Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction
"An important challenge to our understanding of an event that scholars  and laypeople alike have preferred to see as an uplifting story of newly  liberated people vigorously claiming their long-denied rights." -The New York Times"Downs has written a scholarly book about emancipation that should    open a whole new discussion about how it was achieved. If there is  any   doubt about his assertions, he has included 56 pages of  footnotes."  -- The Washington Post"Jim Downs' exceptional research has resulted in a major study ... Highly recommended." --Civil War News"As Jim Downs makes clear in this carefully documented work, the Union leadership, domestic and military, was wholly unprepared to deal with the breakdown of the system of slavery that followed the Union army with every foray into southern soil.  ...  However one may 'spin' the story, one comes away from this book with no doubt that the path out of slavery was a minefield of death and disease that needs its proper acknowledgment in histories of reconstruction." --Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences"James Downs'Sick from Freedomis a  signal contribution to the vastly understudied question of freedpeople's health and a formidable challenge to the dominant analytical framework that has heretofore framed our understanding both of the transition from slavery to freedom in the American South and the meaning of death and dying in the era of the Civil War.   It, quite simply, remaps a field.  Against an archival record of statistics--of so many bodies sick or dying and denied access to local and state hospitals and asylums--Downs gives us the story of a people, of individual men, women and children 'dying to be free.'" -- Thavolia Glymph, Duke University"A fresh and ambitious account of the Civil War era that not only interrogates the transition from slavery to freedom in new and unsettling ways but also invites us to rethink the geographical dimensions of Reconstruction." --Steven Hahn, University of Pennsylvania"Jim Downs'sSick from Freedomcharts new, darker, and profoundly revealing paths into the history of the American emancipation in the Civil War.  In a work of medical, social, labor, and military history all at once, Downs shows that achieving freedom for American slaves was a signal triumph, but only through a horrible passage of disease, suffering and death.  A 'new' history of emancipation is emerging, and Downs is one of its most talented and innovative craftsmen.  This book demonstrates that emancipation is real history and not mere sentimental celebration." --David W. Blight, author ofAmerican Oracle:  The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era"InSick from Freedom, Jim Downs paints a startling and little known portrait of African American emancipation in which struggles for health and survival must be factored alongside the political and economic history of the period." --Sharla Fett, Occidental College"Sick from Freedomby Jim Downs traces a shrouded chapter of American history: the mass death and medical devastation that visited African Americans in the immediate wake of legal emancipation. Downs compellingly reveals how the confluence of  racial slander, government indifference, and medical malign neglect proved widely fatal, and in doing so he paints a detailed and disheartening portrait of man's inhumanity to man." --Harriet Washington, author ofMedical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present