Ill and Injured Children on Antebellum Slave Plantations: A Dangerous Childhood

By Marie Jenkins Schwartz

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Childhood was the least healthy stage of a slave’s life (Steckel 449). Prone to accident and disease, many children never lived to adulthood. Planter Martin W. Philips became so inured to high rates of childhood morbidity on his Mississippi plantation that he did not even bother to tally the number who died in the farm journal he used to keep track of daily events. When the adult slave Jane died in 1859, he noted that her death had brought to five the number “grown negroes” who had passed away since the plantation’s establishment in 1840. There was “no telling the number of younger ones,” he added (Philips 463). Of the five children born in bondage to Edna and Bob Jones in North Carolina, only one son—Hyacinth—lived long enough to be given a name, and even he died in infancy (Rawick ser. 2, vol. 15, pt.2: 25).

High rates of mortality, morbidity, and injury among enslaved children worried antebellum slaveholders because it threatened the Southern way of life. The United States had ended its participation in the international slave trade as of 1808, and slaveholders knew that slavery could remain profitable for future generations only if enough enslaved children survived to replace older slaves who died each year. Moreover, high rates of sickness and death suggested failure on the part of owners to care adequately for the youngsters, which encouraged a growing number of people, particularly in the North, to call for its end. Sentimental notions about childhood were gaining ground throughout the nation, which placed pressure on slaveholders to show concern for the enslaved youngsters living in their midst. The human quality that causes a person to empathize with someone who is suffering further motivated planters to worry about the children’s health. Slaveholders cultivated an image of themselves as paternalistic stewards of slaves. High rates of death, [End Page 56] disease, and injury called into question the ability of an owner to live up to this ideal. In more practical and immediate terms, neglect of children roiled relations with adult slaves rendering them less willing to cooperate in the workplace. Yet slaveholders proved reluctant to take steps that might have given enslaved children a better chance of survival.

Simply put, slaveholder desire to care for children was tempered by a desire for profit. To deflect criticism for the children’s poor health, they employed negative stereotyping of parents and other child caregivers and pointed to their own supposed benevolence. Rather than be horrified by what was happening to individual girls and boys, owners congratulated themselves on demographic trends that showed the enslaved population to be increasing. They considered home care—not professional care—the best approach to children’s health: indeed they had few medical allies in caring for enslaved children. They lauded whatever attention white mistresses gave to the children as superior to the care and nurture provided by enslaved parents, particularly mothers. They delegated nursing and childcare duties to black nurses, whom they said performed poorly. And they refused to acknowledge their own role in creating conditions that put children at risk for illness and injury and even death.

Slave owners took more interest in the overall birth and survival rate of slaves than in the fate of individual boys and girls. As long as the birthrate remained high enough and the death rate low enough to replenish a plantation’s slave population, planters considered the health status of enslaved children and adults acceptable. George Noble Jones refused to heed a warning that harsh punishments by one of his overseers were damaging his slaves’ health because he was satisfied with “their natural increase which in the last year has been over ten percent, in a gang of 120” (Phillips and Glunt 124). As long as planters could tally more births than deaths in their farm journals, they were satisfied.
Physicians in the era took little professional interest in childhood ailments, which meant they were not strong allies in the fight against childhood mortality and morbidity. Doctors were eager to treat slaves at the behest of owners: the...

From: The Southern Quarterly, Volume 53, Numbers 3/4, Spring/Summer 2016, pp. 56-69

From: muse.jhu.edu

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Cruel Medical Experiments On Slaves Were Widespread In The American South

By Dan Vergano, BuzzFeed News Reporter, 4-28-15

Invasive surgeries and other shocking experiments were “commonplace” on slaves before the Civil War, according to a sweeping new survey of old medical journals.

Electric shocks, brain surgery, amputations — these are just some of the medical experiments widely performed on American slaves in the mid-1800s, according to a new survey of medical journals published before the Civil War.

Previous work by historians had uncovered a handful of rogue physicians conducting medical experiments on slaves. But the new report, published in the latest issue of the journal Endeavour, suggests that a widespread network of medical colleges and doctors across the American South carried out and published slave experiments for decades.

“The physicians and colleges saw an opportunity in the institution of slavery to elevate themselves, and they took it,” historian Stephen Kenny of the University of Liverpool in the U.K., who wrote the report, told BuzzFeed News. “It was commonplace.”

Medical journals that no longer exist, such as the Baltimore Medical and Surgical Journal and the Western and Southern Medical Recorder, overflow with reports of surgical experiments to treat injuries, birth defects, and tumors, all pioneered on slaves. Doctors often performed the experiments “apparently without pain relief,” according to the study, in an era before anesthesia or sterile surgery.
The study details four surgical experiments in particular, dating from 1833 to 1858, that doctors performed on slaves. One, for example, involved severing “healthy looking brain” from a slave with a head injury, killing him. Another removed a tumor from an unnamed young girl’s lymph node, which likely made it swell grotesquely around her head.

The physician and slave owner William Aiken of Winnsboro, North Carolina, reported an 1852 experiment on a slave named Lucinda, who suffered from a bony growth around her right eye. Aiken and other doctors disfigured her by boring holes in her head — without chloroform, a gas that was used at the time for anesthesia — to remove the growth.

These cases were reported in respected medical periodicals read from Europe to the Western frontier.

