Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation

“Somewhere Toward Freedom is well-written, fast, and entertaining. It presents points of view often overlooked in Civil War studies.”

In Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation, Bennett Parten explores General William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous March to the Sea as participated in and witnessed by African Americans. The author calls it “the largest emancipation movement in US history.”

The book ends with how the March impacted the promises of a Black reconstruction on the Georgia Coast and at Port Royal, South Carolina. Sherman, a soldier, not a social reformer, would be at the center of what became a huge controversy at the time and a stain on American history since.

The author admits that 500,000 African Americans successfully escaped to the federal lines during the war. They encouraged fear among the white population that the remaining enslaved would rise in violence. Their escapes and that of Federal prisoners, helped by conspiracies and an underground railroad of slaves, caused extreme measures from the frightened white population.

Sherman and his army would try to conduct a historic military campaign while dealing with refugees with no home to which they could return. His 60,000 federal soldiers set out to break apart the last Confederate States of America; however, it was not a social crusade. He saw that “a campaign through Georgia had the potential to topple the Confederacy’s entire house of cards.”

The author could have discussed African American freed people, and the United States Colored Troops in Alabama and Tennessee in the months immediately before the March to the Sea. To do so would have included the infamous battles fought by the USCT at Athens, Alabama; Dalton, Georgia; or Fort Pillow, Tennessee, and how Sherman did or did not respond.

Parten, as with many aspects of Somewhere Toward Freedom, provides background on Sherman’s attitudes about race and emancipation but not many answers. The general was, like Lincoln and most white Americans, a racist by modern standards but his personal beliefs were not the problems as much as the peculiarities of the war he was fighting in.

Somewhere Toward Freedom repeats much of the traditional public history of the 1864 Georgia campaign: a jumble of exaggeration, fact, mistake, and myth. Sherman and his legions left much of Atlanta, but far from all of it, in ruins on November 15, 1864. It was not the rebellious South’s last industrial center outside of Richmond, and after Sherman abandoned Atlanta, the Confederate government reoccupied it.

The march to Savannah and the sea took over a month and did not make an already depleted Georgia howl. Sherman’s “bummers” had too little time to take more than they came upon. This rapid movement and subsequent march across the Carolinas did cut off what was left of the failing Confederate States of America from what remained of its armies.

Parten writes that the Black Georgians feared any white men with guns, and some were caught in the crossfire. They heard false stories of horrible atrocities committed against African Americans in Atlanta under orders from Sherman.

Federal soldiers on the March to the Sea plundered the homes of the enslaved. Black laborers as support staff and servants were hired, but now “freed” slaves were also forced (conscripted) into work details. The refugees prepared the captured rice for the soldiers and taught them how to husk it.

The army and the refugees were constantly shadowed and threatened by thousands of Confederate cavalrymen. Confederate General Joseph Wheeler claimed that his men took 2,000 prisoners. Many of these escaped slaves were whipped, and all were sent back to their owners.

Twenty thousand enslaved people, however, believed their opportunity to escape to freedom had arrived. “They came on foot . . . on top of horses and mules, in carriages and the backs of wagons,” bringing food with them and wearing their best clothes. They plunged into an unknown fate.

Many of these civilians, now freed from bondage, treated the federal columns like a parade of liberation, with music provided by military bands. Four columns of 15,000 soldiers each, with artillery, horses, and wagons, were now joined by these refugees.

The author explains that Sherman only wanted the able-bodied; his men did not care. “Turning Freedwomen and children away was something most soldiers did with distaste.” Abandonment of the refugees led to ugly incidents that became legends.

Although the freed slaves had not impeded his march, upon reaching Savannah, Sherman had the non-essential people evacuated to the federal base at Port Royal, which had long accepted escaped slaves and even had United States Colored Troops units. He would not have them on the coming march across the Carolinas.

Works on the Black experience in the Civil War always note this event but not from the view of African Americans. Federal troops would mock the refugees, making them the butt of their jokes while pointing out that the formerly enslaved had no idea what freedom meant.

Sherman’s men misunderstood the African Americans as much as the white Georgia planters. On that point, Piden presents compelling evidence. Georgia’s Black community knew of the Emancipation Proclamation and what they could now do now that had been denied to them before.

Somewhere Toward Freedom is well-written, fast, and entertaining. It presents points of view often missed in Civil War studies. The reader could want more, as this work never moves far from providing the basic premise's background, not even defending it. This book has annotations and some illustrations.