Book Interview with Bennett Parten

Today’s Muster features an interview with Dr. Bennett Parten, author of the recently released Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation. Dr. Parton is an assistant professor of history at Georgia Southern University. A native of Royston, Georgia, Parton’s writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Zocalo, Public Square, and The Civil War Monitor. Portions of this interview have been edited for clarity.

Robert Bland: I’d like to begin and just kind of get a sense of how you encountered Sherman’s March before embarking on this project, both historiographically and through public memory? How did you kind of think about and conceptualize Sherman’s March before beginning this book?

Bennett Parten: There are really two stories to how I got started on this project. One is a longer answer, maybe a longer story. It has everything to do with the fact that I grew up in Royston, Georgia, which is right outside of Athens. And every year my family would make trips down to the coast, to Jekyll Island, Savannah, to Port Royal, Hilton Head, Beaufort, and others. And for all of that trip, except for maybe the first 30 minutes, you are on the path of Sherman’s March. And so this is all very much lived history and then now coincidentally that I live in Savannah is the same route that I take to go visit my parents. And I follow Sherman’s right wing when I go visit my in-laws who live in Atlanta.

Both of those are essentially all along the route of Sherman’s March. And then when we would visit the coast when I was a kid, as much as I love to sit on the beach and fish, what I really love to do more than anything was to drive around and explore the low country. Go to all the different small towns, the different beaches. And so I think there’s a part of this book that really begins just with my own kind of background living in Georgia and visiting the coast and There’s a part of me I think that always relished the idea of writing a history that was really about two places that meant so much to me and still mean a lot to

But then the shorter answer has to do with me reading a work of fiction. I’m sure several readers might be familiar with E.L. Doctorow’s book, The March. Doctorow is great historical fiction writer. He’s probably best known for ragtime. But he also took on Sherman’s March in a book he called Simply The March. And in that book, as was Doctorow’s style, he wrote with a wide range of different characters. There’s a German-born US Army surgeon. There’s a Southern debutante. There are two Confederate prisoners of war. Even Sherman himself is a character.

But he also included a freed woman by the name of Wilma Jones is one of his characters. Wilma Jones was someone who dropped everything to run to the army and then follow Sherman’s army to the coast. And this book really started, I think, with me realizing that Jones was not a singular character, but a composite character. There were likely many hundreds, if not thousands of Wilma Joneses. And the book really began with the question of whether or not we could tell Jones’s experience as a matter of history and not just historical fiction. And so I really came at this project both from having my own biography being one that’s rooted here in Georgia, but also just reading Doctorow fictional take on the march.

RB:  I want to talk a little bit about history and historiography and would be interested to hear you say a little bit about kind of how this interpretation, this reorientation of the march fits into the historical literature. Obviously, the story of emancipation, which you kind of spend a lot of time thinking about, but also right the story of wartime Reconstruction and of how might we kind of reorient the way we have these big kind of ongoing discussions about emancipation and wartime reconstruction. How did your telling of Sherman’s March kind of reframe those stories.

BP: I think first and foremost this book falls into or at least contributes to a growing body of literature on emancipation that sees it as a refugee experience. This has been something that’s become much more common in recent years, both with historians recognizing that the experience of emancipation for all intents and purposes likely looked and felt like a real refugee experience. It was one of deep insecurity, instability, immense complexity. It was one in which what freedom actually meant was always being defined in the moment. It was a time before any notions of asylum, really, or citizenship And so this book, I think, sort of fits in with that move in the scholarship.

And I should say too that many historians are writing about emancipation as a refugee experience, in part because in recent years there’s been excellent research done on the existence of refugee camps that attach themselves to the army, whether it be in Louisiana, near New Orleans, the Mississippi Valley, or the Virginia coast. The fact is on this wide landscape of the Civil War, wherever the army went, there were usually camps of formerly enslaved people that had attached themselves to the army and inhabited what were essentially refugee camps. And so I think there’s very good reasons for why historians have begun to reinterpret the story of emancipation as being one that looks and feels, and for all intents and purposes was a refugee experience.

