'Nurse, Spy, Cook:' How Harriet Tubman Found Freedom Through Food

By Nina Martyris, 4-27-16

Harriet Tubman, who will soon be the first African-American to grace a U.S. currency note, spent her whole adult life raising money either to rescue slaves or help them start life afresh on free soil. While her abolitionist friends in the North were generous contributors to the cause, Tubman also self-funded her heroic raids through an activity she enjoyed and excelled at: cooking.

Tubman's role as a professional cook, which provided her with a much-needed source of money in her long and poverty-stricken life, has often been overlooked.

Tubman was the daughter of a cook. Her mother, Rit Ross, worked in the "big house" on the plantation in Dorchester County, Md., where Tubman was raised. An early food-related incident is testimony to the future General Tubman's strong-willed character. When she was about 6, Tubman was hired out to a neighboring farm – a common practice at the time – run by James and Susan Cook. When she got there, writes biographer Kate Clifford Larson in Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero, the hungry little girl was so nervous in the company of a white family, she refused the milk offered by her new mistress.

"I was fond of milk as any young shoot," Tubman later said to her first biographer, Sarah Bradford. "But all the time I was there I stuck to it, that I didn't drink sweet milk."

She spent almost two unhappy years with the family, during which she was regularly flogged and finally sent home after she fell seriously ill.

In 1849, fearing she would be sold like her two older sisters had been, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia. She travelled to Baltimore and New Jersey, where in order to support herself and raise money to go back to rescue her family, she spent the summer of 1852 working as a cook in a resort at fashionable Cape May, N.J. She used her wages to pay for a raid that freed nine slaves.

On the roughly 13 raids Tubman conducted "down into Egypt" over the course of a decade, one of the many challenges she faced was keeping her party of rescued slaves fed on their long and arduous journey – often through snow, icy rain and swamps, with teams of armed men and dogs searching for the runaways. To keep babies from crying and attracting attention, she dosed their bread with laudanum to put them to sleep.

On the Underground Railroad, "one of the conductor's chief duties was finding nourishment – those slaves who didn't have the benefit of a conductor were on their own. One slave recalled wandering through the woods all day eating acorns."
Kate Clifford Larson, Tubman biographer

She may have been hailed as the Black Moses, but unlike that ancient prophet, she couldn't wave her staff and produce manna from heaven. Instead, she simply used her ingenuity. Once, after buying two chickens at a market, she almost came face to face with a former overseer. So she quickly released one of the chickens she was carrying, and pretended to give chase, creating a comic kerfuffle that allowed her to slip away unnoticed, even though, ironically, everyone's eyes were on her.

Otherwise, Tubman went foraging in the forest. "While the woods were rich with resources like sassafras, black cherry, and paw-paw, not everything was safe to eat," Clifford Larson told me. "One of the conductor's chief duties was finding nourishment – those slaves who didn't have the benefit of a conductor were on their own. One slave recalled wandering through the woods all day eating acorns."

What made foraging doubly difficult was that many slaves fled in the winter, shortly after Christmas. "They knew they would probably be sold off at the end of the year, so this was when they would have to run," says Robyn Affron of Adkins Arboretum, who worked on an audio tour of the Underground Railroad with Clifford Larson. "In winter in the mid-Atlantic, they had little or no food. If they were lucky they could seek refuge and food from the Quaker community. Sacks would be hidden in holes in trees with warm socks and hardtack biscuits."

But no matter how dire the situation, Tubman, who was deeply religious, operated on the unshakable belief that God would provide. An abstemious eater, she fasted on Fridays, a practice she learned from her father Ben Ross. He also taught her some invaluable survival skills.

"An expert lumberjack, Ross spent much time living off the land, navigating through forests, fields and waterways," says Clifford Larson. "He passed that knowledge to his gifted daughter, and she put it to good use while traveling along the Underground Railroad."

Tubman grew up on a farm, and through her life, she reached for earthy food metaphors to express herself. "I felt like a blackberry in a pail of milk," she said when she, an illiterate black woman, bid for and bought a parcel of land in Auburn, N.Y., that would eventually house the Harriet Tubman Home for Aged and Infirm Negroes.

"I threw him acrossed my shoulder like a bag o' meal and took him away out of there," was how she described her audacious 1860 rescue of a fugitive slave named Charles Nalle in Troy, N.Y., in the midst of a whirl of police batons and bullets.

And in response to a group called the African Civilization Society, whose mission it was to repatriate all Negroes – free and slave alike – to Africa, Tubman related the parable of a farmer who sowed onions and garlic on his land, but when he found his cow's butter too strong and unsellable, returned to planting clover. By then it was too late – the wind had blown the onions and garlic all over the field. White people, she said, had got slaves to do their hard work for them, but now that their presence didn't suit them, they wanted to pack them off to Africa. "But they can't do it," she said in a public speech in Boston that drew loud applause. "We're rooted here, and they can't pull us up."

