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HOW SHERMAN’S MARCH OPENED THE DOOR FOR SELF-EMANCIPATION  
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Adria R Walker
August 7, 2025
The Guardian
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_ Historian Bennett Parten's new book, Somewhere Toward Freedom,
focuses on the experience of those who seized a chance at
emancipation. “Through the collective weight and power of their
movement, [they] found a way to essentially be in the room.” _

Engraving depicting Sherman's march to the sea, Alexander Hay
Ritchie,

 

The story of Sherman’s march to the sea is often remembered for its
destruction of the south.

Led by the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman through Georgia from
15 November until 21 December 1864, the march
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with Union forces taking Atlanta, and ended when they took the port of
Savannah.

Sherman instructed his forces to follow a “scorched earth” policy,
which was intended to break the civilian population’s support for
the Confederacy. White southerners supported the Confederacy through
providing food, railroads and other goods. Sherman’s soldiers
destroyed everything from military targets to civilian property,
raiding farms and plantations and stealing goods.

But the version of the march that was popularized in the book and film
Gone With the Wind doesn’t tell the full, or even a partially
accurate, story, despite it being perhaps the most prominent
understanding in the American zeitgeist of Sherman’s actions. Gone
With the Wind perpetuated a narrative in which “the skies rained
death” on Sherman’s arrival, though Sherman did not burn Atlanta
to the ground: much of the city’s destruction was from
entrenchments dug by Confederates
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the detonation of ammunition as they fled.

In the common understanding of the march, enslaved people are an
afterthought, affected by Sherman’s actions by happenstance and
largely rendered voiceless and without agency. But the historian
Bennett Parten is adding to that notion.

“It’s the moment where ideas of American freedom came into
collision,” Parten said of the march. “It was always being
re-imagined. I think as Americans, continually questioning and
querying what American freedom actually means is a really good
practice.”

In his latest book, Somewhere Toward Freedom, Parten, an assistant
professor of history at Georgia Southern University, seeks to add to
the common understanding of Sherman’s march by presenting it as an
emancipatory movement led by formerly enslaved people.

“We have certain assumptions about what claiming freedom or certain
ideas about what freedom should look like, but we should also
recognize that for enslaved people, claiming freedom with your feet,
following the army to try to find and reconstitute it into family,
searching for a sense of security – this was all some form of
pursuing freedom for themselves,” Parten said.

“Offering this new perspective, and by shifting the focus on to
enslaved people, free people in their experiences, offers a version of
the march for a whole new generation of Americans to really understand
what this moment was and to come to a new understanding of what the
civil war was about and what it looked like as a conflict.”

For many enslaved people, the march meant freedom, not just the
destructive path of Sherman’s forces. Much of how the war exists in
the zeitgeist currently focuses on how soldiers or southern planters
viewed the war, but Parten aims to center enslaved people, who used
the moment to seize their freedom. His book makes the newly freed
people’s experience its sole focus, and argues that they are pivotal
to understanding the true impact of the march.

“We can include others in this dynamic as well – the war becomes
so much more multidimensional, it becomes so much more local, so much
more personalized,” he said. “I really hope readers come away with
a different understanding of what the wartime experience might have
been like. I want readers to understand just how central enslaved
people were to the actual fighting.”

Enslaved people were “agents of their own story ,Parten said, and
they worked to aid the Union army. They acted as scouts, intelligence
agents and in other capacities to ensure a Union victory.

“I want readers to, when they approach the civil war, be able to see
and identify the presence and the, in many cases, paramount importance
of the role that enslaved people played in shaping the story of the
civil war and shaping its outcome,” he said.

A moment of jubilee

Somewhere Toward Freedom opens with the story of Sally, a formerly
enslaved woman who spent each night searching the Union army camps for
her children. Her ritual of searching the faces of freed people who
had joined the army became known and expected throughout the camps,
though many doubted that Sally would be successful in her efforts.
Just as Sally and Ben, her husband, had joined the Union army on their
march and used that opportunity to find their long-ago stolen
children, other enslaved people used the moment to free themselves and
make decisions about their lives.

