Black History Month lesser-known stories

Sixty thousand Union soldiers led by General William T. Sherman killed the Confederacy with their famous “March to the Sea” in 1864—but 20,000 enslaved blacks liberated themselves by marching with them. Bennett Parten’s Somewhere Toward Freedom (Simon & Schuster, 2025) tells that often-neglected story and brings out emancipation excitement. Parten also reports disappointment as Reconstruction faltered, land-reform lagged, and Somewhere became Nowhere.

Parten shows how the March from Atlanta to Savannah “evolved into a profound religious experience.” The formerly enslaved were “frantic with joy” at their “day of jubilee.” That thrill, along with their willingness to help foraging northern soldiers find where plantation masters had hidden food and valuables, belies Gone With the Wind propaganda about the enslaved feeling like members of a happy plantation family.

Many Union soldiers learned to sympathize with those who ran from plantations toward their ranks, but some generals ordered bridges destroyed as soon as the troops crossed swollen rivers. Some refugees, stuck between the water and pursuing Southern cavalry, drowned in raging currents or were hacked to death. But the story of “America’s largest emancipation” has many positive elements: for example, legal “slave codes” had often kept the enslaved from learning to read, so early in 1865 many of those housed by the army along the coast rushed into literacy classes.

Slave markets treated men and women as cattle, and Judith Giesberg’s Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families (Simon & Schuster, 2025) brings out what happened to children. They accounted for 20 percent of slave sales, and one-third of the children lost contact with one or both parents because of long-distance sales. More children were locally separated and had only occasional parental visits. Adult slaves suffered beatings and rape, but slavery was also what historian Erik Hofstee called “a continued and structural exercise in child abuse.”

Giesberg reports some rays of light amid the horror. She tells how John Walker, taken by his master from Tennessee to California in 1850, nineteen years later paid for an ad in the Christian Recorder, published in Philadelphia. The text: “Wishes to know the whereabouts of his wife Peggie, and his three sons William, Samuel, and Miles.” Word got back to him that they were in Nashville: Sixteen months (and 2,700 miles) after the ad appeared, John (63) and Peggie (55), were living together again as husband wife, two decades after their forced separation.

Plutarch, the ancient biographer who paired lives of Greeks and Romans, would have enjoyed paralleling Nat Turner (1800-1831), and Sojourner Truth (1797-1883). In the Matter of Nat Turner by Christopher Tomlins (Princeton, 2020) and We Will Be Free: The Life and Faith of Sojourner Truth by Nancy Koester (Eerdmans, 2023) tell their stories.

Turner’s rebellion resulted in death for 55 whites and probably 200 blacks. Sojourner Truth, though, chose words rather than swords and Christ rather than revenge. Koester describes her most famous moment: As ex-slave Frederick Douglass gave a violence-supporting speech, “from the hushed crowd came the lone voice of Sojourner Truth,” asking “Is God gone?”

Truth testified that when she was thirty years old Jesus took away her hatred of whites. She had a lot to overcome. Truth’s master had sold her brother and freed her elderly parents so he didn’t have to feed them when they could no longer work. She asked herself, “What about the white folks, who have abused you, and beat you, and abused your people? What about them?” Then, she said, a wave of love enveloped her and she was able to “love even white folks.”

Sojourner Truth never learned to read or write, but she was a powerful speaker and singer who enjoyed William Lloyd Garrison’s verse sung to the tune of Auld Lang Syne, “I am an Abolitionist! No threats shall awe my soul. No perils cause me to desist, no bribes my acts control. A free-man I will live and die, in sunshine and in shade, and raise my voice for LIBERTY, of naught on earth afraid.”

In Brief

John Bardes in The Carceral City (U. of North Carolina Press, 2024) examines mass imprisonment in New Orleans from 1803 to 1930. He shows how lock-up procedures first used as punishment for freedom-seeking slaves became a Jim Crow weapon against anyone who could be accused of “vagrancy.”

Sidney Thompson’s three novels about Bass Reeves, an escaped slave who became a great Deputy U.S. Marshall, are lively: The Forsaken and the Dead (Bison Books, 2023) completes the trilogy that began with Follow the Angels, Follow the Doves and continued with Hell on the Border.