A new reading of Sherman's march shows how enslaved people sought to free themselves

The Guardian

4 days ago

The story of Sherman's march to the sea is often remembered for its destruction of the south.
Led by the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman through Georgia from 15 November until 21 December 1864, the march began with Union forces taking Atlanta, and ended when they took the port of Savannah.
Sherman instructed his forces to follow a 'scorched earth' policy, which was intended to break the civilian population's support for the Confederacy. White southerners supported the Confederacy through providing food, railroads and other goods. Sherman's soldiers destroyed everything from military targets to civilian property, raiding farms and plantations and stealing goods.
But the version of the march that was popularized in the book and film Gone With the Wind doesn't tell the full, or even a partially accurate, story, despite it being perhaps the most prominent understanding in the American zeitgeist of Sherman's actions. Gone With the Wind perpetuated a narrative in which 'the skies rained death' on Sherman's arrival, though Sherman did not burn Atlanta to the ground: much of the city's destruction was from entrenchments dug by Confederates and the detonation of ammunition as they fled.
In the common understanding of the march, enslaved people are an afterthought, affected by Sherman's actions by happenstance and largely rendered voiceless and without agency. But the historian Bennett Parten is adding to that notion.
'It's the moment where ideas of American freedom came into collision,' Parten said of the march. 'It was always being re-imagined. I think as Americans, continually questioning and querying what American freedom actually means is a really good practice.'
In his latest book, Somewhere Toward Freedom, Parten, an assistant professor of history at Georgia Southern University, seeks to add to the common understanding of Sherman's march by presenting it as an emancipatory movement led by formerly enslaved people.
'We have certain assumptions about what claiming freedom or certain ideas about what freedom should look like, but we should also recognize that for enslaved people, claiming freedom with your feet, following the army to try to find and reconstitute it into family, searching for a sense of security – this was all some form of pursuing freedom for themselves,' Parten said.
'Offering this new perspective, and by shifting the focus on to enslaved people, free people in their experiences, offers a version of the march for a whole new generation of Americans to really understand what this moment was and to come to a new understanding of what the civil war was about and what it looked like as a conflict.'
For many enslaved people, the march meant freedom, not just the destructive path of Sherman's forces. Much of how the war exists in the zeitgeist currently focuses on how soldiers or southern planters viewed the war, but Parten aims to center enslaved people, who used the moment to seize their freedom. His book makes the newly freed people's experience its sole focus, and argues that they are pivotal to understanding the true impact of the march.
'We can include others in this dynamic as well – the war becomes so much more multidimensional, it becomes so much more local, so much more personalized,' he said. 'I really hope readers come away with a different understanding of what the wartime experience might have been like. I want readers to understand just how central enslaved people were to the actual fighting.'
Enslaved people were 'agents of their own story ,Parten said, and they worked to aid the Union army. They acted as scouts, intelligence agents and in other capacities to ensure a Union victory.
'I want readers to, when they approach the civil war, be able to see and identify the presence and the, in many cases, paramount importance of the role that enslaved people played in shaping the story of the civil war and shaping its outcome,' he said.
Somewhere Toward Freedom opens with the story of Sally, a formerly enslaved woman who spent each night searching the Union army camps for her children. Her ritual of searching the faces of freed people who had joined the army became known and expected throughout the camps, though many doubted that Sally would be successful in her efforts. Just as Sally and Ben, her husband, had joined the Union army on their march and used that opportunity to find their long-ago stolen children, other enslaved people used the moment to free themselves and make decisions about their lives.
It was neither Sherman nor his soldiers' intention to make the march into a liberation event – that was something enslaved people did themselves. As Sherman and his 60,000 soldiers marched from Atlanta to Savannah, they were joined by enslaved people who seized the moment presented to them.
'From the very start and at every stop along the way, enslaved people fled plantations and rushed into the army's path … The movement was unlike anything anyone had ever seen,' the text reads. 'Soldiers described it as being practically providential. Enslaved people did, too. They hailed the soldiers as angels of the Lord and celebrated the army's arrival as if it were the start of something prophetic, as if God himself had ordained the war and the days of Revelation had arrived.'
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Notions of freedom and jubilee were popular from a religious and social standpoint at the time. People were swept up in the mood, rooted in what Parten said was a radical moment of social renewal and regeneration.
Per Leviticus in the Bible, he said, jubilee was a time in which debts were absolved, slaves went free, land holdings were divided up into equitable plots. Over time, however, labor radicals clung to the term as a demand for the absolution of debts. It began to develop an apocalyptic edge, as people saw universal freedom and emancipation as a harbinger of the coming of Christ.
'It has all these competing, different elements, but fundamentally what's at the bottom of it is this really radical idea of society renewing itself in a way that is rooted to equity and justice,' Parten said of jubilee. 'Certainly, by the time that the war happens, it's used in all different types of contexts, but we should recognize that when enslaved people or others claim this idea, that's what they're claiming. We should recognize that there is a need for some form of regeneration and renewal at times.'
The Union army was reluctant to have the mass of formerly enslaved people that joined them, Parten notes in the book. Many people came fleeing plantations with only what they had on their backs, seizing the opportunity to be free and figuring out what tomorrow would bring when it came. Parten describes the camps of formerly enslaved people that attached themselves to the Union army as 'refugee camps', and describes the way in which even the Union army responded to them as a 'refugee crisis'. The formerly enslaved people, who had self-emancipated, endured harsh elements, often without food or shelter, and marched up to 20 miles (32km) a day. Despite racism from Union commanders, some of whom attempted to prevent them from staying with the army, they persisted.
'The reason I use the term 'crisis' is simply because the presence of so many individuals forces the government or the army to recognize them and to begin taking actions to deal with these large numbers of people,' Parten said. 'The outcome is somewhat of a modern refugee story, whether or not that's how the army viewed them.'
Parten said that the scale and size of the moment was remarkable to him while he was researching the book. By the time Sherman arrived in Savannah at the end of his march, Parten estimates, the number of refugees was about 20,000 – about the size of Savannah itself. There, Sherman met with Black religious leaders. He asked Garrison Frazier, who was the spokesperson for the ministers, about how the refugees decided to do what they did. While Frazier himself wasn't a refugee, he had been talking to those who were. In a way, he was able to act as a proxy for them, sharing their experiences with someone who had the power to enact change for them.
'For me, this was such a remarkable little nugget of what you find in the sources, because it suggests that the refugees, who, through the collective weight and power of their movement, found a way to essentially be in the room,' Parten said. 'They're not [physically] in the room, but they're nonetheless really doing things to change the policy of the army, the US government, and to have a presence in this meeting with Sherman and [Edwin] Stanton [Lincoln's secretary of war], who were two of the most powerful men in the country … [It] really spoke to the power of the refugees to really lay claim on this moment and what it might mean.'
In making formerly enslaved people the sole focus of the story, Parten encourages readers to reconsider their understanding of Sherman's march, its implications and its legacy. Thoroughly researched yet written in a compelling, accessible way, the book offers a fresh perspective on a centuries-old event.