Emancipation, sickness, and death in the American Civil War

Abstract

The American Civil War has often been described as the “bloodiest war” in US history, with the death of about 700 000 soldiers between 1861 and 1865. Unfolding alongside of this tragic story has been the more triumphant account of the war as the victorious ending of the institution of slavery and the freeing of the slaves. Although the war certainly succeeded in dismantling plantation slavery, more than a million former slaves became sick and tens of thousands died during this bloody war. These events have often been overlooked, and instead a narrative has developed about emancipation that emphasises how the war led to economic opportunities, education, and political suffrage for freedpeople in the postwar period between 1865 and 1877. Yet between 1862 and 1865, freed slaves entered into environments marked by conflict, in which more soldiers died from camp diseases—pneumonia, typhus, and dysentery—than from battle. As a result, when the institution of slavery crumbled, countless numbers of former slaves also lost their lives.Although yellow fever, typhoid fever, and smallpox certainly existed in the American South before the conflict, the Civil War, like many other wars during the 19th century, including the Crimean War, Cuba's revolt against Spain in 1895–98, and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, gave rise to explosive outbreaks of disease and inordinate mortality and suffering. Emancipation liberated bondspeople from slavery, but they often lacked clean clothing, adequate shelter, proper food, and access to medical care in their escape towards Union lines. Many freed slaves died once they secured refuge behind Union camps.In an era before germ theory, outbreaks of dysentery, typhoid fever, smallpox, yellow fever, and cholera plagued the Civil War South. The high rates of illness and mortality during the war resulted from a range of factors, including the unsanitary conditions of army camps, polluted waterways, unburied bodies of animals and soldiers, overcrowded populations, dislocation, and the medical profession's uncertainty about how to respond to the many outbreaks of disease. During the Civil War, a group of women reformers established the US Sanitary Commission, which was modelled after the British Sanitary Commission from the Crimean War. While these reformers earnestly attempted to prevent the further spread of disease by preaching a gospel of cleanliness, their efforts proved ineffective in response to the smallpox and cholera epidemics that broke out during the war. Even when they managed to whitewash camps with lime and quarantine infected patients to isolated quarters, the huge dislocations of former slaves and the migrations of soldiers that the war produced excacerbated the spread of disease. Disease and sickness had a more devastating and fatal effect for emancipated slaves than for white soldiers, since they often lacked the basic necessities to survive. In Camp Nelson, Kentucky in 1864, for example, hundreds of freed slaves died of malnutrition and exposure to the elements, whereas white soldiers stationed in the same camps did not suffer in this way.Throughout the Civil War and reconstruction, many freed slaves became sick and died due to the unexpected problems caused by the exigencies of war and the massive dislocation triggered by emancipation. The destruction of slavery and the gradual erosion of the plantation economy, compounded by the federal government's initial ambivalence and often ambiguous plans for rebuilding the South, left former slaves without an institutional structure to help them survive. The ending of slavery led to the abrupt dismantling of antebellum systems of medical care—both those organised by enslaved people and by individual slaveholders on local plantations—and it exhausted the networks of support provided by municipal almshouses and state hospitals. Enslaved people had also developed certain remedies while living under slavery, but the war displaced them from the vegetable gardens and other resources that they relied on to create such remedies. On certain large plantations, slaveholders hired doctors or established sick houses for enslaved people during the antebellum period, but once the war began, former slaveholders argued that it was no longer their responsibility to provide medical assistance to formerly enslaved people and claimed that it was the responsibility of the federal government to provide aid since they were responsible for emancipation. Meanwhile, federal officials believed that it was the responsibility of city and state governments to step in and provide aid for the poor and dispossessed since they had provided such assistance for poor white people since the early 19th century. Local and state governments, however, claimed that they were beleaguered and maintained that the number of white Southerners in need of clothing, food, and medicine had drained their meagre budgets.This confusion created an institutional vacuum that left ex-slaves defenceless against disease outbreaks, and their situation was further exacerbated by freedpeople's nebulous political and economic status. Emancipated slaves did not have a clear political status during and after the war. While the ratification of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution in 1868 granted former enslaved people the right to be recognised as citizens and the ratification of the 15th Amendment enabled freedmen to vote in 1870, it took a great deal of time for these transformations to take shape. Within the context of political history, 1862 to 1870 represents a short timeframe, but 8 years is a rather long time to struggle with inadequate food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. As a result, according to federal records, more than a million slaves requested medical assistance between 1865 and 1869. Yet this number only reflects the number of freed slaves that federal officials encountered, many more, who lived in rural regions, remain uncounted and not part of the government's tabulation. Further, there was no protocol that recorded the number of slaves who became sick and died when the war first began.When military officials eventually encountered the high mortality among the newly freed population, they soon realised that they needed plots of land to bury the freedpeople who died during and after the war. As military physicians began to alert federal officials of the need for burial grounds, the government commanded military doctors to work out arrangements with local governments for proper burial grounds. Local authorities, in turn, often rejected such