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A few years before Thomas Jefferson sat down to write the Declaration of Independence in the summer of 1776 at a second-floor rented apartment in Philadelphia, a mysterious pest began to devastate farmers’ wheat crops in Long Island, New York.
Soon it spread to New Jersey. In its larval stage the tiny white worm munched its way to adulthood by feeding on wheat, barley and rye.
“It began in Long Island and Brooklyn, and they could sit and watch as the insect moved further west and further south,” said Lou Masur, professor of American history at Rutgers University. Masur said the fly worried farmers, many of whom, like Jefferson, were also delegates to the Continental Congress.
“They are concerned, deeply concerned because wheat is critical not only to domestic production but to exports,” Masur said.
After the American Revolution, Jefferson would embark on a mission to understand and document one of the country’s first invasive species. No larger than a gnat, it spurred suspicions of biological warfare, threatened the new nation’s economy and inspired a citizen science project that in one historian’s assessment epitomized American “optimism in the power of collective scientific work.”
In some ways this story begins in August 1776, when thousands of German soldiers known as Hessians arrived on Staten Island to fight against the Continental Army. Paid by the British, the Hessians sparked fear and resentment among the colonists — helping to rally more American colonists to the cause.
These soldiers were so hated, they were mentioned as one of the 27 grievances listed by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson condemned King George III for hiring about 30,000 of these “mercenaries” who “compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny.” The soldiers raped women and pillaged farms throughout New Jersey before getting routed by George Washington’s troops during the Battle of Trenton, who made the famous crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas Eve 1776.
The hated fly that destroyed farmers’ wheat crops soon became linked with the hated German soldiers. Rumors spread that the pest hitched a ride to America through the straw bedding of Hessian soldiers. Some thought it was a deliberate attempt to sabotage the rebellion. In theory, the insect could have arrived this way, but there is no evidence linking its origins to Germany or that it was a piece of biological warfare employed by the Hessians or the British.
But the story stuck.