The State of Jones (12 page)

A local slave was detailed to issue a frightening summons to him. On a piece of paper was sketched a coffin, a freshly dug open grave, and a figure with hands tied behind his back and a sack over his face, ready for execution. In bold letters was written, “Such be the doom of all traitors.”

The atmosphere in the state became even more inflamed after July 21, 1861, when the Confederates won the first major battle of the war, at Manassas, Virginia. Rebel troops under Generals P. G. T. Beauregard and Joe Johnston forced the Northerners into an uncontrolled retreat back to Washington, D.C., along with panicked congressmen’s wives who had come to picnic. News of the victory was greeted with delirium, and pressure on Southern men to enlist increased: only the traitorous or cowardly held back.

A sergeant in the 24th Mississippi wrote to his sister, “I much reather [sic] be numbered amongst the slain than those that stay at home for it will be a brand upon their name as long as a southren lives.”

A week after Manassas, on July 29, 1861, Newton Knight responded to local pressures and enlisted. He joined Company E of the 8th Mississippi Infantry, an outfit raised in Jasper County by a local landowner named B. F. Moss. Although no one was formally impressing troops yet—it would be several months before Newton was forced into the 7th Mississippi Battalion and marched off to Corinth under the First Conscription Act—his reasons for this first enrollment can be guessed at.

Newton had any number of incentives to enlist. He did not want to be perceived as a coward or a submissionist, and it had become dangerous to oppose the war and to resist military service. Also, the enlistment came with the provision that he would be furloughed until September 18, 1861. There was a general assumption that the war would be over before the fall harvest. He might never have to report for actual duty. Finally, it was a regular paycheck, and being a soldier affirmed his sense of manhood.

Even so, he enlisted reluctantly, and perhaps even under coercion. B. F. Moss was no great friend of Newton’s. The two quarreled when Moss’s brother, also a Confederate officer, impressed a local woman’s horse purportedly for the army’s use. A horse was a farm-wife’s livelihood, as Newton well knew, and he came to the woman’s aid and forced the return of the animal. The incident left lingering ill will between him and the Moss brothers. According to his own
account years later, Newton only reported for mustering into Company E, 8th Mississippi, “under guard.”

By coincidence during this period, Newton’s Jasper County home burned to the ground, and everything he had in it was destroyed. It was Newton’s belief that the local Confederates led by Moss retaliated against him for his Union sympathies, and for his interference in the matter of the horse, by torching his property. “His residence with all its contents together with all of his corn and out houses … around his plantation were burned by his enemies,” his friend William Welch recalled.

The suspicion was shared by some of his friends in Jones County, who after the war filed a deposition in his behalf. “Before and during the late rebellion we know that he was opposed to the war and refused to take up arms against the United States, and the rebels was determined to make him fight or kill him they destroyed all his effects horses and muls and his household and left his family destitute.”

Whether or not Confederates burned his farm, Newton’s stay in the 8th Mississippi was brief. The unit formally entered Confederate service in October of 1861 and was sent to Pensacola under Braxton Bragg. But Newton served just three months before he received a special discharge from Bragg on January 2, 1862. Discharges were rare; the Confederacy sought every able-bodied man, but under special circumstances soldiers were released from service if they were needed back home. Newton was probably discharged to attend to an urgent family matter.

Newton’s family indeed needed him at home: his father, Albert, had fallen gravely ill and was on his deathbed, and there was no one to look after his mother or wife. Serena was living with his parents in their cabin near the Leaf River, in a household full of dependents. In addition to the fifty-five-year-old Mason, soon to be widowed, there were Serena’s three baby boys and Newton’s two youngest siblings, sixteen-year-old Martha, who was newly married, and twelve-year-old Taylor.

There may have been another reason Newton was needed at
home: the teenaged Martha had married badly, to a local criminal. Her new husband was a mysterious man who went by the name of “Morgan,” and he was uniformly described as a rough character, a killer and an outlaw who thieved cattle. In the absence of any other men, Morgan had taken over the household. Newton began receiving alarming reports from Serena that Morgan was abusing his children and frightening the women. Also, he was apparently a Confederate informant.

“He would keep the Confederates’ cavalry posted about my father,” T. J. Knight wrote. “He made himself mighty busy attending to other people’s business.”

Morgan’s identity has been lost, but he may have been Morgan Lines, a twenty-one-year-old day laborer and convicted murderer. His father, Thomas Lines, was also a killer: on the 1860 federal census for Jones County, in a section reserved for criminal convictions, both men carried notations for murder. According to the Knights’ neighbor, Ben Graves, who lived two farms over, Morgan was “a regular outlaw, a bad man. Everybody was afraid of him.”

