Warren McKinney was born in Edgefield County, South Carolina.  He was born a slave.  His master was George Strauter.  He had a big plantation and worked twenty-five or thirty work hands.  There were twenty-five or thirty children too small to work in the field.  They raised cotton, corn, oats, and wheat.  His mother washed and ironed and cooked.  He was small but well remembers once when his mother had been sick and had just gotten out.  George Strauter whipped her with a switch on her legs.  Warren did not approve of it.  Rocks were plentiful and he began throwing at him.  He said Mr. George took out after him but didn’t catch or whip him.

George Strauter tried to teach them all how to be good farmers and be saving.  Warren knew war was going on but he didn’t see any of it.  His father came home several times.  He was off building forts.  He said he remembered a big “hurly-burly” and he heard ’em saying, “Thank God I’ze free as a jay bird.”  He didn’t know why they were fighting so he didn’t know then why they were saying that.

George Strauter had a shop at the fork of the roads.  He had his own gin.  They sold cotton and bought provisions at Augusta, Georgia.  They made some of their meal and flour and raised all their meat and made enough lard to do the year around.

He heard them talking about the “Yankees” burning up Augusta, but he saw where they had burned Hamburg, South Carolina or North Augusta they call it.

After they were free he remembers his mother bundling up her things and her family and them all going in an ox cart to Augusta to live.  Warren’s mother washed, cooked and ironed for a living.  Her husband went off and lived with another woman after freedom.  Warren was about eleven years old then.  The Government furnished food for them too.  One thing that distressed Warren was the way people died for more than a year.  He saw five or six coffins piled up on a wagon being taken out to be buried.  He thought it was changing houses and changing ways of living.  They didn’t have shoes and warm clothes and weren’t fed from white folks smoke house. Lots of the slaves had Consumption and died right now.  Stout men and women didn’t live two years after they were freed.  Lots of them said they didn’t like that freedom and wanted to go back but the masters were broke and couldn’t keep many of them if they went back.

When Warren was about fifteen years old, there was a white man or two, but colored leaders mostly got about a thousand colored people to start for the West walking.  Warren had sisters and brothers who started on this trip.  Warren had some fussy brothers, his mother was afraid would get in jail.  They kept her uneasy.  They shipped their “stuff” by boat and train.  He never saw them any more but he heard from them in Louisiana.  Louisiana had a bad name in those days.

When Warren was about fourteen and fifteen, his mother had them on a farm, farming near Hamburg.