On the second day Georgia began to "howl." Soldiers began to feast, white citizens to protest, and Negroes to discover how false were the stories their masters had told them of Sherman's fondness for tossing black men into fires. Noting how the "Lincoln soldiers" laughed, the shrinking Negroes rushed to them shouting, "De day ob Jubilo hab come!" and "Massa Lincum done remember us!" Pickaninnies began to turn somersaults in the dust. Sherman saw the blacks turn "simply frantic with joy"; he watched a slave girl seize a regimental flag, embrace it, and scream that she was "jumping to the feet of Jesus." At every crossroads there emerged throngs of dancing, capering, singing Negroes. Boys of the Thirty-third Massachusetts were embraced by shuffling field hands, by spruce house servants, by bandannaed mammies, and by giggling "yaller gals" whose arms brought sheepish desire to white faces. The New England boys saw blacks hanging to Sherman's stirrups, pressing their faces against his horse, and hailing him as the Angel of the Lord. Major Hitchcock saw a Negress holding a baby whose mulatto skin betrayed the white blood of its father and pointing at Sherman with the cry, "Dar's de man dat rules the world!"
from page 438, Sherman- Fighting Prophet
from page 438, Sherman- Fighting Prophet