John Freeman

Long before Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, the worst natural disaster to befall the South didn't come from Mother Nature but man himself. Or to be exact: one man's army. On November 12th, 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman marched out of Atlanta and to the sea, bringing with him more than 60,000 Union troops and a comet trail of newly freed slaves.

While the details of Sherman's lethal procession are well known today, time seems to have forgotten the human angle. Sure, property was destroyed, but how were the Union troops greeted? Did they proceed with guilt? Did they pause before torching cities to the ground? Did the recently emancipated slaves really believe this fire-breathing beast was their conductor to the Promised Land?

From now on, the recommended source for answers to such questions ought to be "The March," E.L. Doctorow's savage new novel about Sherman and his warpath. The book does not just put us in the thick of battle, bullets whizzing by heads, the stench of dead fouling the air. It uses this cataclysm as a powerful metaphor for the dangerous and unstoppable way we humans move through the world.

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 on Sherman's march, as movement must be maintained at all costs.

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 by doing this they handed the South a twisted sort of moral victory it could lord over the North until the end of time.

"The March" gives us an indelible glimpse at a few souls caught in that brief and fiery moment of hope, when it seemed like things would go another way, even if the way forward was--by martial 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.

"The March"

By E.L. Doctorow

Random House, $25.95, 363 pages

(2005-10-11)

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