“Medicine is an integral part of the story of slavery,” Todd Savitt, a medical historian at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University, told BuzzFeed News.

Savitt first reported in the 1970s that medical schools in Virginia had trafficked in slaves prior to the Civil War. But historians had seen medical experiments on slaves as a practice isolated to a few physicians — until now.

“We are moving here toward a view of experiments on slaves as something more systematic,” Savitt said.

In the summer of 1989, construction workers unearthed 10,000 bones from a basement belonging to the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta.

Many of the bones showed signs of dissection. Forensic investigators quickly discovered they were the legacy of five decades of grave robbing intended to provide medical students before and after the Civil War with cadavers for anatomical lessons. This practice didn’t end until the early 20th century.
That medical college and others like it grew in the shadow of slavery, Kenny said, and the professionalization of medicine in the decades before the Civil War. “Physicians needed to learn anatomy and slaves provided a supply of bodies,” he said.

The price of slaves increased precipitously in 1807, after the halt of the British slave trade. That made medical treatment to heal injured or diseased slaves “an industry,” Kenny said, and helped create a demand for experiments.

Slave hospitals sprang up around trading centers such as Augusta, New Orleans, and Charleston, South Carolina, to doctor sick slaves intended for sale and to heal valuable workers.

The South Carolinian physician J. Marion Sims, often referred to as the “Father of Gynecology,” developed a surgery for complications of childbirth on slave women in the 1840s. (Long seen as a villain, more recent historical research has suggested that some women willingly participated in Sims’ surgeries, making him a more ambiguous figure.) Many surgical techniques — including amputations and experiments using ether as anesthesia — were tested on slaves before they made their way into standard medicine.

“In the days before clinical trials, doctors did not universally agree what constituted appropriate standards of care,” Marie Jenkins Schwartz, a historian at the University of Rhode Island, told BuzzFeed News by email. “One thing I know from studying doctors (other than the very successful Sims) is this: reckless experimentation does not make for good medicine,” said Schwartz, author of Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South.

The old studies did not mention whether the slaves consented to the experiments, and physical restraints were common. Some reports describe slaves bolting from the room when subjected to electrical shocks or scalpels without pain relief.

A woman named Harriet who was suffering from seizures was electrically shocked in an 1848 experiment for 53 minutes, for example, even though it required three doctors to restrain her. Doctors interpreted her protests about her back being burned as “as a sign of electrotherapy’s efficacy,” according to the study, and recommended it for everyone suffering “nervous disorders.”
“Under the skin, they knew on some level that people were the same. So they used [slaves] in medicine,” Savitt said. “They knew that, but still saw slaves as different from other people. I struggle with the question every time I’m asked to explain it.”

Although historians are only beginning to explore widespread experimentation on slaves and grave robbing, Kenny added, the findings won’t surprise black communities near the sites of medical hospitals. Folklore of “Night Doctors” who robbed graves, or “Black Bottle Men” who poisoned patients to dissect them, is more than a century old, he said, and likely springs from the era of these cruel experiments.

Image 1: Lucinda, a slave subjected to experimental surgery for an eye tumor. Waring Historical Library, MUSC, Charleston, South Carolina

Image 2: A slave with a tumor attached to her head, likely triggered by a surgical experiment in 1833. Courtesy of Waring Historical Library, MUSC, Charleston, South Carolina

From: buzzfeed.com

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Jackson Street Hospital in Augusta, Georgia

By Tim Talbott, 2-11-2014

When it comes to primary sources few things catch me by surprise anymore. However, looking through the May 1860 issue of the Southern Cultivator, an antebellum agricultural publication produced in Augusta, Georgia, I came across an advertisement for the Jackson Street Hospital in Augusta.  That, of course, is not the surprising part; the surprising part is that the advertisement claimed this medical facility was a "SURGICAL INFIRMARY FOR NEGROES."

Immediately, I thought that this hospital was not solely for free people of color. Perhaps they treated free people of color, but why would a hospital for free blacks advertise in a planter's journal? It appears to me that this hospital was mainly for the treatment, rehabilitation, and cure of afflicted enslaved individuals. Is that not fascinating?

The ad strikes me as particularly intriguing because of some of the language that is included in it. First, the opening sentence clearly states that this hospital "is an acknowledged advantage to the Patient, the Owner, and the attending Physician." It clearly states the word "owner," which, of course, means it was for slaves. Secondly, it states that the hospital was established due to the "great need in the State of Georgia, and in the adjoining States." This phrase is strengthened by the next one. That is, that the infirmary "was established, ten year ago" just "for such a purpose." Now, if the Jackson Street Hospital was not proving successful and was being underutilized it is doubtful that it would have existed for a decade. Owners apparently saw the hospital beneficial and effective in the treatment of their slaves.

The ad also makes note that it is located near the town's railroad depot so owners could seemingly send their sick, diseased or worn out enslaved workers via train to be treated. Hospital amenities are enumerated as well: "rooms are furnished with proper bedding and accommodations; and Hot, Cold shower Baths, are at all times, convenient on each floor of the building." Mentioned also is the attending staff of "Resident Physician, and both Male and Female nurses" that are "in constant attendance, and every effort made to render the patients comfortable."

Patients were received by locomotive, as mentioned above, or by steamboat. And, it only cost $10 per month for room, board, and nursing per patient. To give a comparison, in 1860, field slaves often were rented for about $10 per month.

