- President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation gifted freedom to four million black Americans in 1863
- Former slaves struggled to begin their free life and up to one million died or got sick
- Challenges the accepted wisdom of the Unionist North being sympathetic to the cause of freed slaves
- Whole families returned to work on the plantations they had escaped because there was no work and no food
The end of slavery in the United States led to anarchy and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of black Americans claims a new revisionist history of the Civil War.
Instead of a granting former slaves a glorious moment of freedom, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation condemned millions to a life of disease and hunger says historian Jim Downs in his new book, ‘Sick from Freedom’.
Scouring through obscure records, Professor Downs has revealed that freed slaves were subject to outbreaks of cholera and smallpox as they attempted to start new lives for themselves and that thousands starved to death.
Writing about the period of 1862 to 1870, Professor Downs claims that one million of the four million salves former slaves freed by Lincoln’s 1863 executive order died or got sick.
This number includes at least 60,000 who lost their lives in a smallpox epidemic that started in Washington and spread to the south as black Americans left their former slave-masters in order to find work.
Calling this ‘the largest biological crisis of the 19th century’, Downs states that this tragedy has failed to be acknowledged because it does not match with the rosy view of the Civil War being a fight between the Unionist North and Confederate South for God-given rights.
Professor Jim Downs new revisionist history of the Civil War and Emancipation Proclamation claims that a million black Americans suffered hunger and died following the end of slavery
‘The freed people we want to see are the ones with all their belongings on the wagon, heading towards freedom,’ said David W. Blight, a professor of history at Yale to the New York Times.
‘But the truth is, for every person making it there may have been one falling by the way.’
As the anniversary of President Lincoln’s order approaches, Mr. Downs, 39, is part of new school of thought re-addressing commonly held beliefs about the history of emancipation.
‘We’re getting ready to celebrate 150 years of the movement from slavery to freedom,’ said Professor Downs to the New York Times.
‘But hundreds of thousands of people did not survive that movement.’
In fact in the years following 1863, the public health problems that freed slaves experienced attempting to set up their own homes, getting jobs and feeding their families seemed so intense that some historical observers wondered whether all black Americans might die.
In 1863, one white religious figure wrote, ‘Like his brother the Indian of the forest, he must melt away and disappear forever from the midst of us.’
While the accepted view is that the Unionist North was sympathetic to the plight of all southern slaves, Professor Downs feels that there was in fact an element of turning a blind eye to the problems the newly freed people experienced.
‘In the 19th century people did not want to talk about it,’ said Professor Downs to the Observer.
‘Some did not care and abolitionist, 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.’
