In the fall of 64 on the way to Savannah during the “March to the Sea” my mess were on the flank working as skirmishers to foil any surprises Wheeler and his men might decide to try and spring upon the army. We found a clearing full of corpses; slaves slaughtered so that they might not face the burden of freedom. Among those corpses was a young woman with both of her legs broken. Gangrene had settled in and she had little time left upon this earth. But she had endeavored to keep her child, an innocent babe alive. The arrival of our mess gave her the chance to see her child to safety. No real man will harm a child and no one but a fool would have called us anything but real men.
The woman demanded that we prove to her that we would show her baby freedom. Seth and Emmanuel agreed and she put that child into his hands. The woman passed before we could learn either her or the child’s name. Seth and a few of the other men gave her a hasty christian burial with a cross marked “Freedom’s Mother” to show the world who slept there. Emmanuel took the child back to the column handing her off to my Mina. When Mina asked for the child’s name he called her “Freedom.”
I provided a bottle of Scotch to clean the child, Little Foot provided a dipper of mares milk to feed her, Kevin found a feather to tickle her nose and Emmanuel made a baby rattle from a turtle shell beans and a stick. A neighboring plantation provided the cloth for swaddling clothes and bedding before we fired the place. That little girl was a pathway back to humanity for many a man in my Regiment. That child would not stray from my Mina for most of the next year. Even today, years later, only a fool might say Little Miss Freedom is anything but an angel. I am proud to say my men did a good turn for a woman as she slipped this mortal coil. In return God provided my men, and to a lesser extent me, a bit of salvation in the midst of war.
May god have mercy upon any who would harm this child for I will have none.