PROGRAM DESCRIPTION: Historians have documented that more Civil War soldiers died from disease unrelated to battle, but few have considered how the biological crises that the war created led to unexpected mortality among formerly enslaved people. Based on his book, "Sick from Freedom," Jim Downs uncovers how a smallpox epidemic took the lives of over 60,000 freed people. When the smallpox epidemic began to dissipate, formerly enslaved then faced the outbreak of the 1866 cholera pandemic, which was then followed by a famine that enveloped the postwar South. The federal government responded by creating the Medical Division of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the first ever system of federal medical care. This unprecedented intervention attempted to solve the medical crises by defining freed people based on their ability to return to the plantation labor force. While many were employed as agricultural workers, many disabled, elderly and orphaned enslaved people were placed in asylums or left with no support and suffered and died.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Dr. Jim Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Sick From Freedom: African American Sickness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford UP, 2012) and Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation (Basic Books, 2016). He has edited four anthologies, including Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation, coedited with David Blight (University of Georgia Press, 2017) and Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America (University of Illinois Press, 2016) coedited with Jennifer Brier and Jennifer Morgan. Downs’ current research is on the origin of epidemiology, which will be published as Maladies of Empire: How Slavery, Colonialism and War Transformed Medicine by Harvard University Press.

PAY WHAT YOU CAN: We have made our virtual lectures pay what you can, but donations are always appreciated to help us cover our costs associated with putting on this program. Your generosity helps us pay honoraria to all current and future presenters.