Inhumane Treatment of ex-Slaves, 1862-70

Jim Downs of Connecticut College has written a book, Sick from Freedom, about the freeing of slaves at the end of America’s Civil War. The bloody war and its chaotic aftermath had shocking effects on the freed slaves.

 

• The freed slaves were often neglected by union soldiers
• Freed slaves faced rampant diseases such as smallpox and cholera
• Many of the slaves starved to death
• Downs estimates that about a million freed slaves died or were very ill between 1862 and 1870. Many did not want to check into this tragedy at the time.
• Many Notherners were indifferent to the health of the freed slaves
• Those abolitionists who knew about the tragedy feared widespread knowledge of it would play into the hands of their critics
• Many freed slaves were kept in unsanitary camps in a state of hunger and disease
• Some could only leave the camp by returning to the plantation where they were only slaves
• Some of the union soldiers were brutal in their conduct
• Some observers thought the entire former slave population would itself die out, as the Indians had done previously

-- summarized from a review of the book by Paul Harris for the UK Guardian at: 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/16/slavery-starvation-civil-war