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  • Marching with Sherman: Through Georgia and the Carolinas with the 154th New York by Mark H. Dunkelman
  • Joseph G. Dawson III
Marching with Sherman: Through Georgia and the Carolinas with the 154th New York. Mark H. Dunkelman. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-8071-4378-0, 276 pp., cloth, $39.95.

With this book, Mark H. Dunkelman continues to investigate the Civil War odyssey of the 154th New York Infantry Regiment, the unit of his great-grandfather. Dunkelman’s scholarly effort is remarkable and thorough; this book is not a hagiography reciting vague, unsupported episodes or a collection of paragraphs highlighting supposed adventures of the author’s relatives and their friends. Dunkelman successfully places the military actions and efforts of a single regiment into the bigger picture of one of the Civil War’s most controversial and most written about campaigns, Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s destructive marches through three southern states. Furthermore, the author combines the perspectives and descriptions from Union veterans of that New York regiment with the written recollections and postwar memories of Confederates, with the impressions and attitudes of twentieth- and twenty-first-century southerners. Modern Georgians and Carolinians related to Dunkelman what they had heard about the Federal campaign through their towns, counties, and states. The result is informative, engaging, and fresh.

Instructive are Dunkelman’s juxtapositions of accounts by New York veterans in letters, diaries, or other writings, contrasted with the writings of former Confederates or their supporters (members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, for example). In several instances, he determines that postwar Confederates and their progeny had made assertions about Federal destructiveness, but these claims conflicted with official records and photographs of structures that survived the war. In other words, “memory” of one type or another sometimes failed to measure up to the facts Dunkelman confirms by following the route of the 154th New York as closely as possible through Georgia and the Carolinas.

Dunkelman’s investigations introduce him to southern stereotypes that have remained alive for more than a century. For instance, the author hears stereotypical stories created by postwar Confederates and their offspring centered on loyal slaves who assisted their owners in several ways—concealing livestock, hiding food, protecting farmhouses or plantations, and burying treasured possessions so that the Federals would not take them. In multiple states, Dunkelman reads about or hears retold stories of how relatives survived only by picking up corn dropped by Union soldiers who had fed their horses in the yards of family homesteads. One of the favorite features the author hears involved variations on “Steel Magnolias,” pro-Confederate white women who through guile, brass, or persuasion turned away Yankee soldiers bent on destruction or made such a favorable personal impression on even Sherman himself that their properties (or entire towns) were spared damage, even if Dunkelman’s research showed that the general never had been there.

Marching with Sherman also helps readers understand the efficiency and strength of the Federal army. The Union mail system delivered letters and parcels to soldiers of the 154th New York while they were on the march. Northern troops policed Savannah, Georgia, so well that some of the city’s residents were sorry to see them leave. Several senior Federal commanders took seriously the standing orders and admonitions [End Page 544] against injury to southern noncombatants and damage to civilian property that had no military usefulness. Nevertheless, Dunkelman confirms that some of the New York soldiers caused destruction, perpetrated capricious violence, and committed thefts: some veterans had brought purloined keepsakes back to New York with them.

Making a notable contribution to the literature on historical memory, Dunkelman supports his evocative book with excellent maps, appropriate photographs, and a good index.

Joseph G. Dawson III
Texas A&M University
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