On January 12, 1865, in Savannah, Georgia, a score of Black ministers met with Major General William Tecumseh Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. Through their spokesperson, formerly enslaved, sixty-seven-year-old Rev. Garrison Frazier, the assembly articulated its keen understanding of slavery, the war, and the meaning of freedom. In response to a series of interrogatories from Stanton and Sherman, Rev. Frazier registered his conviction that land was a prerequisite for any attempt at postwar Reconstruction. “We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own,” explained. Without land, Frazier argued, the formerly enslaved would have no autonomy, no economic independence, no path to political or civil rights. Within the week, Sherman would issue Special Field Order No. 15, which divided into forty acre plots coastal lands abandoned by enslavers throughout the war. A further promise to supply to newly settled families “partially broken down” army animals ensured that the measure would be known as “forty acres and a mule” (157).
Though the Garrison Frazier meeting is well known to specialists of the period, the rich history bracketing that surreal scene has been largely lost. Only recently have scholars begun to render a more capacious picture of slavery’s demise—one that captures all its human complexity. By placing enslaved persons at the center of the narrative frame and exploiting a range of methodological tools and approaches—social history, foodways, histories of the environment, and new materialism—modern historians have rendered legible the lived experiences of escaping bondage. Freedom-seeking enslaved persons became refugees displaced by the abrasions of civil war: men, women, and children subjected to the whims of military commanders, the scourge of epidemic diseases, the fortunes of fighting armies, the specter of sexual violence. In hundreds of contraband camps and behind the Yankee lines, on the margins of militarized spaces and in occupied zones, freedom seekers placed their own liberation on the agenda of both military commanders and the nation itself. When the Confederacy collapsed all around them, formerly enslaved persons haunted by their past looked toward an uncertain future.
In his impressive debut outing, historian Bennett Parten, an assistant professor of history at Georgia Southern University, finds new significance in one of the U.S. Civil War’s most storied episodes. Parten observes that previous scholars have levied Sherman’s March to the Sea in lengthy debates over the nature and character of the Civil War. But setting aside the question of whether the civil war was a “total war” (an ahistorical question at any rate) allows one to tell another, more important story. Sherman’s March to the Sea, Parten contends, was “a turning point in the history of American freedom”—as much the movement of refugees as it was a well-choreographed military campaign. By the tens of thousands, freedom-seekers transformed Sherman’s march into “the largest emancipation event in our history, and one of the largest in the rise and fall of Atlantic slavery,” fomenting an urgent humanitarian crisis that set the agenda for Reconstruction (5).
Parten unspools his tale across six chapters that move chronologically, beginning with the fall of Atlanta. Throughout, he recovers the “ordeal” of Sherman’s march for those who attached themselves to the federal lines: fording swollen rivers, navigating muddy roads, dodging rebel cavalry, being stranded by a hard-hearted Yankee named Jefferson C. Davis on the wrong side of Ebeneezer Creek.
No less significantly, Parten connects the story of Sherman’s march to the Port Royal Experiment (171). Before reaching Savannah, Sherman packed many of the refugees his columns had liberated in Georgia aboard groaning steamers bound for the South Carolina Sea Island where a “rehearsal for Reconstruction” was underway (118). On the island, relief workers and pious missionaries confronted a staggering humanitarian crucible for which the nostrums of “free labor” proved wholly inadequate (189). The sage of Sherman’s march, then, was that of the Civil War itself: a moment of great promise suddenly betrayed; a conflict begun, not ended (209).
One wishes Parten would have continued his narrative of Sherman’s march through the Carolinas Campaign—a leg of the campaign that he leaves to his epilogue. The march through Georgia was but the first movement of Sherman’s operation; apart from very good scholarship by Jacqueline Glass Campbell and Mark Bradley, too few historians have told the story of when Sherman “marched north from the sea.” Parten also might have done more to locate Sherman’s March in the history of the war itself. From the moment the war began, freedom-seeking enslaved persons rushed to the federal armies and navies, plied Yankee soldiers with military intelligence, and toiled on behalf of the Union Cause. Sherman’s March may be more accurately termed the “largest emancipation event” of America’s largest slave rebellion.
These quibbles aside, Parten accomplishes that rarest of feats in Civil War history: he finds a new tale in an old story. In doing so, he reminds us—like Rev. Frazier reminded General Sherman—of what this war was all about. With its compelling prose and narrative verve, Somewhere Toward Freedom will appeal to the wide readership it so richly deserves.
Brian Matthew Jordan, an associate professor of history at Sam Houston State University, is the author or editor of six books on the Civil War era.