requests, opposing the mere suggestion that freedpeople be buried near the same lot used for white Southern residents. In Raleigh, North Carolina, for instance, sparks flew when municipal officials informed military agents in April, 1866, that “the cemetery is a resting for those remains of Union soldiers and not an indiscriminate burying ground for freedmen”. Military officials responded by asking for an appropriate place to bury the freedpeople, but municipal authorities failed to provide an adequate solution, yet continued to complain that the bodies should be removed. Debates about where to bury freedpeople reignited the issue of who was in charge of reconstruction in the South: the federal government or local authorities.On an emotional level, the turmoil of not being able to properly bury loved ones must have been unbearable for former slaves. Joseph Miller's son froze to death on his journey from a Union camp to a boarding house in Kentucky in 1864. With nowhere to bury his 7-year-old son, Joseph carried him 5 miles back to the Union camp and buried him in an unmarked grave. On a public health level, the need for cemeteries for freedpeople who died from illness created dangerous health problems. In April, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina, many freedpeople became infected with typhoid fever and were left to die in isolation without any proper burial. As a city official in Charleston, South Carolina explained, “The health of this institution and the city requires that dead bodies by typhoid fever should be removed with as little delay as possible.”But removing bodies proved to be a difficult task without sanctioned areas for burial. Transporting the bodies of freedpeople to remote locations in the countryside was considered, but this would require labour, funds, and, most of all, a designated area to bury the bodies. In many parts of the South, the failure of the federal and local governments to systematically create cemeteries made the removal of the dead a difficult task to accomplish. A freedwoman in southern Illinois in 1864 pleaded with military officials to bury her son. She had already witnessed how the bodies of other formerly enslaved children had been left exposed on a nearby dock where wharf rats had gnawed on their remains. She feared a similar fate would befall her son and begged the Captain in charge of the camp to ensure that her son would be buried. He simply responded by claiming that his own soldiers lacked a proper burial. This encounter was not unusual: the Civil War landscape was marked by the unburied bodies of many people—both black and white.The death of freed slaves in the American Civil War reveals how the struggle to survive unfolded not only on the battlefields during military engagement but also among civilians in military camps, on abandoned plantations, and in other places that promised liberation. Without access to food, clothing, medical care, and even a place to bury their loved ones, the promise of freedom could not be realised for many people. Furthermore, within American history, historians often narrate suffering and death as unexpected sacrifices that result from war or from other major transformations. Yet, the medical crises that freed slaves endured suggest that sickness and death may not have been the unavoidable consequences of war, but the very price of freedom. The American Civil War has often been described as the “bloodiest war” in US history, with the death of about 700 000 soldiers between 1861 and 1865. Unfolding alongside of this tragic story has been the more triumphant account of the war as the victorious ending of the institution of slavery and the freeing of the slaves. Although the war certainly succeeded in dismantling plantation slavery, more than a million former slaves became sick and tens of thousands died during this bloody war. These events have often been overlooked, and instead a narrative has developed about emancipation that emphasises how the war led to economic opportunities, education, and political suffrage for freedpeople in the postwar period between 1865 and 1877. Yet between 1862 and 1865, freed slaves entered into environments marked by conflict, in which more soldiers died from camp diseases—pneumonia, typhus, and dysentery—than from battle. As a result, when the institution of slavery crumbled, countless numbers of former slaves also lost their lives. Although yellow fever, typhoid fever, and smallpox certainly existed in the American South before the conflict, the Civil War, like many other wars during the 19th century, including the Crimean War, Cuba's revolt against Spain in 1895–98, and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, gave rise to explosive outbreaks of disease and inordinate mortality and suffering. Emancipation liberated bondspeople from slavery, but they often lacked clean clothing, adequate shelter, proper food, and access to medical care in their escape towards Union lines. Many freed slaves died once they secured refuge behind Union camps. In an era before germ theory, outbreaks of dysentery, typhoid fever, smallpox, yellow fever, and cholera plagued the Civil War South. The high rates of illness and mortality during the war resulted from a range of factors, including the unsanitary conditions of army camps, polluted waterways, unburied bodies of animals and soldiers, overcrowded populations, dislocation, and the medical profession's uncertainty about how to respond to the many outbreaks of disease. During the Civil War, a group of women reformers established the US Sanitary Commission, which was modelled after the British Sanitary Commission from the Crimean War. While these reformers earnestly attempted to prevent the further spread of disease by preaching a gospel of cleanliness, their efforts proved ineffective in response to the smallpox and cholera epidemics that broke out during the war. Even when they managed to whitewash camps with lime and quarantine infected patients to isolated quarters, the huge dislocations of former slaves and the migrations of soldiers that the war produced excacerbated the spread of disease. Disease and sickness had a more devastating and fatal effect for emancipated slaves than for white soldiers, since they often lacked the basic necessities to survive. In Camp Nelson, Kentucky in 1864, for example, hundreds of freed slaves died of malnutrition and exposure to the elements, whereas white soldiers stationed in the same camps did not suffer in this way. Throughout the Civil War and reconstruction, many freed slaves became sick and died due to the unexpected problems caused by the exigencies of war and the massive dislocation