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Civil War America
Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman's March and American Memory
Sherman's March, cutting a path through Georgia and the Carolinas, is among the most symbolically potent events of the Civil War. In Through the Heart of Dixie, Anne Sarah Rubin uncovers and unpacks stories and myths about the March from a wide variety of sources, including African Americans, women, Union soldiers, Confederates, and even Sherman himself. Drawing her evidence from an array of media, including travel accounts, memoirs, literature, films, and newspapers, Rubin uses the competing and contradictory stories as a lens into the ways that American thinking about the Civil War has changed over time.
Compiling and analyzing the discordant stories around the March, and considering significant cultural artifacts such as George Barnard's 1866 Photographic Views of Sherman's Campaign, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, and E. L. Doctorow's The March, Rubin creates a cohesive narrative that unites seemingly incompatible myths and asserts the metaphorical importance of Sherman's March to Americans' memory of the Civil War. The book is enhanced by a digital history project, which can be found at shermansmarch.org.
Compiling and analyzing the discordant stories around the March, and considering significant cultural artifacts such as George Barnard's 1866 Photographic Views of Sherman's Campaign, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, and E. L. Doctorow's The March, Rubin creates a cohesive narrative that unites seemingly incompatible myths and asserts the metaphorical importance of Sherman's March to Americans' memory of the Civil War. The book is enhanced by a digital history project, which can be found at shermansmarch.org.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published September 15, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 3, 2015
Review Title: The night Sherman drove down old Dixie
Joint review with Sherman's ghosts : Soldiers, civilians, and the American way of war by Matthew Carr. These two books were side by side on my local public library shelf, covering g Sherman's March from similar but slightly different angles that just begged for a paired review. I was intrigued right up front that Carr, a journalist according to his book flap bio, approached the topic from the seemingly more academic view of the influence of Sherman's approach to "total war" on subsequent American military strategy and tactics, yet his book included no bibliography and was essentially an extended essay. Rubin, on the other hand, a professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, takes a strictly academic approach to the (seemingly again) less rigorous topic of the March's impact on the recorded memory--memoirs, letters, novels, movies, and other sources--of the soldiers, civilians, and embattled African Americans caught in between. While both books are worth reading, neither had that spark of genius that would have warranted a higher rating.
That both authors recap the March highlighting exactly the same events and referencing the same primary sources let's us know that there is no new ground to be broken here. Indeed, as Rubin sometimes references the events from the point of view of the three main types of participants in different chapters., by the time I finished both books I had read of the same events as many as four different times. Too bad these writers couldn't have met and collaborated on a single account of the March with the most current thinking.
For readers new to the topic, a quick recap: William Sherman led northern troops from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Atlanta, Georgia in 1864, battling deep into Confederate territory during the American Civil War. Rather than commit a major portion of his force to defending his newly won territory and extended supply lines, he proposed and was Granted permission to burn Atlanta and March across Georgia to the sea, then up the coast through South and then North Carolina to Richmond and a crushing combination with Grant to end the war. Along the way, as both strategy and tactic,, Sherman's troops lived off the land and destroyed much of the South's war making industry and agriculture that was in its path. Sherman famously said that war is (tactically) Hell and that the strategy of attacking all of an opponent's war making capacity and not just its troops is the quickest and most humane way to end it.
A big part of Rubin's survey of American memory of the March is spent examining the scope of this "total war"--a more modern term applied to the Sherman strategy. While the March covered several hundred miles with a 60 mile wide sweep, the widely spread lines meant that even within the path much was shared, a fact that in the continuation of the Lost Cause sectional struggle after the war required explanation by those whose property was spared to avoid accusations of collaboration with the enemy. Conversed, Rubin cites memoirs and local histories that claimed destruction by Sherman's "bummers" even though they were no where near the path of the March.
Carr also questions the severity of the "total war" approach as practiced by Sherman, even though he used the same practice in the American Indian wars in the decades after the Civil War with even more ruthless effectiveness. And even this level of violence pales against later comparisons with the European wars of conquest in Africa and the European infighting in World War I. But the interesting part of his inquiry is whether Sherman's tactics were explicitly encoded and followed by military manuals and colleges. Even though popular history and cultural memory accords Sherman the lion's share of the credit, Carr finds the documentary evidence much more sketchy.