During the Civil War, Tubman worked as a nurse and a spy, but supplemented her income by running an eating-house in Beaufort. There, she sold Union soldiers root beer, pie and ginger bread, which she baked during the night, after her day's work. When she put in a claim for a Civil War pension, her role was described as "nurse, spy and cook."

Tubman's earliest childhood memory had to do with food. She recalled how, when she had to babysit her younger brother – she was barely 4 or 5 years old herself – she used to "cut a fat chunk of pork and toast it on the coals and put it in his mouth. One night he went to sleep with that hanging out, and when my mother come home she thought I'd done kill him. I nursed that there baby till he was so big I couldn't tote him any mo'."

Indeed, the dramatic arc of Tubman's life story, from slave to national hero, can be captured in her tragicomic relationship to pigs. Caught stealing a lump of sugar at the Cooks' house, she saw the mistress reach for the whip, and fled to a neighboring farm. For the next five days, she hid in a pigpen and fought with "an ole sow, an' perhaps eight or ten little pigs" for the potato peelings and other pigswill. Finally, starved and afraid of the belligerent mother pig, she went back. James Cook whipped her.

Over three decades later, when Tubman made history by leading three Union gunboats in the famous 1863 Combahee River Raid that freed 700 slaves in South Carolina, she described how the throngs of slave women came streaming towards "Lincoln's gun-boats" with their babies, baskets, chickens and pigs.

"I nebber see such a sight," she is quoted saying in Bradford's 1869 biography. "We laughed, an' laughed, an' laughed. Here you'd see a woman wid a pail on her head, rice a smokin' in it jus' as she'd taken it from de fire, young one hangin' on behind, one han' roun' her forehead to hold on, 'tother han' diggin' into de rice-pot, eatin' wid all its might; hold of her dress two or three more; down her back a bag wid a pig in it."

One woman brought along two pigs, one white, one black. All three were taken on board, and the pigs promptly christened after a Confederate Civil War general and the president of the Confederate States of America: "de white pig Beauregard, and de black pig Jeff Davis."

Nina Martyris is a freelance journalist based in Knoxville, Tenn.

Image: Harriet Tubman, pictured between 1860 and 1875. The woman who will soon become the first African-American to grace an American currency note self-funded many of her heroic raids to save slaves by cooking.

From: npr.org

Learn more about the heroic women of the Civil War at www.CivilWarRx.com

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Chimborazo Hospital: Largest Military Hospital in the World

By Maggie MacLean, 10-10-15

Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond, Virginia essentially functioned as a village, complete with bathhouse, soap factory, morgues, and a bakery. Phoebe Yates Pember was one of the first women to serve as a hospital matron during the Civil War. Her memoirs describe in vivid detail her experiences as one of the first women to enter the previously all-male field of medicine in the Confederacy.

A Hospital on a Hill
Several million men went off to war in the early 1860s. They fell sick with disease and died from battle wounds by the hundreds of thousands. The Confederate government was not prepared for the sudden burden of caring for so many men. Hundreds of hospitals sprang up in the Confederate States, particularly in Richmond, where five railroads converged and close to many of the war's battles.

On May 29, 1861, Confederate President Jefferson Davis arrived in Richmond. In June 1861, street cleaners and unemployed free blacks were put to work building the three lines of defense around Richmond. The interior line consisted of a series of forts; in the middle line, earthworks were constructed in a five-mile radius from the capitol building, with intermittent installations of artillery batteries; the outer line was a set of simple trenches that soldiers could quickly occupy if the city were threatened.

Essentially, there were three types of fortification surrounding the city – artillery batteries strategically placed to maximize the effectiveness against approaching troops, forts to house more artillery along with soldiers and supplies, and. They were made almost entirely of earth and wood, which is why you often see old photos of fortifications almost completely barren of any nearby trees.

During the summer of 1861, newly-enlisted Confederate troops inundated Richmond. The undeveloped forty-acre plateau in the city's east end, known as Chimborazo Hill, was selected as a camp for soldiers. In late September and early October 1861, a workforce of slaves began erecting permanent winter quarters on the site. Plans called for soldiers' barracks, officers' quarters, three hospitals, and a large bake house.

The newly appointed Surgeon General of the Confederacy, Samuel Moore, soon recognized that Richmond's ability to care for the army's sick and wounded was sorely lacking. Many soldiers had died that previous summer because of the crowded conditions in the hotels, warehouses, stores, and private homes that had been used as makeshift hospitals. With many structures already in place on Chimborazo Hill, Moore decided to use the barracks as the beginnings of a hospital. He placed prominent Richmond physician, Dr. James B. McCaw, in command with the rank of surgeon-in-chief.

