The Refugee Crisis of Sherman's March: Savannah, Port Royal, and the Transformation of the Sea Islands

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• The Refugee Crisis of Sherman's MarchSavannah, Port Royal, and the Transformation of the Sea Islands
• Bennett Parten (bio)

On Christmas 1864, Gen. Rufus Saxton spent his holiday pacing the docks along the wharf at Beaufort, South Carolina. The first "seven hundred" of the roughly twenty thousand freed refugees from slavery who had followed Sherman's army during its march from Atlanta to Savannah were set to arrive that afternoon. As military governor of the Department of the South, Saxton was tasked with integrating the refugees into the so-called Port Royal Experiment—an enterprise that had been ongoing since 1861, when the arrival of US gunboats prompted the region's white inhabitants to take flight, leaving behind nearly ten thousand enslaved people and a large supply of unsold cotton. Overwhelmed by only the first groups of refugees, many of whom suffered serious deprivations stemming from the long and difficult march, Saxton would later write to the freedmen's aid societies in the North for assistance. "So extreme and entire is the destitution of this people that nothing that you can afford to give will come amiss," he told his audience, hoping the right amount of Northern benevolence might be enough to stave off disaster.¹

Saxton, however, was unable to forestall what he so desperately wanted to avoid. The arrival of Sherman's army in Savannah transformed the self-contained [End Page 9] freedmen's colony at Port Royal into the epicenter of a sprawling refugee crisis. The influx of such a large number of refugees into the area swelled the size of the original population of freedpeople living on the islands around Port Royal. So many new inhabitants destabilized a region already in the throes of social revolution. To Saxton, the man charged with overseeing the transition, finding basic necessities like food, clothing, and shelter presented one problem; finding these items and resettling the refugees from Georgia as quasi-free laborers was another task entirely. While the refugees were eventually resettled on the islands, their arrival in the aftermath of Sherman's March set off a series of events that would ultimately reshape the nature of the project at Port Royal.

Historians have long recognized Port Royal's central place in the history of American emancipation. It was arguably there on sandy soils of the South Carolina Sea Islands that freedom came first, making Port Royal and its environs a sort of staging ground for the trials of Reconstruction. Yet this impulse to see the islands as a laboratory for experimenting with freedom has led historians to see the region as an outpost or enclave set apart from the wider developments of the war. As such, the story of the Georgia refugees often gets folded into the larger story of the Port Royal Experiment without fully considering how Sherman's March added new, unforeseen variables and changed the nature of the project. Most easily missed in this general narrative is that Port Royal and the surrounding Sea Islands became, almost overnight, the grounds of a serious crisis. Freed refugees from as far as Atlanta and elsewhere arrived footsore and weary with little food or supplies; there was a lack of shelter and space, which necessitated expanding the project onto new islands, and new policies, primarily Sherman's Special Field Orders No. 15, led to developments that deviated from the project's original designs.²

Readers will no doubt remember some of these designs from Willie Lee Rose's classic Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment. Rose's was the first full-length study of the experiment, and her work, published in 1964, has framed much of the islands' wartime history. Her story, however, focused [End Page 10] primarily on the white agents who managed the project and how their competing visions concerning land, labor, humanitarian relief, and religious instruction came into constant conflict. Julie Saville and others have since reframed the narrative by focusing on how freedpeople possessed their own visions regarding the essential work of Reconstruction; other scholars have also written about Port Royal from the perspective of education and the creation of Freedmen's Schools. This essay thus brings a new story into the...