End of Slavery led to Starvation and Death for Millions of Black Americans

5fish

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There new school of thought that numerous slaves dead after gaining their freedom after the war...

link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/16/slavery-starvation-civil-war

Hundreds of thousands of slaves freed during the American civil war died from disease and hunger after being liberated, according to a new book.

But, as Downs shows in his book, Sick From Freedom, the reality of emancipation during the chaos of war and its bloody aftermath often fell brutally short of that positive image. Instead, freed slaves were often neglected by union soldiers or faced rampant disease, including horrific outbreaks of smallpox and cholera. Many of them simply starved to death.

After combing through obscure records, newspapers and journals Downs believes that about a quarter of the four million freed slaves either died or suffered from illness between 1862 and 1870. He writes in the book that it can be considered "the largest biological crisis of the 19th century" and yet it is one that has been little investigated by contemporary historians.

"In the 19th century people did not want to talk about it. Some did not care and abolitionists, 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," Downs told the Observer.

Many ended up in encampments called "contraband camps" that were often near union army bases. However, conditions were unsanitary and food supplies limited. Shockingly, some contraband camps were actually former slave pens, meaning newly freed people ended up being kept virtual prisoners back in the same cells that had previously held them. In many such camps disease and hunger led to countless deaths. Often the only way to leave the camp was to agree to go back to work on the very same plantations from which the slaves had recently escaped.

"This challenges the romantic narrative of emancipation. It was more complex and more nuanced than that. Freedom comes at a cost," Downs said.



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Tom

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I don't believe it was millions, but it was bad enough. Probably 200,000 died of starvation or disease during the war and more in the years following the war. Compare the increase of the black population from 1850 to 1860 and 1860 to 1870.
 
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rittmeister

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I don't believe it was millions, but it was bad enough. Probably 200,000 died of starvation or disease during the war and more in the years following the war. Compare 1860 and 1870 census records.
i always thougt believing is sth to do in churches - got any facts?
 

Tom

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Some folks say that the war and death of 750,000 white soldiers was "God's punishment" for the sin of slavery.
If that's true, then why did all of these black people die?
 

5fish

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Believe" and "probably"
Maybe Downs is a 'Lost Causer" trying to show freeing the slaves was the wrong path... so soon ...

A summary:

Bondspeople who fled from slavery during and after the Civil War did not expect that their flight toward freedom would lead to sickness, disease, suffering, and death. But the war produced the largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century, and as historian Jim Downs reveals in this groundbreaking volume, it had deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands of freed people.

In Sick from Freedom, Downs recovers the untold story of one of the bitterest ironies in American history--that the emancipation of the slaves, seen as one of the great turning points in U.S. history, had devastating consequences for innumerable freed people. Drawing on massive new research into the records of the Medical Division of the Freedmen's Bureau-a nascent national health system that cared for more than one million freed slaves-he shows how the collapse of the plantation economy released a plague of lethal diseases. With emancipation, African Americans seized the chance to move, migrating as never before. But in their journey to freedom, they also encountered yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, dysentery, malnutrition, and exposure. To address this crisis, the Medical Division hired more than 120 physicians, establishing some forty underfinanced and understaffed hospitals scattered throughout the South, largely in response to medical emergencies. Downs shows that the goal of the Medical Division was to promote a healthy workforce, an aim which often excluded a wide range of freedpeople, including women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and children. Downs concludes by tracing how the Reconstruction policy was then implemented in the American West, where it was disastrously applied to Native Americans.

The widespread medical calamity sparked by emancipation is an overlooked episode of the Civil War
and its aftermath, poignantly revealed in Sick from Freedom.
 
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rittmeister

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Some folks say that the war and death of 750,000 white soldiers was "God's punishment" for the sin of slavery.
If that's true, then why did all of these black people die?
disclaimer: i think
"God's punishment" for the sin of slavery.
is mere and utter bullshit for many a reason. having said that and assuming for a second that idea caries any weight: without those black people dying they might have gotten off with a mere 500,000.
 

Wehrkraftzersetzer

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Some folks say that the war and death of 750,000 white soldiers was "God's punishment" for the sin of slavery.
If that's true, then why did all of these black people die?
maybe a different god? or no god at all and they simply started a war they couldn't win?
 
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5fish

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Here a look about after the war.... there was a problem buring the freedmen....