I wasn't able to find much information on the named doctors, Henry F. Campbell and Robert Campbell, but I did find that they were brothers. The 1860 census shows Henry as a 36 year old physician with a wife named Sarah and a daughter in the household. Robert is listed as a 34 year old physician with wife Caroline and six children. Henry was worth $25,000 in real estate (likely the value of the hospital building) and $5,000 in personal property. Robert owned $8,500 in real estate and an amazing $20,900 in personal property. I was not able to find out if the brothers were slaveholders.

One source, a book on Augusta's history and published in 1890, claimed Jackson Street Hospital had 50 beds and an auditorium for clinical lectures. The book mentioned in common Lost Cause terms that "its [the hospital's] ample patronage and support well vindicated the kindness and humanity of the Southern people, in the care and attention they were willing to secure, at liberal cost, for the sick and afflicted among their dependents."  On one level I see what the author was saying here, and it certainly fits well with the paternalistic label that some owners reveled in. But on the other hand it appears, too, that owners were likely seeking to heal and cure their slaves for another motive - that is to get more labor from them. This source says that the Jackson Street Hospital operated until after the Civil War when Freedmen's Bureau hospitals took over, "supported out of the public funds."

This article also states that Dr. Henry F. Campbell was educated at the Medical College of Georgia, graduating in 1842. During the Civil War Dr.Campbell apparently secured a position as an army doctor and served in the hospital that attended to Georgia soldiers in Richmond, Virginia. After the war he served on the faculty of the New Orleans School of Medicine and also worked at Charity Hospital. Later he returned to teach at the University of Georgia. He also published numerous articles on various medical issues.

In all of my reading on slavery I had never heard of a hospital that advertised in a planter's magazine. I often had read that owners went to great expense paying for the heath care of their enslaved populations, and why wouldn't they, being such a valuable investment. But that health care usually involved a local doctor making house calls at the slave quarters to attend to sick or diseased slaves or assist in a difficult birthing. The idea of an actual slave hospital is something that is totally new to me, but this evidence proves that regardless of owners' motive - benevolent or otherwise - the health of some masters' slave work force was important enough to go great expense and effort.

From: randomthoughtsonhistory.blogspot.com

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Childhood and Transatlantic Slavery

By Steven Mintz, Columbia University

Until recently, the subject of childhood under slavery was almost entirely unstudied. This was true despite the fact that childhood is central to an understanding of slavery. In classical antiquity, abandoned children were a major source of slaves. Although most sub-Saharan Africans forced into slavery were in their teens and 20s, a substantial and growing proportion were children. In the American South in the decades before the Civil War, half of all slaves were under the age of 16.

A focus on children not only underscores slavery's oppressions, it also reveals the ways that enslaved children and their parents dealt with slavery's hardships and horrors. It demonstrates that even children were active agents who were able to carve out a space where they could find a degree of autonomy.

The study of slave children has brought many important facts to light. Infant and child mortality rates were twice as high among slave children as among southern white children. A major contributor to the high infant and child death rate was chronic undernourishment. Slaveowners showed surprisingly little concern for slave mothers' health or diet during pregnancy, providing pregnant women with no extra rations and employing them in intensive field work even in the last week before they gave birth. Not surprisingly, slave mothers suffered high rates of spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, and deaths shortly after birth. Half of all slave infants weighed less than 5.5 pounds at birth, or what we would today consider to be severely underweight.

Growth rates among slave children were extremely slow. Most infants were weaned early, within three or four months of birth, and then fed gruel or porridge made of cornmeal. Around the age of three, they began to eat vegetables soups, potatoes, molasses, grits, hominy, and cornbread. This diet lacked protein, thiamine, niacin, calcium, magnesium, and vitamin D, and as a result, slave children often suffered from night blindness, abdominal swellings, swollen muscles, bowed legs, skin lesions, and convulsions. These apparently stemmed from beriberi, pellagra, tetany, rickets, and kwashiorkor, diseases that are caused by protein and nutritional deficiencies.

Deprived of an adequate diet, slave children were very small by modern standards. Their average height at age three was shorter than 99 percent of 20th-century American three year olds. At age 17, slave men were shorter than 96 percent of present day 17-year-old men and slave women were shorter than 80 percent of contemporary women.

About half of all U.S. slave children grew up apart from their father, either because he lived on another plantation, had been sold away, or was white. On large plantations, infants and very young children were supervised and cared for by adults other than their parents. Children as young as two or three might work at domestic chores, including childcare or collecting trash and kindling, toting water, scaring away birds, weeding, or plucking grubs off of plants. Generally, in the U.S. South, children entered field work between the ages of eight and 12.

Slave children received harsh punishments, not dissimilar from those meted out to adults. They might be whipped or even required to swallow worms they failed to pick off of cotton or tobacco plants. During adolescence, a majority of slave youth were sold or hired away.

The study of childhood under slavery has given rise to a series of controversies. One is the extent to which slave children succeeded in "stealing" a childhood. Despite slavery's hardships and brutalities, many slave children were able to experience something that we would consider a childhood. Children played with home-made toys, including improvised marbles and hobby horses. Even where education was forbidden or strongly discouraged, a surprising proportion—perhaps between five and ten percent—learned how to read and write. Through their activities, games, religion, and relations with kin and other members of the slave community, children were able to make life bearable.

