Book examines Sherman's march and its massive emancipation

Axios

09-02-2025

U.S. Army Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's 1864 "March to the Sea" was not a "total war" campaign against the Confederacy as previously portrayed but a freedom movement that led to a great emancipation, a new book argues.
The big picture: " Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation," released last month, revisits a crucial moment of the American Civil War and shows how it sparked an emancipation — then refugee tragedy — that is often forgotten today.
The book's release comes on the heels of the 160th anniversary of the march and is one of the latest historical analyses of the Civil War that challenges old narratives about the Lost Cause and white grievances.
Zoom in: Bennett Parten, a history professor at Georgia Southern University, tells Axios that as a native of Georgia he's always been interested in the "March to the Sea."
He grew up hearing the popular version of the march as told by white southerners: It was a total war campaign that brutalized the South and flattened Atlanta as the Confederacy was weakening.
That version has been popularized by false images seen in the 1939 film, "Gone with the Wind," as a heartless Union military operation that forced any Antebellum white southerners into poverty without any regard to the enslaved people who welcomed that downfall.
"We always assumed this was the case and it just never had a real good narrative of it."
Reality check: Sherman's "March to the Sea" was a strict military operation where soldiers were ordered not to burn homes randomly, only those connected to cotton plantations, Parten writes.
Soldiers couldn't enter the homes of private residents, and it wasn't a pillaging of innocent bystanders, yet the end of enslavement and its economy.
Allegedly "loyal" enslaved people didn't run for the invading U.S. Army like their white owners but thousands fled toward it, creating a massive refugee of 20,000 people.
The intrigue: Parten details that the refugee crisis of newly emancipated people grew as formerly enslaved people fled destroyed plantations and went searching for children, spouses and family members.
"We're looking at the largest emancipation event in American history," Parten said.
That alone counters the narrative that Sherman's campaign was heartless and brutal, but one offering hope, he said.
Parten offers documented cases of unification and also shows how difficult it was for formerly enslaved people to reconnect with others who could not read or write.
Yes, but: The massive number of refugees overwhelmed the city of Savannah, Georgia.
A Sherman subordinate ordered pontoon bridges pulled up near Savannah, preventing Black refugees from crossing over and leaving hundreds of men, women and children to drown or be reslaved.
Sherman would then issue Special Field Order No. 15, which set aside a vast strip of land for newly freed people.
Zoom out: Parten said he wanted to write a story that didn't sanitize the past nor romanticize it:
"I didn't necessarily expect that this would be the way the story would end, but the more you kind of start pulling the different threads, the more you ask the question of what happened to the refugees, this is where you know the story does end."
What's next: Visitors to Georgia can take a tour through The March to the Sea Heritage Trail and visit sites mentioned in Parten's book.