#BlackLivesMatter: Toward an Algorithm of Black Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction

The handwriting is illegible. Pages upon pages of numbers, often with no names, just dates and lists that separated men from women. Dates of when people were admitted to the hospital; dates when they were released; dates when they died. I scan the sloppily written pages for any other identifying details. Where did these numbers originate? There is a reference to North Carolina, another to Salisbury, and an indication about a box number. The folder in which I have located these pages is labeled “venereal disease.” On some of the documents, there are lists that separate the number of men from the number of women infected with gonorrhea and syphilis. I try to figure out where these statistics originated. Did a doctor record this data or was it a military official who tabulated these numbers based on a report that a physician conducted? I carefully check and recheck the documents for any identifying term, code, or mark that would indicate the origin of these statistics. I cannot find any. It would likely take weeks if not months to trace the origin of this messy stack of numbers scratched on pages of loose-leaf paper in order to try to reconstruct an outbreak of both gonorrhea and syphilis that infected formerly enslaved people in North Carolina in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War.¹

This indecipherable data that sits in front of me is my own fault. It is my mistake that I cannot make sense of the data. It is my own handwriting that I don’t understand. I am the one who took the notes, copied the numbers, and did not carefully annotate each document that I read. Reviewing the records I am fairly certain that they derived from the Chief Medical Surgeon but I cannot be entirely sure because I did not clearly note the citation for each record. I was too busy trying to copy down the numbers, note the divisions made between men and women, and most of all transcribe as quickly as I could every phrase, word, or chart that mentioned sexually transmitted infection.

It was the summer of 2002, and I had won a summer research grant to conduct research on the health conditions of freed slaves at the National Archives in Washington, DC. While the grant was generous, it afforded me only two weeks lodging and travel so I had to work as fast as I could. The problem was that I had never before worked with records from the Medical Division of the Freedmen’s Bureau, a temporary federal government institution that established 40 hospitals, employed over 120 physicians, and provided medical assistance to an estimated one million freedpeople after the Civil War ended. At the time, I did not understand the logic or even the organization of the records, and many of the documents, much to my disappointment, detailed the administrative operations of the Medical Division, not freedpeople’s actual health conditions. Doctors corresponded with federal officials in Washington, noting that they had received a particular letter, or asking to whom they should send their reports, or whether their request for supplies would be filled, but they did not discuss patients in any detail. In short, the overwhelming majority of the records reflected the institution’s bureaucratic makeup and provided no systematic account of the health conditions or well-being of formerly enslaved people, despite the fact that the Medical Division of the Freedmen’s Bureau was the one government division set up to deal with this issue.

Therefore, when I discovered a slim set of records that referred to sexually transmitted infections, it seemed to be an answer to my prayers. I finally was able to unearth some data that pointed to the conditions of the actual freedpeople. Yet even these clues to the number of people infected with gonorrhea and syphilis over a two-year period offered no other details about how these illnesses spread, how doctors treated them, or how the patients suffered with these infections. Instead, there were just numbers that tallied the people admitted to...