Thursday, January 30 at 5:30 pm Off Square Books
Author and historian Bennett Parten in conversation with Robert Colby for Somewhere Toward Freedom, a groundbreaking account of Sherman’s March to the Sea – 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.
About the book
In the fall of 1864, General 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.
In Somewhere Toward Freedom, historian Bennett Parten brilliantly reframes this seminal episode in Civil War history. He not only helps us understand how Sherman’s March impacted the war, and what it meant to the enslaved, but also reveals how it laid the foundation for the fledgling efforts of Reconstruction.
Sherman’s march has remained controversial to this day. But as Parten reveals, it played a significant role in ending the Civil War, due in no small part to the efforts of the tens of thousands of enslaved people who became a part of it. In Somewhere Toward Freedom, this critical moment in American history has finally been given the attention it deserves.
About the author
Bennett Parten is an assistant professor of history at Georgia Southern University whose area of expertise is the Civil War period. He is a native of Royston, Georgia, and completed his PhD in history at Yale University. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Zocalo Public Square, and The Civil War Monitor, among others. He currently lives in Savannah, Georgia.
About the conversation partner
Robert Colby is an award-winning scholar and teacher of United States history, and the author of An Unholy Traffic: Slave trading in the Civil War South. His work on the domestic slave trade during the Civil War has won the Society of American Historians’ Allan Nevins Prize and the Anthony Kaye Memorial Essay Award and Anne J. Bailey Prize from the Society of Civil War Historians. Originally from Virginia (where he grew up walking Civil War battlefields), he is now an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mississippi.
Somewhere Toward Freedom
By Bennett Parten
$29.99
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 9781668034682