Another thing that I’ve tried to do in the book is to modernize the story of Sherman’s March. I mean, I think for the longest time, the way historians have understood the march itself has been geared towards this question of total war. Whether or not Sherman’s tactics in Georgia was an example of total war, whether it birthed total war. This, along with the prevalence of white Southerners focusing on their own grievances for what Sherman’s army may or may not have done here in Georgia, I think has always kept the march as being in a kind of terrain of military history. And I think there’s good reason for that. But what I really tried to do was to blend this classic military history with some of the excellent historical work on emancipation, on slave resistance, the work of folks like Thavolia Glymph and Steve Hahn and others that really show and shine a light on the agency of enslaved people, the resistance that enslaved people used to free themselves of plantations and run to the army.

So that’s another thing that I really tried to do here in the book. And then to your point about Reconstruction, one of the things that I tried to accomplish as well is just pinpoint how important this movement of refugees was to the beginnings of Reconstruction. The fact is the movement behind Sherman’s army was so large, they would go on to have immense consequences for what the early phases of Reconstruction would look like.

On the coast around Savannah. And the whole point in doing so is to point out that the refugees people who have since been faceless, nameless to history, but who nonetheless, in the power of their collective movement went on to really force the US government’s hand into thinking about what reconstruction might look like and who, through their own movements really shaped the early history of Reconstruction.

RB: I’d like to ask you to speak a little bit about the kind of subheading of your book, right? It’s a really kind of powerful and kind of provocative claim, right? The story of America’s largest emancipation. When does that fact and framing kind become important and apparent? When does it become clear that this is not only a story of emancipation but also the story of the largest emancipation?

BP: One of the big questions was, well, exactly how many refugees might have followed Sherman’s army? This was always a kind of moving number and as one reviewer of mine pointed out. There are no census. The Army’s not taking a census as this is happening. And so drilling down on any specific numbers was always a real question for me.

But nonetheless, when Sherman arrives in Savannah, he speculates that there are as many as 20,000 refugees that are following his army. And when I first read this, I recognized this would be a large number, but I don’t think it really clicked with me how big of a movement this was until I realized that Savannah itself only had a population of 22,000.And then Atlanta, which now is the great metropolis, you can call it that of Georgia, only had a population of 10,000. And so only when I began to realize some of these numbers did I recognize just how large of a movement this was.

And we should recognize that this 20,000 number doesn’t take into account folks who might have run to the army and then turned back on their own volition or were turned back from the army, which absolutely happened. It doesn’t take into account the folks who might have run to the army and then decided not to make the march. It doesn’t take into account the folks who experience freedom as a consequence of this movement.

And so my argument is that taking all this combined, what you have is, yes, a military event by definition, but also an extraordinarily large liberation event and the largest emancipation event in American history.

RB: Along those lines, I wonder if you could say a little bit about how you periodize your story, where you talk about the marches taking place in phases, right, to kind of On the one hand, this is not a large amount of time, especially kind of your history department, you talk to your colleagues in other fields of history who study the early modern or ancient world and they think in terms of centuries. Here, we’re talking about a couple months. As Civil War historians know, in the time of war, months can feel like years. I wonder if you could say a little bit about kind of how you think about the kind of phases of the march and kind of kind of how we might think about these months as kind of a pivotal turning point in the broader war.

BP: That’s really well said. And you can imagine it made research really difficult in that I was looking for specific stories from just a month and a half in very specific places right when I was combing through the archives. And so that was always a real challenge that I had to kind of grapple with in doing some of this work.

