The story of Sherman’s Western army including the march through Georgia, highlighting among other stories a young Black boy who went along to help out even though Sherman wouldn’t let Black men fight; the relief efforts of women who raised money and tirelessly fed and tended soldiers; and the German immigrants including some of America’s first Communists who fought for Union and freedom. ( )

It’s interesting to compare this book with Noah Andre Trudeau’s Southern Storm; both cover The March to the Sea but from different perspectives. Trudeau’s book is a day-by-day account of the March with maps of the route and the battles along it; Dickey’s Rising in Flames is more of a collection of military biographies. Dickey draws on war diaries and unit histories to profile personalities involved in the March: Major General and Congressman John “Black Jack” Logan; Mary Ann “Mother” Bickerdyke, self-appointed nurse and hospital supervisor; Major Charles Wills, 103rd Illinois Volunteer Infantry; Lieutenant Edward Salomon, 82nd Illinois Volunteer Infantry; Colonel and former German revolutionary Friedrich Hecker, 82nd Illinois Volunteer Infantry; Captain Rudolph Mueller, disgruntled officer in the 82nd Illinois; John McCline, “contraband” who had attached himself to the 13th Michigan Volunteer Infantry; John Hight, Chaplain in the 58th Indiana Volunteer Infantry; Mary Livermoore, organizer of the Sanitary Commission; and, of course, William Tecumseh Sherman.

Dickey follows his protagonists from well before the Civil War through their subsequent careers; the actual March to the Sea only occupies about a quarter of the book. I found all of the biographies interesting, but was most taken by Black Jack Logan, who metamorphosed from a racist (even by 1860s standards; as an Illinois state legislator before the war he had sponsored the “Black Law”, which prohibited Negroes from setting foot in the state) to a committed abolitionist after seeing the actual conditions of slavery as he marched through the South. This alienated him from his own family; his sister Ann showed up at his speeches and shouted slurs while his mother disowned him until a year before her death.

Dickey’s portrayal of Sherman is also more critical than Trudeau’s or other Sherman biographies I’ve read. Dickey quotes letters from Sherman with racist and antiSemitic comments, and notes that Sherman refused – even when ordered – to use black troops (he stripped them of their weapons and put them to work corduroying roads and building bridges). Sherman was also implicated in the Ebenezer Creek incident; all of Sherman’s columns attracted a train of freed blacks in their wake. At Ebenezer Creek, Corps Commander Jefferson Davis (no relation) allowed his troops to cross on a pontoon bridge, then held off the following blacks at gunpoint, removed the pontoons, and marched away. Some of the abandoned blacks were able to get across the rain-swollen creek, some drowned, and some were scooped up and re-enslaved by Confederate cavalry. An investigation exonerated both Davis and his commander Sherman on the basis of “military necessity”. Interestingly enough, late in his life Sherman also changed his views; he wrote a magazine article calling on the South “…to let the Negro vote, and count his vote honestly”, warning of another conflict unless this was done.

Adequate maps of the theater of war, the Chattanooga Campaign, the Atlanta Campaign, the siege of Atlanta, the March to the Sea, and the Carolina Campaign. Photographic plate section showing the protagonists. Endnotes by page. An excellent bibliography, with references both by chapter and for the entire book. Recommended, for a different take on the March to the Sea than the usual. ( )