One hundred and sixty years ago this month, U.S. General William T. Sherman launched his famous March to the Sea, a 250-mile march from Atlanta to Savannah that crushed the Confederacy and helped end the Civil War.
For most of the past 160 years, however, we’ve gotten the March to the Sea all wrong. Thanks to feature films like “Gone With the Wind” and popular Southern myths about the ravages of Sherman’s army, we’ve often only understood the march as a military campaign. We’ve focused on the soldiers, the city of Atlanta all ablaze, or how Sherman’s sought to make the war so terrible that Southerners had no choice but surrender.
Credit: JONATHAN CHICK
Credit: JONATHAN CHICK
As a result, we’ve given space to old, Lost Cause narratives about the Civil War and allowed our Gone With the Wind syndrome to survive. This is especially the case here in Georgia, where the historical memory of the March is not only stale and overdone, it’s useless, giving modern Georgia, much less modern America, nothing to learn from, celebrate or feel chastened by.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. For what we’ve missed over the past 160 years is that the march doubled as the largest emancipation event in American history, the campaign that achieved in effect what the Emancipation Proclamation could only ever do on paper.
Indeed, from the moment Sherman’s army shoved out of the Atlanta area in mid-November 1864, the army’s movement’s set off a groundswell. Thousands of enslaved men and women, sensing that the war would end in freedom, ran off to meet Sherman and his men. They fled masters, escaped plantations and eluded local slave patrols. Some would later serve the army as roadbuilders, carriage drivers or cooks. And though many enslaved people would ultimately stay behind, opting to remain on their plantations rather than follow Sherman’s army for fear of what might lie ahead or an unwillingness to leave family behind, many thousands more decided to pull up stakes and become wartime refugees traveling at the army’s rear.
So large was this movement, in fact, that by the time the army arrived in Savannah, Sherman speculated that as many as 20,000 freed refugees followed in its wake. This number, if true, not only represents about a third of Sherman’s overall force, but it also nearly matches Savannah’s prewar population and is roughly double the size of antebellum Atlanta, which means that a refugee movement the size of a major Southern city joined the army on its famous March to the Sea.
But it’s not just the overall size of the movement that matters; it’s what the movement represented. The refugees endured incredible hardship: sickness, the cold, a lack of food. They marched for miles while struggling to keep families together and feet moving, sometimes schlepping through the rain and mud while sharing a road with soldiers who saw them as obstacles or encumbrances and little else.
Precisely because of these hardships, however, the refugees carried an important message about what freedom meant to them, and by following the army so closely — at times, even pressing into the army’s camps at night — the refugees transformed the march into an epic struggle over the fate of emancipation and what it should mean.
This was the case in what was undoubtedly the darkest, most heinous episode of the roughly two-month march. On Dec. 9, alongside the banks of Ebenezer Creek, a winding tributary of the Savannah River, U.S. General Jefferson C. Davis ordered a pontoon bridge pulled up before the lines of refugees at the rear of his column had a chance to cross. The move left hundreds of refugees stranded on the opposite bank, where a Confederate cavalry force led by Georgian Joseph Wheeler soon charged them, sending the refugees rushing into the river below. Shots rang out. Screams of drowning men and women echoed across the water. When it was all over, few of the refugees managed to make it across. The rest were either killed or captured by Wheeler’s men.
This terrible betrayal en route to Savannah speaks to why the refugee story of Sherman’s march matters. For the refugees, the crossing was a turning point. They wore the trauma of the tragedy in the threads of their dampened clothes, grieved for lost loved ones and did their best to keep going. For the soldiers, witnessing men and women plunge themselves into the cold water of Ebenezer Creek underscored that theirs was now a march of liberation and that the army had an obligation to see emancipation through.
The story, though, doesn’t end there. After the army’s arrival in Savannah in mid-December, news of the incident began to leak out to Washington, D.C., and beyond. Reports of terrible betrayal along a dark stream deep in Georgia plus the overall size of the refugee movement following the army led Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to convene a meeting with 20 of Savannah’s Black religious leaders. The purpose of the meeting had been to discuss the refugee population now living in and around the city, but it soon turned into a wide-ranging conversation about the nature of emancipation and the meaning of freedom.
Four days later, Sherman released a document known as his Special Field Orders No. 15, a military directive setting aside a strip of requisitioned land from Charleston, South Carolina, to the St. Johns River in Jacksonville, Florida, exclusively for Black homesteading. It was the first time the federal government had tied land redistribution to emancipation policy and a sign of just how radical and far-reaching Reconstruction could become. A couple of days later, Sherman would issue an additional directive allocating the army’s old pack animals to free Black homesteaders, thus the origins of the phrase “Forty Acres and a Mule.”
This brings us back to how we’ve typically remembered Sherman’s March. For most of our history, we’ve emphasized the triumph of Sherman’s army, the pace at which the army moved, and experience of Confederate Georgians caught in the army’s path.
Yet by shifting our focus to how enslaved people viewed the march, we can finally bury some of these older narratives in the past and reclaim what historian David Blight refers to as the “Emancipationist Memory” of the Civil War. It is an opportunity, in other words, to finally get our history right and imagine Sherman’s March for what it truly was: a freedom movement.
Bennett Parten is a professor of history at Georgia Southern University and a protégé of Pulitzer-Prize winner David Blight.
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