Posted on 02/16/2013 9:48:32 AM PST by Davy Buck
If it is getting to the point of armed rebellion on a large scale, the goodies of our life’s will be gone forever. Such a civil war would create huge infrastructure damage that would take decades to replace. In the end, this would be OK because the Red Sox suck, the Pats are getting old with the Celtics...and if we wait a few weeks there won’t be anything decent on TV.
LOL
Read the review in The Michigan War Studies Review. The reviewer comes up with a lot of criticisms.
Apparently Jim Downs, the author, has a very modern welfarist idea of the freed slaves deserving food, shelter, and medical care from the government. Whether that idea is right or not, it would have been impossible for 19th century America to provide that level of care.
What is surprising is the degree to which food, housing, medical care, and employment were provided by the Army and Freedmen's Bureau in an age unused to such mass provision of care. "Humanitarian disasters" have been common and familiar in our own day. It's not surprising that an earlier era didn't know how to cope with large numbers of refugess.
While there were doubtless some terrible cases of negligence or callous indifference, I doubt what happened could truly be called genocide. I don't think you can blame either the US Army or the federal government for smallpox epidemics that killed off thousands -- including many people who weren't freed slaves or African-Americans. Maybe we should blame the former slave owners for not having inoculated their work force when they were in charge of things.
Someone could do more with the topic, though. I don't know how many African-Americans died in the epidemics of the 1860s, but the losses and their effect on the country are probably something historians would be interested in. Epidemics in the western territories, Western Canada, the Pacific Islands, China, and India during roughly the same years did a lot to shape the history of those countries or regions.
The Nazis did the same to concentration camp inmates, with the only difference being that they intended to kill, and the Union Army didn't.
The British Army at least tried not to needlessly injure the groups of escaped slaves who followed its forces during the Revolutionary War, and it had a lot less resources than the Union Army during the Civil War.
And I remind you that my church's volunteers in the Freedmen's Bureau were very aware of the death rate of escaped slaves during the war. I first read of that 35 years ago in books about those volunteers' personal experiences in my local Church of the Brethren library. It appears that no one had the computer-aided statistical means of putting together the horrific 10% overall Southern slave population death rate until about the time Downs did.
Imagine that you were a Union Army commander and hundreds of refugees turned up in a battle zone that you didn't food or shelter for or transport to take to the rear. You could try to put them up as best you could where you were. You could tell them to go away. You could send them off with an escort. None of those alternatives would be ideal. All of them would leave you liable to reproach from people 150 years later who'd never been in the position of having to deal with such a problem.
You would be operating under constraints from above. The number of rations or wagons or horses or tents you had would have been allotted to you based on the number of troops you had. Not on the number of refugees who might conceivably runaway to your lines to escape the slavers. And those generals and quartermasters above you who distributed war materiel would have to answer to Congress and the public for any resources diverted from the war effort.
Looking at various forums where this has been discussed it's striking how closely latter-day Confederate sympathizers and leftists support each other on this topic. On the Guardian site Britons who just love to attack America as racist mingle with neo-confederates who want to get back at the North. But on some of those hard-core neo-reb sites there's always one old geezer who doesn't get it and wonders why the professor is so worried about the Blacks (which was probably a more accurate reflection of attitudes at the time).
There were also a lot fewer escaped slaves in the Revolution, and I'm assuming more of them would have been young and in decent physical condition. The logistical difficulties would have been easier for the British to deal with.
As it was, though, many of the runaways in the Revolution did die of disease, particularly smallpox. The British were accused by the patriots of deliberately spreading the disease, though that was only a rumor so far as I know.
Accounts of the smallpox epidemics in Yorktown and Portsmouth in the last phase of the war make harrowing reading and illustrate the difficulties that any army would have dealing with large numbers or refugees when contagious diseases rage.
“First, there were no documented atrocities by any Confederate field army. “
Wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelton_Laurel_Massacre
‘Lincoln’ Screenwriter: Obama Win a Rejection of ‘Psychotic’ Reagan Era Ideology
Newsbusters | February 15, 2013 | Geoffrey Dickens
Posted on 02/15/2013 9:16:01 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2989076/posts
The point of _Sick From Freedom_ is that such disregard of the obvious consequences was normal - basically _no one_ in authority gave a rip for what was happening to escaped slaves.
But the slaves died in such numbers that whether genocide was intended was irrelevant. 10% of them died.
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