Commanding an army of some 60,000 men, in late 1864, Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman marched the 300 miles from Atlanta to Savannah in 37 days. Sherman, who had taken Atlanta in September, intended to defeat the Confederacy by inflicting on its heartland the terrible consequences of a war the Southern secessionists had begun. A bit of audacious military strategy that’s assumed almost mythic proportions, Sherman’s March to the Sea has been depicted as barbaric, brilliant, Napoleonic — a “grand adagio movement,” as the diarist George Templeton Strong astutely called it.
All this is well known, particularly the barbaric part, since many of Sherman’s men torched or pilfered property even though they were ordered not to enter civilian homes or rob the poor. Taking a more novel approach, Bennett Parten, an assistant professor of history at Georgia Southern University, paints Sherman’s March to the Sea in essentially liberationist colors, for, as he writes, the march “captures America’s rebirth, our pivot from slavery to freedom, and the lasting legacy of our Civil War.” To Parten, the march symbolizes “the hopes and failures, and all the beauty and horror of how emancipation actually happened.”
Parten’s signature contribution to the vast literature on Sherman’s march is to consider it from the vantage of the 20,000 or more refugees who trailed in the wake of his soldiers. As enslaved men and women thronged around the army, many were heard to say that the day of Jubilee had finally arrived. Though the refugees often distrusted the soldiers, who had been foraging through Georgia leaving many communities without food, they fell in with the troops anyway, knowing they’d be protected by the federal government. “I was freed when Sherman’s army came through,” Scipio King, who had been born enslaved, later testified.
Still, the decision to abandon their homes to follow the army to an uncertain place could be heart-rending. As the army and the refugees advanced into the pine barrens and swampy coastal territory of Georgia, and it became harder to find food, one soldier sadly noted that “the Negroes come into our lines by hundreds, but we cannot do anything for them.” Some Union soldiers acted with outright hostility. Maj. Gen. Jefferson Columbus Davis, who complained of the huge number of refugees following his column, typically ordered soldiers to pull up pontoon bridges before the refugees could cross the water. At Ebenezer Creek, he reportedly ordered the bridge be burned — just as a squad of Confederates arrived. It was a massacre of horrific proportions. One Union soldier called these actions “disgraceful to American history.”
Drawing extensively on Willie Lee Rose’s “Rehearsal for Reconstruction,” an influential chronicle of the Union’s early and mixed efforts to assist freed Black Americans, Parten argues that “what came after the march was as much a crucible, as much an ordeal, as the march itself.” Though Sherman triumphantly entered Savannah in December, most of the refugees never entered the city. Instead, they were sent up the coast to Port Royal, the Union outpost on the coast of South Carolina where about 15,000 freed people lived alongside Northerners who had migrated south to serve as educators and missionaries.
There, Brig. Gen. Rufus Saxton, the military governor of the Department of the South, had been ordered to take possession of all plantations previously occupied by rebels and to feed, shelter and generally care for the formerly enslaved. But as 17,000 Georgian refugees arrived, many had to be housed in rough tents, or they slept outdoors, often without blankets. At least 1,000 of them died of exposure.
In this, the second and somewhat more derivative half of his book, which is less about the march than about its aftermath, Parten largely focuses on how the “hopes and failures” of the march persisted, particularly when Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, in Savannah, met with Garrison Frazier, a formerly enslaved pastor, who told them, “We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.” Sherman’s subsequent Special Field Order No. 15 allowed freed men and women to settle on a strip of captured land that stretched from Charleston down to Jacksonville, under a provision that came to be known colloquially as “40 acres and a mule.”
Men like Edward Philbrick, one of the Northerners who came to Georgia’s Sea Islands with humanitarian intentions, purchased 11 plantations in the strip, arrogantly assuming that by employing freed people on his property, he would bring about their “elevation.” As Parten rightly observes, Philbrick represents those capitalists who wanted “to reshape the slaveholding South in the image of the North,” with its highhanded, paternalistic privatization of land.
To General Saxton the matter was a clear-cut moral one: The former planters were traitors who had forfeited any rights to the land that had been cultivated by the formerly enslaved, and the newly freed Americans should take possession of it. Saxton was blocked at every turn. Sherman’s field order didn’t stipulate that Black families legally owned the plots allotted to them. Besides, President Andrew Johnson would soon demand all confiscated lands not already sold be restored to their original owners. They needed only show proof of ownership and pardons, which Johnson had been generously doling out.
Enter the temperamentally conservative Oliver Otis Howard, a pious evangelical known as “the Christian general,” whom Parten considers a defender of Black civil and political rights. Appointed to head the Freedmen’s Bureau, Howard had to deliver the awful news in September 1865, but, as a sop to the freed people, he promised that these ex-Confederates would be setting aside lands for them to work as their own. Maybe they could purchase or lease the land someday. Of course, Black men and women understood this as the betrayal — and system of peonage — that it was. So did General Saxton, who was peremptorily mustered out of service.
Once back in session, Congress “dithered,” or so Parten charges, but that seems not entirely correct. Abolitionists like the Pennsylvania representative Thaddeus Stevens had already been hatching a radical plan to redistribute the wealth of the South: Divvy up the confiscated property and give it to the families of formerly enslaved people and thus effectively overturn the propertied class system that so long had ruled the region. Land ownership meant political power. Stevens reminded the House that four million people had been freed, but “if we leave them to the legislation of their late masters, we had better have left them in bondage. If we fail in this great duty now, when we have the power,” he warned, “we shall deserve and receive the execration of history and of all future ages.” And so they have.
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