The nearly complete winter quarters - which measured about eighty feet by twenty-eight feet - were converted into patient wards. The walls were composed of two-inch-thick boards nailed to a simple vertical frame, and then a coat of whitewash inside and out. The workers covered the roofs with shingles and the floors with wood planks. Three doors and ten windows ran along each side for access and ventilation. There was a woodstove to fend off the cold, and a candle to show the way for the night shift of physicians.

Construction began in the autumn of 1861, and the complex grew to include ninety hospital wards, which were divided into five hospitals that could accomodate 3,600 patients at one time. In addition to the patient wards, Dr. McCaw's crew built kitchens, five ice houses, a large stable, a guard house, a chapel, five mortuaries, and various shops, bringing the total number of buildings to nearly 150. Wide avenues separated the rows of buildings to provide fresh air, which Dr. McCaw believed necessary for a speedy recovery.

With the buildings arranged in this fashion, Chimborazo became the first pavilion-style hospital in America. An assistant surgeon described the scene:

"The hospitals presented the appearance of a large town, imposing and attractive, with its alignment of buildings kept whitened with lime, streets and alleys clean … The buildings were separated from each other by wide alleys or streets, ample spaces for drives or walks, and a wide street around the entire camp or hospital."

Slaves at Chimborazo
In addition to the workforce of slaves who constructed the hospital buildings, Chimborazo relied on the slaves of local plantation owners to fill positions such as cooks and laundresses. Hundreds of African Americans, mostly enslaved males, served as nurses at Chimborazo Hospital. Slaves working at Chimborazo moved from a private to a public work environment and worked alongside free blacks, which must have been somewhat liberating.

Dr. James McCaw recognized early on the necessity of employing blacks for the hospital's own survival:

"I have at this time only two hundred and fifty-six cooks and nurses [slaves] in my Hospitals, to take care of nearly 4,000 sick soldiers ... it will be entirely impossible to continue the hospital without them."

Patient Care
Dr. McCaw first had to organize the massive facility. Contract surgeons were hired as needed, and civilian doctors occasionally volunteered their services. McCaw purchased hospital rations from local suppliers, and for the good of his patients, he established a large vegetable garden and a herd of hundreds of goats and milk cows a nearby farm.

In the summer of 1862, the constant dread that must have niggled at the mind of every person employed there came to pass. Wounded from the Seven Days' Battles filled the hospital beyond capacity. To accommodate the overflow, hospital workers set up Sibley tents, which housed eight to ten soldiers per tent, and the hospital continued to function as before.

The level of medical care within Chimborazo Hosptial varied greatly. Many accounts praised the doctors and the care provided by the female matrons. However, some patients complained that sufficient food was sometimes unavailable and some wards were poorly supervised. Some eyewitnesses went so far as to pronounce the medical staff negligent and the environment filthy and foul-smelling. However, the system worked. Throughout its existence, Chimborazo had a mortality rate of about nine percent; the best-staffed Union hospitals achieved only ten percent.

The Matron Law
On September 27, 1862, Confederate President Davis signed into law "an act to better provide for the sick and wounded of the Army in hospitals." The law provided that each hospital could employ two chief matrons at salaries not to exceed forty dollars per month to "exercise a superintendence over the entire domestic economy of the hospital." Each facility could hire two assistant matrons "to superintend the laundry, to take charge of the clothing of the sick, [and] the bedding of the hospital, to see that they are kept clean and neat." These women received compensation up to thirty-five dollars per month. Each ward could employ two ward matrons for salaries of thirty dollars per month whose duties were:

"to prepare the beds and bedding of their respective wards, to see that they are kept clean and in order, that the food or diet for the sick was carefully prepared and furnished to them, the medicine administered, and that all patients requiring careful nursing are attended to."

For the rest of the war, white Southern women managed Confederate hospitals as matrons. Those who filled these positions had to be blessed with the stamina to endure physical and mental hardships and the will to defy conventional ideas about their proper role in southern society. In addition to their salaries, all matrons received rations and suitable lodging. Matrons were not nurses. Most Civil War nurses in Confederate hospitals were hired slaves, free blacks, or convalescent soldiers. Matrons were almost always white women.

Phoebe Yates Pember
In her book Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust states that only a few "exceptional women" dedicated their lives to work as hospital matrons. Phoebe Yates Pember was one of the first women to serve as a hospital matron, and she served in that position at the largest military hospital in the world: Chimborazo. Pember's memoirs describe the difficulties she encountered as one of the first women to enter the all-male field of medicine.

Pember was born into a prosperous and socially prominent Jewish family in Charleston, South Carolina who later moved to Georgia. When her husband of five years died of tuberculosis in Boston on July 9, 1861, Pember joined her family, who had left the coastal city of Savannah for the supposedly safer town of Marietta, Georgia; they would spend the rest of the war as refugees.

