The story of Sherman's March has never been told quite like this. Instead, for much of the twentieth century the question has been whether Sherman's March represented an early instance of "total war"—or, said differently, whether Sherman's "hard-war" policies previewed the civilian horrors of twentieth-century warfare. Scholars now see the issue as mostly settled. As hard as Sherman wanted to make the war, he never targeted civilians outright, and his March was never as horrific as, say, the bombing of Dresden or the Rape of Nanjing. Yet for decades the question loomed so large that it continues to frame the history of the campaign. To write about Sherman's March has been to write about warfare; it's been to focus on the soldiers, on Sherman, or on how he endeavored to "make war so terrible" that generations would pass before the South ever considered rebelling again. As a result, we've typically imagined the March as a military campaign and with a few exceptions have traditionally treated it as military history.

One of the principal claims of this book, however, is that to understand Sherman's March is to reimagine its history by seeing it for what it truly was: a veritable freedom movement. That was clearly how the enslaved people saw it. From the moment Sherman moved his army out of Atlanta, enslaved people across Georgia appraised the situation, knowing that wherever the army went, freedom went also. That calculation led tens of thousands of enslaved people to travel down roads and footpaths and creek beds, sometimes enduring incredible hardships, in an attempt to reach army lines. Yet it wasn't just the movement of enslaved people that made the March such a freedom movement; it was the movement of the army as well. The way the army marched—its speed, its breadth, and the intensity with which it broke the back of the planter class—cut out a space deep in the heart of Georgia wide enough for enslaved people to begin imagining freedom as something real, as something coming within reach, and as something that existed in the path of the March. That mix of movement, momentum, and meaning defined the entire campaign.

Another implication of this focus on the army has to do with how we view the March's aftermath. 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 book tells a new story by bringing this history of the March's aftermath to the fore. In doing so, however, it actually revisits a venture that historians have been writing about for decades, a project known as the Port Royal Experiment. Based on a set of barrier islands surrounding a wide deepwater sound just north of Savannah, the Port Royal Experiment was an early model—or "rehearsal," as one historian described it—of Reconstruction. Its goal was to begin the transition from slavery to freedom by instituting a free labor regime on the region's abandoned plantations. Its presence on the islands—indeed, its foothold—was why Sherman decided to send the refugees there to begin with. But if we accept the project's dubious label as an experiment, it's clear that Sherman's arrival in Savannah represented the uncontrolled variable that no one had seen coming. The presence of so many refugees transformed that self-contained outpost in an isolated corner of the war into the site of a full-fledged crisis. Historians have known and written about Port Royal, but the story of the Georgia refugees has largely gone untold.

 

These arguments point to Somewhere Toward Freedom's main argument: that Sherman's March was a turning point in the history of American freedom. I mean this, on the one hand, in a very real and grassroots sense: it was the largest emancipation event in our history and one of the largest in the rise and fall of Atlantic slavery. The army's movements from Atlanta to Savannah channeled enormous force, enough to destroy Georgia's slave system, pummel the planter class, and bring freedom to some untold thousands of enslaved people. The collective movement of so many enslaved people—first to the army and then behind the army—did the same. It dismantled slavery from within, undermined the Confederate project, and kept the idea of freedom at the center of the campaign. In fact, one way to understand the March is that it did in effect what the Emancipation Proclamation could do only on paper.

The story of Sherman's March has never been told quite like this. Instead, for much of the twentieth century the question has been whether Sherman's March represented an early instance of "total war"—or, said differently, whether Sherman's "hard-war" policies previewed the civilian horrors of twentieth-century warfare. Scholars now see the issue as mostly settled. As hard as Sherman wanted to make the war, he never targeted civilians outright, and his March was never as horrific as, say, the bombing of Dresden or the Rape of Nanjing. Yet for decades the question loomed so large that it continues to frame the history of the campaign. To write about Sherman's March has been to write about warfare; it's been to focus on the soldiers, on Sherman, or on how he endeavored to "make war so terrible" that generations would pass before the South ever considered rebelling again. As a result, we've typically imagined the March as a military campaign and with a few exceptions have traditionally treated it as military history.

One of the principal claims of this book, however, is that to understand Sherman's March is to reimagine its history by seeing it for what it truly was: a veritable freedom movement. That was clearly how the enslaved people saw it. From the moment Sherman moved his army out of Atlanta, enslaved people across Georgia appraised the situation, knowing that wherever the army went, freedom went also. That calculation led tens of thousands of enslaved people to travel down roads and footpaths and creek beds, sometimes enduring incredible hardships, in an attempt to reach army lines. Yet it wasn't just the movement of enslaved people that made the March such a freedom movement; it was the movement of the army as well. The way the army marched—its speed, its breadth, and the intensity with which it broke the back of the planter class—cut out a space deep in the heart of Georgia wide enough for enslaved people to begin imagining freedom as something real, as something coming within reach, and as something that existed in the path of the March. That mix of movement, momentum, and meaning defined the entire campaign.

Another implication of this focus on the army has to do with how we view the March's aftermath. 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 book tells a new story by bringing this history of the March's aftermath to the fore. In doing so, however, it actually revisits a venture that historians have been writing about for decades, a project known as the Port Royal Experiment. Based on a set of barrier islands surrounding a wide deepwater sound just north of Savannah, the Port Royal Experiment was an early model—or "rehearsal," as one historian described it—of Reconstruction. Its goal was to begin the transition from slavery to freedom by instituting a free labor regime on the region's abandoned plantations. Its presence on the islands—indeed, its foothold—was why Sherman decided to send the refugees there to begin with. But if we accept the project's dubious label as an experiment, it's clear that Sherman's arrival in Savannah represented the uncontrolled variable that no one had seen coming. The presence of so many refugees transformed that self-contained outpost in an isolated corner of the war into the site of a full-fledged crisis. Historians have known and written about Port Royal, but the story of the Georgia refugees has largely gone untold.

 

These arguments point to Somewhere Toward Freedom's main argument: that Sherman's March was a turning point in the history of American freedom. I mean this, on the one hand, in a very real and grassroots sense: it was the largest emancipation event in our history and one of the largest in the rise and fall of Atlantic slavery. The army's movements from Atlanta to Savannah channeled enormous force, enough to destroy Georgia's slave system, pummel the planter class, and bring freedom to some untold thousands of enslaved people. The collective movement of so many enslaved people—first to the army and then behind the army—did the same. It dismantled slavery from within, undermined the Confederate project, and kept the idea of freedom at the center of the campaign. In fact, one way to understand the March is that it did in effect what the Emancipation Proclamation could do only on paper.