Nope I see nothing in there about N.C., Social Security or Kirby Smith.

Change the subject David? I believe Western NC was an Unionist stronghold in a Confederate State.

I also believe Kirby Smith was commander of the Department of Eastern TN, which I think included the adjacent area of Western NC.

West Virginia? Why not tell me about poverty in Hawaii which would be as much to the point.

I'm glad my phrase Confederate Reconstruction strikes your fancy, I thought it would with your scintillating wit.

Let me tell a story about some folks from Easter TN (Sorry David, not West Virginia).

At a refuge camp in a place called Stevenson Alabama. Refuge Camp for Hundreds...plural there, David...of East TN women and children who had been driven from their homes by strife with their Confederate occupiers, one Union soldier tells this story about those women talking to their children. "I heard them repeat over and over the names of the men which they were never to forget, and whom they were to kill when they had sufficient strength to hold a rifle."

Frank Wilkerson, Recollections of a Private Soldier (New York:Putnam 1887) 232-35.

No doubt they all kissed and made up after the war. With that hatred existing in people from the same state?

Oh yes David , I don't believe any of these women were from West Virginia.