triggered by emancipation. The destruction of slavery and the gradual erosion of the plantation economy, compounded by the federal government's initial ambivalence and often ambiguous plans for rebuilding the South, left former slaves without an institutional structure to help them survive. The ending of slavery led to the abrupt dismantling of antebellum systems of medical care—both those organised by enslaved people and by individual slaveholders on local plantations—and it exhausted the networks of support provided by municipal almshouses and state hospitals. Enslaved people had also developed certain remedies while living under slavery, but the war displaced them from the vegetable gardens and other resources that they relied on to create such remedies. On certain large plantations, slaveholders hired doctors or established sick houses for enslaved people during the antebellum period, but once the war began, former slaveholders argued that it was no longer their responsibility to provide medical assistance to formerly enslaved people and claimed that it was the responsibility of the federal government to provide aid since they were responsible for emancipation. Meanwhile, federal officials believed that it was the responsibility of city and state governments to step in and provide aid for the poor and dispossessed since they had provided such assistance for poor white people since the early 19th century. Local and state governments, however, claimed that they were beleaguered and maintained that the number of white Southerners in need of clothing, food, and medicine had drained their meagre budgets. This confusion created an institutional vacuum that left ex-slaves defenceless against disease outbreaks, and their situation was further exacerbated by freedpeople's nebulous political and economic status. Emancipated slaves did not have a clear political status during and after the war. While the ratification of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution in 1868 granted former enslaved people the right to be recognised as citizens and the ratification of the 15th Amendment enabled freedmen to vote in 1870, it took a great deal of time for these transformations to take shape. Within the context of political history, 1862 to 1870 represents a short timeframe, but 8 years is a rather long time to struggle with inadequate food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. As a result, according to federal records, more than a million slaves requested medical assistance between 1865 and 1869. Yet this number only reflects the number of freed slaves that federal officials encountered, many more, who lived in rural regions, remain uncounted and not part of the government's tabulation. Further, there was no protocol that recorded the number of slaves who became sick and died when the war first began. When military officials eventually encountered the high mortality among the newly freed population, they soon realised that they needed plots of land to bury the freedpeople who died during and after the war. As military physicians began to alert federal officials of the need for burial grounds, the government commanded military doctors to work out arrangements with local governments for proper burial grounds. Local authorities, in turn, often rejected such requests, opposing the mere suggestion that freedpeople be buried near the same lot used for white Southern residents. In Raleigh, North Carolina, for instance, sparks flew when municipal officials informed military agents in April, 1866, that “the cemetery is a resting for those remains of Union soldiers and not an indiscriminate burying ground for freedmen”. Military officials responded by asking for an appropriate place to bury the freedpeople, but municipal authorities failed to provide an adequate solution, yet continued to complain that the bodies should be removed. Debates about where to bury freedpeople reignited the issue of who was in charge of reconstruction in the South: the federal government or local authorities. On an emotional level, the turmoil of not being able to properly bury loved ones must have been unbearable for former slaves. Joseph Miller's son froze to death on his journey from a Union camp to a boarding house in Kentucky in 1864. With nowhere to bury his 7-year-old son, Joseph carried him 5 miles back to the Union camp and buried him in an unmarked grave. On a public health level, the need for cemeteries for freedpeople who died from illness created dangerous health problems. In April, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina, many freedpeople became infected with typhoid fever and were left to die in isolation without any proper burial. As a city official in Charleston, South Carolina explained, “The health of this institution and the city requires that dead bodies by typhoid fever should be removed with as little delay as possible.” But removing bodies proved to be a difficult task without sanctioned areas for burial. Transporting the bodies of freedpeople to remote locations in the countryside was considered, but this would require labour, funds, and, most of all, a designated area to bury the bodies. In many parts of the South, the failure of the federal and local governments to systematically create cemeteries made the removal of the dead a difficult task to accomplish. A freedwoman in southern Illinois in 1864 pleaded with military officials to bury her son. She had already witnessed how the bodies of other formerly enslaved children had been left exposed on a nearby dock where wharf rats had gnawed on their remains. She feared a similar fate would befall her son and begged the Captain in charge of the camp to ensure that her son would be buried. He simply responded by claiming that his own soldiers lacked a proper burial. This encounter was not unusual: the Civil War landscape was marked by the unburied bodies of many people—both black and white. The death of freed slaves in the American Civil War reveals how the struggle to survive unfolded not only on the battlefields during military engagement but also among civilians in military camps, on abandoned plantations, and in other places that promised liberation. Without access to food, clothing, medical care, and even a place to bury their loved ones, the promise of freedom could not be realised for many people. Furthermore, within American history, historians often narrate suffering and death as unexpected sacrifices that result from war or from other major transformations. Yet, the medical crises that freed slaves endured suggest that sickness and death may not have been the unavoidable consequences of war, but the very price of freedom.