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  • Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Jim Downs
  • Jonathan Scott Holloway
Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction. By Jim Downs (New York, Oxford University Press, 2012) 264 pp. $29.95

In Sick from Freedom, Downs encourages readers to think about the lessons to be learned from African Americans' struggles to survive in the months and years after emancipation. Although a relatively brief study, Sick from Freedom marks a major turning point in how we understand the African-American past, the nation's past, and their intertwining.

Building upon a foundation of careful archival work and nuanced interpretations, Downs is consumed with the task of changing our perspectives about events and circumstances that appear to be familiar. Apart from the historians who debate the numbers of Civil War casualties, Downs argues that failing to account for civilian African-American illness and death in that conflict results in a significant underestimation of the war's epidemiological nightmare (indeed, Downs' first sentences ponder just what a "casualty of war" is). Unlike scholars who declare that much of the African-American past is inaccessible, Downs points to the stacks of evidence to be found in new places—most important to this book, the Medical Division of the Freedmen's Bureau. Most people tend to think of emancipation as a moment of moral triumph and economic transformation, Downs sees it as a "process" laced with significant challenges about how individuals and institutions wrestled with the very meaning and consequences of freedom.

Sick from Freedom provides wrenching details about freed people becoming casualties of war when their basic needs—food, shelter, and clothing—were not met, even when promised. Children died from exposure; [End Page 640] newly freed black fathers bonded themselves to the Union Army in the hope that the United States government would stand by its word and care for their families; smallpox ravaged the African-American population unchecked because the science of the day suggested that African Americans were racially predisposed to illness and bound for extinction. In short, this book catalogs how misery was conjoined with the psychological blessing of freedom.

In canvassing what he terms the greatest biological crisis of the nineteenth century, Downs produces a sweeping history of disease, labor, and the debates about the obligations and limits of federal oversight or intervention. This book has interest for interdisciplinary scholars not so much because Downs employs a broad, interdisciplinary network of sources—he is, in many ways, a traditional archival historian—but because he marshals his evidence in such a way that his questions galvanize various methods and disciplines. What does a social history of emancipation reveal that a political history cannot? What can the history of science and medicine teach us about the history of labor struggles? How do illness and disease animate the body politic?

All of these overlapping issues are at play in Sick from Freedom. This smart book will force scholars to reconsider the consequences of emancipation when understood in light of individuals' fleeting agency, the expansion of the federal government, and evolving conceptions of citizenship in the wake of the Civil War.

Jonathan Scott Holloway
Yale University
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