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Surviving Wartime Emancipation: African Americans and the Cost of Civil War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2021
Extract
Ask any Civil War historian about the cost of the Civil War and they will recite a host of well-known assessments, from military casualties and government expenditures to various measures of direct and indirect costs. But those numbers are not likely to include an appraisal of the humanitarian crisis and suffering caused by the wartime destruction of slavery. Peace-time emancipation in other regions (the northern U.S., for example) and in other societies (like the British West Indies) certainly presented dangers and difficulties for the formerly enslaved, but wartime emancipation chained the new opportunities and possibilities for freedom to war’s violence, civil chaos, destruction and deprivation. The resulting health crisis, including illness, injury, and trauma, had immediate and lasting consequences for black civilians and soldiers. Although historians are more accustomed to thinking of enslaved people as the beneficiaries of this war, rather than its victims, we cannot assess the cost of this war until we answer two important questions: first, what price did enslaved people have to pay because their freedom was achieved through warfare rather than a peacetime process; and secondly, in this war in which so many Americans paid such a high cost, to what extent did racism inflate the cost paid by people of African descent? In answering these questions, we reconsider this specific war, but we must also tie the U.S. Civil War to a larger scholarship on how wars impact civilians, create refugee populations, and accelerate harsh treatment of people regarded as racial, religious, or ethnic outsiders. We are reminded that war is not an equal-opportunity killer.
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References
Typical measures include some 620,000 causalities, more than any other war; U.S and Confederate expenses of more than $8,000,000,000 (not counting 3.3 billion in veterans' pension spent by 1906); the “loss” of three billion dollars worth of slave property (more than 18% of the national wealth); the destruction of $1.5 billion worth of non-slave property in the South; and 60,000 amputations (survived by only 45,000). See Houston, J. L., Calculating the Value of the Union (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003): At 27; and Ransom, R. L., “The Economics of the Civil War,” EH-Net Encyclopedia, available at <http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/ransom.civil.war.us> (last visited November 12, 2010); Pearn, J., “Civilian Legacies of Army Health,” Health and History 6, no. 2 (2004): 4–17, at 5.Google Scholar
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