Rosa Millard

In this third Unvanquished story, Rosa Millard takes her determination to maintain the plantation in the absence of her son-in-law, Colonel Sartoris, on the road, launching her own kind of 'raid' against the Union troops who have been moving through and destroying the region. She leads Bayard and Ringo into Alabama in a campaign against the Yankees who burned Sartoris in the previous story in the series; her goal is to retrieve the family's silver and mules - along with a slave couple who have followed the Union troops in quest of freedom. Along the way she becomes the temporary 'mistress' several hundred slaves who have similarly tried to emancipate themselves; she sends them "home" - by which she means back to the plantations they escaped from (55). She also acquires more than a hundred mules and ten chests full of silver; the story ends with her praying for forgiveness for the lies that made that possible. She has returned to Sartoris, but perhaps with her own kinds of war wound: the loss of her character as a genteel Southern lady.