Category:

Sally may have even had Jubilee's promise in mind when she dropped her things and praised God after hearing the news of a woman named Nan. We don't know. All we know is that in the blink of an eye, Sally "flew to where they were." The campfires lit the way. She ran past soldiers and tents, probably ignored shouts and jeers, and might have grabbed the wrong person once or twice. When she finally got near enough, the woman she believed to be Nan stopped and stared at Sally. Sally stared back. The two didn't know what to say or do; a decade had passed since Sally had seen her daughter, and her daughter had been just eight the last time she had seen her mother. It wasn't until the woman said that she'd used to live near Atlanta as a young girl that Sally felt sure it was Nan. She called Nan her child and said she'd been looking for her all that time. Then came the tears. The two hugged, kissed, and cried out in joy. Friends cheered as soldiers watched, and pretty soon the entire camp erupted in a riotous commotion. Sally then went to get Ben, and the whole scene repeated itself. The soldier who later narrated the reunion called it "the most powerful demonstration of human emotion" he'd ever seen.

Sally and Nan enjoyed their tearful reunion while marching along with Sherman's army. They were, however, only two of as many as twenty thousand. Not everyone had the same experience. The idea of Jubilee may have promised a rebirth, but it also called forth more apocalyptic ideas of upheaval and strife. The reality of the March—of sixty thousand soldiers marching to the sea in the final full year of a bloody civil war—is that it was often loud and chaotic and always dangerous. Violence, or the threat of it, lingered around every bend in the road. Freedom—or something like it—was often more uncertain than certain. And calamity was never all that far behind. The March may have been the war's most revolutionary moment, an instance when the ground shook, tumult ensued, and freed people everywhere started realizing freedom as never before. But as the well-known New England abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson once warned, "revolutions may go backward." They sometimes turn tragic. And by the end of 1865, a year after Sherman's army arrived in Savannah, the refugee story of Sherman's March did just that: it became an American tragedy.

THE VIEW FROM ATLANTA

On September 1, 1864, Sam Richards, a white merchant, saw the city of Atlanta explode. Around noon, rumors began circulating of a Confederate defeat on the outskirts of town. Confederate general John Bell Hood would be evacuating his forces at once, leaving William Tecumseh Sherman's Union Army free to take the city. Word of the impending evacuation set off a mad scramble among the remaining residents. Some packed their bags and evacuated hurriedly; others searched the town looking for food. "If there had been any doubt of the fact that Atlanta was about to be given up it would have been removed when they saw the depots of Government grain and food thrown open" and distributed by the "sackful and cartload," Richards wrote. Then the explosions started. Hood had ordered the burning of all remaining munitions trains, which caused whole railcars to burst like fireworks. One such explosion, Richards remembered, lasted for "half an hour or more" and was powerful enough to shake the ground and shatter the glass of nearby windows. Other, louder explosions continued throughout the evening, making the city feel as if it were stuck inside a roaring cannon. "This has been a day of terror and a night of dread," Richards wrote after it was all over.

The next day, local officials surrendered the city to Sherman's army without a fight. The campaign was complete. After marching out of Chattanooga, Tennessee, earlier in the spring, after months of the Confederate Army's digging in and falling back, after more than a hundred miles of hard marching and continuous fighting, after fierce battles at places such as Dalton, Resaca, New Hope Church, Kennesaw Mountain, and Peachtree Creek, after countless miles of train tracks torn up and destroyed, bridges burned, farms desolated, and nearly

seventy-five thousand casualties, Atlanta, one of the last great Confederate strongholds, had finally fallen. Soldiers from the Twentieth Army Corps were the first to arrive and make the city home. The rest began arriving shortly thereafter. Sherman, who remained headquartered at Marietta, a town just to the city's northwest, and wouldn't arrive for several more days, nevertheless announced the news of Atlanta's occupation on the night of September 3, writing "Atlanta is ours, & fairly won."

By then Atlanta was already a city transformed. "It is strange to go about Atlanta now and see only Yankee uniforms," Richards wrote the following day. City Hall had been turned into the headquarters of the Provost Guard, an official army term for the military police. It was one of the few buildings left undisturbed, for in the search for liquor and tobacco, Sherman's soldiers had looted stores. "Such a state of utter disorder and confusion presented itself to my eyes then," wrote Richards, who watched as soldiers rummaged through his own store, breaking open everything and taking it as if it were a "free fight." Even more alarming, the forlorn prisoners who had once filled the city's jails and worn blue now wore a faded gray. Roughly 1,800 Confederate prisoners had been marched through the center of town while their blue-coated captors whooped and hollered. Even Richards's church had been taken over by an "abolition" preacher, sentiments that would have been grounds for an arrest and punishment only days earlier.