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152 chapter six On Sherman’s Track In 1869, Union veteran and journalist Russell H. Conwell set off to see the South, sending letters back for the edification of the readers of the Boston Evening Traveler. Like so many other visitors, he boarded a train in Savannah and headed toward Macon to see “the traces of Sherman’s great march which are still to be seen on every side.” The countryside through which he passed was “a hideous ruin.” Chimneys stood everywhere, “surrounded by weeds and wild shrubs. Old posts and here and there a broken rail are all that is left of the fences.” The pine and oak forests still bore the scars of fire “and the Negroes plant cotton between the dead and leafless trees, where before the war was a wild and impassable thicket.” Conwell retold stories of devastation and theft and skies glowing red with fire, all the while admitting to skepticism. “But, alas!” he concluded, “the proofs show us some acts of heinous barbarity, preclude a denial, and show the worst side of war. We must say that the ruin and ashes we saw and the tales with which the people filled our head destroyed all the poetry we used to see in . . . ‘While we were marching through Georgia’”1 Sherman’s men had scarcely completed their march through Georgia and the Carolinas before travelers started flooding into the South. Visitors came by the dozens to see the devastation firsthand and later to trace the scars on the landscape. From Reconstruction-era newspaper reporters to novelists , from riders of freight trains to hikers on foot, they retraced Sherman’s path through Georgia and the Carolinas. The places they visited illuminated struggles over history and interpretation. As these travelers recorded their impressions, they revealed much about themselves and their attitudes toward the Civil War.2 This chapter draws on several dozen accounts written by either Britons or Americans (all men but one) published between 1866 and 1998. I have divided them into three chronological groups: the Reconstruction writers; the 1980s and 1990s writers; and the one that I call “the middle,” which includes writers active roughly from 1880 to 1960. For reasons that are not entirely on sherman’s track : 153 clear to me, I have no travel accounts from the 1960s-1970s. The Reconstruction writers, not surprisingly, focused on stories of destruction and rebuilding , with a side interest (especially during the 1860s) in the plight of the freedmen. The middle group is the hardest to characterize: some novelists, some more attuned to sociological studies, and a very few more interested (particularly in the 1930s and 1940s) in the “race problem” in America. Finally , the members of the more contemporary group seem to be on more explicit journeys of self-discovery, with Sherman’s path serving as the medium. Reconstruction Writers Northern writers like Whitelaw Reid, Sidney Andrews, John Trowbridge, and John Dennett came to see the impact of the war on the region, to gauge the degree to which former Confederates were cowed and defeated, and to see firsthand the freedmen’s struggles in their new lives. While their routes often varied, their impressions rarely did. As historian Megan Kate Nelson has pointed out, some of what they explicitly came to assess were the ruins of the war, seeing them as physical symbols of cultural change. This was especially true in places traversed by the March.3 Like many a nineteenth-century traveler, visitors to Georgia and the Carolinas complained about their traveling conditions, especially the “execrable” conditions of the roads.4 Of course, such complaints had been a staple of prewar writings, and four years of wartime and neglect in general could not have helped. Almost without fail, Reconstruction-era writers remarked on the condition of the railroads, noting the prevalence of “Sherman’s necklaces”— hairpins, bars, corkscrews, twists—but often with an amused tone, as though marveling at the Yankee ingenuity involved. In Blackville, South Carolina, Sidney Andrews noted his “profound admiration for the genius displayed by his troops in destroying railroads. Literally their work must be seen to be appreciated . To wind a bar of iron twice around a telegraph pole or a small tree seems to have been but mere pastime, and to fuse a dozen bars together at the center by an immense fire of ties appears to have been thought a happy joke.”5 On New Year’s Eve 1865–66, John Dennett took the train from Augusta, Georgia...

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