Following the retreating Confederates from Rivers Bridge to Branchville SC, Thomas Osborn a Yankee soldier gives us his view of the South Carolinians during this time of the war. The first hand account is in his book The Fiery Trail. This account of the suffering and poverty of our people gets you in the Gut. We have life to easy today and do not appreciate it. Even though I find his account hateful we have to expect that for the times. Just focus on the story as you are viewing the mother and her children in 1865. (Picture her face, picture the children, picture their clothing). His last sentence will grab you.

05 February 1865 Branchville
“ The majority of the citizens here are of the same cracker or sandhill species we have found so plentiful every where we have been. I heard a soldier say to his comrade today, “the whole damn state was not worth the life of one of our Federal Soldiers. “ Osborn states, “he was about right.” He then goes on to say, “ A man not acquainted with his larger population of the South can form an idea of it in their style of living and
cleanliness. They are not fit to be kept in the same sty with a well to do
farmers hogs in New England. Once in ten or fifteen miles we find a plantation owned by a reliable man, a first family who lives in Charleston or Columbia, while every half a mile we find a shanty with poles a foot apart, a stick chimney, three or four half naked children, two or three with nothing but a shirt, and a incrustation of dirt which entirely conceals the natural color: the mother with her person partially concealed by ragged cotton cloth and dirt combined. If you as her where
her husband is, the reply is “ In the Army”