There were mass deportations of Confederate civilians - many of them women and children - during the American Civil War. This book chronicles two poignant segments of that deportation. It is the story of how, in the summer of 1864, William Tecumseh Sherman created at least three hundred refugees in his own unique way. He ordered the arrest of civilian millworkers in Roswell, Georgia, and charged them with treason for spinning yarn and weaving cloth. Then he shipped them and millworkers from Sweetwater Creek, Georgia, at Union government expense and with army rations, north out of their homeland, up through Tennessee, and on to Louisville, Kentucky. Sherman directed these Confederate refugees to cross the Ohio River and support themselves in Indiana in whatever way they could. Some of these millworkers, completely uprooted from everything they knew, chose to continue the new lives they made for themselves in a totally foreign part of the country. Others put every ounce of energy into returning to their roots, in spite of the fact that little was left for them in the devastated areas near Atlanta where they had once lived. --from the Introduction.