Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman's March and American Memory

by Anne Sarah Rubin

Overview

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 for examining the ways American thinking about the Civil War have 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469633404
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	02/01/2017
Series:	Civil War America
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	9.20(w) x 6.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Anne Sarah Rubin is professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: Marching through Metaphors 1

1 Stories of the Great March 8

2 Southern Belles and Brother Masons 45

3 Freedpeople and Forty Acres 69

4 Brave Bummers of the West 94

5 Uncle Billy, the Merchant of Terror 121

6 On Sherman's Track 152

7 Songs and Snapshots 175

8 Fiction and Film 204

Conclusion: Rubin's March 232

Notes 239

Bibliography 271

Index 293

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Through the Heart of Dixie illustrates that Sherman's March was, itself, a character in the larger narrative of the Civil War, which is why it has been the subject of nonfiction as well as fiction writers, of songsters, of artists, and of filmmakers. Rubin tells a good story. This book was a joy to read." —Karen L. Cox, author of Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture

Editorial Reviews

An engrossing exploration of the ways in which the march has been recounted and understood over the years.—The Wall Street Journal



A valuable contribution to the memory literature.—Blue & Gray Magazine



An exceptionally creative and ambitious study, like nothing else that I can think of in the field of Civil War history.—Civil War Monitor



Drawing on an impressive range of source material, Rubin considers a wide variety of views and actors, from participants and witnesses to novelists and filmmakers.—America's Civil War



One of the more innovative books which has been published this year on the Civil War and one of the more innovative books on the March to the Sea.—Gettysburg Chronicle



An excellent addition to the flourishing literature on Civil War memory, and scholars and Civil War enthusiasts will find it interesting.—H-Net Reviews



Much more than another study of Sherman. . . . Rubin has made a significant contribution to the study of American memory and the history of Sherman's March.—On Point: The Journal of Army History



A fascinating consideration of how Americans have remembered [the soldiers on Sherman's March] and the events of 1864-65. . . . [A] compelling analyses of the various participants who fashioned memory of the marches and put it in the context of larger developments in national life.—Civil War Times



Rubin's examination of certain aspects of the Lost Cause myth and her utilization of neglected sources represent a good addition to Sherman historiography.—South Carolina Historical Magazine

From the Publisher

11/01/2014
. $35. HISTA historiography of Sherman's March, examining how American thought about the Civil War has changed over time.

Library Journal

2014-08-27
On the trail of William Tecumseh Sherman's "bummers." Sherman's brilliant feint across the Carolinas and Georgia, writes Rubin (History/Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County; A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868, 2005), is remembered today as both punitive and liberating—punitive against resistant secessionists, liberating for the slaves along his path. Yet, as the author writes, though he was a vengeful and violent man, Sherman was no abolitionist: He did not publicly support emancipation, opposed the use of black soldiers in the Union Army and "accepted black laborers only grudgingly." Infamously, he abandoned "contrabands" at Ebenezer Creek after they built his troops a bridge across the swamp, leaving them to the mercy of Confederate attackers; it is possible that as many as 5,000 former slaves were thus left behind to be killed. Even so, as Rubin writes, Sherman "became fundamentally identified with liberation." The author examines the history of Sherman's March to the Sea and its often overlooked aspects—one uncomfortable example being the incidence of rape committed against women of whatever ethnicity along the way and the attendant trauma, including that of women who would later be hospitalized for mental breakdowns and other symptoms attributable "to that signal event." In all this, Rubin writes confidently and well. Somewhat more scattershot are her discussions of Sherman's march in popular history: Ross McElwee's film of that name, which is only nominally about the historic event, seems shoehorned into a more searching look at Margaret Mitchell's use of the facts in Gone with the Wind. If often slow, her work is at its best when it turns up small, forgotten episodes such as the use of Confederate prisoners as human shields against explosive booby traps along the army's route—a very modern matter indeed. Rubin's earnest, occasionally plodding study is unlikely to win Sherman new admirers in either North or South, but it is of much interest to Civil War buffs.

Kirkus Reviews