programs initiated under the Indian Vaccination Act were funded with an initial $12,000 appropriation in 1832, plus another $5,000 that was set aside in 1839 to cover vaccinations after the smallpox epidemic of 1837-38. ¹ This $17,000 constituted the main federal effort to control smallpox among American Indian tribes for almost a decade, as vaccinations were used to legitimize and justify an otherwise intrusive federal presence among American Indian nations.

Legislative Processes

Two years prior to the Vaccination Act, U.S. Indian agents had been authorized by the acting secretary of war, Dr. L. G. Randolph, to hire physicians on an ad hoc basis to vaccinate or treat American Indians at their agencies. ² As smallpox spread to American Indian communities across the Central Plains between 1831 and 1832, individual efforts were not sufficient to stop the spread of the disease. From October 1831 to April 1832, desperate federal Indian agents begged regional superintendents of Indian affairs and the commissioner of Indian affairs, Elbert Herring, for help. By March 1832, Baptist missionary and federal surveyor Isaac McCoy echoed the pleas of the agents and personally lobbied members of Congress and the commissioner of Indian affairs in Washington, D.C. ³ The reports of Indian agents John Dougherty and James Jackson and those of missionary McCoy spoke of the horrors of smallpox as it struck tribe after tribe located along the western frontier. The spread of the disease was a significant problem for a Congress that was deeply involved in plans to remove another seventy-two thousand American Indians into the heavily infected frontier areas. ⁴

In his annual report to the secretary of war and to the Congress (1832), Commissioner Herring attributed the first epidemics of smallpox among the Chippewas to their associations with the French and British. Herring implied that Chippewa political alliances unfavorable to the United States had placed them in a position to bring smallpox into their nation...