Carr spends the last quarter of his book (and Rubin a chapter of her book in another case of overlap) examining the influence of Sherman (or the perception of his influence by the participants) on the moral quagmire of the American war in Vietnam and then the supposedly cleaner "surgical" approach of the 21st century Gulf Wars. The extremes of blaming Sherman for the napalm bombing of villages and appropriating his memory as a clear-eyed realist responsible for surgical air strikes are clearly wrong in light of Carr's analysis. It is fair to say that even with his faults (which were many as documented by Rubin and Carr) Sherman looked at life, war and life after war with a more balanced and healthy moral scale than modern militaristic politicians. In his final chapter "War without War" Carr provides a chilling look at what a world at war with no moral compass might look like in a not distant enough future.
One area of Heart of Dixie where Rubin excels in providing a needed corrective to the literature of the March is in trying to highlight the plight off the African Americans caught in the midst of the sectional hatred. Because so few whites on either side were willing to grant them equality or even a voice, the surviving contemporary memoirs hardly mention the physical, spiritual, political, economic and emotional impact of the March on the slaves killed, freed, abandoned, or retained in its path. The horrific events at the Ebenezer Creek crossing (where as many as several thousand African American men, women and children were stranded in front of the approaching Confederates when the Northern army took up the temporary bridge across the creek behind them) are described from the perspective of some white soldiers as a tragedy, and Sherman and his leadership did have to answer to charges of callous neglect or worse, but there are no words from the black perspective. Perhaps the silence is their most eloquent protest.
The bibliography provided by Rubin makes it valuable for further reading, and both books make valid and valuable points about past events, present memory, and possible futures. Combining the two into a single well researched, written and documented analysis might have been a classic. Separately they are still worth the time, just a little less than they might have been.
Joint review with Sherman's ghosts : Soldiers, civilians, and the American way of war by Matthew Carr. These two books were side by side on my local public library shelf, covering g Sherman's March from similar but slightly different angles that just begged for a paired review. I was intrigued right up front that Carr, a journalist according to his book flap bio, approached the topic from the seemingly more academic view of the influence of Sherman's approach to "total war" on subsequent American military strategy and tactics, yet his book included no bibliography and was essentially an extended essay. Rubin, on the other hand, a professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, takes a strictly academic approach to the (seemingly again) less rigorous topic of the March's impact on the recorded memory--memoirs, letters, novels, movies, and other sources--of the soldiers, civilians, and embattled African Americans caught in between. While both books are worth reading, neither had that spark of genius that would have warranted a higher rating.
That both authors recap the March highlighting exactly the same events and referencing the same primary sources let's us know that there is no new ground to be broken here. Indeed, as Rubin sometimes references the events from the point of view of the three main types of participants in different chapters., by the time I finished both books I had read of the same events as many as four different times. Too bad these writers couldn't have met and collaborated on a single account of the March with the most current thinking.
For readers new to the topic, a quick recap: William Sherman led northern troops from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Atlanta, Georgia in 1864, battling deep into Confederate territory during the American Civil War. Rather than commit a major portion of his force to defending his newly won territory and extended supply lines, he proposed and was Granted permission to burn Atlanta and March across Georgia to the sea, then up the coast through South and then North Carolina to Richmond and a crushing combination with Grant to end the war. Along the way, as both strategy and tactic,, Sherman's troops lived off the land and destroyed much of the South's war making industry and agriculture that was in its path. Sherman famously said that war is (tactically) Hell and that the strategy of attacking all of an opponent's war making capacity and not just its troops is the quickest and most humane way to end it.
A big part of Rubin's survey of American memory of the March is spent examining the scope of this "total war"--a more modern term applied to the Sherman strategy. While the March covered several hundred miles with a 60 mile wide sweep, the widely spread lines meant that even within the path much was shared, a fact that in the continuation of the Lost Cause sectional struggle after the war required explanation by those whose property was spared to avoid accusations of collaboration with the enemy. Conversed, Rubin cites memoirs and local histories that claimed destruction by Sherman's "bummers" even though they were no where near the path of the March.
