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

EIGHT: Fiction and Film

204 chapter eight Fiction and Film Tragically beautiful, spirited, Southern ladies. Handsome and gallant Union officers. Sneaky or comical bummers. Faithful, loyal slaves. Hidden valuables, secret messages, star-crossed lovers. All of these are staples of Civil War fiction in general and the Sherman saga in particular.1 These tropes and clichés form the backbone of tales of the Lost Cause and reunion . The novels and films that focus on the March tend to emphasize certain themes and incidents—Sandersville, Ebenezer Creek, and Columbia are staples. They tend to focus on the dramatic clashes, and the melodrama , often at the expense of smaller moments. Many of the older novels have fallen out of favor, but they strongly influenced the popular cultural understanding of the March. Only in recent years have authors begun to capture the March’s full complexity. Films, both fictional and documentary , have brought the March to a far larger audience than ever read the memoirs or poems, saw Barnard’s photographs, or traveled through Georgia and the Carolinas. Union Men and Southern Ladies The first major novel about the March was published in 1867, when the physical scars of the March had barely healed, to say nothing of the emotional ones. The title page of The M’Donalds; or, The Ashes of Southern Homes. A Tale of Sherman’s March is a masterpiece of signaling. Author William Henry Peck, already a prolific novelist, is identified as being “of Georgia,” indicating Southern (and by implication pro-Confederate) bona fides. But the book itself is “Dedicated to the American People,” indicating a desire to draw in a broader national audience. This might be seen as purely a marketing decision , but for the fact that Peck periodically addresses his Northern readers directly. The novel’s first paragraph includes a call for enduring peace, invoking a “mental prayer that the great American people may never again be the sufferers or the perpetrators of similar atrocities.”2 fiction and film : 205 Peck never absolves Union soldiers and Sherman of blame for the March, but he does complicate the expected narrative. The story focuses on the widowed Mrs. Preston M’Donald and her beautiful daughter, Myrtis. They are stereotypical and idealized characters, brave and self-sacrificing, genteel and dignified. When the novel opens they are living in Atlanta in much reduced financial circumstances, along with their “aged and faithful” slave, Myra. Mrs. M’Donald has lost her husband and four sons to the war; her youngest son was serving with Wade Hampton. Myrtis has a beau, the handsome and brave (though prone to being wounded) Frank Bartow. The true villain of the novel is not Sherman (although his orders and actions drive much of the narrative) but the evil and ugly Seth Cashmore, a Northerner by birth who lived in Georgia, speculating and extorting, lusting after the lovely Myrtis, and generally making the M’Donalds miserable. Over the course of the novel he shoots Frank Bartow, throws the M’Donalds out of their home, spies on his Southern neighbors for the Union army, takes up with a group of thieving, rapacious bummers, sets fires to the homes he plunders in Columbia , and eventually dies from a combination of a gunshot wound and his own greed.3 In contrast to the venal Cashmore, we have the gallant Major Irving, a New Yorker attached to General Slocum’s staff. Irving performs two functions in the novel: his overall nobility and helpfulness insulate Peck against any allegations of anti-Northern bias, and he serves as a mouthpiece for Peck to criticize Sherman and the bummers. One would expect Major Irving to fall in love with Myrtis, but he does not—he has his own lady friend back in New York, and thus his kindness toward the M’Donald women is entirely altruistic. And he is quite kind to them: he describes witnessing the death of one of the M’Donald sons, he arranges for them to get out of jail after being arrested on trumped up charges, and he protects them from bummers in multiple locations as they seek refuge during their travels from Atlanta to Oxford, Georgia, and finally Columbia.4 Ultimately, The M’Donalds is, as subtitled, about the ashes of Southern homes, and there are many. Peck describes bummers swaggering into family parlors across Georgia and South Carolina, stealing heirlooms and destroying everything they couldn’t carry. Nor do they prey only on the wealthy; Peck includes an extended story of a...