The End of Slavery

[Lady Cop]

i just read about this new book, and may have to read it.
i'd like to hear what everyone says about this topic. here is one comment that was under the article:

Did it occur to the author that disease was very common in the mid-19^th century, and that the vast majority of white soldiers who died in the Civil War died from disease in unsanitary camps? So what is the point of the author's thesis? Also, huge numbers are attached to vague terms like "dying or going hungry", as if there's no difference.

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The end of slavery in the United States led to anarchy and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of black Americans claims a new revisionist history of the Civil War.


Instead of a granting former slaves a glorious moment of freedom, President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation condemned millions to a life of disease and hunger says historian Jim Downs in his new book, 'Sick from Freedom'.


Scouring through obscure records, Professor Downs has revealed that freed slaves were subject to outbreaks of cholera and smallpox as they attempted to start new lives for themselves and that thousands starved to death.

Writing about the period of 1862 to 1870, Professor Downs claims that one million of the four million salves former slaves freed by Lincoln's 1863 executive order died or got sick.


This number includes at least 60,000 who lost their lives in a smallpox epidemic that started in Washington and spread to the south as black Americans left their former slave-masters in order to find work.

Calling this 'the largest biological crisis of the 19^th century', Downs states that this tragedy has failed to be acknowledged because it does not match with the rosy view of the Civil War being a fight between the Unionist North and Confederate South for God-given rights.


Professor Jim Downs new revisionist history of the Civil War and Emancipation Proclamation claims that a million black Americans suffered hunger and died following the end of slavery

'The freed people we want to see are the ones with all their belongings on the wagon, heading towards freedom,' said David W. Blight, a professor of history at Yale to the New York Times.

'But the truth is, for every person making it there may have been one falling by the way.'


As the anniversary of President Lincoln's order approaches, Mr. Downs, 39, is part of new school of thought re-addressing commonly held beliefs about the history of emancipation.


'We're getting ready to celebrate 150 years of the movement from slavery to freedom,' said Professor Downs to the New York Times.

'But hundreds of thousands of people did not survive that movement.'


In fact in the years following 1863, the public health problems that freed slaves experienced attempting to set up their own homes, getting jobs and feeding their families seemed so intense that some historical observers wondered whether all black Americans might die.

In 1863, one white religious figure wrote, 'Like his brother the Indian of the forest, he must melt away and disappear forever from the midst of us.'


While the accepted view is that the Unionist North was sympathetic to the plight of all southern slaves, Professor Downs feels that there was in fact an element of turning a blind eye to the problems the newly freed people experienced.


'In the 19^th century people did not want to talk about it,' said Professor Downs to the Observer.

'Some did not care and abolitionist, when they saw so many freed people dying, feared that it proved true what some people said: that slaves were not able to exist on their own.'

Professor Downs paints a desperate picture of freed families staggering away from southern plantations and finding themselves in Union run 'contraband camps' struggling for food and living in unsanitary conditions.


His book points out the irony that these camps were sometimes no better than the freed slaves previous living conditions and that the only way out was to offer to return to the same plantations from which they had escaped.


In 'Sick from Freedom' Professor Downs recounts the tragic story of one former slave, Joseph Miller, who arrived at a union camp in Kentucky with his wife and four children in 1864 and watched them all die within months, before he died in 1865.

During his research, Professor Downs discovered the horrific conditions within what were essentially refugee camps dotted around the south.


A military official with the Union army wrote that life for the former slaves was so appalling that they were: 'dying by scores - that sometimes 30 per day die and are carried out by wagon-loads without coffins, and thrown promiscuously, like brutes, into a trench.'

Not wishing to cast aspersions on the Emancipation Proclamation, for which Professor Downs still holds its true moral value, he nonetheless wants to bring a fuller picture to the public.


'I've been alone with these people in the archives,' said Professor Downs. 'I have a responsibility to tell their stories.'





Professor Jim Downs. professor of history at Connecticut College

[pspence]

Fabulous pictures. So sad to hear that but sure makes sense.

[cladking]

I don't know much about the subject but emancipation would have been very hard on many newly freed people. Slaves were normally well cared for and most didn't work extremely hard but did put in long hours. They had a pretty much lifetime job with a pension. While many slaves continued to work for their old owners for "pay" some had to compete with other workers which often meant more work. Many slave owners died in the civil war or financially ruined by it (think confederate currency). This resulted in their former slaves being unemployed and generally unemployable. The southern economy did recover fairly rapidly and former slaves helped tobring this about but the end of the war would have been very hard on many of them. It seems quite plausible that many might have died. There was an exodus of healthy young male blacks toward the west after the war where they were much better accepted than in the south. More than a few took families with them.

I don't know the facts but it does sound interesting if any of it is true.

[cladking]

Young healthy freed slaves would have done alright but the children, old, and sick were at risk.

My guess is that these conditions didn't persist long but everyone in the south was hurting by the end of the war and many would be great risk and this would include everyone. Conditions in the north were near-normal except for spot shortages like sugar and tobacco (I believe). The percentage of young males killed in the war was just staggeing in the south but the north had a much larger population and fewer fatalities. Many families were virtually unaffected in the north but this would be rare in the south.

[SIXFOOTERsez]

Smallpox and cholera don't give a shit what color you are or where your from, exposure was a near death sentence. No doubt many blacks died from filthy conditions in the camps they were forced to flee to, there was nowhere to go. In those days a big camp was going to get infected with something, they didn't know about infectious agents or the treatments for many of the illnesses. I am not sure what this guys point to all that was? Should we have kept slavery for their own good? I think not, slavery was wrong, but it happened in every culture all over the world and still does in places, coincidentally its still wrong. The blacks in our culture now have had the benefit of 150 years of freedom and nearly as many in preferential treatment, where they are now is a matter of choices. I know to many good ones to believe any different. That was a very dark age for our country, its over and everyone needs to accept that. There was no real Entry Strategy to the civil war and there was certainly no Exit Strategy. Revisionist historians are just cheap arm chair quarterbacks, monday morning second guessers.