In late 1862, Pember received a letter from her friend Mary Elizabeth Adams Pope Randolph, wife of the Confederate secretary of war. Randolph was active in the Richmond Ladies Association, which organized relief efforts for Confederate soldiers. Randolph offered Pember a position as chief matron of Chimborazo Hospital's Second Division, one of five hospital divisions. It was "rather a startling proposition to a woman used to all the comforts of luxurious life," Pember later wrote in her memoirs, but she reported for duty at the age of 39.

While working at the hospital, Pember not only dealt with the pain and suffering of her patients, but also with shortages of medicine, food and equipment. In addition, she dealt with doctors as well as a society that criticized women for working in hospitals, to which she responded:

In the midst of suffering and death, hoping with those almost beyond hope in this world; praying by the bedside of the lonely and heart stricken; closing the eyes of the boys hardly old enough to realize man's sorrows, much less suffer man's fierce hate, a woman must soar beyond the conventional modesty considered correct under different circumstances.

Pember made sure that the orders of surgeons were performed properly, and that the medical and dietary needs of her patients were fulfilled. As the war progressed, casualties multiplied and Phoebe's duties increased. She continually washed and dressed minor wounds and prepared the most difficult cases for the surgeons. She eventually found some respite from her duties by renting a room in town, to which she returned every night.

By the end of the Civil War, 76,000 patients had received medical care at Chimborazo; 15,000 of those were under Phoebe Pember's supervision in the 150 wards she managed. She remained at Chimborazo until the facility was taken over by Federal authorities and her last patients were discharged. At the end of the war, she wrote, "I found myself with a box full of Confederate money and a silver ten-cent piece." She spent the 10 cents on a box of matches and five coconut cakes.

Phoebe Pember then returned to Savannah, where she maintained her elite social status, and traveled in the United States and Europe. In 1879, her memoirs A Southern Woman's Story: Life in Confederate Richmond was published. It is considered a pioneering resource in women's history. During her last years she lived with her niece, Fanny Phillips Hill in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she died on March 4, 1913 of breast cancer.

Fall of Richmond
Because Richmond never endured a direct attack, Chimborazo operated safely throughout the Civil War. However, on April 2, 1865, Union forces penetrated Confederate defensive lines around Petersburg, twenty-three miles south of Richmond. When General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia retreated to the west, Richmond was no longer protected and had to be evacuated. Those of Chimborazo's patients who were able began leaving on their own, while the staff and those too sick or injured to travel waited for the arrival of Union troops. Dr. McCaw surrendered the hospital to a group of Union surgeons on April 3, 1865. Soon after, ambulances began delivering Union patients, who were placed in separate wards away from the Confederates.

Freedmen's Bureau School at Chimborazo
By the early summer of 1865, patients had been removed from a section of the hospital, which was then designated as classrooms for a Freedmen's Bureau school. Two months after the fall of Richmond, the village on Chimborazo Hill was providing a home as well as an education for thousands of former slaves. Quaker societies like the New York Friends' Association supported the school, and they sent white Quaker women from the northeast to serve as teachers. Almost 200 newly-freed slaves enrolled in an afternoon session, and by fall their number had increased to 345.

The Freedmen's Bureau was a federal agency established to assist freed slaves in finding education and employment. They also used the former barracks and other buildings to house the flood of African American refugees pouring into Richmond. One ward was inhabited by 1,500 ex-slaves, some of whom were employed by Union authorities to begin cleaning up the city.

Sometime after 1869, the Freedmen's Bureau school at Chimborazo closed its doors, probably due to the ratification of the new Virginia Constitution, which required a public school system for all Virginia children. According to the Richmond Public Schools, in 1869, rooms were rented nearby to educate African American children. In 1881, a new school building was constructed, which eventually became today’s George Mason Elementary School.

The buildings at Chimborazo disappeared quickly after that. Local residents, desperate for firewood, tore down the hospital wards and burned them in their fireplaces and stoves.

In 1874, when the city purchased Chimborazo Hill to be used as a park, few buildings remained. In 1909, a United States Weather Bureau Station was constructed on the site. In 1959 the National Park Service acquired six acres of Chimborazo Hill, including the weather station building, which now serves as a visitor center for Richmond National Battlefield Park and the Chimborazo Medical Museum. The museum offers a great deal of information about the famous hospital, other hospitals in Civil War Richmond, and the practice of medicine in the 1860s.

Image 1: Image: Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond, Virginia. A man with a crutch looks out upon the long white buildings of Chimborazo Hospital on the hill above in a photograph taken just after the city had fallen to Union forces in April 1865.

Image 2: Freedmen's Bureau Classroom at Chimborazo School for Slaves

From: civilwarwomenblog.com

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The End of the Slave Trade

By Joshua D. Rothman, 3-27-15

On March 21, 1865, black Charlestonians reveled in their freedom in a parade that began before more than 10,000 people on the Citadel green and stretched for nearly two and a half miles.

