Asiatic Cholera in America: The Deadly Consequences of Emancipation in the United States

Jim Downs investigates the health conditions of emancipated slaves in a broader, global context by paying particular attention to the international cholera epidemic of 1866. While medical historians have charted the history of this epidemic, these scholars have primarily focused on the cholera epidemic in New York City. Downs investigates how freedpeople in the postwar South confronted the cholera epidemic at the height of the campaign for black suffrage. Downs then places freedpeople’s health experience in a broader international context, which challenges previous studies of this period that identify 1866 as the turning point in the history of black suffrage. The outbreak of this epidemic reveals the ways in which freedpeople, the federal government, and white Southerners had to come to terms with the world that existed beyond the gates of the crumbling Confederacy.