The March the Sea has always been the Savannah campaign from Atlanta to Savannah. But one of the things that I’ve really tried to do in this book is situated in a much larger story. And while the Savannah campaign is my focus, I do reach back into Atlanta to show how what happened on the march to Atlanta and around Atlanta set the stage for what would happen in Georgia. And then especially in the coast, where most stories I think would follow the army back through the Carolinas, I really wanted to be very intentional about showing how Sherman’s March affected the islands around Savannah and South Carolina and others. And really how this story bled into, as I’ve said before, and as you mentioned, the early history of reconstruction. So one of the things that I try to do is just be really intentional about keeping the focus on the refugees for as long as possible. And when you do that, you recognize that the march, though it ends in Savannah, at least as a military campaign, the story on the islands goes on for another year, year and a half. And again, as I said, it really bleeds into reconstruction.

In terms of periodizing it, one of the things that I really tried to do was to move away from our traditional stories or understanding of the march as just the Savannah campaign.

RB: This is also a story about the land, right? One of the major things that scholars of the Civil War and Reconstruction think a lot about are the stories coming out of Sherman’s Field Order 15 and the ways that landownership was promised, achieved, delayed, and denied. And I wonder kind of how you think about the story of land ownership coming out of the march.

BP: It’s hugely important. And I should say when I went into it, I didn’t really, I think, recognize how intertwined these two stories were. I mean, I knew of the story of Field Order 15. I Knew of the story of Port Royal. I also knew of the story of Sherman’s March. And I think as I was writing this and working on it, as I began to sort of work through this, I began to recognize how intertwined they were. But when I started, I don’t think I quite realized just how closely connected these two movements or at least two stories really are.

And no, I think it’s hugely important. I think it’s a very important story. It’s one that is tragic and it leaves this story as one that ends in a very ambiguous place. One of the difficult things about writing this is that the story of the march itself is a story that features instances of liberation, of triumphalism, of excitement, of optimism, of hope.

This is always underpinned by the real dangers of what it was like to be a refugee on the march. Some of the actions that Sherman’s men took in regards to the refugees. But then once the story transitions here to the coast and land reform becomes a question and then ultimately fails, it turns this moment that is tinged with a sense of optimism and triumphalism into one that is anything but fulfilled, completely ambiguous, and one that is sort of left searching for meaning.

And so it was always an interesting and dispiriting and disappointing place to end the story. But I nevertheless end there because it’s true. It’s what happened, right? And so it’s a… tragic and… as I said, ambiguous place to end the story on.

RB: Sometimes history has reckon with the hard truths of the past.  You mentioned before that you’re part of cohort of scholars including think Amy Murrell Taylor, Chandra Manning, and Abigail Cooper who are all thinking about wartime emancipation as much as a moment of crisis as a moment of liberation.

How do you think about the march as both this moment of jubilee— thinking about emancipation as this kind of real kind of turning point—and as maybe just a piece of long emancipation that spanned the 19th century?

BP: That’s a great question. And this is one that a reviewer recently has pointed out, and it’s kind of drawn on this distinction of, as you said, some historians seeing this sort of troubled emancipation story that is ambiguous and ill-defined. And then others who trace this longer story and see this as such a critical moment and as a moment that truly meant something and matter, right? And was a real turning point in this long history emancipation and the death of slavery.

And to be honest with you, I think fall into that later camp personally. I mean, I think this is a moment that truly does matter and that it does have real consequence and meaning. And we should recognize it as a turning point. But I also think we can be of two minds and recognize that is as such as a lived experience at least. It was one that was, for all intents and purposes, one that mimicked the experience of being a refugee, that in the moment, at least, what was freedom was ill-defined and constantly trying to be defined and was ambiguous.

RB: Well, you’ve added a rich contribution to the ongoing conversation about Sherman’s March and more importantly, provided a story that takes seriously the broad and complicated story of this particular moment of emancipation. The stories are told from above and below. You get a sense of a kind of real human drama. The tragedy, but also, the ways that this story tells us something about what emancipation really meant. I want to again thank you to Dr. Parton for joining us today to discuss your new book.