King experienced directly the hardships that are central to her fiction. As a child of nine, she watched from a window as the residents of New Orleans burned bales of cotton, broke open barrels of whiskey and poured their contents into the gutters, and otherwise prepared to surrender their city to Union troops in the late spring of 1862. Her father, William Woodson King, a prosperous New Orleans lawyer, was able to escape to their outlying plantation, and later the family set out to join him. After a struggle to obtain the necessary passport from the commanding general, the same Benjamin F. ("Beast") Butler who achieved international infamy for the indignities he visited on the ladies of occupied New Orleans (whom he referred to collectively as "she-adders" and prostitutes), King's mother, Sarah Ann Miller King, started the family on its perilous journey. Their steamboat was fired on by Confederate guerrillas; they had to pass the night in a house that had been abandoned during an outbreak of scarlet fever; a ferry they had to take had been burned; and their skiff was grounded on a shallow. But the resourceful Sarah King kept everyone's spirits up and arranged for ways around every obstacle.
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