Policing Infection: Boston’s Watch and the Containment of Smallpox, 1764–75

Organized in 1631, Boston’s night watch was part of a longstanding legal and customary tradition; for centuries, cities and towns across the Atlantic World trusted nightly watches to safeguard the sleeping public. A method of local-level policing, watches walked the streets, observed, and executed their duties to maintain health, the environment, order, and social concerns. Watches kept the peace, supported colonial and state-building projects, protected local and Atlantic economies, enforced the moral and social order, and maintained civil authority. At times, they acted as agents upholding the racial, class, and gendered order of the town, and at other times, administered assistance and care to Boston’s inhabitants. Duties related to illness existed in a middle ground between keeping order and care.

The common practice of quarantining the sick to their homes by force, first enacted in England under King James I in response to the plague, was implemented in Boston in the seventeenth century. Nightly watches participated directly in the quarantining of townspeople, strangers, and travelers who took ill with various ailments. Most commonly watchmen responded to instances of smallpox and were posted to monitor infected dwellings. Using the official reports composed by the night watch constables, town statistics for the smallpox epidemics, diaries, newspapers, and military records, this paper examines how individual watchmen and entire watch units functioned during smallpox outbreaks in Boston. I will focus on a large outbreak in 1764 and outbreaks that occurred during the occupation of Boston by the British Army. Specifically, the paper will consider the legal and social dimensions of the practice including the specific actions performed by the men, protocols, interactions with townspeople and British regulars over infections (including acts of resistance to watch duties), as well as the efficacy of the practice.