I was surprised to find a multi-volume work called, The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. It is filled with interviews of slaves prepared by the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration around 1937 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972). Lack of a bibliography makes for tedious reading, but it is fascinating nonetheless. The appearance of Yankee soldiers toward the end of the war is a common theme in the two volumes devoted to Georgia. But references to Confederates are difficult to trace. For instance, former slave Marshal Butler (born 25 Dec 1848) mentions that an uncle went to war as a servant to a Major Frank Collar, who was supposedly wounded at Gettysburg and afterwards died. Before the war Collar had managed the plantation of 250 slaves himself with no overseers - he entertained Robert Toombs, while Alexander Stephens was a frequent visitor. But I cannot identify Frank Collar. Marshal Butler's mother was a maid in the home, and his father was a field hand on the plantation of Ben Butler a few miles away. Five miles distant was the Palmer plantation. In another narrative, General Heard had a plantation near Washington, Georgia; his son Thomas was either killed or lost an arm at Second Manassas. A couple of mentions are made of the night the "stars fell," which is a reference to an extraordinarily brilliant Leonid meteor shower on the morning of 13 November 1833 that produced at least 10,000 meteors an hour and was visible throughout much of the United States.