The march
Subtitle: a novel
By: E.L. Doctorow
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2005
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 363
ISBN-13: 9780375506710
Subjects: Sherman's March through the Carolinas -- Fiction; Sherman's March to the Sea -- Fiction; South Carolina -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Fiction; Georgia -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Fiction
Genres: Fiction; War fiction; Civil War fiction; Historical fiction
First sentence: At five in the morning someone banging on the door and shouting, her husband, John, leaping out of bed, grabbing his rifle, and Roscoe at the same time roused from the backhouse, his bare feet pounding: Mattie hurriedly pulled on her robe, her mind prepared for the alarm of war, but the heart stricken that it would finally have come, and down the stairs she flew to see through the open door in the lamplight, at the steps of the portico, the two horses, steam rising from their flanks, their heads lifting, their eyes wild, the driver a young darkie with rounded shoulders, showing stolid patience even in this, and the woman standing in her carriage no but her aunt Letitia Pettibone of McDonough, her elderly face drawn in anguish, her hair a straggled mess, this woman of such fine grooming, this dowager who practically ruled the season in Atlanta standing up in the equipage like some hag of doom, which indeed she would prove to be.
Description: In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched his sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces and lived off the land, pillaging the Southern plantations, taking cattle and crops for their own, demolishing cities, and accumulating a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the uprooted, the dispossessed, and the triumphant.