Mrs. Robert E. Lee's father and uncle freed some five hundred slaves, with General Lee's approval, thus alienating from her over $500,000 worth of property. The Hampton family, of South Carolina, sent to Liberia a great colony of freed slaves, who presently plead to be brought home. General Preston, Confederate, of Kentucky, freed his negroes; he would not sell, and could not afford to keep, them; they were "over-running and ruining his plantation, and clearing up forests for firewood; slavery is the curse of the South." Many families had arranged for a gradual emancipation, a fixed percentage of slaves being freed by each generation. By will and otherwise, they provided against division of families, an evil not peculiar to slavery, as immigrant ships of today, big foundling asylums, and train-loads of home-seeking children bear evidence. But freedom as it came, was inversion, revolution. Whenever I pass "The House Upside Down" at a World's Fair, I am reminded of the South after freedom. In "South Carolina Women in the Confederacy,"[12] Mrs. Harby tells how Mrs. Postell Geddings was in the kitchen getting Dr. Geddings' supper, while her maid, in her best silk gown, sat in the parlour and entertained Yankee officers. Charleston ladies cooked, swept, scrubbed, split wood, fed horses, milked and watered the cattle; while filling their own places as feminine heads of the house, they were servants-of-all-work and man of the house. Mrs. Crittendon gives an anecdote matching Mrs. Geddings'. A Columbia lady saw in Sherman's motley train an old negress arrayed in her mistress' antiquated, ante-bellum finery, lolling on the cushions of her mistress' carriage, and fanning (in winter) with a huge ostrich-feather fan. "Why, Aunt Sallie, where are you going?" she called out impulsively. "Law, honey! I'se gwine right back intuh de Union!" and on rode Aunt Sallie, feathers and flowers on her enormous poke-bonnet all a-flutter. Mrs. Jewett, of Stony Creek, saw her negro man walking behind the Yankee Army with her husband's suit of clothes done up in a red silk handkerchief and slung on a stick over his shoulder. Her two mulatto nurse-girls laid down their charges, attired themselves in her best apparel and went; her seamstress stopped sewing, jumped on a horse behind a soldier who invited her, and away she rode.