ABSTRACT
Death and suffering were near certainties whether an individual slave chose to remain with an enslaver or flee to Union lines. Human cruelty was not the sole cause of the suffering. Disease was rife in an environment that served, in Chandra Manning’s phrase, as an “epidemiological incubator” for the smallpox virus and for bacterial infections such as cholera. Earlier studies were not oblivious to the compromises and the cruelties personal, practical and political that attended the process of emancipation in the Civil War era. The extent of the humanitarian crisis that accompanied the ending of slavery in the United States did not become fully apparent until the final years of the Civil War. Congress saw the former slaves, certainly, but in a conceptual sense as the focus of increasingly heated partisan debate concerning both the progress and purpose of the war and the role of emancipation in that.