Like children of the Holocaust, they played games that helped them cope with slavery's oppressions, including mock auctions or games that included whipping. Their songs, too, helped them deal with slavery's horrors. One song included the following lyrics that addressed the subject of family separation directly: "Mammy, is Ole' Massa gwin'er sell us tomorrow? / Yes, my chile. / Whar he gwin'er sell us? / Way down South in Georgia."

Another area of controversy involves the extent to which slave parents were able to shield their children from slavery's brutalities. We have discovered that there was a "tug-of-war" between slave children's parents and plantation masters and mistresses, who were eager to make slave children, especially young children, feel loyalty, and even gratitude, to their owners. To win over children's affection, owners sometime gave them gifts and favors. At times, owners asked children to report rules violations within the slave quarters.

Slave parents, in turn, sought to instill in their children a sense of loyalty to the slave community as a whole. They taught children to refer to other girls and boys as sister and brother, and to unrelated adults as aunt or uncle. Through folk tales, such as the famous "Br'er Rabbit" stories, parents taught their children how to outwit more powerful adversaries.

Less studied questions are how the lives of slave children differed in urban and rural areas or on larger and smaller plantations, and how childhood experience differed at various points in time.

Why I Taught the Source
In reconstructing children's experience under slavery, historians tap a wide range of sources. These include the published testimony of fugitive or emancipated slaves, contemporary letters, journals, plantation records, and oral histories, such as those collected by the U.S. Works Projects Administration during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Recently, scholars have supplemented traditional sources with unconventional forms of evidence, including photographs, slave songs, and artifacts, such as toys.

Published narratives by fugitive or former slaves provide especially useful insights into the world history of slave children. Especially notable are those by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, who were enslaved in the U.S. during the early 19th century and whose writings underscore important aspects about childhood under slavery: (1) the extent of interracial interaction, including interracial play, on plantations in the U.S. South; (2) the moment when the full reality of life-long bondage dawned on slave children and the moment when they learned that adults in their lives, including parents, could not protect them from punishment; and (3) the harsh reality of sexual abuse faced by slave girls in their teenage years.

Especially useful in helping to place slavery in a world history perspective is one of the first slave narratives, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African, originally published in 1772. A former slave who purchased his freedom from a Quaker merchant in 1766, he traveled across the Atlantic and the Mediterranean on British merchant ships, served in the British navy, and became a leading figure in the 18th-century British antislavery movement. His autobiography, which went through nine editions between 1789 and 1797 and was translated into Dutch, German, and Russian, awakened thousands of readers to the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade.

His narrative challenges the view that Africa at the time of the slave trade was a benighted or backward region. His region, "a charming fruitful vale, named Essaka," was "uncommonly rich," and his fellow countrymen were "almost a nation of dancers, musicians, and poets." He offers a graphic account of his kidnapping into slavery at the age of 11, and describes being held captive along the West African coast for seven months before was subsequently sold to British slavers, who shipped him to Barbados and then took him to Virginia.

His narrative also offers a harrowing account of the shock and isolation he felt during the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. His description of the inhuman conditions aboard the slave ship has a power that has not been matched. "The air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died," he wrote. "The closeness of the place and the heat of the climate," he wrote, "added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. . . . The wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable. . . . The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable."

Excerpted from: chnm.gmu.edu

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The Slave South: Medicine Chests and Self-Sufficiency in Medical Care

From: historyengine.richmond.edu

R. Jeffery and A. Alt advertised the sale of aromatic snuff in the American Beacon and Commercial Daily on June, 27 1817 in Norfolk, Virginia. Jonathon P. Whitwell prepared and bottled the aromatic snuff in Boston. Whitwell shipped the snuff to Norfolk and various other locations across the East coast. Jeffery and Alt sold the aromatic snuff to Virginians who desired to fill their medicine chests in order to gain self-sufficiency in medical care.

According to Catharine C. Hopely, a tutor at Forest Hill near Tappahannock County in 1815, a capacious medicine chest is an inseparable part of a Southern establishment; and I have seen medicines enough dispensed to furnish good occupation for an assistant when colds or epidemics have prevailed. Virginians frequently resorted to home-remedies due to the inaccessibility of many farms to main highways, good roads and means to speedy transportation that prevented them from reaching physicians. Thus, Virginians on plantations, farms, and even urban households desired self-sufficiency in medical care. The desire for self-sufficiency stemmed from the economics of slave holding that instructed masters to do everything possible to keep their slave force healthy.

When caring for slaves, if a combination of drugs or particular medication arrested symptoms, slave owners used that treatment until a better one came along. According to historian Todd L. Savitt, plantation overseers and owners recorded useful medical recipes and clipped suggestion from newspapers into their journals. Most homes possessed a medical digest in addition to a well stocked medicine chest. Many Virginians owned Simon's Planters Guideand Family book of Medicine or Ewell's Medical Companion. Digests presented specific instructions on the treatment of many disease, the proper dosages of drugs for each age group, and the best uses for most medicine.

Historian Stephanie P. Browner claims that slaves frequently treated their diseases or illnesses themselves without their master's knowledge. Slaves did this for several reasons; to offset the failures and harshness of white remedies or the negligence of masters, and most often to exert some control over their own lives. Black home remedies secretly circulated throughout slave quarters, and elders passed them down to younger generations. According to Browner, some medicines contained ingredients that had purely superstitious values, but slaves mainly obtained cures from local plants. Occasionally, whites learned of an effective treatment that slaves used, and adopted it for themselves. However, this did not affect the business of Jeffery and Alt who traveled around Virginia and sold medicine to Virginians who desired to fill their medicine chests with a large assortment of remedies.

