New and Noteworthy---Sherman's March: How Popular Cultures Fib About The Civil War

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.

 Link To Full Text: H-Net

News: Slave Cabins and Sherman's March Encampment Sites In Path of New Georgia Highway

Archaeologists Discover Slave Artifacts Were Georgia Highway Project Will Cross Georgia Plantation Site, Russ Bynum, Associated Press, December 1, 2013.

A Mexican coin punctured with a small hole, nails from long-decayed wooden dwellings, and broken bits of plates and bottles are among thousands of artifacts unearthed from what archaeologists suspect were once slave quarters at the site of a planned highway project in Savannah.

A team hired to survey the site by the Georgia Department of Transportation spent three months excavating 20 acres of undeveloped woods tucked between a convenience store and apartments off busy Abercorn Extension on Savannah's suburban south side. Archaeologist Rita Elliott said the project yielded a staggering 33,858 artifacts believed to date from about 1750 until after the Civil War.

Historical records show that a wealthy Savannah attorney named William Miller owned a large plantation at the site and at one time had 87 slaves, Elliott said. Archaeologists didn't find the main plantation house but believe many of the artifacts they found are consistent with slave dwellings.
"These people are pretty anonymous in the historical records," Elliott said. "The archaeology may not tell us much about their names, but it will tell us about their lives."

As for the sheer volume of items recovered at the site, Elliott said, "It's not unheard of. But this is a lot of artifacts." The plantation site had plenty of high ground that probably would have been used for growing row crops, while the lower-lying marshlands would have been suitable for growing rice. Records show that two planters owned the land until Miller bought it all in the mid-1850s.
Clusters of nails found in the ground indicate that buildings were made from wood instead of brick, Elliott said. Archaeologists uncovered small pits used to store items in the floors of dwellings and dug up no window glass, further evidence the site had crude structures occupied by slaves.

Archaeologists found a silver Mexican coin from 1831 with a hole punched near the edge, as if it had been worn as a pendant. An 1865 penny was recovered from a pit. Researchers also found fragments of brick, broken dishes and bottles, a cast iron pot and a small brass thimble.

A small part of the site also turned up clues that some Union troops of Gen. William T. Sherman camped out at the site around the time Savannah was seized in1864. Archaeologists found bullets from muskets and uniform buttons, as well as what appear to be spikes used to hold down tents.
Elliott said records show that some of Sherman's troops marched right through Miller's plantation en route to Savannah. She estimates that several hundred camped there.

The archaeological work was ordered as part of the pre-construction phase of a $30.3 million dollar project to elevate Ga. 204, which links Savannah's south side to Interstate 95, above a busy residential crossing. Archaeological research was required for the project because it uses federal transportation money. Construction is scheduled to begin next year. "It is rare, and it's an opportunity that we enjoy," Georgia DOT spokeswoman Jill Nagel said of the plantation discovery. "We're preserving Savannah's history."
 
Since field work at the site ended in May, archaeologists have kept busy in the laboratory cleaning and examining each artifact, looking for clues to piece together the stories of slaves who lived on Miller's plantation. Eventually the artifacts will be turned over to the University of West Georgia in Carrollton for safe keeping.

Text Source:  TribTown, December 1 2013
Image Source: Memphis Commerical Appeal, December 1, 2013

New and Noteworthy: Bonfires in the Most Northern of Southern Cities

The Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta, Marc Wortman, Public Affairs Press, 352 pages, $26.95, August 2009.

The capture of three great Southern cities were turning points in the American Civil War. The capture of New Orleans in April 1862, the most populated and prosperous city in the Confederacy put Europe on notice and plugged the Mississippi River's Gulf of Mexico and trans-Atlantic trade. The capture of Atlanta in September 1864 put the electorate on notice that the war was being won and that there was a light at the end of the tunnel. The capture of Richmond during the first days of April 1865 routed the Confederate civil government and put it flight.

Recently, Atlanta's Civil War history has received attention In particular, Secret Yankees has revealed that the Northerners that founded the city and lived there remained loyal to the Union and supplied a vast amount of intelligence on commissary stores and troop movements. Marc Wortman offers Bonfire: The Seige and Burning of Atlanta which provides the story of Atlanta from its founding in the 1830s to its burning in the fall of 1865. IN reviewing the index and the first several pages, Wortman's narrative appears to be character driven and accessibly written.

Noted historian, Debby Applegate reports that Wortman offers "extraordinary original research" and "vivid prose and old-fashioned suspense." Wortman is the author of The Millionaires’ Unit: The Aristocratic Flyboys Who Fought the Great War and Invented American Air Power, now in development as a feature film. An award-winning freelance writer, his work has appeared in numerous national magazines. He has taught literature and writing at Princeton University.