Carr also questions the severity of the "total war" approach as practiced by Sherman, even though he used the same practice in the American Indian wars in the decades after the Civil War with even more ruthless effectiveness. And even this level of violence pales against later comparisons with the European wars of conquest in Africa and the European infighting in World War I. But the interesting part of his inquiry is whether Sherman's tactics were explicitly encoded and followed by military manuals and colleges. Even though popular history and cultural memory accords Sherman the lion's share of the credit, Carr finds the documentary evidence much more sketchy.
Carr spends the last quarter of his book (and Rubin a chapter of her book in another case of overlap) examining the influence of Sherman (or the perception of his influence by the participants) on the moral quagmire of the American war in Vietnam and then the supposedly cleaner "surgical" approach of the 21st century Gulf Wars. The extremes of blaming Sherman for the napalm bombing of villages and appropriating his memory as a clear-eyed realist responsible for surgical air strikes are clearly wrong in light of Carr's analysis. It is fair to say that even with his faults (which were many as documented by Rubin and Carr) Sherman looked at life, war and life after war with a more balanced and healthy moral scale than modern militaristic politicians. In his final chapter "War without War" Carr provides a chilling look at what a world at war with no moral compass might look like in a not distant enough future.
One area of Heart of Dixie where Rubin excels in providing a needed corrective to the literature of the March is in trying to highlight the plight off the African Americans caught in the midst of the sectional hatred. Because so few whites on either side were willing to grant them equality or even a voice, the surviving contemporary memoirs hardly mention the physical, spiritual, political, economic and emotional impact of the March on the slaves killed, freed, abandoned, or retained in its path. The horrific events at the Ebenezer Creek crossing (where as many as several thousand African American men, women and children were stranded in front of the approaching Confederates when the Northern army took up the temporary bridge across the creek behind them) are described from the perspective of some white soldiers as a tragedy, and Sherman and his leadership did have to answer to charges of callous neglect or worse, but there are no words from the black perspective. Perhaps the silence is their most eloquent protest.
The bibliography provided by Rubin makes it valuable for further reading, and both books make valid and valuable points about past events, present memory, and possible futures. Combining the two into a single well researched, written and documented analysis might have been a classic. Separately they are still worth the time, just a little less than they might have been.
June 18, 2020
Civil War memory is a burgeoning area of scholarship. Seminal works such as This Republic of Suffering, by Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust, have set the standard for this fascinating area of intellectual history. Historian Anne Sarah Rubin, in Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and American Memory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 306pgs), has contributed a much needed volume to this area of study. Professor Rubin chronicles the March to the Sea undertaken by Union General William T. Sherman during the Spring of 1865. Professor Rubin outlines the course of Sherman’s march in the overall course of the Civil War s as well as the intervening decades. Through the Heart of Dixie does a good job in journeying through this complicated period.
The Civil War’s last spring would see General Sherman looking to close out the war. He had already conquered the second city of the South in making short work of Atlanta. He was pushing past Savannah, into South Carolina, and eventually meeting Union Commander Ulysses S. Grant in time for a grand review in May 1865. Professor Rubin does a wonderful job in showing the reader how the march affected Sherman’s southern contemporaries and how it has continued to have an effect on those contemporaries' descendants. In some circles, this effect is still felt in the early twenty-first century.
The only downside of this work is its’ numerous typos. It is hard to get engrossed in this work when the reader has to stop for a typo. The narrative, however, does flow well and is very enjoyable. Through the Heart of Dixie is a good read and well worth the time. It should be on the shelf of every Civil War student.
Matt
The Civil War’s last spring would see General Sherman looking to close out the war. He had already conquered the second city of the South in making short work of Atlanta. He was pushing past Savannah, into South Carolina, and eventually meeting Union Commander Ulysses S. Grant in time for a grand review in May 1865. Professor Rubin does a wonderful job in showing the reader how the march affected Sherman’s southern contemporaries and how it has continued to have an effect on those contemporaries' descendants. In some circles, this effect is still felt in the early twenty-first century.
The only downside of this work is its’ numerous typos. It is hard to get engrossed in this work when the reader has to stop for a typo. The narrative, however, does flow well and is very enjoyable. Through the Heart of Dixie is a good read and well worth the time. It should be on the shelf of every Civil War student.
Matt
May 2, 2021
I thought this book did an excellent job of explaining the march and the many different ways it has been remembered and discussed since. This is an area of particular interest to me since college where I studied the march and the role of had on women.
