New Haven County Court Records

Smallpox Transmission and Culpability

Today we are going to examine a case where a man took someone to the New Haven County Court for bringing smallpox to Connecticut and subsequently infecting his minor son.

When quoting from documents, we will use the actual spelling, including transcriptions of individual words as necessary. (For more information about colonial spelling practices, see The Standardization of American English at teachinghistory.org.)

Michael Baldwin vs. John Goodwin

In October 1771, Michael Baldwin of New Haven sued John Goodwin of Middletown for giving his son Dudley smallpox.

Writ for Michael Baldwin vs. John Goodwin

Specifically, Baldwin claimed that Goodwin “did voluntarily go into the Province of New York, & and in s[ai]d Province of New York the Def[endan]t did then voluntarily receive the Infection of the Small Pox; & the Def[endan]t Returning into this Colony on the 2 Day of March AD 1771, did bring the Infection of the Small Pox with him, & the Def[endan]t Did then & there give & communicate the s[ai]d infection of the Small Pox to Dudley Baldwin Son of the Pl[ain]t[iff] then a minor under age.” Baldwin further stated that because he was “oblidged by Law to Provide” care for his dependent child, he was “put to great Trouble Expense & Cost in Nursing Doctoring & taking Care of s[ai]d Dudley to the amount of £30 Lawful Money.”

Baldwin requested 90 pounds in damage from Goodwin—triple the amount that he claimed was spent on his son’s medical costs. Given that the cleaning and decontamination procedures the authorities demanded for smallpox-infested residences and personal goods were both time-consuming and expensive, this may not have been an unreasonable amount of money. In colonial New England, “there were extraordinary charges associated with the pox: removing oneself or one’s children from a household; cleansing the same; being called on to nurse the afflicted or pay for nursing. But what added to the severity of these costs was that all of the actions required to meet the threat of contagion could seriously hamper, if not destroy, the normal means used to pay off debts” (Ben Mutschler, The Province of Affliction: Illness and the Making of Early New England, p. 154).

Interestingly, Baldwin’s plea was originally written by the clerk as “Trespass” (see this post for further discussion of the broad applications of this legal term in colonial Connecticut). However, this statement was crossed out in favor of quoting the applicable law: “a Plea brought on one certain Statute Law of this Colony Entituled an Act in further Addition to the Law Entituled an Act providing in Case of Sickness wherein among Other Things it Stands Enacted, that whensoever any Person or Persons belonging to this Colony, shall go into any other Province or Colony, & there voluntarily recieve the Infection of the Small Pox, & Shall upon his Returning into this Colony bring the Infection, either in his Cloaths or Otherwise, & give or communicate the same to any other Person or Persons, such Person shall be Liable to pay to the Party hurt or Injured thereby, For the Damages & Cost of Prosecution.”

Lest we surmise that Goodwin was maliciously spreading smallpox, let us examine the meaning of “voluntarily.” From a legal perspective, voluntary means “willingly; done with one’s consent; negligently.” Taking this into account, it is unlikely that Goodwin was acting with malicious intent, as it likely would have been stated in the writ if Baldwin or the Justice of the Peace believed this to be the case. However, given that smallpox was one of the few diseases the colonists considered to be dangerously infectious, they took a dim view of anyone they identified as a vector of this malady.

In the end, Goodwin did not attend the trial. His absence is unexplained, so we can only speculate as to the reasons. Perhaps he dreaded the stigma surrounding smallpox to a degree where he was unable to face such ignominy in public. “To suggest that someone had smallpox had serious social, political, and economic implications that extended well beyond the sick and those closest to them. As one of the few diseases in early America considered to be contagious, smallpox required elaborate rules to contain its assaults, including prolonged confinement of the afflicted and the impressment of caretakers. But even with such procedures, towns might feel an outbreak’s effects for years to come through the lives it claimed, the commerce it stifled, and the costs of care it demanded” (Mutschler, The Province of Affliction, p. 127). Or perhaps Goodwin was simply too ill to leave home—this was a common excuse among plaintiffs and defendants alike for missing court dates (Mutschler, The Province of Affliction, p. 14).

Whatever the case, the official record book states “The Pl[ain]t[iff] appeared, but the Def[endan]t appeared not” (County Court Records, New Haven County, Vol. 7, 1767-1773, p. 348). Upon consideration of this matter, the Court awarded Baldwin the full 90 pounds in damages, as well as court costs.

The next blog post will profile a case involving an enslaved woman named Sim, whose life was put in grave danger when the Selectmen of Wallingford forced her into service at a house where people had smallpox.

As noted in a previous post, the records for this case, as well as several of the cases previously profiled in this blog, are currently in the process of being digitized. They will eventually be available for public viewing at the Connecticut Digital Archive (CTDA).

The Connecticut State Library would like to thank the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) for their generous support of this project.