Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (review)

Colin Powell was not around to warn President Abraham Lincoln, “If you break it, you own it.” As Jim Downs makes clear in this carefully documented work, the Union leadership, domestic and military, was wholly unprepared to deal with the breakdown of the system of slavery that followed the Union army with every foray into southern soil. Slavery, and the southern system of plantation agriculture built upon it, may have been destroyed, but the Union’s leaders had given little thought to what it meant to “own” the liberated peoples who turned to them for protection, succor, and direction in the strange new world brought by the blue uniforms. (For one conversation with Powell about this famous quotation, see http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/04/a-conversation-with-colin-powell/5873/, accessed 25 May 2012.)

While the high mortality cost of the Civil War is frequently calculated in terms of soldier death and disability, a major contribution of this study is to bring forward how much freedom cost when measured in terms of ex-slave lives. That some thirty-three thousand black Union troops died during the war is well known; the fact that thirty thousand former slaves died in a smallpox epidemic in North and South Carolina in 1865 is much less familiar. Downs borrows the phrase “process of freedom” from the historians of Latin American slavery, using it to emphasize that freedom did not come at any single moment, nor was freedom fully realized in days or even years. The transition from slavery to citizenship was long and perilous, and many, many freedpeople did not survive the journey. Slaves escaped plantations only to suffer in makeshift camps near Union military bases, where they lacked the essentials of life: food, clothing, and sufficient shelter. Not surprisingly, many succumbed from malnutrition, exposure, and rampant epidemic diseases, especially smallpox.

Throughout the book, Downs contrasts the misery of the freedpeople with the inadequate response of the Union government. They were indeed the immediate cause of “breaking” the southern system of chattel slavery, but never took full responsibility for the people that came to them for help. Downs frequently uses the word “unprepared” to characterize the union approach to the process of emancipation. But the problem was not just lack of planning; the army’s medical department was similarly unprepared when war began for the coming tide of casualties and illness, yet by 1864, it was operating fairly smoothly. Rather, the Union leadership was persistently ambivalent about their responsibility for the freedpeople. There was great fear that government charity would breed a dependent race that would never become self-sufficient. And a great focus on getting the former slaves back to work, as labor was seen as the solution to the whole ex-slave problem. Yet where would they work? Able-bodied men were recruited into the army; others were put to work on confiscated plantations with wages promised, if not always delivered. But this response failed to take into account the elderly, the disabled, the children, and the women caring for them. Or the fact that so many would quickly become ill in crowded refugee camps. Most freedpeople were physically located within the states of the Confederacy, where their former owners felt little sympathy for their plight. Unknown thousands died, many of them starving in the outbuildings of ruined plantations or dying of exposure in the woods with no one to tend to them.

There was some benevolent society response to the plight of the freedman. Freedmen’s aid societies sent workers south to see to the needs of black refugees, and distribute aid. But their letters home attest to the inadequacy of the response, begging for more food, more workers, more doctors to aid the many sick, and starving. Letters to the...