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Somewhere Toward Freedom Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation
by Bennett Parten published by Simon & Schuster (2025)
There was a lot of anticipation before this book appeared in bookstores and on Amazon. I heard scholars talking about the work months before it came out. While there have been some very good books on Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s “March to the Sea,” Bennett Parten combined the military story of the last months of Confederate Georgia with an analysis of the impact the march had on enslaved African Americans it encountered on the Union army’s journey. And, of course, it also examines the slave communities’ effort to help the Federal army and what they were hoping for that would come as a result of their actions.
Parten says that the way historians have looked at Sherman’s March to the Sea is very incomplete. He writes:
Though we’ve typically looked at Sherman’s March only as one of the last campaigns of the Civil War, it was also an early battle of Reconstruction, a wartime crucible that went on shaping American society long after the marching stopped and the campaign came to a close.
The March presented enslaved people with the sudden end of slavery if they followed the soldiers. The incorporation of tens of thousands of Black refugees into the train following Sherman presented to the Federal government an opportunity to begin establishing clear lines of protection to African Americans. Sherman’s men sometimes sheltered the escapees, and sometimes abused them. Jefferson Davis, one of Sherman’s division commanders, carried out actions that led to Confederate troops retake many of the former slaves, some of whom were slaughtered. However, as Sherman’s came to see the evolving situation they understood that the prior history of slavery was nearing an end and that they were facilitating a massive change in history for the United States.
The largest number of enslaved people fled to the Union Army during Sherman’s March, but other escapees joined other armies beginning in 1861. Roughly 500,000 slaves came into Union lines from 1861 to 1865, 15% of the total slaver population. This deprived the white rulers of the Confederacy of a significant part of the nascent republic of slavery of a significant part of its labor. It also mandated that as Union troops threatened different areas of the South, “owners” would have to move their slaves further South to avoid them. Rather than allowing slaves to stay on plantations with Union troops around, the enslaved had to be moved to Arkansas or Texas to avoid being freed. The Union Army’s emancipationist policy meant that slaves had to be taken away by their “owners” from the land they were used to farm to areas of less fertile land where the slaves would be ill housed and often without equipment to farm.
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