Somewhere Toward Freedom – Speaker On Enslaved People Freed By Sherman’s March
Sherman’s march to the sea was more than a military triumph during the Civil War. It was also a liberation that allowed thousands of people to throw off the chains of slavery, as author Bennett Parten will explain. He’ll be speaking at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, October 7.
Parten, an assistant professor at Georgia Southern University, is the author of “Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation.” The book has received rave reviews both for its clear, compelling description of the march and for its focus on the men and women who were able to escape enslavement as U.S. troops blazed a path across Georgia. Parten also examines the messy aftermath of the march for the newly freed, including being granted land to begin their new lives and then having that land taken away by the government.
Kirkus Reviews called the book “fresh and illuminating.” The Wall Street Journal said it presents a story of “exhilaration and dashed hopes, of suffering and survival.” The New Yorker said it may be the first book “to make freed people its sole focus, and to claim that they were essential to the march’s meaning.”
Audience members will also be able to visit the special exhibit “The Second American Revolution,” which examines the war’s aftermath, the attempts to give African Americans an equal role in the South and the successful movement to reverse most of those gains for the next century. The exhibit includes the pen Abraham Lincoln used when signing the Emancipation Proclamation, artifacts from racial terror groups and short films explaining the forces that reversed Reconstruction.
“As America marks its 250th birthday, the ALPLM has examined the impact left by Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. ‘Somewhere Toward Freedom’ fits in wonderfully with this effort. It takes a famous moment of the war, looks at it from the perspective of enslaved people and then shows what happened next,” said Christina Shutt, the ALPLM executive director.
The march began in November 1864 after forces led by Gen. William T. Sherman captured the city of Atlanta. Rather than pursuing Confederate troops, Sherman decided to cut the Confederacy in half and isolate Robert E. Lee’s army from support in the deep South by driving southeast until he reached the coast. Sherman’s 60,000 troops would forage for food, seize livestock and destroy rail lines as they went. At the end of the march, on Dec. 22, Sherman sent a telegram to Lincoln: “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition and about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.”
The march passed through territory where some 150,000 people were being held in slavery. Some of these people, now freed by U.S. troops, went to work as laborers for the army. Nearly 20,000 followed the army, braving uncertainty, food shortages and bad weather to find somewhere to begin their new lives.
The event is free, but reservations are required. To register, visit https://presidentlincoln.illinois.gov/Events.
The mission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is to inspire civic engagement through the diverse lens of Illinois history and share with the world the life and legacy of Abraham Lincoln. We pursue this mission through a combination of rigorous scholarship and high-tech showmanship built on the bedrock of the ALPLM’s unparalleled collection of historical materials – roughly 13 million items from all eras of Illinois history.