History of the United States I / Unit 15 USH1 2159 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Dolly Sumner Lunt
The idea
Dolly Sumner Lunt was a Georgia widow running a cotton plantation when Sherman's army passed through, and she recorded what happened. Enslaved workers were forcibly removed. One hid in bed claiming sickness. Another crawled under the floor, was pulled out, and was mounted on a horse. The army tore down her garden fencing, made roads through her back-yard, and drove off her livestock. She wrote that they had wantonly desolated her home when there was no necessity for it. She reckoned herself poorer by thirty thousand dollars than she had been the previous morning, and she declared herself a much stronger Rebel. Sherman's march cut a swath of destruction to Savannah, and despite strict instructions preserving civilian property, houses and barns were burned, homes were looted, food was stolen, crops were destroyed, orchards were burned, and livestock was killed or confiscated. Towns remained standing. Savannah fell on December twenty-first, eighteen sixty-four, which Sherman proclaimed a Christmas gift for Lincoln.
In practice
A woman itemising her own losses in the same passage in which she describes the removal of people she owned, who were at that moment being freed.
Where people slip
Read the passage for what it contains as well as for what it says. Lunt is a reliable witness to the destruction of her property and an unreliable one about what she is watching, and both facts are usable. The thirty thousand dollars she lost was mostly the people, which is why the sum appears in the same sentence as their removal. The person who crawled under the floor was hiding from an army that had come to free them, and the passage does not tell you why, because Lunt could not have known. A first-hand account tells you what one person saw from where they stood, and this one stands inside the institution it is describing.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
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