LINK: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)61937-0/fulltext

When military officials eventually encountered the high mortality among the newly freed population, they soon realised that they needed plots of land to bury the freedpeople who died during and after the war. As military physicians began to alert federal officials of the need for burial grounds, the government commanded military doctors to work out arrangements with local governments for proper burial grounds. Local authorities, in turn, often rejected such requests, opposing the mere suggestion that freedpeople be buried near the same lot used for white Southern residents. In Raleigh, North Carolina, for instance, sparks flew when municipal officials informed military agents in April, 1866, that “the cemetery is a resting for those remains of Union soldiers and not an indiscriminate burying ground for freedmen”. Military officials responded by asking for an appropriate place to bury the freedpeople, but municipal authorities failed to provide an adequate solution, yet continued to complain that the bodies should be removed. Debates about where to bury freedpeople reignited the issue of who was in charge of reconstruction in the South: the federal government or local authorities.

On an emotional level, the turmoil of not being able to properly bury loved ones must have been unbearable for former slaves. Joseph Miller's son froze to death on his journey from a Union camp to a boarding house in Kentucky in 1864. With nowhere to bury his 7-year-old son, Joseph carried him 5 miles back to the Union camp and buried him in an unmarked grave. On a public health level, the need for cemeteries for freedpeople who died from illness created dangerous health problems. In April, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina, many freedpeople became infected with typhoid fever and were left to die in isolation without any proper burial. As a city official in Charleston, South Carolina explained, “The health of this institution and the city requires that dead bodies by typhoid fever should be removed with as little delay as possible.”
But removing bodies proved to be a difficult task without sanctioned areas for burial. Transporting the bodies of freedpeople to remote locations in the countryside was considered, but this would require labour, funds, and, most of all, a designated area to bury the bodies. In many parts of the South, the failure of the federal and local governments to systematically create cemeteries made the removal of the dead a difficult task to accomplish. A freedwoman in southern Illinois in 1864 pleaded with military officials to bury her son. She had already witnessed how the bodies of other formerly enslaved children had been left exposed on a nearby dock where wharf rats had gnawed on their remains. She feared a similar fate would befall her son and begged the Captain in charge of the camp to ensure that her son would be buried. He simply responded by claiming that his own soldiers lacked a proper burial. This encounter was not unusual: the Civil War landscape was marked by the unburied bodies of many people—both black and white.

The death of freed slaves in the American Civil War reveals how the struggle to survive unfolded not only on the battlefields during military engagement but also among civilians in military camps, on abandoned plantations, and in other places that promised liberation.
Without access to food, clothing, medical care, and even a place to bury their loved ones, the promise of freedom could not be realised for many people. Furthermore, within American history, historians often narrate suffering and death as unexpected sacrifices that result from war or from other major transformations. Yet, the medical crises that freed slaves endured suggest that sickness and death may not have been the unavoidable consequences of war, but the very price of freedom.
 

5fish

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The headline of the Guardian article is poorly written.
Outbreak: in Washington DC... Freedmeen..

Smallpox broke out in 1862 in the nation’s capital, where wartime upheaval was promoting conditions for transmitting the virus, which spreads through air exhaled by an infected person and by contact with an infected person, bedding or clothing. The Union troops were assembled in makeshift quarters, and freed slaves were flooding into squalid settlements known as “contraband camps.” The city was in a panic. While wealthy Washingtonians were vaccinated two to three times to ward off being infected with the full-blown deadly virus, city officials scrambled to develop a procedure to vaccinate all the city’s school-age children. Some freed slaves dosed their bodies with tar to ward off possible infection. The metropolitan police requested that the army remove the bodies of former slaves who died of smallpox and were left on city streets. Letter-writers from the capital warned travelers and passersby to avoid the area at all costs, and yellow flags were hung throughout the city to signal the presence of the “deadly scourge.”

While military officials ordered some former slaves to recross the Potomac to live in prisons and former slave pens in Alexandria and Fortress Monroe, others were left on their own. After a snowstorm struck the city, followed by rain and icy cold temperatures, former slaves were forced to find shelter on frozen or muddy streets. With few options available to them, many former slaves congregated in overcrowded tents in the center of Washington, D.C.


Ironically, smallpox was a virus that local governments and doctors had been battling since the 18th century, yet when it broke out among emancipated slaves, federal officials failed to follow the protocols and procedures—vaccination, and quarantine where necessary—that doctors and communities had implemented for decades. They seemed to regard the outbreak among freed people as a “natural outcome” of emancipation, which only reinforced theories that newly freed black people were on the verge of extinction. From that point of view, officials had little incentive to try to stop its spread. Instead, they propagated a medical fiction that smallpox was a disease limited to former slaves—despite advances in 19th-century medicine that underscored environmental factors as the cause of the virus’ transmission.

