Through The Heart of Dixie: Sherman's March and American Memory, Anne Sarah Rubin, University of North Carolina Press, 2014, 300 pp., 20 b/w illustrations, 2 maps, end notes, bibliography, index, $35.00.
Below is a book review written by Krista Kinslow and published January 14 2015 on H-Net.
In Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman's March and American Memory,
Anne Sarah Rubin presents the many stories that have been told about
Union General
William T. Sherman’s infamous March to the Sea in late 1864. She is
interested in showing how these stories emerged and evolved over time,
rather than discerning which are more accurate. Rubin writes that “this
project explores the myriad ways in which Americans
have retold and reimagined Sherman’s March,” and she examines several
groups’ stories about this event, starting with “the participants
themselves, including white Southerners, African Americans, Union
soldiers.” Drawing on “travel accounts, memoirs, music,
literature, film, and newspapers,” she aims to unpack “the many myths
and legends that have grown up around the March, using them as a lens
into the ways that Americans’ thoughts about the Civil War have changed
over time” (p. 4).
The book begins with an
overview of the march, setting the stage for Rubin’s analysis. She
captures the confusion of the campaign, showing foraging and
destruction, but also acts of kindness. She discusses the
complicated relationship between the march and African Americans who
came into its path. Rubin stresses that the Union army was not wholly
made up of abolitionist proponents and showcases events, like the
abandonment of black camp followers at Ebenezer Creek,
to demonstrate the callous and strategic choices the military made in
the context of complicated racial views and the realities of war.
Not surprisingly,
different groups told different stories about Sherman’s march. White
Southerners saw the march as indicative of Northern excess and rapacity.
Rubin focuses on stories told about Southern women
hiding their valuables and livestock and Northern soldiers
stealing, although she only briefly discusses rape and assault, which is
surprising given later accusations of such crimes. In contrast to
legends about Sherman’s scorched-earth policy, Rubin points
out that a large percentage of buildings were not burned,
and Southerners had to come up with creative
explanations for unaffected structures. According to Rubin, one of the
most common ways to explain a structure’s survival was to link it to the
Freemasons,
which conveyed a sort of Passover message, in that if the Masonic symbol
was displayed, the building was spared. Alongside such conspiracy
theories stood stories about Northern kindness, especially tales of
soldiers helping women and children. Rubin’s work
could have benefited from further analysis of when these stories
circulated and whether there was any indication that some narratives
were more popular in certain contexts.
African Americans also
told stories about the march and were often part of tales spun about it.
Stories ranged from the predictable “faithful slave” narratives white
Southerners told, to tales of liberation.
Throughout, Rubin explains how “Sherman’s March was the epitome of the
double-edged sword,” bringing not only emancipation but also “hunger,
destruction, and mistreatment” for African Americans (p. 69). Throughout
her analysis, Rubin stresses the ambivalence
soldiers felt about emancipation, showing that the cause for which Union
soldiers fought was more complicated than the view that many Americans
continue to espouse. Although such complexity strengthens the book’s
argument, more discussion on how black audiences
received these stories would have been helpful.
Rubin suggests that
“the importance of the March for African Americans seemed to wane over
the twentieth century,” but it returned to importance in the 1960s with
the intersection of the centennial of the march
and the civil rights movement. When John Lewis, newly elected chairman
of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), wanted to use
rhetoric about the march in his speech for the 1963 March on Washington,
other civil rights leaders considered it
too incendiary and told him to change it. Reformers seeking peaceful
change needed to avoid symbols of conquest and violence, no matter how
important they were historically.
Northern soldiers, the
“bummers” in the Union ranks, and Sherman himself told stories that
focused on the justification of the march. Rubin stresses that
nineteenth-century soldiers were different and should
not be compared to their twentieth-century counterparts—for instance,
Union soldiers reflected on the march in a “light or celebratory
fashion” (pp. 97-98). Further, Union soldiers pushed back against the
Lost Cause narrative—they wanted to “make sure that
their version of the March dominated” (p. 98). This meant spinning tales
that emphasized the Union and ending slavery as well as the restraint
of soldiers and the triumph of the good over the evils of rebellion and
oppression. Rubin notes that Sherman and his
march became inseparable in memory and the general worked hard to
present his own version of events. His own actions during the aftermath
influenced historical memory. In the years just after the war, white
Southerners were willing to forget Sherman’s destruction
because he advocated for a gentler reconstruction. But in the 1880s,
Southern views toward Sherman became much more negative, perhaps because
Sherman’s march “was being conflated with the economic challenges of
Reconstruction, and a sense of nostalgia for an
imagined golden age.” Rubin notes that “Sherman became the symbolic
repository for white Southerners frustrations” (p. 132).
Finally, Rubin examines
the literature, songs, and movies inspired by the march. These chapters
are perhaps the most illuminating and illustrate the divide in
interpretations. Rubin joins other recent scholars
like Caroline E. Janney (Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation [2013]) in
pointing toward a more complicated view of reunion. Rather than seeing
it as a process that proceeded linearly, she notes the twists and turns
that
the rapprochement between the North and South took. For example, in
1902, a Louisville, Kentucky, schoolgirl refused to sing or listen
to the Unionist classic, “Marching through Georgia.” The girl was hailed
as a Confederate hero because of the incident. “That
this sense of sectional grievance persisted even during what historians
have told us was the peak of reunionist sentiment, after the
Spanish-American War, is telling,” Rubin suggests, before adding
that “beneath the placid surface of joint reunions and Southern
whites fighting under the American flag again, lay a deep well of
animosity” (p. 182).
This study is an
excellent addition to the flourishing literature on Civil War memory,
and scholars and Civil War enthusiasts will find it interesting. In her
commitment to examining the many different stories
told about the march, Rubin shows how contested one event can be and how
different people work to present their own narratives and construct
their own memories of the past.
Huge Cache Of Confederate Weapons Seized by General Sherman may have Been Found In South Carolina River, Washington Post, January 21, 20155 