Slaves represented a financial investment that required protection, and it made enormous sense for masters to maintain the health of their slaves. Awareness that certain illnesses could easily spread to a master's own families if not properly treated became a strong incentive for masters to keep their slaves healthy. A sick and physically incapacitated slave could not work, and represented a financial loss. The economics of slave holding instructed masters to do everything possible to keep their slave force healthy. This required masters to keep a well stocked medicine chest and adopt an assortment of home remedies.

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Slave Owner Uses Modern Medicine to Treat Malaria

From: historyengine.richmond.edu

In late September 1846 several slaves from the Fairntosh plantation in Durham, North Carolina fell sick with malaria. Their owner, planter Paul Cameron, tells his father Duncan how he provided medicine for his sick slaves as well as the traditional herbs and teas.

“Since that time we have a great deal of chill and fever at the mill quarter in [unintelligible] I have made the best arrangements possible that I could for administration of medicine by cutting it up into portions one g[rain] for the elder ones and five grains for the younger [unintelligible] with a little oil with instructions for the use of our usual teas and no doubt I will get about as good accounts from them as from the other.”

Paul Cameron, like many slave owners, was carefully attuned to the health of his work force. Neither his concern over the health of his slaves however, nor his quickness to use newer medical treatments, necessarily indicate that Paul Cameron was a more humane owner of slaves, or that he possessed more egalitarian views. Rather, Paul’s use of medicines was part of a larger debate over medical treatment for slaves. The development and application of medical science was part of the ideological environment of the Antebellum South and an important argument for the justification of Slavery.

The US South in the 19th century was an unhealthy place. Epidemics of cholera, yellow fever, and typhoid ravaged the population, killing many of those infected. Malaria, though not as lethal as other common diseases, was a great concern for slave owners as it could severely weaken their work force. Spread through the Anopheles mosquito, the parasite causing malaria damages the blood cells and the liver and causes fever, vomiting, chills and headaches. Though it infrequently causes death, the initial infection can last several weeks, and relapses of symptoms can occur months, even years, after the initial infection. 19th century physicians did not understand the origins of the disease, nor that it was spread through mosquitoes, but that did not stop them from prescribing a multitude of treatments for what they referred to as “fever and chills” or the “autumnal fever”. In the early 19th century a debate arouse over the proper treatment of slaves who contracted malaria.

Physicians were not taught specific treatments for slave diseases, despite calls for such training, and owners and doctors alike were left guessing over the proper course of medical treatment. (Savit 1981) Treatments such as bleeding and blistering had fallen out of use on whites, but were still prescribed for blacks suffering from the same diseases. Prevailing medical thought considered slaves to be resistant to malaria and other tropical diseases, and “those few blacks who fell victim to the fever were treated in a simple manner. Hot bricks were applied to the feet, hot brandy or water given in large quantities, as well as hot snake-root tea containing forty or fifty drops of spirit of ammonia.”(Haller 1973) This spirit of ammonia is likely the medicine Paul gave to his sick slaves.

Paul was confident that this minimal treatment would suffice because the leading physicians of his day believed blacks to be resistant to malaria and other tropical diseases. This belief served as a justification for the institution of slavery, as such resistance was seen as evidence of Africans’ natural suitability and inclination for fieldwork. Paul’s treatment of his slaves was modern in comparison to his Alabama overseer Charles Lewellyn, who generally took a less active approach to his sick slaves. Yet, this attention should not be considered to be an indication of a kinder type of slave owner or a rejection of the harshness of the plantation system. The modern medical science practiced in the Antebellum South created new justifications for the institution of slavery. Paul Cameron may have been modern in his application of medical science, but his motives were grounded in an ideology of racial inferiority that served to legitimize slavery.

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Slave Medicine

From: nchealthandhealing.com

In antebellum North Carolina, ownership of slaves included the right to direct their treatment when they were sick. As they did with their own families, slaveholders usually tried to treat sick and injured slaves themselves before consulting a physician. In fact, doctors were called only for life-threatening cases. Then slaves were treated with the same medicines and therapies that whites relied on.

Health issues often brought slaves into conflict with their owners, since they held very different beliefs about the causes and treatment of illnesses. Enslaved African Americans drew upon their own healing traditions. Many distrusted the harsh therapies used by white physicians in the 1800s and concealed ailments from their owners. It was one way they could maintain a degree of control over their bodies.

When it came to health care, slave communities maintained a long tradition of self-reliance. They preferred to treat themselves or receive treatment from another slave, rather than accept the therapies of slaveholders and white physicians. So they cultivated herbs in their gardens, gathered plants in the wild and relied on the knowledge of friends and relatives. They had treatments for a wide variety of illnesses and injuries, including wounds inflicted by whippings.

With their years of experience in delivering and treating children, enslaved midwives and older women often had extensive knowledge about herbal and home remedies. Many became midwives to their mistresses and other white women as well—a valuable service for which the slave owner would be paid.

Healing traditions in slave communities were grounded in African thought. As in many cultures, sickness was attributed to spiritual and social as well as physical causes. Good health depended not only on balance within the body but also on harmonious relations with neighbors, ancestors and spirits.

