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Chapter 10
IN LATER LIFE
Marion Francis Baxter came home to a region that had excaped the destruction suffered by much of the Confederacy. That stretch of coast between Mobile and New Orleans, although tightly blockaded, had never seen a Union soldier. Mobile, blockaded	since	the summer of 1864,	held out	until after Lee?s
surrender.	New	Orleans, blockaded almost from	the beginning of
hostilities,	fell	to Union forces late	in April	1862. But this
stretch of	coast	along the Mississippi	Sound (and inland for at
least 75 miles) remained untouched by Yankee hands.
The region, of course, suffered all the indirect burdens that the war occasioned. Items normally brought in by ship had been reduced to a mere trickle, and what did get past the Federal blockade was priced beyond the reach of the ordinary citizen. Demands by the quartermaster General of the Confederate States on local farms, mills, and such industry as existed here were heavy. And above all, the Coast had been stripped of virtually all its young manpower. But throughout the war, blockade or no blockade, there remained an abundance of seafood in the coastal waters. An enormous variety could be found, and it was there for the taking. Also, small inland farms continued with their food crops, and there was plenty of wild game: deer, wild turkey, quail, duck, and geese.	JZ*
So when Baxter trudged into Handsboro on that hot June 20, 1865, after walking from Hamburg, South Carolina (roughly 500 miles), he was not greeted by the ruins he would have seen had he been returning to Atlanta or Columbia or Vicksburg. Handsboro (and Mississippi City) bore the same placid look of pre-war days.
In all likelihood he moved in with his favorite sister, Susan Amelia, who was unmarried, and the arrangement proved of mutual benefit. Marion, after a few days of rest and talk