Should've Kept Slavery

[Revolution]

FarCenter (10,247 posts)

How the end of slavery led to starvation and death for millions of black Americans

In the brutal chaos that followed the civil war, life after emancipation was harsh and often short, new book argues
 

Hundreds of thousands of slaves freed during the American civil war died from disease and hunger after being liberated, according to a new book.
 
The analysis, by historian Jim Downs of Connecticut College, casts a shadow over one of the most celebrated narratives of American history, which sees the freeing of the slaves as a triumphant righting of the wrongs of a southern plantation system that kept millions of black Americans in chains.
 
But, as Downs shows in his book, Sick From Freedom, the reality of emancipation during the chaos of war and its bloody aftermath often fell brutally short of that positive image. Instead, freed slaves were often neglected by union soldiers or faced rampant disease, including horrific outbreaks of smallpox and cholera. Many of them simply starved to death.
 
After combing through obscure records, newspapers and journals Downs believes that about a quarter of the four million freed slaves either died or suffered from illness between 1862 and 1870. He writes in the book that it can be considered "the largest biological crisis of the 19th century" and yet it is one that has been little investigated by contemporary historians.
 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/16/slavery-starvation-civil-war

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002818280

Sick from Freedom?   So what this idiot author is basically saying...what it basically boils down to in his mind is that black people were wild animals; then suddenly domesticated; and then were wild again, and couldn't take care of themselves? Really???

I knew these people were crazy, and racist, but I guess I didn't think I'd see anything THIS God aweful bad! Wow.

dionysus (21,036 posts)

1. and then fled to northern industrial cities looking for work, where they were exploited further,

and thus the beginning of the American ghettos...

Bzzzzzzzzzt! Wrong! The New Deal by your boy FDR was the beginning of the American ghettos. They were a means to hid the "unsavory," idiot.

Zalatix (4,967 posts)

2. Oh great, right wingers will use this as justification for saying slavery was better.

Wrong again, Zalatix. I'm using it upon a whole mountain of evidence. The evidence that you ****ers are INDEED racists. This is just another file to add.

[98ZJUSMC]

  Bzzzzzzzzzt! Wrong! The New Deal by your boy FDR was the beginning of the American ghettos. They were a means to hid the "unsavory," idiot.

 

I would have to posit that the influx of mass immigration and the inability of cities to absorb that many immigrants was the actual cause.  The DUmmie is wholly wrong.  The move up north of the freed slaves didn't really occur in large numbers until about the same time.  I suppose the DUmmie thinks the recent slaves from Alabama simply walked over to the nearest non-existent interstate and started hitching.

[Mr Mannn]

Of course, the democrats never really abolished slavery, they just renamed it, welfare. Millions are addicted to free govt money and dare not vote anything other than straight democrat tickets.

[Revolution]

^ Off topic: Shouldn't Garfield be dead by now? How much has that cat eaten, Mr. Mann?

[98ZJUSMC]

The Democrats never had anything to do with abolishing slavery as the Republican Administration of Lincoln did.  But, not wanting to be outdone, the Democrats formed that innocuous little fraternal order known as the Klu Klux Klan.  When I came down to Southern Illinois to live in the early 80's, there was still a subdued, but virulent KKK prescence here.  Every last one of them were FDR Democrats.  

Every.  Single.  One.

They're still around.  And still Democrat.

I do have one thing in common with them though.  We both hate Chicago with a flaming passion.  Southern Illinois is a completely different world from the cesspool that is Northern Illinois.