Sick from Freedom & Video

--------Jim Downs in his book Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction skillfully explores the problems that freed African-American slaves experienced during and after the civil war and reconstruction. The first few chapters specifically explore how the process of emancipation unfolded and how subsequent living conditions resulted in the spread of disease. Downs explains that the deaths of many freed slaves was largely due to the “unintended and unexpected consequences of war and emancipation” (21). Emancipation clearly did not come to fruition the way that it was imagined to. Because freed slaves were not provided with essential resources many were doomed to death. John Eaton, a general in the civil war, calls emancipation a farce “because it was proclaimed by President Lincoln as a military necessity, and not on the ground of humanity and justice” (qtd. in Downs 38). Sadly, as Down explains, the emancipation was a strategy of war to encumber the South.

--------Additionally, many of the military officials and doctors who treated the newly freed slaves had false, and quite frankly racist, notations about the physiology of African-Americans. Downs explains that there arose “arguments that black men were innately invulnerable to fever and thereby better suited to be stationed in the swampy climates of Louisiana.” Assumptions of African-American inferiority caused doctors to become “[c]onvinced of the differences between the races” which resulted in “some Union doctors [refusing] to touch sick black people” (35). Unfortunately, African-Americans were faced with racism by those who were supposedly fighting for them. Was the emancipation of the slaves, how it was conducted, in true moral compulsion? Thomas D. Eliot, a U.S. representative from Massachusetts, argued that “[t]he liberation of millions of slaves without federal protection would have constituted a crime against humanity” (qtd. in Downs 61). Without proper care and resources freed African-Americans were condemned to suffer. So why did African-Americans have to experience as much horror as they did and why would the United States government not act more quickly to mitigate these blatant problems?      

Works Cited

Downs, Jim. Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and                      --------Reconstruction. Oxford University Press, 20015.   

Below is an interesting video from the History Channel that talks about African-Americans during and after the Civil War. The video talks about some of the things Downs argues in Sick from Freedom including the limitations that African-Americans had without support from the United States government.

https://youtu.be/GnEKiw7LPvw