Like their African ancestors, slaves generally believed that some illnesses were caused by conjure, evil spells placed by conjure doctors with special powers. Traditional wisdom held that only another conjure doctor could help. Although some slaveholders tried to suppress the superstition, conjure practices thrived among slave communities, often out of sight of whites.

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"Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race" (Historical Document)

HISTORICAL DOCUMENT/pbs.org

Southern journals of the antebellum era were full of advice for slaveholders. De Bow's Review, for example, offered numerous articles detailing methods for dealing with slave discipline, nutrition, work strategies, and other topics.

In this article, "Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race," Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a highly respected and widely published doctor from the University of Louisiana, discusses two diseases which he claims are unique to African Americans. One is his newly-discovered "Drapetomania," a disease which causes slaves to run away; the other, "Dysaethesia Aethiopica," a disease causing "rascality" in black people free and enslaved.

Dr. Cartwright offers advice for preventing and curing these diseases. He says, "With the advantages of proper medical advice, strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many negroes have of running away, can be almost entirely prevented, although the slaves be located on the borders of a free state, within a stone's throw of the abolitionists."

THE FOLLOWING IS REPRODUCED FROM AN HISTORICAL DOCUMENT 
"Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race," by Dr. Cartwright (in DeBow's Review)

DRAPETOMANIA, OR THE DISEASE CAUSING NEGROES TO RUN AWAY.
It is unknown to our medical authorities, although its diagnostic symptom, the absconding from service, is well known to our planters and overseers... In noticing a disease not heretofore classed among the long list of maladies that man is subject to, it was necessary to have a new term to express it. The cause in the most of cases, that induces the negro to run away from service, is as much a disease of the mind as any other species of mental alienation, and much more curable, as a general rule. With the advantages of proper medical advice, strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many negroes have of running away, can be almost entirely prevented, although the slaves be located on the borders of a free state, within a stone's throw of the abolitionists.

If the white man attempts to oppose the Deity's will, by trying to make the negro anything else than "the submissive knee-bender," (which the Almighty declared he should be,) by trying to raise him to a level with himself, or by putting himself on an equality with the negro; or if he abuses the power which God has given him over his fellow-man, by being cruel to him, or punishing him in anger, or by neglecting to protect him from the wanton abuses of his fellow-servants and all others, or by denying him the usual comforts and necessaries of life, the negro will run away; but if he keeps him in the position that we learn from the Scriptures he was intended to occupy, that is, the position of submission; and if his master or overseer be kind and gracious in his hearing towards him, without condescension, and at the sane time ministers to his physical wants, and protects him from abuses, the negro is spell-bound, and cannot run away.

According to my experience, the "genu flexit"--the awe and reverence, must be exacted from them, or they will despise their masters, become rude and ungovernable, and run away. On Mason and Dixon's line, two classes of persons were apt to lose their negroes: those who made themselves too familiar with them, treating them as equals, and making little or no distinction in regard to color; and, on the other hand, those who treated them cruelly, denied them the common necessaries of life, neglected to protect them against the abuses of others, or frightened them by a blustering manner of approach, when about to punish them for misdemeanors. Before the negroes run away, unless they are frightened or panic-struck, they become sulky and dissatisfied. The cause of this sulkiness and dissatisfaction should be inquired into and removed, or they are apt to run away or fall into the negro consumption. When sulky and dissatisfied without cause, the experience of those on the line and elsewhere, was decidedly in favor of whipping them out of it, as a preventive measure against absconding, or other bad conduct. It was called whipping the devil out of them.

If treated kindly, well fed and clothed, with fuel enough to keep a small fire burning all night--separated into families, each family having its own house--not permitted to run about at night to visit their neighbors, to receive visits or use intoxicating liquors, and not overworked or exposed too much to the weather, they are very easily governed--more so than any other people in the world. When all this is done, if any one of more of them, at any time, are inclined to raise their heads to a level with their master or overseer, humanity and their own good require that they should be punished until they fall into that submissive state which it was intended for them to occupy in all after-time, when their progenitor received the name of Canaan or "submissive knee-bender." They have only to be kept in that state and treated like children, with care, kindness, attention and humanity, to prevent and cure them from running away.

DYSAETHESIA AETHIOPICA, OR HEBETUDE OF MIND AND OBTUSE SENSIBILITY OF BODY--A DISEASE PECULIAR TO NEGROES--CALLED BY OVERSEERS, " RASCALITY."

Dysaesthesia Aethiopica is a disease peculiar to negroes, affecting both mind and body in a manner as well expressed by dysaesthesia, the name I have given it, as could be by a single term. There is both mind and sensibility, but both seem to be difficult to reach by impressions from without. There is a partial insensibility of the skin, and so great a hebetude of the intellectual faculties, as to be like a person half asleep, that is with difficulty aroused and kept awake. It differs from every other species of mental disease, as it is accompanied with physical signs or lesions of the body discoverable to the medical observer, which are always present and sufficient to account for the symptoms. It is much more prevalent among free negroes living in clusters by themselves, than among slaves on our plantations, and attacks only such slaves as live like free negroes in regard to diet, drinks, exercise, etc. It is not my purpose to treat of the complaint as it prevails among free negroes, nearly all of whom are more or less afflicted with it, that have not got some white person to direct and to take care of them. To narrate its symptoms and effects among them would be to write a history of the ruins and dilapidation of Hayti, and every spot of earth they have ever had uncontrolled possession over for any length of time. I propose only to describe its symptoms among slaves.

