Thrifty and well-to-do people were not exempt from it. One instance came directly to the knowledge of the Commissioners. A member of the Society of Friends from Blount County, sought for help from the U. S. Quartermaster at Knoxville, saying that he and all his people had nothing to eat. Before the peace of the country had been broken, they lived in plenty. At various places the visitors met with refugees on their way to the North in search of bread, not only from East Tennessee, but from Western North Carolina, Northern Georgia and Northern Alabama. Their losses had been entire, and having no means to buy food and shelter by the way, they kept on fleeing, for behind was threatening starvation. In their poorly clad and dispirited condition, sickness among them, especially of women and children, was inevitable. Pitiful cases of afflicted families came to the knowledge of the Commissioners, such as that of a mother and four children, all prostrated at the same time by disease. These unhappy emigrants were to be counted by thousands, not always impelled only by hunger and losses of property. Fear of being coerced to do military service for the Confederacy was in some instances an additional motive. At one town, a Western North Carolinian, nearly three-score years old, lay dangerously ill. His distressed wife, standing at his bed-side, said: “We came away because the ‘Rebs’ took away every thing from us and were about to force my husband and my son, 17 years old, into their army.” At a point between Bridgeport and Chattanooga, the Commissioners, detained by a railroad accident, approached a group of passengers, decently but poorly dressed, huddling around a fire. They were three families, thirteen persons in all, on their way to Vincennes, Indiana, where they had friends. One old man, dressed in home-spun and wearing a straw hat, said simply, “All gone!”.[60] He lived eleven miles east of Knoxville, and when Burnside arrived, he volunteered and was in camp five weeks, but he was then refused on account of his age--being over sixty-six years old. The evidences of a superior loyalty to the United States among East Tennesseeans (and Western North Carolinians) were as conclusive to the visitors from Philadelphia, as were those of great destitution. A farmer who had emigrated and was returning home, told them that if secession had succeeded, he would have left all and remained at the North. He said, “I would rather protect the Government than protect my property. If I had one bushel of corn, I would be glad to give one-half of it to the Union men. We could do a heap of good, if we could only stay there and raise truck for the army.” The mind he expressed was that of the people generally, and justified the opinion that “with the men of East Tennessee, devotion to the Union was not a mere sentiment, but a passion.”