The destruction of Atlanta is one of the two epic moments in the film Gone with the Wind. A third epic moment occurred in 1970 when the film was released in major theatres and to my shock and dismay Nancy, my date, burst into tears at the scene where Scarlett is the most broken and then becomes the most resilient. Well, . . . it was an epic moment in my life.

Looking at the stack of soon to be read books on the floor next to my desk, Wortman's Bonfire is next; by the length its bibliography and the first several pages, it looks like one that I might wish to read a second time.

CWL---The Great March To The Sea

Southern Storm: Sherman's March To The Sea, Noah Trudeau, 35 maps, 42 black and white illustrations, order of battle, notes, bibliography, index, 671 pp., Harper Collins, 2008,$35.00.

Trudeau, former National Public Radio program producer and popular Civil War historian, addresses William T. Sherman's 1864 Atlanta to Savannah march through Georgia. Sherman's chief objective was to demonstrate to the Confederacy that there was no place in the South safe from Union troops. Industry and agriculture that supported the South's ability to make war was put to the torch as well as many civilian homes. Trudeau addresses the destruction and finds that it was similar to and did not exceed other campaigns by Northern and Southern armies. Nevertheless, the campaign shocked Georgians who had not experienced the war in any way other than sending soldiers, commissary goods, and armaments forth.

Confederate resistance was limited and what small defensive efforts were taken they were uncoordinated; there was not theatre commander to direct the Confederate resistance. The author does not go to great depths regarding Richmond's lack of leadership on this issue. Over and over again Trudeau shows that Sherman’s orders allowed his army have a great deal of latitude about what to burn and what to take. In a very thorough manner 60,000 Federal soldiers seized Georiga's food and forage. The destruction of Georgia railroads was one of the chief goals of the campaign and was thoroughly accomplished.

Trudeau concludes that Sherman's operational generalship was vastly superior to the Confederate resistance. Also Trudeau frequently shows that the Federal wing and corps commanders made significant tactical decisions. Both wing commanders, Howard Slocum as well as the cavalry corps commander, Kilpatrick, were Army of the Potomac veterans with mixed records in the east. The relationship between Sherman's operational decisions and the other commanders tactical decisions was founded upon the army's engineer officers who produced quickly superior maps for brigade, divisions and corps commanders. Trudeau offers abundant civilians' voices as well as those from enlisted Federal and Confederate ranks. His work is an enlisted men's, civilians' and generals' story.

The army's engineers also transported and installed pontoons and repaired and built bridges from materials on hand. Houses closest to the river nearly always were torn down to provide materials for bridge construction. It appears most destruction of family dwellings that occurred during the campaign was done in order to build bridges. At the operational level, Sherman kept the Confederate commanders guessing as to his destination. Was it Charleston or was it Columbia South Carolina? What it Mobile, Alabama? Was it Savannah, Georgia? This lack of knowing kept Confederate forces fractured.

Trudeau moderately approaches the campaign's myths and gently turns them over. Not necessarily brutal but similar to other armies' campaigns, Sherman's March was neither a lark nor complete desolation. Confederate soldiers fought bravely and against the odds but were often ill-led and themselves victims of meager central planning. Did Sherman abandon runaway slaves to following Rebel guerrillas? Yes. Sherman's policy allowed single families to join the march as employed servants but he refused to escort large bands of runaways through Georgia. As his army lived off the land, he would not allow it to forage for large numbers of blacks. He never put Andersonville prison on the list of the campaign's objectives due to the fact the the army could not absorb 24,000 diseased and starving prisoners and still march.

CWL notes that the maps were very handy and contained weather information; this is similar to Trudeau's maps in Gettysburg that had a clock and weather temperatures. CWL relied upon Earl McElfresh's watercolor campaign map to see the large operational picture and gain an understanding of the terrain and the numerous rivers that had to be crossed. McElfresh Maps are essential additions to CWL's library and are frequently consulted while on guided tours and reading books. The maps are printed on durable paper yet CWL has so frequently consulted the Gettysburg and the Antietam maps and that he has replaced them once.

Early Review: Trudeau's Southern Storm in the Christian Science Monitor

Southern Storm; Sherman's March To The Sea, Noah Andre Trudeau, Harper Collins 671 pp., $35

The Truth Behind The Legend Of General Sherman’s March To The Sea, Randy Dotinga the Christian Science Monitor, September 4, 2008

Long before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an American Civil War general exposed the horrible power of “total war” as he rampaged across the South. Or did he?

