"A groundbreaking account of the critical Civil War campaign that destroyed the Confederacy -- told for the first time from the perspective of the enslaved people who transformed it into the biggest liberation even in American history. In the fall of 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman led his army through Atlanta, Georgia, burning buildings of military significance -- and ultimately most of the city -- along the way. From Atlanta, they marched across the state to its most important city at the time: Savannah. Mired in the deep of the South with no reliable supply lines, Sherman's army had to live off the land and the provisions they seized from the plantations along the way. As the army marched to the east, plantation owners fled, but even before they did so, slaves self-emancipated to Union lines. By the time the army took Savannah in December, as many as 20,000 enslaved people had attached themselves to Sherman's army. They endured hardships, marching as much as twenty miles a day -- often without food or shelter from the winter weather -- and at times Union commanders discouraged and even prevented the self-emancipated from staying with the army. Racism was not confined to the Confederacy. In Somewhere Toward Freedom, historian Bennett Parten brilliantly reframes this pivotal episode in Civil War history. Sherman's March has remained controversial to this day. But as Parten reveals, it played a significant role in ending the Civil War, due in no small part to the efforts of the tens of thousands of enslaved people who became a part of it. In Somewhere Toward Freedom, this critical moment in American history has finally been given the attention it deserves." -- Book jacket.