An account of Sherman's March to the Sea--the critical Civil War campaign that destroyed the Confederacy--told for the first time from the perspective of the tens of thousands of enslaved people who fled to the Union lines and transformed Sherman's march into the biggest liberation event in American history.
Parten’s signature contribution to the vast literature on Sherman’s march is to consider it from the vantage of the 20,000 or more refugees who trailed in the wake of his soldiers ... In this, the second and somewhat more derivative half of his book, which is less about the march than about its aftermath, Parten largely focuses on how the 'hopes and failures' of the march persisted ... Once back in session, Congress 'dithered,' or so Parten charges, but that seems not entirely correct. Abolitionists like the Pennsylvania representative Thaddeus Stevens had already been hatching a radical plan to redistribute the wealth of the South: Divvy up the confiscated property and give it to the families of formerly enslaved people and thus effectively overturn the propertied class system that so long had ruled the region.
Parten’s descriptions are vivid, drawing on official accounts as well as the letters of soldiers and the memories of former slaves ... Parten tells it with vigor and compassion and an acute eye to the consequences of a failure that we live with still.
The greatest strength of Parten’s book is the way it follows this turn from achieving emancipation to defining freedom, allowing his brief account to illuminate some of the largest dynamics of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
