V/O Kate Stone
The life we are living now is a miserable, frightened one -- living in constant dread of great danger, not knowing what form it may take, and utterly helpless to protect ourselves.

NARRATOR
Kate Stone was 21 years old when the Civil War came to her doorstep. In the winter of 1862, Union troops overran Milliken's Bend, only a few miles from Brokenburn, the family's plantation in Louisiana. Stone watched as bluecoats scoured the countryside for food and supplies and ransacked plantations.

AYERS
Before the Civil War, the South would have been among the five richest societies in the world. To the eyes of the South, this is almost this Biblical attack. It's like a plague being brought down on the white South. Their sense of self has been shattered just as their property has. Those are the memories that white Southerners hold close to them as examples that their enemy were not really honorable men.

NARRATOR
With her father dead and her brothers away fighting for the Confederacy, managing Brokenburn fell to Kate Stone and her mother. The plantation was 1,260 acres, with 150 slaves.

FAUST
Owning 150 slaves meant that they were in the absolute upper echelons of Southern society and Southern wealth. And so she is both a young privileged woman, but she finds herself, essentially, on the battlefield. And sees Yankee troops frequently, runs from Yankee troops.

NARRATOR
Many of her wealthy neighbors abandoned their homes. The Stones clung to their plantation, and determined to wait it out. As frightening to Kate as the federal troops were the black men and women now claiming their freedom.

V/O Kate Stone
Mr. Hardison's Negroes came out today... Six men with their children and clothes walked off in broad daylight after a terrible row, using the most abusive language to Mrs. Hardison... The other Negroes declare they are free, and will leave as soon as they are ready.

PAINTER
It was a tremendous shock for many in the planter class to discover, first of all, that the people who worked for them were not happy to work for them, and secondly, sometimes the people who had worked for them were really angry at them.

FAUST
Kate expresses a lot of fear throughout the war, and it's most often fear of armed slaves. "What are they going to do to me, given what we have done to them?"

NARRATOR
Mother and daughter watched as their world was upended, until they could watch no more.

FAUST
This kind of lack of order, lack of control, was the most frightening thing to the Stones, and they thought they had to get away.

V/O Kate Stone
With much difficulty we got everything ready for the start at midnight... the night was cloudy and dark with occasional claps of thunder, but we had to go then or never.

NARRATOR
From Louisiana, the Stones fled three hundred miles by horseback and boat to Tyler, Texas. There, they joined other wealthy planters, who had also escaped to wait out the war.

V/O Kate Stone
God will aid us in our righteous cause... the people will... fight till the last foe expires, to conquer or die.

NARRATOR
Less than two yeas later, General William Tecumseh Sherman scorched a path of destruction across Georgia that ended with the capture of Savannah. In December 1864, Sherman offered the port city to President Lincoln as a Christmas gift. Union victory was near. The general took for his headquarters the mansion of one of the city's wealthiest cotton merchants. He celebrated with his officers, feasting on native oysters and turtle soup. On the outskirts of the city, thousands of emancipated slaves were gathered. They had followed Sherman's army to Savannah, doubling the city's population.

WALKER
In the Book of Revelations it is written that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. And this is interpreted as that moment where God, in his omnipotence, has now come to deliver his people from bondage.

NARRATOR
"It came so sudden on 'em, they wasn't prepared for it," recalled one liberated slave. "Just think of whole droves of people, that had hardly ever left the plantation, turned loose all at once with nothing in the world but the clothes on their back." Lincoln 's Emancipation Proclamation had freed slaves across the South. But Washington still had no clear plan for what to do once African Americans were free.