Book Review: Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation

Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation. By Bennett Parten. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2025. Hardcover, 253 pp. $29.99.

Reviewed by Codie Eash

Among the most provocative operations of the American Civil War, General William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea has inspired an extensive historiography. Notable modern titles include Joseph T. Glatthaar’s The March to the Sea and Beyond (Louisiana State University Press, 1985), Burke Davis’s Sherman’s March (Knopf Doubleday, 1988), Noah Andre Trudeau’s Southern Storm (HarperCollins, 2008), and Anne Sarah Rubin’s Through the Heart of Dixie (The University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Now, Bennett Parten has entered the scene with a debut book, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation.

The central difference between his entry and others that preceded it, Parten contends, “is that to understand Sherman’s March is to reimagine its history by seeing it for what it was: a veritable freedom movement…that Sherman’s March was a turning point in the history of American freedom. I mean this,” Parten clarifies, “in a very real and grassroots sense: it was the largest emancipation event in our history and one of the largest in the rise and fall of Atlantic slavery” and “one of the most active, concentrated, and robust reimaginings of freedom in all of American history.” (4, 5, 83)

Parten’s narrative is eloquently written for a lay audience, but contains eminently quotable lines on most pages, emphasizing his craftsmanship in telling this complex chronicle in a comprehensible way. The fact that, despite its specificity, this could be the first book someone has read on Sherman, the March to the Sea, or emancipation—and that it will still make perfect sense as a full story—is a testimony to its readability. But even for seasoned veterans of those components of Civil War history and their nuances, this work contains brand-new, fresh interpretations that take Sherman, his campaign, and wartime efforts to end slavery into uncharted interpretive territory.

Light on illustrations, the book contains one pertinent photo between each chapter, and only two rather high-level maps at the beginning of the book. On the latter point, many readers may lodge a common complaint—that there can always be more maps depicting armies’ shifts across geography. However, Somewhere Toward Freedom is notably more social than most military histories, and thus following its story is not entirely dependent upon understanding troop movements.

A perusal of Parten’s endnotes shows that in addition to secondary historiography, his thorough research is entirely based on primary sources of the published sort, as opposed to unpublished archival accounts. While this could be seen as a lost opportunity to extract fresh, unknown sources, it nevertheless shows the author’s ability to unearth and reinterpret previously printed—but often long-unused—sources. Importantly, Parten clarifies his research and writing occurred as his doctoral dissertation within the public-access restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic’s early stages.

Early on, Parten maintains that “the underlying battle between soldiers and enslaved people was what gave the March its most profound meaning,” and that included Sherman himself, whose evolution the author traces from “complaining that emancipation only complicated the war effort” to accepting “emancipation as being a central part of the war effort.” (26, 36, 149) Parten describes the varying ubiquitous roles of Black refugees and service members, as not only soldiers but as rather well-equipped laborers, military informants, revealers of hidden supplies, guides, assistants in leading prisoners of war safely back into United States Army lines, and riders alongside U.S. forces to give the illusion of even greater numbers in the face of the enemy. He spans everything from exploring how Sherman’s March fit into the long shadow of American slavery as a system, to the granular level of lesser-known figures “who wrote it all down.” (43)

Chronologically spanning the fall of Atlanta in September 1864 through the Grand Review in May 1865, and even bleeding into the spring of 1866, Somewhere Toward Freedom employs a healthy mix of quantitative data and analysis, mixed with narration and anecdotal storytelling to employ human interest stories—perhaps none more impactful than Parten’s pivot from detailing a joyful campfire scene at which freedpeople sang and laughed, to his extensive, tragic examination of the massacre at Ebenezer Creek. That atrocity—one of many murky, violent topics into which Parten freely delves—had longstanding impacts on race relations within the army and as an indicator of looming postwar controversies within former Confederate cities amid Reconstruction, showing that despite much hope, this is ultimately not a story with a long-term happy ending.

“As a matter of sheer force, Sherman’s March through Georgia made the redefinition of American freedom possible,” Parten concludes. However, “it was also a missed opportunity.” (208, 209) Fortunately for Civil War scholarship, Somewhere Toward Freedom has likewise redefined campaign studies of this sort—and Parten has not missed an opportunity with this stirring volume that redefines how modern students should consider the March’s place in history.

Codie Eash serves as Director of Education and Interpretation at Seminary Ridge Museum and Education Center in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he has been part of the staff since 2012. Having earned his undergraduate degree in Communication/Journalism at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania in 2014, as of 2024 he is pursuing a Master’s in American History at Gettysburg College through The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.