Sheman's Fifth Corps

In November 1864, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman left Atlanta, Georgia
in flames and embarked on his historic Great March from Atlanta to the
Sea. Along the way, he unintentionally liberated thousands of Black
people held as slaves in the Georgia cities and towns. Some joined the
Union lines as hired servants, cooks, laundresses, teamsters, and
pioneers. Others joined "for their actual freedom." In numbers
reaching tens of thousands, they became Sherman's Fifth Corps, and one
of them, a young ex-slave named Jennie Lewis, became Sherman's
mistress.

Through actual and fictional letters, diaries, journals, news
accounts, official reports and for the first time, the words of the
ex-slaves themselves, SFC tells a story of the man and the March that
has never before been told. Sherman's Fifth Corps reconstructs and
imagines what happened when hardened Union soldiers and
newly-liberated Blacks marched across Georgia. They formed an
unplanned, unprecedented alliance that brought the end of the Civil
War, the end of slavery, and, literally, a new birth of freedom for
this country.