The Other Side of Sherman’s March

The second hour of “Gone with the Wind,” the bold, almost brazenly romantic Civil War epic that won ten Academy Awards, is largely a portrait of hell. “The skies rained death,” the screen reads. General William Tecumseh Sherman and his Union Army have brutally taken Atlanta during a hard-fought campaign, at a combined cost of nearly seventy-five thousand casualties. Scarlett O’Hara, a wealthy white Southerner, picks her way out of the city, passing the littered remains of wagons and men while vultures hover overhead. All the plantation houses she sees have been reduced to charred ruins.

Only her own plantation has survived Sherman’s assault. Scarlett opens the door to find her father, but it’s clear from his blank eyes that he’s a broken man. The house, too, is a mere shell of itself. The Yankees used it as a headquarters, and they stole everything they didn’t burn: livestock, clothes, rugs, even Scarlett’s mother’s rosaries. The slaves, too, are gone—only three out of a hundred are left. Scarlett, starving, staggers behind the house and tries to eat radishes from the ground, searching for whatever scraps of food remain.

This scene is typical of the way Sherman’s march through Georgia is usually depicted. In the fall of 1864, Sherman took sixty thousand Union soldiers some two hundred and fifty miles from Atlanta to the ocean, scorching a vast swath of the state along the way. Parts of Atlanta were razed to the ground, and Savannah became Sherman’s “Christmas gift” to Abraham Lincoln. The campaign is remembered as a path of destruction, a total war waged against the white civilians of the South.

Yet to the many enslaved people across the state who left their homes and followed Sherman to the sea, the march meant freedom. Theirs was not the stately freedom of legislative proposals and Presidential proclamations, of men debating and signing documents. It was, instead, military emancipation—always a messy endeavor, full of risks and fears and betrayals, and one that is sometimes forgotten in accounts of how emancipation occurred. This is the central narrative of Bennett Parten’s new book, “Somewhere Toward Freedom.” Parts of this story have been told before, in bits and pieces, in broader works about the Civil War or emancipation or the march itself. But Parten’s may be the first to make freedpeople its sole focus, and to claim that they were essential to the march’s meaning.

Sherman’s march started in Atlanta, the railroad and manufacturing hub that fell to his army in early September, 1864. Sherman had slowly fought his way there from Chattanooga, using a series of minor skirmishes and flanking maneuvers as he worked his way south. In July, he won a set of major victories near the city, but then his momentum stalled. Finally, he managed to pull one more maneuver, going all the way around Atlanta to cut off its southerly connections. The Confederates saw the score and promptly skedaddled. “Atlanta is ours,” Sherman wrote, “& fairly won.”

Sherman’s presence in Georgia, like the Union Army’s presence anywhere in the South, had a corrosive effect on slavery. Almost as soon as his army took Atlanta, the city became “a haven for freed people from across the region,” Parten writes, “with men and women pouring in from the surrounding countryside.” Indeed, enslaved people had been fleeing to Union lines from the start of the war—and Republicans in Congress had been putting in place the policies to make them free. Within months of the war’s start, Congress instructed the military that soldiers had no responsibility to return fugitive slaves; soon after that, the First Confiscation Act said that Southerners forfeited the service of any enslaved people who had been employed against the United States. Under this framework, any slaves coming voluntarily to Union lines were effectively emancipated. The policy freed tens of thousands of enslaved people during the next year as the Union encroached along the edges of the Confederacy. On the Sea Islands of South Carolina, where the Union established a beachhead just seven months into the war, white planters fled the approaching Army while some ten thousand slaves stayed put. “Son, dat ain’t no t’under,” one mother reportedly said when she heard the cannons, “dat Yankee come to gib you Freedom.”

Soon, an even larger emancipation was taking place along the Mississippi River. In the spring of 1862, Ulysses Grant’s army advanced from the north while David Farragut’s amphibious operation came up from the south in a pincer movement around Vicksburg. Full control of the Mississippi would not come for another year, but in the meantime the Union acquired some of the largest cotton and sugar plantations in the South, which were home to more than a hundred and fifty thousand enslaved people. Recognizing that the First Confiscation Act was no longer adequate to deal with the situation on the ground, Republicans quickly passed the Second Confiscation Act, providing for the immediate emancipation of rebel-owned slaves in areas occupied by the Union Army. Practically speaking, this amounted to an announcement that the Union’s goal was universal emancipation in the seceded states—as Lincoln made clear with his Emancipation Proclamation several months later.

