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On the other hand, I mean this in a much larger and perhaps more abstract sense. The best way to describe it is that the March was, as Sherman himself once put it, like "a good-entering wedge." Because the army moved with such overwhelming momentum and because the freed refugees followed the army, the combination of the two had implications and aftereffects that expanded out from the source. Some of those effects were political in nature, having to do with emancipation on a national level; others were more humanitarian and had to do with the fate of the freed refugees. In either case, the result was a series of twists and turns that set the agenda for postwar Reconstruction. The history of the Freedmen's Bureau, the origins of land reform, and indeed the very meaning of freedom all have their origins in either the March or its aftermath. Though we've typically looked at Sherman's March only as one of the last campaigns of the Civil War, it was also an early battle of Reconstruction, a wartime crucible that went on shaping American society long after the marching stopped and the campaign came to a close.

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Over and over, in soldiers' letters and diaries, in war reminiscences and in official military reports, freed people expressed themselves through the idea of "Jubilee." It was the idiom of the age, the metaphor of emancipation, and it bounced like choral notes above the rough sounds of a marching army. Freed people celebrated Sherman's arrival in Savannah by singing the songs of Jubilee—often "The Year of Jubilee" or the "Jubilee Hymn"—and out on roads and along cart paths everywhere, freed people praised the army, claiming with "ecstatic exclamations of joy" that the day of Jubilee had arrived. Soldiers claimed it, too, and recognized that in marching through Georgia they were taking part in something epic, something that would change the order of history, which was why when the Northern composer Henry Clay Work sat down to salute the March in song, he wrote "Hurrah! Hurrah! we bring the Jubile! Hurrah! Hurrah! the flag that makes you free! So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea, While we were marching through Georgia."

Drawn from deep in the Old Testament, the idea derives its power and meaning from an almost celestial moment of rapture and release. According to its biblical origins, the Jubilee was a time when society would renew itself, a period when enslaved people would be freed, large estates would be broken up, debts would be absolved, and fields would go fallow for a full year while the earth regenerated itself. Sometime between the days of Leviticus and the firing on Fort Sumter, however, the idea developed an apocalyptic edge. It came to describe something prophetic and millennial, and it became synonymous with ideas of universal emancipation, a time when the world would make itself anew. Americans of every creed and color knew of the idea, but enslaved people in particular embraced it as a self-evident truth, believing that one day God would right the world of all its wrongs, starting by freeing them for all posterity. The idea therefore developed a special meaning within enslaved communities as a vision of emancipation, and nowhere within the landscape of the war was that vision as clear or as true as on the March.

Indeed, what President Abraham Lincoln described on a crowded platform at Gettysburg as the nation's "new birth of freedom," enslaved people all across Georgia celebrated as their "day of Jubilee," and this is why the idea is such an important metaphor. Refugees typically leave minimal sources; testimonies from freed people are few and far between. Despite the wealth of writing about the Civil War, sources detailing how freed people felt about freedom, how they imagined it, and what it meant to them are sometimes hard to come by. The idea of Jubilee helps fill in the gaps. It tells us that freed people imagined their emancipation as having world-historical significance, as being rooted in ideas of rebirth and divine justice, and as pointing toward a dawning of freedom that would mend the sins of American slavery. In that sense, the ages-old idea of Jubilee is an overarching metaphor for our Civil War, reminding us that underneath all the blood and gore, beneath the banners and flags, and despite all the myths and legends, the Civil War created a redefinition of American freedom largely led and articulated by people who had once been enslaved.

The fact that the idea of Jubilee came to characterize Sherman's March to the Sea only underscores how crucial the campaign was to both those processes: to the lived reality of emancipation as well as the larger redefinition of freedom.

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