Surviving Wartime Emancipation: African Americans and the Cost of Civil War

Typical measures include some 620,000 causalities, more than any other war; U.S and Confederate expenses of more than $8,000,000,000 (not counting 3.3 billion in veterans' pension spent by 1906); the “loss” of three billion dollars worth of slave property (more than 18% of the national wealth); the destruction of $1.5 billion worth of non-slave property in the South; and 60,000 amputations (survived by only 45,000). See Houston J. L. , Calculating the Value of the Union (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003): At 27; and Ransom R. L. , “The Economics of the Civil War,” EH-Net Encyclopedia, available at <http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/ransom.civil.war.us> (last visited November 12, 2010); Pearn J. , “Civilian Legacies of Army Health,” Health and History 6, no. 2 (2004): 4–17, at 5.

As Lydia Maria Child observed in October 1862, after President Lincoln had announced his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, “The ugly fact cannot be concealed from history that [emancipation] was done reluctantly and stintedly, and that even the degree that was accomplished was done selfishly; was merely a war-measure, to which we were forced by our own perils and necessities; and that no recognition of principles of justice or humanity surrounded the political act with a halo of moral glory” (quoted in Masur L. P. , The Real War Will Never Get Into the Books [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993]: At 50).

The most recent and most substantial assessment of the cultural consequences of wartime death, Gilpin Faust's D. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008), does not explore the deaths associated with wartime emancipation.

This point is explained more fully in Schwalm L. A. , A Hard Fight for We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997): 75–88.

One estimate that includes soldiers and free blacks is 474,000; Berlin I. Glymph T. Miller S. F. Reidy J. P. Rowland L. S. Saville J. , eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, ser. I, vol. III, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Steiner P. E. , Disease in the Civil War: Natural Biological Warfare in 1861–1865 (Springfield, Il.: Charles C. Thomas, Publisher, 1968): At 10–11; Shryock R. H. , “A Medical Perspective on the Civil Wax,” American Quarterly 14, no. 2, part I (1962): 161–173, at 165–66; and Stratton Jaquette H. , ed., Letters of a Civil War Nurse: Cornelia Hancock, 1863–1865 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998): At 31–32. In the summer of 1865, the 3500 black residents of the Roanoke, N.C. contraband village had no medical assistance; the Freedmen's Bureau finally responded with the appointment of a surgeon, a doctor, and a steward — and fifty coffins. Click P. C. , Time Full of Trial: The Roanoke Island Freedmen's Colony, 1862–1867 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001): At 150.

Fagan Yellin J. , ed., The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, vol. II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008): 478. Another observer reported a 29% mortality rate at the Alexandria camp over the winter of 1862/63; Berlin I. , eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, ser. I, vol. II, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): At 281.

Schwalm L. , Emancipation's Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009): 62. The army saw fit to remove these refugees from the city, but also refused to feed them, since in Vicksburg, as in many areas of the South, the army barely had enough supplies to keep its troops fed, let alone the refugee population of former slaves seeking shelter and protection.

Berlin I. , eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, ser. I, vol. III, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990): At 410–12.

Berlin I. , eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, ser. I, vol. II, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): At 94, 150–54.

Gilpin Faust D. , This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008): At xi-xii.

Foster G. M. , “The Limitations of Federal Health Care for Freedmen, 1862–1868,” The Journal of Southern History 48, no. 3 (1982): 349–372. In The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South, the editors estimate that 474,000 former slaves lived and worked under federal auspices during the war, but that figure includes many people beyond the inhabitants of camps, including some 200,000 black soldiers and sailors. See Berlin I. , supra note 5, at 77–80.

Id., at 352.

There are a number of primary sources containing reports of morbidity and mortality among black refugee populations, including Yeatman J. E. , Report Upon the Condition of the Freedman of the Mississippi, Presented to the Western Sanitary Commission, Dec. 17, 1863 (St. Louis, 1864); Eaton J. , Report of the General Superintendent of Freedmen, Department of the Tennessee and State of Arkansas, for 1864 (s.n., 1865); United States, Surgeon-General's Office, The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (1861–65) (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1870); Strong Newberry J. , The U.S. Sanitary Commission in the Valley of the Mississippi, During the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1866; Final Report of Dr. J.S. Newberry (Fairbanks, Benedict, 1871). See also Berlin , eds., Wartime Genesis, Upper South, at 94, 281, 327, 350, 370, 558, 654, and Lower South, 412, 454, 686, and 730 for related documents. The highest mortality rate reported in the sources I consulted was at Alexandria, Virginia, in the winter of 1862/63; the lowest in Corinth, Mississippi, in the spring of 1863. The data, however, is both inconsistent and uncertain.

Foster , supra note 12, at 354. Among the camps where civilian aid workers had a great impact were in Alexandria, Virginia, and in Helena, Arkansas.

Ryan S. , The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003): At 4–8.

Law Olmsted F. , Defending the Union: The Civil War and the U.S. Sanitary Commission, 1861–1863 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). See also Fredrickson G. M. , The Black Image in the White Mind the Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); Ryan , supra note 16; Faulkner C. , Women's Radical Reconstruction: The Freedmen's Aid Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Yellin , supra note 7.

Olmsted , Id., at 284. See also Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1862 comments in the Atlantic Monthly, and those by John William De Forest the same year, both in Masur , supra note 2, at 173, 183.

Lutz C. , “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis,” in Gupta A. , ed., The Anthropology of the State: A Reader (London: Blackwell, 2006): 291–309, at 292.

