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During the Civil War, an unnamed freedwoman didn’t want to leave her dead 8 yr old son on a wharf unburied b/c she witnessed how rats gnawed on “one dead chile’s face” but the Northern army forced her on a boat & left him unburied. Confederate statues were built over the dead.
Joseph Miller & his family escaped from slavery & made it to a Union camp where he enlisted in the army.
The army later expelled his family from the camp and he begged for them to stay with him since his 7 yr old son was sick.
The Union soldier told him, under gun point, that if his family didn’t leave “he would shoot every last one of them.”
Hours later, after Joseph completed his work for the army, he found his family miles away at a boardinghouse “without a morsel to eat.” His 6 yr. old son had frozen to death.
Joseph had to then carry his dead son miles back to the camp & bury him.
Within 2 months, the rest of his family, one by one, slowly died of infectious disease.
Miller later died as well from with the unreported epidemics that ravaged through the newly freed population or from a broken a heart.
Miller’s headstone today at Camp Nelson, Kentucky.
This area has been marked at Camp Nelson to commemorate the hundreds of freedwomen & their children who escaped from slavery but died from infectious disease during the war & were left unburied.
I explain more of these unreported stories in my book.
