At the time of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, a wickedly satirical cartoon made the rounds, showing the notorious William Tecumseh Sherman sporting a lewd grin as he grasped an Olympic torch. “Atlanta’s Original Torch-Bearer,” snarked the caption.
What was interesting about the cartoon was that it needed no further explanation. One hundred and thirty-two years after Sherman and the Union Army of the Tennessee set off on the march across Georgia that was supposed to bring the Civil War to an end, everyone still seemed to know who Sherman was and what he was accused of doing to Atlanta, the smoking city he left behind. One of the most popular songs of the Civil War, Henry Clay Work’s “Marching Through Georgia,” celebrates how easily Sherman’s resistless legions swept “from Atlanta to the Sea” in the late fall of 1864, ticketing anything in their path for destruction. And anyone who has seen Gone With the Wind surely knows that Sherman’s March was one long trail of wartime death and mayhem, visited mostly on a helpless Georgia population.
Umm, maybe. Sherman liked to boast that he had accomplished “the utter destruction of [Georgia’s] roads, houses, and people … in the interior of the state,” and estimated that he had inflicted “one hundred millions of dollars” on “Georgia and its military resources.” But the entire population of Georgia on the eve of the Civil War was fewer than a million people (including slaves), its entire banking capital only $16 million, and its entire land value only $136.6 million. Where the $100 million estimate came from is anyone’s guess, but it may have been from Sherman’s weakness for what the historian Albert Castel scorchingly described as “exaggerations, distortions and falsehoods.”
Still, the notion that Sherman was responsible for inventing some kind of civilian catastrophe on the way from Atlanta to Savannah suited the mythmakers of the “Lost Cause,” who could hold up Sherman as “the merciless commander” and an example of Yankee perfidy. A hundred years later, it would come equally in handy to critics of the Vietnam War like James Reston Jr. of The New York Times, who pointed to Sherman’s March as the forerunner of “Dresden, Hiroshima, and Vietnam.”
Yet that too earns an ambiguous maybe. Sherman ordered “all depots, car-houses, shops, factories, foundries, &c.”—in other words, anything of military value—in Atlanta destroyed, but left three-quarters of the city undisturbed. The entire campaign, compared to the rest of the Civil War’s campaigns, was almost bloodless. Only one serious confrontation with Sherman’s army was attempted by Georgia militia at Griswoldville, on November 22; overall casualties along the way amounted to fewer than 2,000, and there was no report of even a single civilian casualty along the entire march. And when Anne Sarah Rubin retraced the route of Sherman’s March in 2008 for Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and the American Memory, she was surprised by how many antebellum buildings showed no sign of Sherman’s affection for torches.
In the long back-and-forth over Sherman’s military mania, historians have largely bypassed a story about the march that may have even greater importance in American culture: the long and unsung train of refugees from bondage who flocked to Sherman’s soldiers as liberating conquerors. Unfortunately for the historical record, most of the refugees were illiterate, and thus unable to match the vast outpouring of memoirs and reminiscences with which white soldiers, both Union and Confederate, littered the ensuing decades. Their story, with the exception of a handful of unavoidable disasters, has not been told until now.
Bennett Parten’s Somewhere Toward Freedom began as his PhD dissertation at Yale in 2020. But from the outset, nothing about this literary debut reads like academese. Parten is a gifted writer, with a marvelous sense of timing and pattern, which makes his book read like first-person observation. He also has the advantage of being a native Georgian who understands the changing geography and shifting environment of the 285 miles Sherman’s army crossed from November 15 to December 22, 1864. Above all, he has the storyteller’s sharp eye for vivid detail—for the “winding columns, glittering muskets, glowing flags” recalled by the chaplain Thomas Stevenson of the 78th Ohio, for example, and for the “caravans of negroes” John R. Kinnear of the 86th Illinois saw following “our war-path.”
It is those “caravans” that form the centerpiece of Parten’s narrative of the march; the refugees whose story he tells constituted “the largest emancipation event in our history and one of the largest in the rise and fall of Atlantic slavery.” Parten is conscious that “we’ve only ever seen the March as a military campaign.” What that misses is how Sherman’s Yankees “cut a path through the state of Georgia wide enough for freed people to begin putting the pieces of freedom together.”
In doing so, the refugees were not simply running away from slavery. They were running toward an army they hoped would welcome and protect them, toward a future where they could acquire their own land, to a system that would rewrite the laws of race that had held them in captivity for generations, and in the process extend the promise of American freedom to all. For Parten, the most important part of Sherman’s March was not the soldiers, the generals, or the battles—but, instead, a deliverance that counted as nothing less than a biblical Jubilee.
Not that it was planned that way. Sherman’s war was about the restoration of the Union, not the emancipation of the slaves. He regarded southern slavery as “the mildest and best regulated system of slavery in the world, now or heretofore,” and believed that at best, “the negro is in a transition state, and is not the equal of the white man.” Emancipation, he told his brother (a U.S. senator from Ohio), was “a judicial matter not mine.” If anything, he preferred that the refugees “stay where they were” rather than join his march.
