THROUGH THE HEART OF DIXIE

On the trail of William Tecumseh Sherman’s “bummers.”

Sherman’s brilliant feint across the Carolinas and Georgia, writes Rubin (History/Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County; A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868, 2005), is remembered today as both punitive and liberating—punitive against resistant secessionists, liberating for the slaves along his path. Yet, as the author writes, though he was a vengeful and violent man, Sherman was no abolitionist: He did not publicly support emancipation, opposed the use of black soldiers in the Union Army and “accepted black laborers only grudgingly.” Infamously, he abandoned “contrabands” at Ebenezer Creek after they built his troops a bridge across the swamp, leaving them to the mercy of Confederate attackers; it is possible that as many as 5,000 former slaves were thus left behind to be killed. Even so, as Rubin writes, Sherman “became fundamentally identified with liberation.” The author examines the history of Sherman’s March to the Sea and its often overlooked aspects—one uncomfortable example being the incidence of rape committed against women of whatever ethnicity along the way and the attendant trauma, including that of women who would later be hospitalized for mental breakdowns and other symptoms attributable “to that signal event.” In all this, Rubin writes confidently and well. Somewhat more scattershot are her discussions of Sherman’s march in popular history: Ross McElwee’s film of that name, which is only nominally about the historic event, seems shoehorned into a more searching look at Margaret Mitchell’s use of the facts in Gone with the Wind. If often slow, her work is at its best when it turns up small, forgotten episodes such as the use of Confederate prisoners as human shields against explosive booby traps along the army’s route—a very modern matter indeed.

Rubin’s earnest, occasionally plodding study is unlikely to win Sherman new admirers in either North or South, but it is of much interest to Civil War buffs.