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69 chapter three Freedpeople and Forty Acres By the early 1930s, eighty-seven-year-old Henry Jenkins had long transcended his origins as a slave on a plantation in Sumter County, South Carolina . He owned 480 acres of land, and was described as a respectable “church member, citizen, and tax payer.” While he owed his emancipation to Sherman ’s marchers, he recalled them more with anger than gratitude. “When de Yankees come, what they do?” he asked rhetorically, and then answered “They did them things they ought not to have done and they left undone de things they ought to have done.” Jenkins complained that jewelry and silver “was took and carried ’way by a army dat seemed more concerned ’bout stealin’, than they was ’bout de Holy war for de liberation of de poor African slave people. They took off all de hosses, sheeps, cows, chickens, and geese, took de seine and de fishes they caught, corn in crib, meat in smoke-house, and everything.” Jenkins knew all too well that in taking food from plantation owners, Union soldiers took food from African Americans as well. He also understood that for most Union soldiers, the March had very little to do with black liberation, and he waited patiently for judgment to come. “Marse General Sherman said war was hell,” Jenkins told his interviewer. “It sho’ was. Mebbe it was hell for some of them Yankees when they come to die and give account of de deeds they done in Sumter and Richland Counties.”1 For African Americans, Sherman’s March was the epitome of a doubleedged sword. While many enslaved people were liberated by Union soldiers as they moved across the plantation landscape, that emancipation was often accompanied by hunger, destruction, and mistreatment. If African Americans stayed put while the army moved on, they would have had to live amid ruined farms and looted storehouses, side by side with angry masters, who might not see themselves as “former” slaveholders.2 Those who chose to follow Sherman’s army found themselves largely unwelcomed, left to fend for themselves, often trapped by Confederates in their wake. The stories told by and about African Americans reflect this ambiguity. African Americans sometimes recalled Sherman as a liberator, even as they 70 : freedpeople and forty acres resented his soldiers’ casual demolition of the food that they, not Southern whites, had grown. Southern whites, for their part, saw African Americans as filling one of two stock roles: either as faithful retainers, helping to hide valuables and livestock from the Yankees, or (less frequently) as ungrateful turncoats who betrayed the family’s trust. Union soldiers, starting with Sherman himself, presented a similar spectrum of attitudes.3 Although the importance of the March for African Americans seemed to wane over the twentieth century, it reappeared in the 1960s, as its 100th anniversary coincided with the burgeoning civil rights movement. Like a Blue Cloud Coming Through The Works Progress Administration (WPA) slave narratives are both tremendously valuable and deeply problematic as a source of information about African Americans’ lives before and during the Civil War. Briefly, the flaws include biased interviewers, faulty memories, and an inherent bias toward people who lived into the 1930s (and were consequently young during the years before emancipation).4 Approximately seventy African Americans mentioned Sherman and his March in their narratives, with the majority of them coming from Georgia and South Carolina. Their stories tended to be brief, perhaps a reflection of the limited number of questions being asked about the war specifically.5 Despite their myriad limitations, the narratives are still worth using, because they are the largest single cache of African American memories of Sherman that I have been able to find. Other sources used in this chapter, observations by travelers, soldiers, or white Southerners , are also biased and problematic. What the narratives can reveal are patterns and similarities across the range of the March, and they form the basis of this section. A number of African Americans mentioned Sherman in the broader context of Union leaders like Lincoln and Grant and, more strikingly, included a personal encounter with one of these men. For example, Frank A. Patterson, of Raleigh, North Carolina, remembered “during that campaign, Lincoln came to North Carolina and ate breakfast with my master.” He described the meal in great detail, from ham with gravy to biscuits, poached eggs, waffles, and grits. Lincoln supposedly chastised Patterson’s “old boss” for “[con] ‘ceivin’ children by slaves and buyin’ and...

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