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Juneteenth and Other Lesser Known African-American Historical Culture

Khalid Elhassan June 15, 2020 34 min

Colonel Tye - American Revolutionary War — Colonel Tye as portrayed in a PBS documentary. PBS

22. Epidemics in British Black Camps

By arming and hastily training the escaped slaves who flocked to his lines by the thousands, Lord Dunmore, was able to double his available forces within a few weeks. Unfortunately for him and for his black recruits, diseases – particularly typhoid and smallpox – swept through the escaped slaves.

Back then, the standards of medical care and sanitation were generally low even in ideal conditions, and conditions in the camps hastily thrown up for the new black recruits were far from ideal. Epidemics swept the runaways’ camps, killing them off almost as fast as they were assembled. It prevented Dunmore from raising the vast slave armies he had once envisioned.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.