The State of Jones (10 page)

Rachel was a young mother even by the standard of the day; slave women tended to have their first child around the age of nineteen. Her youthful pregnancy may suggest that she was unusually attractive. As the slave memoirist Harriet Jacobs wrote, beauty was a curse: “That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave.”

In any event, Rachel’s childbearing was encouraged because her Knight owners, like all slaveholders, wished to see their property increase. Pregnant, Rachel received additional clothing and food allowances, and had a somewhat lighter workload. Once she delivered, however, her responsibilities doubled; one of the few things we can be sure of about her was that she was a woman of immense physical stamina. She nursed and tended to her children between ceaseless duties and house chores, preparing breakfast for the Knights, doing their laundry, cooking their suppers and dinners, and making trips to the henhouse or storehouse. In the evenings she spun and wove and did all of the sewing for the household, enough to occupy several hands. In fact, her presence in the house defined the matron for whom she worked as a “mistress” rather than a farmwife. The whites who truly ruled Rachel’s life were not men but women.

Rachel had precious little time to devote to her own children, who were looked after by one of the elderly slave women and brought to her at work for feedings, as she herself had been as a small baby. As Rachel’s children grew old enough, they acquired their own chores: hauling water, picking up wood chips, sweeping the yard, and carrying food from the kitchen to the big house.

The Rachel whom Newton first knew was a carefully masked young woman whose outward subservience hid guile, a quality any slave had to possess in order to cope with the domination under which she lived. The Knight slave cabins constituted a separate society, the goings-on of which the whites were almost wholly unaware.
The people who lived in them were far more self-determined and politically alert than the Knights could have guessed—as Newton would discover.

Deception was a necessary and ubiquitous tool with which Rachel avoided unpleasant work or whippings, or hid clandestine activities. One South Carolina bondsman testified that he belonged to no fewer than seven secret societies formed by slaves to help one another in distress. They prayed constantly for the “day of their deliverance,” and the meek front they presented to their owners was a disguise: “One life they show their masters and another life they don’t show,” he said. A white planter remarked on a trait “often noticed” in his slaves, “that of pretending to misunderstand what was said to them when it suited their purpose to do so.”

The cabin in which Rachel lived had one room, about sixteen by eighteen feet, with a homemade bed and clay-and-stick fireplace draped with strings of dried red peppers and other drying medicinal roots and leaves, such as mayapple roots and cyprus. Out back, there were small garden patches full of melons and potatoes, which she cultivated in her free time, on occasion bartering and selling her goods.

At night and on Sunday, Rachel had her autonomy. According to her descendants, she was unusually independent, virtually self-sufficient in her cabin and vegetable patch. In the cabins, Rachel traded folk remedies, recipes, superstitions, favors, and information. She knew how to treat fevers with mint and horehound teas, and aches and pains with a resin from crushed pine needles. There was a lingering hint in the Knight family that she conjured spells, and she seems to have had some knowledge as a folk doctor.

A fugitive slave from another plantation could tap lightly on Rachel’s door and be sure of receiving aid, such as medicines, directions through the swamp, and food: some hoecake, a cornmeal patty cooked in grease and ashes and wrapped in a collard leaf, greens and dumplings, or boiled peppergrass with meat scraps, with lumps of cornmeal to stretch it.

A thriving grapevine was a source of the latest gossip, as well as reports from the larger world. Whites were often astonished to learn of the speed and distance which information traveled in the black communities. The stunning news of John Brown’s 1859 attack on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry penetrated deep into the interior of Mississippi, where it circulated in Marshall County. John Adams once observed that the grapevine was “a wonderful art of communicating intelligence among themselves; it will run several hundred miles in a week or fortnight.” Rachel was an especially good source of information as a house slave; she had ample opportunity to eavesdrop on the Knight masters and mistresses. Children also learned to pass on what they overheard from whites while frolicking in yards, kitchens, or under porches. “I’d play around the white folks and then hear what they’d say and then go tell the niggers,” a slave from Monroe County remembered.

