Somewhere Toward Freedom Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation by Bennett Parten published by Simon & Schuster 272 pages (2025)
There was a lot of anticipation of Somewhere Toward Freedom long 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 control of Georgia with an analysis of the impact the march had on enslaved African Americans the March 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. Previous books have told us that thousands of slaves were set free, that they followed stupidly behind the Union armies, and that Sherman was a racist and unconcerned with the Black refugees following in his wake.
Parten 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 helped Confederate troops retake many of the former slaves, some of whom were slaughtered by their captors. However, as Sherman’s armies 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 Confederate slave population. This deprived the white rulers of the Confederacy of a significant part of the nascent slaveowners’ republic 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 or west 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 raise and harvest agricultural products.
Apart from the freeing of slaves, previous historians have devoted very little space to the relocation of Black refugees. By just telling the stories of the Union armies, they have presented a view of carefully planned Union victories without detailing the lack of preparation for the massive amount of Black Refugees. Parten says:
“We often think of Sherman’s March through Georgia as simply the Savannah Campaign—meaning the roughly 250-mile march from Atlanta to Savannah in November and December 1864. We also sometimes follow the march to Savannah but then quickly shift the story’s focus to Sherman’s next move: the army’s push through the Carolinas and on to Durham, North Carolina, where Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston surrendered his army in April 1865. But the problem with this narrative is that it obscures what happened in January and February in Savannah and therefore misses the fact that Sherman’s March initiated a sprawling refugee crisis along the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. The crisis began as an attempt to resettle the freed refugees at a federal outpost on the South Carolina Sea Islands and ended in tragedy: men and women died from sickness and exposure; freed people landed in places ill equipped to support them; and thousands of people found themselves experiencing freedom in what were effectively foreign lands, in places far from home and in unfamiliar environments.”
This focus on the armies also leads to the neglect of this campaign as an early incident in the Reconstruction of the Southern United States. As Blacks saw the Union armies marching by they saw this as a fulfillment of the Biblical prophesy of the Day of Jubilee having arrived. It also had an immediate impact on the common Union soldiers as Blacks hailed their Union liberators.
The interchange between newly freedpeople changed attitudes as well. After Atlanta was taken by the Federal forces, white residents were incensed by what one Confederate said were the “uppity airs” put on by African Americans. The same source said that Black people “were all free and the Yankee soldiers don’t fail to assure them of that fact.” Even Blacks living far from the Federal armies could join in the liberation by fleeing their plantations to go to join the line of Federal march. The Confederate wrote that it was as if slavery had “vanished into air.”
Sherman did see the liberationary impact of his armies marching through Georgia. Parten says that:
“Despite his tough talk about the folly of emancipation and its impact on the army, Sherman’s record while commanding Memphis is mixed. On the one hand, he abided by the terms of the Second Confiscation Act, which went into effect as he began his governorship. When enslaved people came into the city seeking refuge, he refused to send them away or return them to their masters, as the law prescribed, despite countless numbers of local slave owners writing him for help. To his credit, he remained resolute on that score and relished writing back to planters, rebuking them for having the nerve to ask such a thing in a time of war. Yet on the other hand, his instinct was always to do little more than the law required. He wasn’t shy about telling his brother, who had spoken up in support of the bill in the Senate, that he disapproved of the policy and wouldn’t actually declare enslaved people free. To him, that was something only judges could do, and he wouldn’t let John or any other politician convince him otherwise. He also refused to provide refuge to enslaved people unless they agreed to work for the army, a policy that privileged men over women because of the labor they could provide and incidentally left a whole host of women and children without access to the refuge of US Army lines.”
This mixed record would both protect at least some refugees and contribute to the ending of slavery in the United States, but it also reflected the lack of clear plans for turning Black men and women into full citizens. While Sherman had at least the rudimentary beginnings of a plan for the refugees, the Black populations themselves evolved their own vision and goals.
This book supplies the military background for understanding the March to the Sea and beyond. It also provides many quotes not just from Union and Confederate military men, but also from enslaved African Americans. Parten looks at Black conventions and delegations both in Georgia and in the North arriving at plans for the post-emancipation world. The author makes major contributions in detailing how escaped slaves could transform their own lives and help with Union victory. Unfortunately the Union policies also allowed former slaveowners to reconstruct a world of white racial hegemony as Reconstruction was overthrown.
I recommend this short book for both well-read “March to the Sea” historians and for beginners.
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