Snip...

By 1869, the chairman of the Committee of Freedmen’s Affairs estimated that smallpox had infected roughly 49,000 freed people throughout the postwar South from June 1865 to December 1867. This statistic tells only part of the story. Records of Freedman Bureau physicians in the field suggest that the numbers in their specific jurisdictions were, in fact, much higher. In the Carolinas roughly 30,000 freed people succumbed to the virus in less than a six-month period in 1865. From December 1865 to October 1866, when the epidemic reached its peak, bureau physicians in Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina and Virginia estimated that hundreds of freed people a month became infected with the virus. Due to the countless freed people in need of medical assistance, many bureau doctors claimed to be unable to keep accurate records. “I am unable to forward the consolidated reports of the sick freedmen for the month of February,” wrote a Bureau doctor from North Carolina.
 

5fish

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Here is a great article about Louisianan 1866... good read...


Snip...

An outbreak of illness in Louisiana in the aftermath of the Civil War shows just how dangerous disease can be as a weapon in the hands of racist or incompetent officials — an essential lesson we must apply to the current pandemic crisis.

In the spring of 1866, just after the federal government formally ended slavery with the passage of the 13th Amendment, Capt. Azor Howitt Nickerson served under the shadow of a looming epidemic. Nickerson was stationed in Bayou Sara, La., in 1866 as part of the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency tasked with protecting the interests of freedpeople — African Americans who had, until very recently, been enslaved. Although instructed to prevent former enslavers from trying to resurrect slavery, Nickerson and many of his peers in the bureau were unsympathetic to black equality and cared little about the well-being of African Americans, and this informed their response to public health crises.

Snip...

When widespread smallpox and yellow fever outbreaks erupted in Louisiana in the aftermath of the war,
it was in large part due to the racist neglect and incompetence of local and federal officials. Nickerson, for example, wrote that he was visited by an African American man who was “taken [horribly] ill in front of [my] house and was hardly able to return to the house from which he came.” Rather than offering help or treatment,

Nickerson sent the man away in a panic. He was more concerned about being infected himself than making sure the sick man received treatment.
To control the spread of smallpox, Nickerson met with both the ex-Confederate mayor of Bayou Sara and the town’s doctor, Patterson Whicher. Together, they hatched a plan to contain the disease by isolating the African Americans who were infected.

Before emancipation, enslavers had theorized that enslaved African Americans were immune to diseases such as yellow fever and smallpox. After slavery, however, they argued that the susceptibility of black Louisianans to the diseases signified their racial inferiority. Although their logic seemed inconsistent, it reflected their fundamental belief that slavery was natural and necessary for black people. So long as African Americans were enslaved, slave owners theorized, they were better off.

Snip...


Nickerson, the mayor and the doctor agreed that infected black people would be sent out of town to fend for themselves. Banishing infected people from town condemned them to almost certain death while threatening to spread the disease to anyone with whom they had contact. The plan failed to promote the public good and was designed, instead, to serve the interests of the town’s white property owners and officials, to protect not only their own health but the productivity of their black workers.

Nickerson’s ex-Confederate collaborators saw black patients as an opportunity to overturn federal constraints on white power.
Whicher publicly boasted about the strategy and Nickerson recalled that he “sent word that it was his instruction to ‘give the freedmans bureau hell.’” Like many ex-Confederates, the doctor and local officials had fought to protect slavery and hated the Freedmen’s Bureau for offering basic protections against violence and the most brazen exploitation to African Americans after emancipation. Although they reluctantly worked with Nickerson, they seized the opportunity presented by the epidemic to eliminate any constraint on their power.
 

rittmeister

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Downs never claims that "millions" died. The headline of the Guardian article is poorly written.
the problem is that there is special staff for headlines. i never got one of mine through (if you are lucky they keep your sub-titel). those headliners don't necessarily have a proper title on their minds. they created 'clickbait' long before the internet was a thing.
 
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O' Be Joyful

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the problem is that there is special staff for headlines. i never got one of mine through (if you are lucky they keep your sub-titel). those headliners don't necessarily have a proper title on their minds. they created 'clickbait' long before the internet was a thing.
Gött dämmed editors.
 
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