Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

by David W. Blight

Sherman faced a tremendous dilemma: what to do with so many refugee freedpeople, and how to begin to define their status. He and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton decided to ask the opinions of the representative black leadership of Savannah and of the very Georgia counties through which Sherman’s troops had wreaked devastation. Twenty black ministers, most of whom had been slaves at some time in their lives, and some of whom had achieved freedom only in the past month at the hands of the Union armies, sat in a room together, face to face with Sherman and Stanton. Twelve carefully worded questions were written out and read aloud to the ministers. The answers as well were “written down in . . . exact words” and “read over” by each participant so as to determine “concurrence or dissent.”35 These words, like the Gettysburg Address, might not remake America, but everyone present seemed to understand that their articulation was a part of that process.