Sick from Freedom

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.

Conversation · Political science · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society