It was neither Sherman nor his soldiers’ intention to make the march
into a liberation event – that was something enslaved people did
themselves. As Sherman and his 60,000 soldiers marched from Atlanta to
Savannah, they were joined by enslaved people who seized the moment
presented to them.

“From the very start and at every stop along the way, enslaved
people fled plantations and rushed into the army’s path … The
movement was unlike anything anyone had ever seen,” the text reads.
“Soldiers described it as being practically providential. Enslaved
people did, too. They hailed the soldiers as angels of the Lord and
celebrated the army’s arrival as if it were the start of something
prophetic, as if God himself had ordained the war and the days of
Revelation had arrived.”

Notions of freedom and jubilee were popular from a religious and
social standpoint at the time. People were swept up in the mood,
rooted in what Parten said was a radical moment of social renewal and
regeneration.

Per Leviticus in the Bible, he said, jubilee was a time in which debts
were absolved, slaves went free, land holdings were divided up into
equitable plots. Over time, however, labor radicals clung to the term
as a demand for the absolution of debts. It began to develop an
apocalyptic edge, as people saw universal freedom and emancipation as
a harbinger of the coming of Christ.

“It has all these competing, different elements, but fundamentally
what’s at the bottom of it is this really radical idea of society
renewing itself in a way that is rooted to equity and justice,”
Parten said of jubilee. “Certainly, by the time that the war
happens, it’s used in all different types of contexts, but we should
recognize that when enslaved people or others claim this idea,
that’s what they’re claiming. We should recognize that there is a
need for some form of regeneration and renewal at times.”

The Union army was reluctant to have the mass of formerly enslaved
people that joined them, Parten notes in the book. Many people came
fleeing plantations with only what they had on their backs, seizing
the opportunity to be free and figuring out what tomorrow would bring
when it came. Parten describes the camps of formerly enslaved people
that attached themselves to the Union army as “refugee camps”, and
describes the way in which even the Union army responded to them as a
“refugee crisis”. The formerly enslaved people, who had
self-emancipated, endured harsh elements, often without food or
shelter, and marched up to 20 miles (32km) a day. Despite racism from
Union commanders, some of whom attempted to prevent them from staying
with the army, they persisted.

‘It’s a bit of a portal’: the star chef serving Gullah Geechee
cuisine at a US airport
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“The reason I use the term ‘crisis’ is simply because the
presence of so many individuals forces the government or the army to
recognize them and to begin taking actions to deal with these large
numbers of people,” Parten said. “The outcome is somewhat of a
modern refugee story, whether or not that’s how the army viewed
them.”

Parten said that the scale and size of the moment was remarkable to
him while he was researching the book. By the time Sherman arrived in
Savannah at the end of his march, Parten estimates, the number of
refugees was about 20,000 – about the size of Savannah itself.
There, Sherman met with Black religious leaders. He asked Garrison
Frazier, who was the spokesperson for the ministers, about how the
refugees decided to do what they did. While Frazier himself wasn’t a
refugee, he had been talking to those who were. In a way, he was able
to act as a proxy for them, sharing their experiences with someone who
had the power to enact change for them.

“For me, this was such a remarkable little nugget of what you find
in the sources, because it suggests that the refugees, who, through
the collective weight and power of their movement, found a way to
essentially be in the room,” Parten said. “They’re not in the
room, but they’re nonetheless really doing things to change the
policy of the army, the US government, and to have a presence in this
meeting with Sherman and Stanton [Lincoln’s secretary of war], who
were two of the most powerful men in the country … really spoke to
the power of the refugees to really lay claim on this moment and what
it might mean.”

In making formerly enslaved people the sole focus of the story, Parten
encourages readers to reconsider their understanding of Sherman’s
march, its implications and its legacy. Thoroughly researched yet
written in a compelling, accessible way, the book offers a fresh
perspective on a centuries-old event.

_Adria R Walker [[link removed]]
is a reporter on the Guardian US's race and equity team. Her reporting
focuses on the Deep South_

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* History
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* Black History
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* US Civil War
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* slavery
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