Long before flooding from Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, the worst natural disaster to befall the South came not from Mother Nature but from man himself. Or to be exact: one man’s army. On Nov. 12, 1864, Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman marched out of Atlanta toward the sea, bringing with him more than 60,000 troops, prisoners of war, stolen livestock and a trail of newly freed slaves.
While the details of Sherman’s lethal procession are well known – Atlanta was ordered evacuated and then burned to the ground, like many cities after it – time has laid a carpet of down over the human angle. Sure, property was destroyed, but how were the Union troops greeted? Did they proceed with guilt? Who came with them, and did blacks believe this was their train to the Promised Land?
From now on, one of the best places to turn for answers to such questions will be “The March,” E.L. Doctorow’s savagely beautiful new novel about Sherman’s vision of total war. The book does not just put us in the thick of battle, with bullets whizzing by heads, the stench of death in the air and the anguish of widows’ cries ringing in our ears. It uses the event as a powerful metaphor for how we as humans move through the world.
From the moment of our birth to the instant of our death, we never stop moving – that is Doctorow’s book’s overarching theme – and in this fashion, he kicks off the action with one headlong sentence that stretches on for half a page. The prose energy doesn’t flag until 350 pages later, when the war is over and the dust begins to settle.
A conventional novel might follow a fixed group of characters through this journey. Not this one. Characters are introduced and then dropped, or summarily killed off, sometimes even offstage. There is no time to grieve as forward movement must be maintained at all cost.
Among the chaos, a few lost souls survive the carnage, often by making unusual compacts. A Union surgeon named Col. Sartorius carves his way through a river of bodies and winds up on the other side as surgeon general of the United States; Emily Thompson, the daughter of a prominent Southern judge, hitches her wagon to his train, ensuring her safety, but not her happiness. A mixed-race slave girl named Pearl is swooped up by a Union general, later takes on the identity of a drummer boy and travels for a while under the wing of Sherman himself, an avowed racist.
As one might surmise, to read this book requires a kind of historical “negative capability,” Keats’ term for living with contradictions and not “searching after fact of reason.” In order to be born, the country had to be burned. Or so Sherman and his compatriots believed. But in so doing they handed the South a moral victory it could lord over the North for the rest of time. They had been willing to sacrifice everything to their ideals – and they went down dying for it.
This is rich terrain for a novelist, and Doctorow tills it well, without succumbing to the urge to transplant foreign ideas onto the ancient soil. This means that the word that has put Mark Twain books under close scrutiny appears throughout this novel in all its unabashed hatefulness, as does much of the blood and grit and unpleasantness typical of life in the 1860s. The operating scenes in Sartorius’ open-air theater are masterful and gruesome.
Sherman rises from the rot and ruination as an authentic fictional character, a melancholic, whose sanity was preserved by a white-knuckled grip on his idea of The Union. Doctorow must occasionally put him into service as a thinking and breathing politician, but even then he rings true. When Secretary of War Stanton visits the general in Georgia and tells him to be more sympathetic to blacks, Sherman contains his rage and then explodes during a private reverie.
“I have marched an army intact for four hundred miles. I have gutted Johnny Reb’s railroads. I have burned his cities, his forges, his armories, his machine shops, his cotton gins. I have eaten out his crops, I have consumed his livestock and appropriated ten thousand of his horses and mules … And that is not enough for the Secretary of War. I must abase myself to the slaves. Damn this Stanton – I am sworn to destroy the treasonous insurrection and preserve the Union. That is all. And that is everything.”
But of course, it didn’t turn out to be everything. After the war came Reconstruction, and a great many freed slaves entered an indentured servitude that was in some cases even worse than slavery.
“The March” gives us an indelible glimpse at a few souls caught in that rare moment of hope, as the only way forward came – by dictum and executive order – through a valley of death. It should seem like a tragedy, but as this bleak and moving novel reminds us time and again – we’re all going there anyway.
John Freeman is a writer in New York.
The March
By E.L. Doctorow
Random House,
363 pages, $25.95
