Opium Slavery

“This book will move our study of Civil War veterans in a new direction—and recover the stories of men and women who have otherwise been forgotten in the war.”—Civil War Monitor’s Best Civil War Books of 2025

“A remarkable contribution. . . . Opium Slavery is a timely and much needed piece of scholarship. It fills a previously yawning gap in our understanding about the service-related trials and tribulations that veterans faced upon returning home from the Civil War’s dangerous battlefields and camps . . . [and] reminds us about the long, dark shadow that war casts on a nation’s direct participants and its society at large.”—Emerging Civil War

“Driven by the gripping stories of opiate-addicted Civil War veterans, Opium Slavery is a compelling read as well as a rich and textured analysis of an important topic that has—somehow!—not received the attention it deserves. The result is a sensitive exploration of how war, trauma, and social prejudices affected a generation of people who used drugs.”—David Herzberg, author of White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America

“This is scholarship of the highest order—deeply researched, smartly framed, elegantly written, and poignantly urgent. Through innovative use of digital tools and painstaking archival research, Opium Slavery illuminates how addiction emerged from the wreckage of war and became woven into the fabric of the Second American Republic. This book compels us to rethink not only the Civil War but also the long history of trauma, therapeutics, and addiction in the United States.” —Jim Downs, author of Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine