the Western Sanitary Commission was moved to
establish an agency at Helena, Ark., for the special relief of several
hundred colored families at that military post who had gathered there
from the neighboring country, and from the opposite shore in
Mississippi, as a place of refuge from their rebel owners. It was at
that time a miserable refuge, for the post was commanded by pro-slavery
Generals, who succeeded the humane and excellent Major-General Curtis,
who was unfortunately relieved of his command, and transferred to St.
Louis, in consequence of slanders against him at Washington, which some
of his pro-slavery subordinates had been busy in fabricating; and the
free papers which he gave to the colored people were violated; they were
subjected to all manner of cruelties and hardships; they were put under
a forced system of labor; driven by mounted orderlies to work on the
fortifications, and to unload steamboats and coal barges; and discharged
at night without compensation, or a comfortable shelter. No proper
record was kept of their services, and most of them never received any
pay for months of incessant toil. They were compelled to camp together
in the outskirts of the town, in huts and condemned tents, and the
rations issued to them were cut down to a half ration for the women and
children; so that they were neither well fed nor sheltered properly from
the weather, while they were entirely destitute of comfortable
clothing, and were without the means of purchasing new. Subjected to
this treatment, very great sickness and mortality prevailed among them.
In the miserable building assigned them for a hospital, which was wholly
unprovided with hospital furniture and bedding, and without regular
nurses or attendants, they were visited once a day by a contract
surgeon, who merely looked in upon them, administered a little medicine,
and left them to utter neglect and misery. Here they died at a fearful
rate, and their dead bodies were removed from the miserable pallet of
straw, or the bare floor where they had breathed their last, and buried
in rude coffins, and sometimes coffinless, in a low piece of ground near
by. The proportion of deaths, was about seventy-five percent. of all who
were carried sick to this miserable place, so that the colored people
became greatly afraid of being sent to the hospital, considering it the
same as going to a certain death; and many of them refused to go, even
in the last stages of sickness,