Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation [Audiobook]

A groundbreaking 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. In the fall of 1864, Gen. William T. Sherman led his army through Atlanta, Georgia, burning buildings of military significance—and ultimately most of the city—along the way. From Atlanta, they marched across the state to the most important city at the time: Savannah. Mired in the deep of the South with no reliable supply lines, Sherman’s army had to live off the land and the provisions on the plantations they seized along the way. As the army marched to the east, plantation owners fled, but even before they did so, slaves self-emancipated to Union lines. By the time the army seized Savannah in December, as many as 20,000 enslaved people had attached themselves to Sherman’s army. They endured hardships, marching as much as twenty miles a day—often without food or shelter from the winter weather—and at times Union commanders discouraged and even prevented the self-emancipated from staying with the army. Racism was not confined to the Confederacy. In Somewhere Toward Freedom, historian Bennett Parten brilliantly reframes this seminal episode in Civil War history.