Loretta wrote: 
 
"There is in the Bedford County TN Heritage History book published within
the last five years a story of a black man who followed his white slave
owner into war. The soldier was a Confederate. When he was wounded his black
servant cared for him until he could travel and took him home to recuperate.
The white family for whom he had been a slave was left landless and
penniless by the war...To be sure, the world is full of meanness. But it is
also full of kindness." 
 
-------------------------
The Civil War devastated families, and my ancestors in Henderson CO, TN,
were not spared. One of them was a woman of means before the War but
destitute during and after. One of her brothers was killed in fighting in
Georgia. The family had hardly assimilated this news when word came that
another brother lay languishing in a primitive field hospital in Vicksburg. 
 
Gritty and determined, she gathered provisions, a feather mattress, her
grandmother’s quilt, and put them into a wagon. All the horses on her farm
had been commandeered earlier by General Forrest, leaving her with one mule
and a cow to pull her wagon. But that didn't stop her. She enlisted an
elderly member of the the freedmen who had stayed on out of loyalty and
served as houseman, and set off for Vicksburg, some 500 miles to the
south-to bring her brother home. 
 
There were no road maps of course, ands no inns. Most roads were little more
than dirt tracks, and dangerous ones at that. The farm people they met along
the way were not much better off than she and the freedman. At one point,
they spent the night with a family who had a new baby. The were overjoyed to
swap a mule for the cow and her milk and the two could make much better time
with a team of mules. It was a long, arduous journey, filled with horror and
comedy, tales too numerous to recount and perhaps lost over time but against
the odds, they finally reached Vicksburg. They found her brother still alive
and nursed him until he was strong enough to travel.  They brought him him
home to the farm. She never would have succeeded without this wonderful man
s help. 
 
NOT a historian either but addicted to genealogy.
 
Regards, Rick