Mounted marshals led a band, the 21st Regiment of the United States Colored Troops, and clergymen from numerous denominations. Behind them walked an assembly of women, more than 1,800 newly enrolled public school children and a variety of black tradesmen, from fishermen and carpenters to barbers and blacksmiths, who carried banners that read, among other things, “We Know No Master But Ourselves,” “Free Homes, Free Schools, One Country and One Flag” and “Our Reply to Slavery — Colored Volunteers.”

The march’s joy was not unmixed. According to a New York Daily Tribune correspondent, a horse-drawn cart followed the tradesmen, carrying an auctioneer’s block on which sat two black women and a child. Riding alongside them was a black man carrying a bell and waving the red flag that for decades had been the unmistakable sign of a slave trader open for business. Ringing his bell, the man called to spectators, “How much am I offered for this good cook?” “She is an ‘xlent cook, ge’men.” “She can make four kinds of mock-turtle soup—from beef, fish or fowls.” “Who bids?” Sixty men, tied together by a rope, walked behind the auction cart “in imitation of the gangs who used often to be led through these streets on their way from Virginia to the sugar-fields of Louisiana.” They were followed in turn by a hearse on which was chalked “Slavery is Dead,” “Who Owns Him? No One,” and “Sumter Dug His Grave on the 13th April 1861,” and by 50 women dressed entirely in black.

These elements of the parade were intended as a burlesque, as suggested by the “shouts of laughter” that met the hearse and the “joyous faces” of the women dressed as mourners. For some people, however, the charade triggered memories of the deepest trauma they ever experienced in their lives. “Old women burst into tears as they saw this tableau,” the Tribune reporter wrote, “and forgetting that it was a mimic scene, shouted wildly: ‘Give me back my children! Give me back my children!’”

Every enslaved person felt the dark touch of the slave trade. The overseas trade dated to the earliest years of the colonial period, and in the decades after the United States banned it in 1808 domestic traders sold nearly one million people from the Upper South to the Lower South, and millions more within individual states and territories.No one who lived in slavery slavery avoided either being personally sold or losing a parent, sibling, child, spouse or friend to the trade, often never to be seen again. The anguish of the mothers at the parade in Charleston, however, spoke not only to collective torment going back more than 200 years. It spoke to fresh pain, because the slave trade was carried on in the Confederacy until the very last days of the Civil War.

Anxiety prevailed among slave traders throughout the fall of 1860. Uncertainty following Abraham Lincoln’s election made potential customers hesitant to buy, and prices for enslaved people dropped substantially as the year drew to a close. One Richmond slave-trading company reported in November 1860, for example, that the “election excitement” had produced “extreme flatness and inactivity” in the market, and in late December another observed that, thanks in part to “political derangements,” prices had fallen by roughly a third since the summer. The company’s principals did not imagine they would rebound anytime soon.

To a certain extent, they were wrong. Spotty sources make it effectively impossible to gauge the precise volume of slave sales during the Civil War, but it is clear that slaveholders and traders bought and sold enslaved people throughout the conflict. The long-distance trade most likely went into steep decline, if it did not end nearly altogether, as Union occupation of Alexandria within months of the war’s outbreak and of New Orleans early in its second year shut down some of the trade’s most vital hubs. Still, sales and purchases within states and between neighboring states revived in the spring of 1861 once the reality of secession solidified and white Southerners acquired confidence in their ability to sustain Confederate independence. Prices never entirely bounced back to what they had been in the late 1850s, but in numerous cities they rallied substantially and held reasonably stable through the end of 1861.

For the remainder of the war, however, the shape and strength of the slave trade and the fates of enslaved people trapped in its maw depended on the fortunes of the Confederate military effort and the state of the Southern economy. Market prices, for example, and probably sales volumes as well, declined noticeably in the spring of 1862 as Union forces made gains in Tennessee and Louisiana, occupied locations along the Carolina coast and approached Richmond during the Peninsula Campaign. They then rose again with that campaign’s failure and subsequent Confederate victories outside the capital, all of which led slaveholders, especially in Virginia, to believe that slaves would retain value. Slave traders seemed to agree, as advertisements for their services continued to appear fairly steadily throughout most of the Confederacy.

Even the issuing of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in the fall of 1862 could not shake white Southerners’ faith in their cause and in the future of slavery. If anything, their faith grew stronger. Demands for enslaved labor by Confederate, state and local governments escalated in the months following the announcement, slaveholders saw purchasing enslaved people as a sign of their patriotism, and newspaper editors crowed about the large sales and rising prices they saw in the market.

The Mississippi editor of the Hinds County Gazette, for instance, noted that at local slave sales he saw “pretty fair prices considering the assurances from Washington that the institution shall be wiped out.” Even cockier was the editor of the Staunton Spectator in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, who scoffed that “just at the very time when Lincoln declares that [slaves] are emancipated they command higher prices than ever before. Could anything demonstrate more satisfactorily,” he asked, “the futility of his infamous proclamation? The people of the South never felt that the institution of slavery was ever safer than at the present time.”