From the careless movements of the individuals affected with the complaint, they are apt to do much mischief, which appears as if intentional, but is mostly owing to the stupidness of mind and insensibility of the nerves induced by the disease. Thus, they break, waste and destroy everything they handle,--abuse horses and cattle,--tear, burn or rend their own clothing, and, paying no attention to the rights of property, steal others, to replace what they have destroyed. They wander about at night, and keep in a half nodding sleep during the day. They slight their work,--cut up corn, cane, cotton or tobacco when hoeing it, as if for pure mischief. They raise disturbances with their overseers and fellow-servants without cause or motive, and seem to be insensible to pain when subjected to punishment. The fact of the existence of such a complaint, making man like an automaton or senseless machine, having the above or similar symptoms, can be clearly established by the most direct and positive testimony. That it should have escaped the attention of the medical profession, can only be accounted for because its attention has not been sufficiently directed to the maladies of the negro race. Otherwise a complaint of so common an occurrence on badly-governed plantations, and so universal among free negroes, or those who are not governed at all,--a disease radicated in physical lesions and having its peculiar and well marked symptoms and its curative indications, would not have escaped the notice of the profession. The northern physicians and people have noticed the symptoms, but not the disease from which they spring. They ignorantly attribute the symptoms to the debasing influence of slavery on the mind without considering that those who have never been in slavery, or their fathers before them, are the most afflicted, and the latest from the slave-holding South the least. The disease is the natural offspring of negro liberty--the liberty to be idle, to wallow in filth, and to indulge in improper food and drinks.

De Bow's Review
Southern and Western States
Volume XI, New Orleans, 1851
AMS Press, Inc. New York, 1967

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Conditions of Antebellum Slavery

From: pbs.org

By 1830 slavery was primarily located in the South, where it existed in many different forms. African Americans were enslaved on small farms, large plantations, in cities and towns, inside homes, out in the fields, and in industry and transportation.

Though slavery had such a wide variety of faces, the underlying concepts were always the same. Slaves were considered property, and they were property because they were black. Their status as property was enforced by violence -- actual or threatened. People, black and white, lived together within these parameters, and their lives together took many forms.

Enslaved African Americans could never forget their status as property, no matter how well their owners treated them. But it would be too simplistic to say that all masters and slaves hated each other. Human beings who live and work together are bound to form relationships of some kind, and some masters and slaves genuinely cared for each other. But the caring was tempered and limited by the power imbalance under which it grew. Within the narrow confines of slavery, human relationships ran the gamut from compassionate to contemptuous. But the masters and slaves never approached equality.

The standard image of Southern slavery is that of a large plantation with hundreds of slaves. In fact, such situations were rare. Fully 3/4 of Southern whites did not even own slaves; of those who did, 88% owned twenty or fewer. Whites who did not own slaves were primarily yeoman farmers. Practically speaking, the institution of slavery did not help these people. And yet most non-slaveholding white Southerners identified with and defended the institution of slavery. Though many resented the wealth and power of the large slaveholders, they aspired to own slaves themselves and to join the privileged ranks. In addition, slavery gave the farmers a group of people to feel superior to. They may have been poor, but they were not slaves, and they were not black. They gained a sense of power simply by being white.

In the lower South the majority of slaves lived and worked on cotton plantations. Most of these plantations had fifty or fewer slaves, although the largest plantations have several hundred. Cotton was by far the leading cash crop, but slaves also raised rice, corn, sugarcane, and tobacco. Many plantations raised several different kinds of crops.

Besides planting and harvesting, there were numerous other types of labor required on plantations and farms. Enslaved people had to clear new land, dig ditches, cut and haul wood, slaughter livestock, and make repairs to buildings and tools. In many instances, they worked as mechanics, blacksmiths, drivers, carpenters, and in other skilled trades. Black women carried the additional burden of caring for their families by cooking and taking care of the children, as well as spinning, weaving, and sewing.

Some slaves worked as domestics, providing services for the master's or overseer's families. These people were designated as "house servants," and though their work appeared to be easier than that of the "field slaves," in some ways it was not. They were constantly under the scrutiny of their masters and mistresses, and could be called on for service at any time. They had far less privacy than those who worked the fields.

Because they lived and worked in such close proximity, house servants and their owners tended to form more complex relationships. Black and white children were especially in a position to form bonds with each other. In most situations, young children of both races played together on farms and plantations. Black children might also become attached to white caretakers, such as the mistress, and white children to their black nannies. Because they were so young, they would have no understanding of the system they were born into. But as they grew older they would learn to adjust to it in whatever ways they could.

The diets of enslaved people were inadequate or barely adequate to meet the demands of their heavy workload. They lived in crude quarters that left them vulnerable to bad weather and disease. Their clothing and bedding were minimal as well. Slaves who worked as domestics sometimes fared better, getting the castoff clothing of their masters or having easier access to food stores.

The heat and humidity of the South created health problems for everyone living there. However, the health of plantation slaves was far worse than that of whites. Unsanitary conditions, inadequate nutrition and unrelenting hard labor made slaves highly susceptible to disease. Illnesses were generally not treated adequately, and slaves were often forced to work even when sick. The rice plantations were the most deadly. Black people had to stand in water for hours at a time in the sweltering sun. Malaria was rampant. Child mortality was extremely high on these plantations, generally around 66% -- on one rice plantation it was as high as 90%.

