Bondspeople who fled from slavery during and after the Civil War
did not expect that their flight toward freedom would lead to
sickness, disease, suffering, and death. But the war produced the
largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century, and as
historian Jim Downs reveals in this groundbreaking volume, it had
deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands of freed people. In
Sick from Freedom, Downs recovers the untold story of one of the
bitterest ironies in American history-that the emancipation of the
slaves, seen as one of the great turning points in U.S. history,
had devastating consequences for innumerable freedpeople. Drawing
on massive new research into the records of the Medical Division of
the Freedmen's Bureau-a nascent national health system that cared
for more than 500,000 freed slaves-he shows how the collapse of the
plantation economy released a plague of lethal diseases. With
emancipation, African Americans seized the chance to move,
migrating as never before. But in their journey to freedom, they
also encountered yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, dysentery,
malnutrition, and exposure. To address this crisis, the Medical
Division hired more than 120 physicians, establishing some forty
underfinanced and understaffed hospitals scattered throughout the
South, largely in response to medical emergencies. Downs shows that
the goal of the Medical Division was to promote a healthy
workforce, an aim which often excluded a wide range of freedpeople,
including women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and
children. Downs concludes by tracing how the Reconstruction policy
was then implemented in the American West, where it was
disastrously applied to Native Americans. The widespread medical
calamity sparked by emancipation is an overlooked episode of the
Civil War and its aftermath, poignantly revealed in Sick from
Freedom.
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