Such trumpeting of high prices for enslaved people, however, disguised the creeping impact of economic disruptions. It was true that market prices for slaves rose steadily and rapidly from the middle of 1862 and continued to do so until the end of the war. Young enslaved men who sold for just over $1,000 in the fall of 1862 cost nearly double that a year later, nearly five times that by the start of 1864, and in some places roughly 10 times that by the early spring of 1865. But in real prices those numbers lagged significantly behind skyrocketing inflation, which in Virginia approached nearly 1,500 percent by late 1863.

And though the real prices of enslaved people stayed slightly higher in Texas and in interior cities such as Montgomery, Ala., and Raleigh, N.C., that were more secure from attack, they dropped almost everywhere within months of the war’s outset and kept dropping through its conclusion. By the spring of 1863 they were just a third of what they had been late in 1861. By the end of the war, real prices were less than one-tenth of what they had been when the first shots were fired, and one estimate suggests that if market prices had actually kept pace with inflation, a young enslaved man in early 1865 would have cost more than $84,000 in Confederate currency.

There were white Southerners, of course, who saw the bluster of newspaper editors for the facade or the delusion that it was, and who understood that the institution they had fled the Union to defend was crumbling around them. Particularly from Vicksburg and Gettysburg forward, slaveholders in some places dumped enslaved people onto the market, hoping to realize whatever they might get in return and preserve their dwindling resources. Late in 1864, for example, the die-hard Confederate Edmund Ruffin sold nearly every enslaved person who had not yet run from his Virginia plantation, with his son observing that they “were sold on account of the expense of keeping and the doubtful tenure of the property.”

Virginia Hayes Shepherd, meanwhile, who was herself enslaved near Norfolk, Va., remembered that white fears of widespread emancipation spread as the war dragged on, and she recalled the day when the sheriff, on orders from her owner, came to the hotel where her mother worked and locked her, Virginia and Virginia’s brother in jail alongside “hundreds of other mothers and their children sleeping on the floor at night just waiting their turn to be sold South.”

Yet Shepherd also remembered that of those crowded into the jail, “each day some were sold off.” Remarkably, no matter how poorly things went for the Confederacy on the battlefield, there remained white Southerners either unable to fathom the prospect of ultimate defeat or unwilling to countenance it. Even as growing numbers of people in 1864 and 1865 grasped that the war was going to end, and that there would be no slavery after it, others said with their pocketbooks that they considered that an impossibility.

In Charleston, the trading firm of Alonzo White sold a lot of nearly 100 slaves early in 1864 for an average price of more than $2,500. Several months later the estate of the Richmond trader Silas Omohundro sold 13 slaves to other traders who were sure they could turn a profit, even though collectively they paid the estate nearly $45,000. In November, 18 people were sold in Augusta, Ga., bringing in nearly $35,000, and a score more belonging to a North Carolina estate were sold in December in Raleigh, where a newspaper editor reported that there were numerous persons “anxious to buy.” In Montgomery, Thomas Frazier was so certain about the flow of buyers that he actually opened a new slave brokerage firm in the spring of 1864, bragging that he would “keep constantly on hand a large and well selected stock such as families, house servants, gentlemen’s body servants, seamstresses, boys and girls of all descriptions, blacksmiths, field hands.”

Remarkably, such willful blindness continued into the spring of 1865. In March, J.B. Jones, the Confederate war clerk in Richmond, was incredulous that “buying and selling [of slaves] for what they call ‘dollars’ are still extensively indulged.” For some people, the slave trade that had been the lifeblood of the antebellum South was the only thing they had left, and they would have to be told in no uncertain terms that squeezing profits from the bodies of enslaved people was no longer their prerogative.

Arguably, that message was delivered on April 2, 1865. As Jefferson Davis and his government prepared to flee Richmond, so did Robert Lumpkin, a slave trader and proprietor of one of the most notorious slave jails in the South. As Davis and his cabinet secretaries scrambled to get out of the city, Lumpkin cleared out his jail and dragged 50 enslaved men, women and children in handcuffs and chains to the train station, only to be informed by sentinels guarding the train leaving Richmond that there was no room.

Instead, the last slave coffle that the United States would ever see walked on, trudging atop a carpet of Confederate bonds that had been underwritten by their sweat and that now lay abandoned, worthless and blanketing the muddy streets of the panic-ridden capital of Virginia. There would be no more sales. There would be no more chains. There would be no more jails. But nothing would bring back the children of the old women who wailed as they watched the parade in Charleston.

Joshua D. Rothman is a professor of history and the director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama.

