The March. Random House. 2006. Copyright © 2005 E. L. Doctorow. 0-8129-7615-0.
The opening 10 paragraphs of The March convincingly sketch the end of Antebellum life for a Georgia planter and his family, and soon the narrative is caught up by General Sherman’s army on its March to the Sea. The conquering forces pick up a civilian tail, thousands of displaced Southerners, slave and free alike. The marchers head to Savannah and from there north to meet up with Grant near war’s end at Appomattox.
Doctorow threads a dizzying number of plotlines together, and the march becomes a cauldron of race relations, personal ambition, heroism, madness, desolation, and hope. He has Sherman reflect at story’s end,
Though this march is done, and well accomplished, I think of it now, God help me, with longing—not for its blood and death but for the bestowal of meaning to the very ground trod upon, how it made every field and swamp and river and road into something of moral consequence…
The moral consequences are real but ambiguous. Doctorow is a writer of such skill that his story and characters embody and pose these questions naturally. What does a slave’s legal freedom mean in a land of such strained race relations? Where is the victory when the vanquished are your countrymen? How do you best carry the death of so many into the new post-war life?
—November 8, 2006