The only problem I had was that the author occasionally was redundant. I think she referenced some sources and what they were multiple times.
Overall, if you want to understand the complexities surrounding the march to the sea, I would check this out.
The only problem I had was that the author occasionally was redundant. I think she referenced some sources and what they were multiple times.
Overall, if you want to understand the complexities surrounding the march to the sea, I would check this out.
June 18, 2021
Really enjoyed this current look at “The March” that is still part of an on going controversy. Sherman the bad guy and the poor Southerners so beaten down and still it goes on. It didn’t end with GWTW folks. I recommend this book cuz there is so much more to that fateful episode in our country’s Civil War
August 18, 2015
Sherman's March to the Sea, from Atlanta to Savannah, through Georgia and North and South Carolina, is one of the most legendary episodes in Civil War history, with especial emphasis on the legendary. Thanks to books such as Gone with the Wind and others, history has evolved into myth, and that myth has come to serve history in different ways, depending on the perspective of those involved. Sherman's March represented and continues to represent different things to different people - to African-Americans it signalled emancipation and jubilee, to Southerners it was destruction and brutality, to Northern soldiers it was either a lark, something shameful or painful military necessity.
In this book Rubin attempts to analyse how the March has been remembered, depicted, processed and memorialised via a variety of different forms, both contemporary and post-war. She looks at contemporary documents and historical memoirs, speeches and recollections, historical memorials, popular culture, and attempts to reconcile many of the disparate stories of the March into some kind of coherent narrative. In many ways, much as the experience of the trenches has come to be shorthand for the entire First World War, the varying experiences of the March have in many ways come to stand for the entire Civil War experience - emancipation, destruction and victory.
It's an interesting approach and thoroughly readable. My only criticism is that this book is too short for such a huge topic, and I felt it lacked a great deal of depth. Discounting endnotes, the book itself is barely more than 200 pages long, and that's not even close to being enough to do this topic any real justice. It could have been twice as long, and perhaps should have been. I'd say it serves as a good introduction but I finished this with a sadly unrealised desire for more.
In this book Rubin attempts to analyse how the March has been remembered, depicted, processed and memorialised via a variety of different forms, both contemporary and post-war. She looks at contemporary documents and historical memoirs, speeches and recollections, historical memorials, popular culture, and attempts to reconcile many of the disparate stories of the March into some kind of coherent narrative. In many ways, much as the experience of the trenches has come to be shorthand for the entire First World War, the varying experiences of the March have in many ways come to stand for the entire Civil War experience - emancipation, destruction and victory.
It's an interesting approach and thoroughly readable. My only criticism is that this book is too short for such a huge topic, and I felt it lacked a great deal of depth. Discounting endnotes, the book itself is barely more than 200 pages long, and that's not even close to being enough to do this topic any real justice. It could have been twice as long, and perhaps should have been. I'd say it serves as a good introduction but I finished this with a sadly unrealised desire for more.
January 20, 2015
A bit of military history, but more of a social history and the role collective memory plays. Rubin discusses the many varied views that developed after Sherman's March in late 1864 into 1865. Rubin successfully argues that the devastation was not as vast as is commonly thought, particularly by southerners. More importantly, she includes stories from enslaved people and their thoughts and actions during this time. She uses a great deal of sources, including many primary sources and oral histories, to support her work. The book is not chronological so it was nice to skip around the different chapters.
February 8, 2015
Rubin looks at the history of Sherman's March as selective memory that serves an individual or--even a region--in helping cope with or justify the trauma of war. By contrasting recollections in archives, books, and popular art, Rubin provides a truer, fuller understanding. I got the sense, for the first time, what it was like for Southerners and African American slaves to have their homes--whether plantation or cabin--plundered. Rubin offers a great 360-degree approach to a historical event that still resonates and disturbs.
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November 15, 201411/15/14 found it in the Wall St. Journal ... In “Through the Heart of Dixie,” Anne Sarah Rubin, a professor history at the University of Maryland, offers an engrossing exploration of the ways in which the march has been recounted and understood over the years.
August 28, 2015
This was an interesting and insightful book. It provided a view of this part of American History from different view points. It read like a college lecture.
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