Image: A slave trading firm in Atlanta, 1864.Credit Library of Congress

From: opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

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Liberation as a Death Sentence

By Jennifer Schuessler
From: nytimes.com

When Civil War History published a paper this spring raising the conflict’s military death toll to 750,000 from 620,000, that journal’s editors called it one of the most important pieces of scholarship ever to appear in its pages.

But to Jim Downs, an assistant professor of history at Connecticut College and the author of the new book "Sick From Freedom," issued last month by Oxford University Press, that accounting of what he calls “the largest biological crisis of the 19th century” does not go nearly far enough.

To understand the war’s scale and impact truly, Professor Downs argues, historians have to look beyond military casualties and consider the public health crisis that faced the newly liberated slaves, who sickened and died in huge numbers in the years following Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.
   
“We’re getting ready to celebrate 150 years of the movement from slavery to freedom,” he said in a recent interview at a cafe near his apartment in Chelsea. “But hundreds of thousands of people did not survive that movement.”
   
“Sick From Freedom,” at 178 pages (not counting 56 pages of tightly argued footnotes), may seem like a bantamweight in a field crowded with doorstops. But it’s already being greeted as an important challenge to our understanding of an event that scholars and laypeople alike have preferred to see as an uplifting story of newly liberated people vigorously claiming their long-denied rights.
   
“The freed people we want to see are the ones with all their belongings on the wagon, heading toward freedom,” said David W. Blight, a professor of history at Yale and the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. “But the truth is, for every person making it there may have been one falling by the way.”
   
Professor Downs, 39, is part of a wave of scholars who are sketching out a new, darker history of emancipation, Professor Blight said, one that recognizes it as a moral watershed while acknowledging its often devastating immediate impact. And the statistics offered in “Sick from Freedom” are certainly sobering, if necessarily tentative.
   
At least one quarter of the four million former slaves got sick or died between 1862 and 1870, Professor Downs writes, including at least 60,000 (the actual number is probably two or three times higher, he argues) who perished in a smallpox epidemic that began in Washington and spread through the South as former slaves traveled in search of work — an epidemic that Professor Downs says he is the first to reconstruct as a national event.
   
Historians of the Civil War have long acknowledged that two-thirds of all military casualties came from disease rather than heroic battle. But they have been more reluctant to dwell on the high number of newly emancipated slaves that fell prey to disease, dismissing earlier accounts as propaganda generated by racist 19th-century doctors and early-20th-century scholars bent on arguing that blacks were biologically inferior and unsuited to full political rights.
   
Instead, historians who came of age during the civil rights movement emphasized ways in which the former slaves asserted their agency, playing as important a role in their own liberation as Lincoln or the Union army.
   
“For so long, people were afraid to talk about freed people’s health,” Professor Downs said. “They wanted to talk about agency. But if you have smallpox, you don’t have agency. You can’t even get out of bed.”
   
Professor Downs first became interested in the health of newly liberated slaves when he was a graduate student at Columbia University with a job as a research assistant in the papers of Harriet Jacobs, the author of the 1861 autobiography “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” and a vivid chronicler of the often abysmal conditions in the “contraband camps” where escaped slaves congregated during the war and in settlements of freed people more generally after it. The papers were full of heart-wrenching encounters with sick and dying freed people — references that he noticed were strikingly absent in recent scholarship.
   

As he developed the topic into his dissertation, Professor Downs recalls sparring with his adviser, Eric Foner, the author of the classic book "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Business, 1863-1877."

“He would joke: ‘Look in my index. You don’t even see smallpox,’ ” Professor Downs said.
But as he sorted through the little-explored records of the medical division of the Freedmen’s Bureau and other archives, he found reams of statistical and anecdotal accounts of sick and dying freed people, whose suffering was seen by even some sympathetic Northern reformers as evidence that the race was doomed to extinction.
   
Meanwhile tallies of the smaller number of white smallpox victims were kept only lackadaisically and eventually crossed out all together — evidence, he argues, that officials were eager to see the outbreak as a “black epidemic” not worth bothering about. (By contrast a cholera outbreak in 1866 that mainly affected whites was vigorously combated, he notes.)
   
Professor Downs also found a medical system that was less concerned with healing the sick than with separating out healthy workers who could be sent back to the fields, and then closing the hospitals as quickly as possible.
   
In an e-mail Professor Foner praised “Sick From Freedom” as offering “a highly original perspective” that “deserves wide attention.” And Professor Downs makes no bones about wanting to place health issues at the center of multiple scholarly conversations about the war and its aftermath.
“I wanted to say, ‘You’re not allowed to do the history of labor or the history of the family or the history of citizenship unless you go through my book,’ ” he said. “I wanted to be able to tell a story about these people’s lives that wouldn't get pushed aside as melodrama.”
   