As the 1860 presidential election approached, Rachel and the other Knight slaves were well aware that a victory by Abraham Lincoln could mean potential deliverance from bondage. Slaves all across the South were. It was impossible not to overhear the heated discussion among whites over secession, as fire-breathers like Dr. John Baylis ranted against “Black Republicans” who wanted to overturn all of civilized society by freeing the Negroes. Abolitionist Yankees sought to “lord it over the South,” and soldiers would “come down here” and commence “killing our children and ravishing our wives.” It was impossible not to sense their anxiety and their outright fear of violent slave revolts.

In Holly Springs, a doctor’s wife noticed a large congregation of slaves crowded into a meeting in a cabin. Suspicious, she slipped over to a window and eavesdropped, as inside, a slave exhorted his companions, “I tell you ladies and gentlemen, we’s all gwine to be free before long. We’s all going to enjoy liberty, mos’ right away. We won’t be slaves no longer and whipped an’ cuffed by de white folks.” The slave reported that he had listened to a speech given by Jeff Davis. “From what he said de people from de Norf is comin’ down to set us
free an’ dey’ll just mow dese southern people down as dey mows de grass. An he said de northern people believes in Negro ’quality, dat de white folks up dar was willing to marry our daughters and let us marry theirn. Jes be ready, as the hime says.”

The woman fled and repeated what the slave said to her husband, who seized a whip and flogged him.

Rachel came from a part of the country in which slaves were particularly attuned to public affairs in the fall of 1860. In Macon, Georgia, that September, every political speech “attracted a number of Negroes, who, without entering the Hall, have managed to linger around and hear what the orators say,” a Georgia newspaper reported. The slaves were so engaged in the politics of the day that the local police in Columbus, Georgia, had to chase them away from “the meetings and discussions of different political parties.”

But Rachel learned to keep her thoughts, and her political sentiments, carefully hidden from view. Even if she trusted a member of the white community in Jones County with her innermost feelings, she likely wasn’t inclined to confide in a Knight male, no matter how sympathetic or antislavery he appeared. All white men wanted to do, it seemed, was put their hands on her. As a member of Jackie Knight’s household Rachel may not have suffered whippings, but she did endure another form of abuse: sexual exploitation.

In 1859 or 1860, not yet twenty, Rachel gave birth to another child, a mulatto boy named Jeffrey Early Knight. The father was Jesse Davis Knight. It was an all too common transaction: a work-roughened man came in from the fields or slipped behind a door, reeking of farm sweat, boot leather, ash soap, and perhaps brown whiskey. Jesse Davis had availed himself of Rachel’s bed, and Jeffrey was the issue.

Sometime after the birth of Jeffrey, old Jackie Knight made his last will and testament. In it, he bequeathed slaves to each of his children by name—except for Albert, who received five hundred dollars in cash. While Albert left no direct statement of his feelings about slavery or the Confederacy, the will is highly suggestive. But perhaps the best record of his beliefs is the conduct of his son New
ton, who at about this time is said to have first become protective of Rachel. If so, he had good reason.

There was another bequest in Jackie Knight’s will, one that would prove to be significant to the family. To his second-youngest son, Jesse Davis Knight, Jackie specifically bequeathed “a certain negro woman named Rachel,” as well as the infant boy Jeffrey, plus Rachel’s “increase, if any.” She was to belong to Jesse Davis in perpetuity, to do with as he pleased, and her children would belong to him, too. Before long, Rachel would be pregnant again by Jesse Davis, with a daughter named Fannie.

Jackie had willed Jesse Davis his own offspring, as cash property.

On December 20, 1860
, men began arriving in Ellisville on every sort of mount, from head-lolling nags to lightly stepping saddlebreds. Livestock pulled rattling wagons to a halt and parked, as passengers hopped down from the buckboards. Citizens stood in groups arguing, trading news, and knocking back amber liquor. Some men used the occasion to play cards on a whiskey barrel; others amused themselves with bare-knuckle fighting, as occasional scuffles broke out. Amid the raucousness, various speakers hollered to be heard for, or against, secession.

