Darlington, South Carolina, March 10, 1865.

30 days before the end of the Civil War, the Confederacy hanged a 17-year-old girl for the crime of being happy.

Her name was Amy Spain. She was light-skinned, described in the records

as mulatto, and she belonged, in the legal sense of that word, to Major Albertus C. Spain, a Mexican-American

war veteran, an attorney, and a delegate to the South Carolina Secession Convention. The major

kept a large property in Darlington,

a small courthouse town of about 500 souls tucked into the cotton and tobacco country,

76 miles northeast of Columbia, 10 miles up the road from Florence, where the railroads crossed.

Darlington had been built around its public square, a compromise born of

an old argument between two men on horseback who rode toward each other from opposite directions until they

met. The spot where they converged became the center of town. The brick courthouse sat on the square,

flanked by a Methodist church and a scattering

of merchant shops. Spanish moss hung from the oaks along the side streets. A lone sycamore grew

at the edge of the courthouse lawn. That sycamore is where Amy Spain died. The road to that

sycamore tree ran through the wreckage of the Confederacy itself.

In the first days of March, 1865, the whole of South Carolina was shaking apart.

General William Tecumseh Sherman had already burned a path from Atlanta to Savannah,

then turned his 60,000 men north into the Carolinas.

Columbia, the state capital, had gone up in flames

on February 17th. Sherman's army rolled northeast like a brushfire, tearing up railroads,

torching cotton stores, and leaving behind a 40-mile-wide corridor of scorched earth. His cavalry,

under the command of Brigadier General

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