He is also not shy about drawing out his work’s contemporary relevance. His dissertation included an epilogue about AIDS, another epidemic, he said, that broke out shortly after a moment of liberation (in this case of gay people), was blamed on the victims and was largely ignored by the federal government. (He dropped the point from the book, which instead ends with an epilogue showing how policies developed in the post-Civil War South were exported to the Western frontier, with similarly devastating health consequences for American Indians.)
   
Professor Downs also sees parallels with the current health care debate. “Freed slaves,” he writes in the book, were “the first advocates of federal health care” — a statement that could be read from the left as an example of early black political activism, or from the right as an instance of newly liberated people immediately asking for a government handout.
   
That second reading was one he initially worried about, Professor Downs said. But he ultimately just let the historical chips fall where they may.
   
“I’ve been alone with these people in the archives,” he said. “I have a responsibility to tell their stories.”

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How the End of Slavery Led to Starvation and Death for Millions of Black Americans

In the brutal chaos that followed the Civil War, life after emancipation was harsh and often short, new book argues

By Paul Harris

Hundreds of thousands of slaves freed during the American Civil War died from disease and hunger after being liberated, according to a new book.

The analysis, by historian Jim Downs of Connecticut College, casts a shadow over one of the most celebrated narratives of American history, which sees the freeing of the slaves as a triumphant righting of the wrongs of a southern plantation system that kept millions of black Americans in chains.

But, as Downs shows in his book, Sick From Freedom, the reality of emancipation during the chaos of war and its bloody aftermath often fell brutally short of that positive image. Instead, freed slaves were often neglected by union soldiers or faced rampant disease, including horrific outbreaks of smallpox and cholera. Many of them simply starved to death.

After combing through obscure records, newspapers and journals Downs believes that about a quarter of the four million freed slaves either died or suffered from illness between 1862 and 1870. He writes in the book that it can be considered "the largest biological crisis of the 19th century" and yet it is one that has been little investigated by contemporary historians.

Downs believes much of that is because at the time of the civil war, which raged between 1861 and 1865 and pitted the unionist north against the confederate south, many people did not want to investigate the tragedy befalling the freed slaves. Many northerners were little more sympathetic than their southern opponents when it came to the health of the freed slaves and anti-slavery abolitionists feared the disaster would prove their critics right.

"In the 19th century people did not want to talk about it. Some did not care and abolitionists, when they saw so many freed people dying, feared that it proved true what some people said: that slaves were not able to exist on their own," Downs told the Observer.

Downs's book is full of terrible vignettes about the individual experiences of slave families who embraced their freedom from the brutal plantations on which they had been born or sold to. Many ended up in encampments called "contraband camps" that were often near union army bases. However, conditions were unsanitary and food supplies limited. Shockingly, some contraband camps were actually former slave pens, meaning newly freed people ended up being kept virtual prisoners back in the same cells that had previously held them. In many such camps disease and hunger led to countless deaths. Often the only way to leave the camp was to agree to go back to work on the very same plantations from which the slaves had recently escaped.

Treatment by union soldiers could also be brutal. Downs reconstructed the experiences of one freed slave, Joseph Miller, who had come with his wife and four children to a makeshift freed slave refugee camp within the union stronghold of Camp Nelson in Kentucky. In return for food and shelter for his family Miller joined the army. Yet union soldiers in 1864 still cleared the ex-slaves out of Camp Nelson, effectively abandoning them to scavenge in a war-ravaged and disease-ridden landscape. One of Miller's young sons quickly sickened and died. Three weeks later, his wife and another son died. Ten days after that, his daughter perished too. Finally, his last surviving child also fell terminally ill. By early 1865 Miller himself was dead. For Downs such tales are heartbreaking.

"So many of these people are dying of starvation and that is such a slow death," he said.

Downs has collected numerous shocking accounts of the lives of freed slaves. He came across accounts of deplorable conditions in hospitals and refugee camps, where doctors often had racist theories about how black Americans reacted to disease. Things were so bad that one military official in Tennessee in 1865 wrote that former slaves were: "dying by scores – that sometimes 30 per day die and are carried out by wagonloads without coffins, and thrown promiscuously, like brutes, into a trench".

So bad were the health problems suffered by freed slaves, and so high the death rates, that some observers of the time even wondered if they would all die out. One white religious leader in 1863 expected black Americans to vanish. "Like his brother the Indian of the forest, he must melt away and disappear forever from the midst of us," the man wrote.

Such racial attitudes among northerners seem shocking, but Downs says they were common. Yet Downs believes that his book takes nothing away from the moral value of the emancipation.
Instead, he believes that acknowledging the terrible social cost born by the newly emancipated accentuates their heroism.

"This challenges the romantic narrative of emancipation. It was more complex and more nuanced than that. Freedom comes at a cost," Downs said.

From: theguardian.com

IMAGE: Fugitive slaves in Virginia in about 1863. Photograph: Andrew J. Russell/Medford Historical Society Collection/CORBIS

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