With soldiers now allowed to entice enslaved people to their lines and Black men able to enlist, the Union Army officially became an army of liberation, absorbing ever larger numbers of freedom seekers as it moved through the South. In early 1864, not long before beginning his campaign in Georgia, Sherman took twenty thousand troops on a monthlong march across Mississippi, living off the land and deliberately punishing the big planters whom the Army held responsible for the war. “Last year they could have saved their slaves,” Sherman wrote as he embarked on the march, “but now it is too late—all the powers of earth cannot restore to them their slaves any more than their dead grandfathers.” As many as eight thousand slaves fled the fields to follow Sherman’s troops.

By the time Sherman and his men marched through Georgia later that year, it was clear that enslaved people would follow wherever they went. Soldiers didn’t really have a choice in the matter. But, to the extent that they did have a choice, it’s worth noting that in the Presidential election that occurred a week before they embarked from Atlanta, an astonishing eighty-six per cent of Sherman’s troops chose Lincoln. These soldiers knew what they were voting for—a platform of pursuing the war to its conclusion and securing a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery—and they wrote home to tell their friends and family to vote for it, too. “If McClellan gets the reins he will have peace sooner than Abe, but by letting them have their slaves,” one soldier told his girlfriend, contrasting the two main candidates. “Then we can fight them again in ten years. But let Old Abe settle it, and it is always settled.” Sherman’s march would mark the culmination of military emancipation, and this fact alone justifies the closer look that Parten gives it.

After taking Atlanta, Sherman faced the question of where to go from there. Most people probably would have pursued the Confederate Army that was retreating to Alabama. But Sherman was determined to make a decisive move that would end the war. “If the North can march an army right through the South,” he told Grant, “it is proof positive that the North can prevail in this contest.”

Sherman’s troops left the city in the middle of November and started to move through a string of central-Georgia counties, where some hundred and fifty thousand slaves had been held before the war. The steady stream of freedom seekers making their way to the Army quickly became a flood. As Parten points out, though, joining the march was never a straightforward choice between slavery and freedom. Sherman, more than many other Northern officers, resisted racial equality. “A nigger is not a white man,” he wrote a few months before starting the march to Savannah, “and all the Psalm singing on earth won’t make him so.” He was happy to take on able-bodied Black men, sometimes even pressing them into service, but he evaded Army policy and avoided enlisting them as soldiers. Instead, he placed them in so-called pioneer roles, responsible for the backbreaking manual labor of clearing downed trees and laying logs across muddy patches. One Union officer suspected that the work was “in many instances greater than they were subjected to by their former owners.”

Not all Black men may have been excited about such an assignment, nor would they necessarily have been thrilled by the prospect of separation from their families, whom Sherman had no intention of supporting. Sometimes these family members remained behind, and sometimes they struggled to follow along in the Army’s wake, trying to stay safe and secure food while marching many miles a day. There were no good options. Nevertheless, a total of nearly twenty thousand freedpeople appear to have followed Sherman’s army to Savannah in late December, and it’s impossible to say how many others might have joined for at least part of the way.

If there was a consensus among Union soldiers that slavery needed to end, there was considerably less agreement about what Black freedom should mean and how Black people should be treated. Plenty of soldiers could vote for Lincoln, fight for abolition, and still abuse or harass at least some of the Black people they encountered across the South. Sherman’s foraging teams sometimes targeted slave cabins in addition to plantation houses, and they often proved perfectly willing to threaten slaves (a rifle held to the temple, say) to get information about where a plantation’s food, livestock, and money might be squirrelled away. Some of this was sheer frustration, soldiers taking out their pains and losses on whatever outlet was available, but very often it was also clear racist resentment.

The most egregious incident of the whole march involved Sherman’s aptly named subordinate Jefferson C. Davis, who bore no relation to the Confederate President but who seems to have shared some of his opinions about Black people. When Davis’s troops crossed Ebenezer Creek, about twenty miles northwest of Savannah, he ordered the pontoon bridges pulled up before the Black refugees behind the Army could get across, leaving those refugees—mostly women, children, and old folks—to try to ford the creek on their own. Some were killed or reënslaved at the hands of oncoming Confederate cavalry, and others drowned in the frigid water. Davis’s conduct at Ebenezer Creek soon leaked to the Northern press, owing to outraged consciences within his own corps, and those reports contributed to the Lincoln Administration’s mounting concerns that Sherman had “manifested an almost criminal dislike to the negro” in the course of the march.