One of the worst conditions that enslaved people had to live under was the constant threat of sale. Even if their master was "benevolent," slaves knew that a financial loss or another personal crisis could lead them to the auction block. Also, slaves were sometimes sold as a form of punishment. And although popular sentiment (as well as the economic self-interest on the part of the owners) encouraged keeping mothers and children and sometimes fathers together, these norms were not always followed. Immediate families were often separated. If they were kept together, they were almost always sold away from their extended families. Grandparents, sisters, brothers, and cousins could all find themselves forcibly scattered, never to see each other again. Even if they or their loved ones were never sold, slaves had to live with the constant threat that they could be.

African American women had to endure the threat and the practice of sexual exploitation. There were no safeguards to protect them from being sexually stalked, harassed, or raped, or to be used as long-term concubines by masters and overseers. The abuse was widespread, as the men with authority took advantage of their situation. Even if a woman seemed agreeable to the situation, in reality she had no choice. Slave men, for their part, were often powerless to protect the women they loved.

The drivers, overseers, and masters were responsible for plantation discipline. Slaves were punished for not working fast enough, for being late getting to the fields, for defying authority, for running away, and for a number of other reasons. The punishments took many forms, including whippings, torture, mutilation, imprisonment, and being sold away from the plantation. Slaves were even sometimes murdered. Some masters were more "benevolent" than others, and punished less often or severely. But with rare exceptions, the authoritarian relationship remained firm even in those circumstances.

In addition to the authority practiced on individual plantations, slaves throughout the South had to live under a set of laws called the Slave Codes. The codes varied slightly from state to state, but the basic idea was the same: the slaves were considered property, not people, and were treated as such. Slaves could not testify in court against a white, make contracts, leave the plantation without permission, strike a white (even in self-defense), buy and sell goods, own firearms, gather without a white present, possess any anti-slavery literature, or visit the homes of whites or free blacks. The killing of a slave was almost never regarded as murder, and the rape of slave women was treated as a form of trespassing.

Whenever there was a slave insurrection, or even the rumor of one, the laws became even tighter. At all times, patrols were set up to enforce the codes. These patrols were similar to militias and were made up of white men who were obligated to serve for a set period. The patrols apprehended slaves outside of plantations, and they raided homes and any type of gathering, searching for anything that might lead to insurrection. During times of insurrection -- either real or rumored -- enraged whites formed vigilance committees that terrorized, tortured, and killed blacks.

While most slaves were concentrated on the plantations, there were many slaves living in urban areas or working in rural industry. Although over 90% of American slaves lived in rural areas, slaves made up at least 20% of the populations of most Southern cities. In Charleston, South Carolina, slaves and free blacks outnumbered whites. Many slaves living in cities worked as domestics, but others worked as blacksmiths, carpenters, shoemakers, bakers, or other tradespeople. Often, slaves were hired out by their masters, for a day or up to several years. Sometimes slaves were allowed to hire themselves out. Urban slaves had more freedom of movement than plantation slaves and generally had greater opportunities for learning. They also had increased contact with free black people, who often expanded their ways of thinking about slavery.

Slaves resisted their treatment in innumerable ways. They slowed down their work pace, disabled machinery, feigned sickness, destroyed crops. They argued and fought with their masters and overseers. Many stole livestock, other food, or valuables. Some learned to read and write, a practice forbidden by law. Some burned forests and buildings. Others killed their masters outright -- some by using weapons, others by putting poison in their food. Some slaves committed suicide or mutilated themselves to ruin their property value. Subtly or overtly, enslaved African Americans found ways to sabotage the system in which they lived.

Thousands of slaves ran away. Some left the plantation for days or weeks at a time and lived in hiding. Others formed maroon communities in mountains, forests or swamps. Many escaped to the North. There were also numerous instances of slave revolts throughout the history of the institution. (For one white interpretation of slave resistance, see Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race) Even when slaves acted in a subservient manner, they were often practicing a type of resistance. By fooling the master or overseer with their behavior, they resisted additional ill treatment.

Enslaved African Americans also resisted by forming community within the plantation setting. This was a tremendous undertaking for people whose lives were ruled by domination and forced labor. Slaves married, had children, and worked hard to keep their families together. In their quarters they were able to let down the masks they had to wear for whites. There, black men, women, and children developed an underground culture through which they affirmed their humanity. They gathered in the evenings to tell stories, sing, and make secret plans. House servants would come down from the "big house" and give news of the master and mistress, or keep people laughing with their imitations of the whites.

It was in their quarters that many enslaved people developed and passed down skills which allowed them to supplement their poor diet and inadequate medical care with hunting, fishing, gathering wild food, and herbal medicines. There, the adults taught their children how to hide their feelings to escape punishment and to be skeptical of anything a white person said. Many slave parents told their children that blacks were superior to white people, who were lazy and incapable of running things properly.

Many slaves turned to religion for inspiration and solace. Some practiced African religions, including Islam, others practiced Christianity. Many practiced a brand of Christianity which included strong African elements. Most rejected the Christianity of their masters, which justified slavery. The slaves held their own meetings in secret, where they spoke of the New Testament promises of the day of reckoning and of justice and a better life after death, as well as the Old Testament story of Moses leading his people out of slavery in Egypt. The religion of enslaved African Americans helped them resist the degradation of bondage.

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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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