The ever-quotable Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman certainly promised to “make Georgia howl!” and he was hardly gentle during his famous march to the sea in 1864. But an exhaustive new history tells a story of military prowess and remarkable survival, not lawless and rampant destruction. Union soldiers did torch homes, confiscate crops, and cripple railroads as they carved a path from Atlanta to Savannah, writes author Noah Andre Trudeau in Southern Storm: Sherman’s March to the Sea. But few soldiers were killed on either side, and northeastern Georgia recovered quickly. Almost 150 years of American mythology suggest a much grimmer story, one that Mr. Trudeau dismisses. The march, he writes, may “forever be best remembered for everything it wasn’t.” Other historians – and plenty of Southerners – are certain to think differently.

But everyone agrees about one thing: The march was a long, tedious, and dangerous slog. Sherman made a risky decision to go off the grid, as we’d put it today, and travel without the benefit of a supply chain or communication with the outside world. He and his troops had to live off the land, no matter who happened to be in their way – city dwellers, farmers, or slaves. There’s no doubt that Sherman & Co. thought the South deserved to pay for starting the Civil War. “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it,” Sherman wrote. One of his aides wrote: “War … must make the innocent suffer as well as the guilty, it must involve plundering, burning, killing.”

But Trudeau, a former executive producer at National Public Radio and author of a well-received book about the Battle of Gettysburg, finds evidence that Sherman’s words were more scathing than his actions. Trudeau’s overly detailed, 688-page account is a bit of a slog itself; readers will grow tired of hearing about each day’s food-finding efforts and the availability of sweet potatoes. But amid the minutiae, the author provides sharp analysis and tells a gripping story of men and women at their best and worst.

In addition to poring over memoirs and newspaper accounts, Trudeau dips into the diaries of participants. Amazingly, he finds each day of the five-week march recounted in at least 50 journals. Some of the most memorable scenes in the book highlight the experiences of ordinary soldiers and civilians, including a surprising number of children. “They came burning Atlanta to day,” writes 10-year-old Carrie Berry. “We all dread it … we will dread it.”

Another girl pleaded for her home: “Mr. Soldier, you would not burn our house down would you, if you do where are we going to live?” The Michigan soldier was so touched that he refrained from torching her house. (Union troops, in fact, were often respectful and even polite to Southerners, and spent much time admiring local women.) Sherman looms largest of all in “Southern Storm,” although he’s a hard man to figure out – “a person of profound ethical and spiritual contradictions, and possessed of many faces.”

Sherman is a deeply sensitive man; the early death of his son leaves him in a fragile emotional state. But he has little interest in rights for black people and is constantly annoyed by the countless slaves that follow his soldiers. On one hand, he appears to be an avenging angel – a “stone-faced devastator” who wrote of wanting to kill 300,000 leading Southerners. But a “moral drift,” as Trudeau describes it, prevents him from doing more to devastate the people and property he came across. Sherman, of all people, has a heart.

Sherman, the No. 1 villain in the history of the South, never seems to wrestle hard with the choices he makes, however. Driven by his commitment to “patriotism and national destiny,” he has no time to agonize or reconsider, unlike President Abraham Lincoln. With the help of savvy strategic decisions and modern-sounding pontoon bridges, Sherman reaches the coast and telegraphs Lincoln that he has a Christmas gift for him: the crucial city of Savannah.

The march did not, Trudeau argues, ever reach the level of “total war.” In the larger picture, however, it “dramatically fractured the social fabric” of the South. And it made Southerners lose faith in the ability of their leaders to protect them, hastening the end of the Civil War. Sherman would live for another quarter century, burnishing the stories of his brilliance to a high gloss and making the truth ever murkier. Georgia would recover – and remember. And the targeting of civilians would become ever more critical to the dark art of warfare.

Text Source: Christian Science Monitor, September 4, 2008

CWL: Though not definitive Trudeau's Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage is a fine book with strategy and tactics fairly balanced with brogans and bonnets. The maps are adequate and feature a clock. Trudeau's other works on African-Americans in the Union Army and a trilogy on the Virginia Campaign 1864-1865 are both comprehensive and accessible to general readers and students of the campaign. The History Book Club is offering both Southern Storm and a campaign map by the McElfresh Map Company for about $33.00.

New--1864, Sherman, The March and It's Legacy

Sherman's March in Myth and Memory , Edward Caudill and Paul Ashdown, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 240 pp, $34.95, (July 2008)

General William Tecumseh Sherman's devastating "March to the Sea" in 1864 burned a swath through the cities and countryside of Georgia and into the history of the American Civil War. As they moved from Atlanta to Savannah-destroying homes, buildings, and crops; killing livestock; and consuming supplies-Sherman and the Union army ignited not only southern property, but also imaginations, in both the North and the South. By the time of the general's death in 1891, when one said "The March," no explanation was required. That remains true today. Legends and myths about Sherman began forming during the March itself, and took more definitive shape in the industrial age in the late-nineteenth century.