Scholarly literature addressing racism in the Civil War armed services is extensive, and the most recent contribution is Humphreys M. , Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Glatthaar J. T. , “The Costliness of Discrimination: Medical Care for Black Troops in the Civil War,” in Inside the Confederate Nation: Essays in Honor of Emory M. Thomas, Gordon L. J. Inscoe J. C. , eds. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Black A. K. , “In the Service of the United States: Comparative Mortality among African-American and White Troops in the Union Army,” The Journal of Negro History 79, no. 4 (1994): 317–333; Eby Steiner P. , Medical History of a Civil War Regiment (Institute of Civil War Studies, 1977); Berlin I. , eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, ser. II, The Black Military Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Humphreys , Id., at 9–10.

Glatthaar , supra note 20, at 251; see also the May 1865 comment by a War Department inspector about the lack of surgeons in black regiments in Berlin , eds., Wartime Genesis, Upper South, 701.

Schultz J. , Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), at 20–26. Pension testimony suggests that in the 60th USCI, fellow soldiers did much of the nursing. George Thomas, for example, frequently emptied Joseph Webster's chamber pot when Webster was hospitalized for chronic diarrhea (General Affidavit, Geo. Thomas, 6/2/1887, Joseph Webster Pension File, WC 942684, Record Group 15, National Archives and Research Administration [hereafter RG 15, NARA, Washington, D.C.]).

Andrew Black notes that 68% of black units served in the western theater ( Black , supra note 20, at 322).

Black , supra note 20, at 317; Humphreys , supra note 20, at 11.

Foster , supra note 12, at 351.

Costa D. L. , “Race and Older Age Mortality: Evidence from Union Army Veterans,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series No. 10902 (2004): At 4.

Logue L. M. Blanck P. D. , ‘“Benefit of the Doubt’: African-American Civil War Veterans and Pensions,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 38, no. 3 (2007): 119–42; Shaffer D. R. , After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004): 119–42.

Only eight of the army's surgeons were African American, and Gaines Foster notes that 6 of the 8 were assigned to the Washington, D.C., area. Foster , supra note 12, at 352.

N. Adams noted that he preferred his home remedy for diarrhea of black pepper tea to anything the regimental medical staff could provide (pension file of Nathaniel Adams, IC 472578, RG 15, NARA]). See Fett S. M. , Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Of course, white soldiers, both North and South, also found their medical officers lacking; see Williams D. , A People's History of the Civil War (New York: The Free Press, 2005): 208–10.

Deposition by George H. Johnson, 21 Nov. 1882, and deposition by John H. Allen, 18 Nov. 1882, both in pension file of John H. Allen, IC 227969; Deposition by Edward Dunn, 27 March 1894, in pension file of John Bandy, IC 840217; Eli Ramsey to Acting Commissioner John C. Black, 4 Oct. 1886, in pension file of Jerry [AKA Henry]White, IC 92134; and deposition by Henry D. Brown, 28 Feb. 1891, in pension file of Henry D. Brown, IC 660715, all in RG 15, NARA.

Medical and Surgical Reporter 12, no. 23 (May 27, 1865.)

Bumstead F. J. , “Report of a Committee of the Associated Medical members of the United States Sanitary Commission, on the Subject of Venereal Diseases… .” (1863): 13, in Hammond W. A. , Military Medical and Surgical Essays Prepared for the United States Sanitary Commission (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1864).

Humphreys , supra note 20, at 95–98; Glatthaar J. T. , supra note 20, at 262; Berlin , eds., Wartime genesis, Upper South, supra note 7, at 326. Glatthaar notes that that rate of illness with the disease was 764% higher among black troops and the death rate 692% higher. Smallpox vaccination and treatment in contraband camps was also inadequate; the superintendent of Camp Barker in Washington, D.C., reported both a shortage of vaccine matter and ineffective vaccine mater in the fall and winter of 1863.

The infection was likely erysipelas; see report by Special Examiner C. P. Epps, 15 May 1886, in Henry Allen Pension file, WC 834236, RG 15.

Kebo George , Declaration For Original Invalid Pension, 28 Feb. 1878, in George Kebo Pension file, WC 919204, RG 15. Infected soldiers would consequently infect the women with whom they were intimate, and the women, pass the infection to their children.

Humphreys , supra note 20, at x-xi.

Haller J. S. , “Civil War Anthropometry: The Making of a Racial Ideology,” Civil War History 16 (December 1970): 309–24. Haller notes that insurance companies helped underwrite most of the expenses involved in the collection of data by the USSC, anticipating the use of the data in actuarial tables (309). See also Barnes J. K. , The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, 2 volumes (Washington, D.C.: U.S. G. P. O., 1870–1888; and Haller J. S. , Outcasts from Evolution; Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971): At 34, 60–68.

See, for example, “Tetanus Successfully Treated by Immersion,” as described in the Medical and Surgical Reporter 2, no. 10 (May 9, 1863): At 215.

The USSC created 28 categories of body measurements ( Haller , supra note 38, at 27).

Medical and Surgical Reporter, July 16, 1864; Hunt S. B. , “The Negro As Soldier,” Anthropological Review VII (1869): 49.

Medical and Surgical Reporter, May 9, 1863; Hunt , id.

Hunt , supra note 41, at 40–54.

Id.

Hunt , supra note 41; Burt W. J. , “On The Anatomical and Physiological Differences Between the White and Negro Races, and the Modification of Diseases Resulting Therefrom,” St. Louis Courier of Medicine 1 no. 18 (November 1882): 416–23.

United States Sanitary Commission, Contributions Relating to the Causation and Prevention of Disease, and to Camp Diseases, Flint A. , ed. (New York: U.S. Sanitary Commission, 1867).

Washington H. A. , Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Harlem Moon Broadway Books, 2006); Haller , supra note 38, at 62–63; Northington Gamble V. , “Under the Shadow of Tuskegee: African Americans and Health Care,” American Journal of Public Health 87, no. 11 (1997): 1773–8; Jay Gould S. , The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1981).