Drawing extensively on Willie Lee Rose’s Rehearsal for Reconstruction, an influential chronicle of the Union’s early and blended efforts to assist freed black Individuals, Parthen argues that “what got here after the march was as a lot a crucible, as a lot a check, because the march itself.” Though Sherman triumphantly entered Savannah in December, a lot of the refugees by no means entered town. As an alternative, they had been despatched up the coast to Port Royal, the Union outpost on the South Carolina coast, the place about 15,000 freedmen lived alongside Northerners who had migrated south to function educators and missionaries.
Right here, Brig. Basic Rufus Saxton, the army governor of the Southern Division, was ordered to grab all plantations beforehand occupied by the rebels and to feed, shelter, and customarily take care of the previous slaves. However when 17,000 Georgian refugees arrived, many needed to be housed in crude tents or sleep within the open, typically with out blankets. At the least 1,000 of them died from publicity.
On this, the second and considerably extra by-product half of his ebook, which is much less concerning the march than its aftermath, Parthen focuses largely on how the “hopes and failures” of the march continued, particularly as Sherman and Secretary of Battle Edwin Stanton, in Savannah, met with Garrison Frazier, a former slave pastor, who informed them, “We wish to be settled on land till we are able to purchase it and make our personal.” Sherman’s subsequent Particular Discipline Order No. 15 allowed freed women and men to choose a strip of conquered land that stretched from Charleston to Jacksonville underneath a provision that grew to become colloquially referred to as the “40 Acres and a Mule.”
Males like Edward Philbrick, one of many Northerners who got here to the Georgia Sea Islands with humanitarian intentions, bought 11 plantations on the strip, arrogantly assuming that by using freedmen on his property, he would result in their “upliftment.” As Parten rightly notes, Philbrick represented these capitalists who needed to “rework the slaveholding South within the picture of the North,” with its haughty, paternalistic privatization of land.