Moreover, flight from slavery usually landed African Americans in so-called contraband camps where they eked out a marginal existence, courtesy of the federal military and under the deep suspicion of northern working-class whites who dreaded the competition the “contrabands” might offer for jobs. The march would be different. Sherman’s army was moving through a hostile landscape for all of the 37 days between Atlanta and Savannah. There was no time, and were certainly no resources, for building refugee settlements, so the refugees simply tagged along while the army moved southeast, mostly in the rear but occasionally scattered throughout the marching columns as cooks, informers, and pioneers (the 19th-century military term for a construction battalion). They were surely happy to rid themselves of masters and whips, delighted at the prospect of living for themselves, and hopeful that the onward march to somewhere might reunite them with family members who had been long ago sold away.
Even so, the march did not always look like a Jubilee, and never less so than in the wrenching desertion of the refugees at Ebenezer Creek. It was one of the great conundrums of the Civil War that so many of the Union generals who brought the Confederacy to its military knees had, like Sherman, no particular enthusiasm for ending slavery. Of Sherman’s four principal subordinates, Oliver Otis Howard of the 15th Corps was the most confirmed abolitionist, followed somewhat more mildly by Henry Warner Slocum and Francis Preston Blair. But the ineptly named Jefferson Davis, who commanded the 14th Corps, was an even deeper racial bigot than Sherman, and when his men crossed the Ebenezer Creek on December 9, 25 miles from Savannah, Davis ordered the bridges his corps had used pulled down before the refugees could follow. They were not just stranded. The shadowing Confederate cavalry swept down on the defenseless freedmen, driving many of the refugees to drown in the creek and its surrounding swamps, and herding many others back into slavery.
Of all the disgraces that mar the image of the Civil War—Fort Pillow, Sand Creek, the Crater—none quite reaches the infamy of Ebenezer Creek. No wonder that, three weeks after Sherman arrived in an unresisting Savannah, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton also showed up, wanting explanations. The explanations were not particularly convincing. But Sherman offered at least a measure of redress by issuing Special Field Order No. 15, which set aside a 400,000-acre swath of rich coastal territory for settlement by the refugees in 40-acre parcels, with help from “partially broken down” army pack animals (the origin of the legendary phrase “forty acres and a mule”).
The refugees were not simply running away from slavery. They were running toward an army they hoped would welcome and protect them, toward a future where they could acquire their own land, to a system that would rewrite the laws of race that had held them in captivity for generations.
In practice, Sherman was less interested in satisfying the refugees’ prayers for land of their own and more in getting them out of the way of the next campaign he was planning, northward into the Carolinas. Anywhere between 6,000 and 8,000 of the refugees who had followed Sherman’s army were never permitted to enter Savannah. Instead, they were loaded onto steamers and tugboats and dumped unceremoniously on the islands of the Port Royal Sound, where a settlement and land redistribution experiment of its own had been going on since 1862 under the oversight of the Union military and northern civilian volunteers and missionaries. Sherman’s offloading of the refugees gave him a free hand to strike northward on February 1, but it swamped the capacities of the Port Royal community.
Ultimately, as many as 40,000 freedmen were able to subdivide the land set aside under Sherman’s special order by April 1865. But with the murder of Abraham Lincoln, the presidency fell to the hands of Vice President Andrew Johnson, a Tennessean whose chief aspiration was to make peace with the defeated Confederates and declare an amnesty that would allow them to reclaim the lands that Sherman’s field order had put into the freedmen’s hands.
Sherman’s March thus became another of the great missed opportunities for a new racial future in America, and almost a trailer for how the postwar disappointment of Reconstruction would unfold. Nevertheless, it is worth asking whether the march was really the “largest emancipation event” Parten would like to believe it was. No one kept a census of the refugees who followed the march, but by even the most optimistic estimates, the Sherman refugees amounted to only a fraction of the slave population of Georgia. Juneteenth in Texas in 1865 announced the emancipation of more than 182,000 people. Parten acknowledges that Sherman’s soldiers were not always seen as friends by Georgia’s African Americans, either. However much the Yankees looked like the paladins of Jubilee, they still presented a mixture of liberation and gamble, a risk that Parten freely acknowledges: “The army was also a threat, especially the foraging parties, who routinely appropriated the property of enslaved people.” It was all well and good that Sherman’s army was there to bring freedom, but that freedom might only last as long as the blue suits were still in the vicinity. Otherwise, as one Union officer was candidly informed, “Massa, you’se’ll go way tomorrow, and anudder white man’ll come.”
The fate of the Georgia refugees is emblematic of the disappointments and shortfalls of the war to end American slavery. The Civil War may remain the central epic of American history—or, as Robert Penn Warren declared 60 years ago, “our only ‘felt’ history.” But in that light, Sherman’s March and its marchers are a major marker of both our failures and our aspirations, and nothing has captured that contradiction with greater skill or depth than Somewhere Toward Freedom.