Sherman's March in Myth and Memory examines the emergence of various myths surrounding one of the most enduring campaigns in the annals of military history. Edward Caudill and Paul Ashdown provide a brief overview of Sherman's life and his March, but their focus is on how these myths came about-such as one description of a "60-mile wide path of destruction"-and how legends about Sherman and his campaign have served a variety of interests. Caudill and Ashdown argue that these myths have been employed by groups as disparate as those endorsing the Old South aristocracy and its "Lost Cause," and by others who saw the March as evidence of the superiority of industrialism in modern America over a retreating agrarianism.

Sherman's March in Myth and Memory looks at the general's treatment in the press, among historians, on stage and screen, and in literature, from the time of the March to the present day. The authors show us the many ways in which Sherman has been portrayed in the media and popular culture, and how his devastating March has been stamped into our collective memory. Edward Caudill and Paul Ashdown are professors of journalism and electronic media at the University of Tennessee. They are co-authors of The Myth of Nathan Bedford Forrest (2005) and The Mosby Myth: A Confederate Hero in Life and Legend (2002). Caudill is author of Darwinian Myths: The Legends and Misuses of a Theory (1997) and co-author of The Scopes Trial: A Photographic History (2000). Ashdown is editor of James Agee: Selected Journalism (1985, 2004) and author of A Cold Mountain Companion (2004).

Text From Publisher

New In August---Southern Storm, Sherman's March

Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea, Noah Andre Trudeau, Harper Publishing, 688 pp., 36 maps, 16 pp., photographs, notes, bibliography, $35.00

From Publishers' Weekly
Trudeau, a prize-winning Civil War historian (Gettysburg), addresses William T. Sherman's march to the sea in the autumn of 1864. Sherman's inclusion of civilian and commercial property on the list of military objectives was not a harbinger of total war, says Trudeau. Rather, its purpose was to demonstrate to the Confederacy that there was no place in the South safe from Union troops. The actual levels of destruction and pillage were limited even by Civil War standards, Trudeau says; they only seemed shocking to Georgians previously spared a home invasion on a grand scale. Confederate resistance was limited as well. Trudeau praises Sherman's generalship, always better at operational than tactical levels. He presents the inner dynamics of one of the finest armies the U.S. has ever fielded: veteran troops from Massachusetts to Minnesota, under proven officers, consistently able to make the difficult seem routine. And Trudeau acknowledges the often-overlooked contributions of the slaves who provided their liberators invaluable information and labor. The march to the sea was in many ways the day of jubilo, and in Trudeau it has found its Xenophon.

From the publisher:
Award-winning Civil War historian Noah Andre Trudeau has written a gripping, definitive new account that will stand as the last word on General William Tecumseh Sherman's epic march—a targeted strategy aimed to break not only the Confederate army but an entire society as well. With Lincoln's hard-fought reelection victory in hand, Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union forces, allowed Sherman to lead the largest and riskiest operation of the war. In rich detail, Trudeau explains why General Sherman's name is still anathema below the Mason-Dixon Line, especially in Georgia, where he is remembered as "the one who marched to the sea with death and devastation in his wake."

Sherman's swath of destruction spanned more than sixty miles in width and virtually cut the South in two, badly disabling the flow of supplies to the Confederate army. He led more than 60,000 Union troops to blaze a path from Atlanta to Savannah, ordering his men to burn crops, kill livestock, and decimate everything that fed the Rebel war machine. Grant and Sherman's gamble worked, and the march managed to crush a critical part of the Confederacy and increase the pressure on General Lee, who was already under siege in Virginia. Told through the intimate and engrossing diaries and letters of Sherman's soldiers and the civilians who suffered in their path, Southern Storm paints a vivid picture of an event that would forever change the course of America.

CWL: Former National Public Radio producer Trudeau has successfully migrated to the print media. Satisfactory scholarship and a pleasant writing style that is accessible to most readers, Trudeau works regularly are featured on bookstores' front tables. The Last Citadel: Petersburg, Virginia, June 1864-April 1865, Bloody Roads South: The Wilderness to Cold Harbor, May-June 1864 and Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862-1865 preceded his bestseller on the Battle of Gettysburg. Gettysburg is noted for its many maps that have the battle clock on them, closely follow the text which is broken into small parts and provide a strong chronological current to the narrative. For example in Gettysburg, Trudeau recounts each segment of the July 2nd fight for the Bliss Farm, from dawn and continuing through dusk. Each segment is provided about every two hours on the battle clock and is set in the context of the day's events. Buyers should expect a 20% and greater discounts on the retail price; also it is likely that it will be offered soon after publication at www.bomc2.com for $9.95 and free shipping.