They were there to choose a delegate to the secession convention. After Lincoln was elected in November 1860, Mississippi governor John Pettus, a fiery secessionist, instructed the state legislature to call the convention so that delegates could vote on an ordinance of secession. Pettus declared himself the Moses of his people, telling them to “go down into Egypt while Herod rules in Judea.”

All over the state, secessionists were shouting down their more moderate opponents. Those who argued reasonably against severing from the Union were drowned out by a vehement cacophony, “the booming of cannon, the joyous greeting, the soul stirring music,” which urged the state to war. Even churches were filled by martial
and menacing airs, so much so that even the ardent secessionist Episcopal bishop William Mercer Green found it sacrilegious. After preaching in St. Andrew’s Church in Jackson, Green “had good reason to fear that the effect of the sermon was utterly driven from the minds of the congregation by the unseemly manner in which the Organ was played at the close of the service; the harsh and martial style of the music being much better suited to a military parade than to the quiet solemnity of the House of God.” He worried that the “warlike” airs sent worshippers marching out of their pews with anything but godliness. “From such Profanations of Thy Temple, Good Lord deliver us!”

In a northern Mississippi county, the young Presbyterian clergyman John Hill Aughey stood in a local grocery store and listened to a virulent anti-Union tirade by Colonel James Drane, a member of the state senate. Anyone who opposed secession was “a base, craven submissionist,” Drane declared. He insisted on “the right to carry slavery into the common domain,” even if it meant war with “the perfidious Yankees. I cordially hate a Yankee.”

To Aughey and other Unionists it all sounded very much like treason. Aughey listened, appalled, to the very essence of “fire-breathing” from another secessionist speaker, who seethed against “the abominable, white livered abolitionist” Lincoln and vowed “to butcher the villain if ever he sets foot on slave territory.” Not only did the elocutionist threaten to assassinate the president-elect, but he also offered to hang any of his fellow citizens who favored union over dissolution. “I, for one, would prefer an hour of virtuous liberty to a whole eternity of bondage under Northern, Yankee, wooden-nutmeg rule,” the orator fulminated. “The halter is the only argument that should be used against the submissionists, and I predict that it will soon, very soon, be in force.”

The speaker continued: “Compromise! Let us have no such word in our vocabulary … Let the war come—I repeat it—let it come! The conflagration of their burning cities, the desolation of their country, and the slaughter of their inhabitants, will strike the nations
of the earth dumb with astonishment, and serve as a warning to future ages that the slaveholding Cavaliers of the sunny South are terrible in their vengeance. I am in favor of immediate, independent, and eternal separation from the vile Union which has so long oppressed us … Cursed be the day when the South consented to the iniquitous league—the Federal Union—which has long dimmed her nascent glory.”

Somehow, after listening to such railings, Aughey still found the courage to vote against secession. At his local precinct, he asked in a clear voice for a Union ticket. He was told there was none. Aughey wrote one out by hand and deposited it, amid glares and murmurs.

The yeomen of Jones County also weren’t the sorts of men easily swayed by fiery oration; they voted their consciences. Newton’s feelings were apparent to those who knew him. “He was strictly a union man, he lived and died a union,” according to one of his oldest friends and neighbors, George Ellzey. Most of his relatives and neighbors felt similarly. “I was acquainted with the whole family; they were all anti secession including Newton Knight,” Joel E. Welborn later said.

The most adamant anti-secessionists in the county were the Collinses, who gave stirring speeches in defense of the Union, with great effect. Family patriarch Stacy Collins had eight sons, all of whom would eventually fight the Confederacy. Neither Stacy nor his sons owned slaves or grew more than token amounts of cotton. Instead, they raised hogs, sheared sheep for their own wool, and grew crops for food. Their homes were made from immense pine logs, with timbers twenty-four feet long, and their sisters, Peggy and Sally, were just as tough as they were. Sally’s second marriage to tavernkeeper James Parker had failed in 1857. When he sued her for divorce claiming adultery, she countercharged him with having sex with a mare.

If anyone wanted a fistfight, just let him argue politics with a Collins. On the stump, the Collinses echoed Lincoln’s famous argument, paraphrasing the Bible and Aesop’s Fables, that if the South was to obtain a separation from the North, the country would be divided and “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”