Tom Knight was too young to remember the events of 1862, but his mother told him the story later. Morgan had a vicious habit of hitting the small children in the house. “Mother said nearly every time I went to the table to eat that man would bounce on me and whip me just because he could and wanted to show off smart. So my mother got tired of it and told my father.”

Newton demanded that Morgan leave the house and said he did not want to hear of him laying a hand on another child. Morgan refused to leave. Newton did not react immediately, as he apparently viewed Morgan as highly dangerous. “He was one man Newt was afraid of,” Ben Graves said. “He was afraid Morgan would slip up on him and kill him.”

Graves and Tom Knight gave slightly differing accounts of what happened next, but they agreed on the outcome: someone shot Morgan to death in the house. Newton was the main suspect. According to Tom, Morgan was sitting by the fire one night after supper, rocking
a baby, when someone aimed a gun through an open window “and shot his brains out.” Martha grabbed the baby out of Morgan’s arms as he fell out of the chair dead. “So we never were whipped any more by him,” T. J. reported laconically.

Graves, who was fourteen years old at the time, raced over from his farm to see what had happened. He claimed to be the first person outside of the household to view the corpse. According to him, Morgan was sitting on the front porch in the morning, with his feet on the doorstep, when someone came through the back of the house and shot him. “He fell over backwards dead,” with a child still in his lap, Graves said.

Morgan lay on the porch until enough men could be summoned to hold an inquest and tend to the body. By afternoon, a crowd had gathered, and all of them “claimed they knew who shot Morgan,” Graves said. “Everybody said it was Newt Knight.” But there was not enough evidence to accuse Newton: Martha, Serena, and Mason, despite the fact that all had been in the room, insisted that they didn’t see who fired the shot.

Graves and the older men watched over the body on the porch through the day. Various wagons passed by, a cavalcade of travelers that included refugees and free Negroes “running from Mississippi to Alabama. They were passing in droves.” But one wagon paused and halted. A young lady passenger stared at Morgan’s body. “I know something of that man,” she said. “That is one of the worst men that ever hit this country.”

An older man watching over the body said, “Sister, you talk mighty plain.”

“But I know it is true,” she said. “I know of his marrying seven women. He is a thief and a robber and anything in the world as bad. He was a desperado.”

Morgan’s murder was never solved, and it’s possible Newton was innocent. Martha eventually married again, to a man named Dick Yawn who was a fellow deserter-compatriot of Newton’s. When Martha had their first child, she named the baby after Newton. A
woman was not likely to name a child after the man who killed her first husband—at least, not unless that husband was so feared and hated that he demanded killing.

For a few brief months after his discharge from the 8th Mississippi in January of 1862, Newton lived at home as a yeoman farmer again. Home was the great stated cause of the Confederacy, and it was Newton’s great cause, too. We can only imagine the peace he experienced for those few months, when he was able to tend to his farm and care for those who relied on him: the overburdened wife, the widowed mother, and children and younger siblings. He may have hoped that he could avoid the war altogether if he lived quietly enough planting peas and corn. His desperation can be envisaged when, four months later, conscription pulled him away from home again and sent him marching into the awful terror of Corinth. Home: it was the place he would fight toward across two hundred miles of thicket and swamp, as that most dishonored and hunted of men, a deserter.

November 1862, Abbeville, Mississippi

T
here was too much water in
the backwoods of Mississippi, and not enough, for a deserter on the run. Newton waded through dark undrinkable pools, slime-covered bayous filled with rotted logs and shin-deep mud that sucked at his boots. He was perpetually damp, either from brown swamp water or his own brackish sweat, yet always thirsty. He soothed his swollen lips in ditches full of old rainwater, scooping green scum away and burying his face in stagnant puddles full of tadpoles.

After deserting near Abbeville, Newton had a journey of two hundred miles ahead of him, a trek almost the length of the state, on foot, to get back to Jones County. It was too dangerous to take the main roads or to cut through open pastures. Instead, he skirted civilization, hacking through undergrowth of dogwood, buckthorn, and wild privet, heavy with jessamine vines and other creepers and infested with snakes, centipedes, and, sometimes, alligators cloaked as logs. He was a skilled woodsman, but he had to forage for food without firing his shotgun, for fear of giving himself away.

As Newton stole through the woods, he wasn’t alone. The Mississippi countryside was alive with the movements of men on the run: scavengers, runaways, deserters, and destitute civilians. There was fighting along the Mississippi River, and men and supplies shuttled to the front lines. Rebels burned cotton so it wouldn’t fall into federal hands, making the horizon glow red-yellow, flames sharp edged beneath the gauzy gray smoke, visible for miles.

Escaped slaves sifted through the woods toward the victorious Union lines at Corinth that Newton had just left behind, emboldened by Lincoln’s issuance of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862. William Tecumseh Sherman, commanding the Union forces in Memphis, counted six thousand of them in camp, and in November, U. S. Grant wrote to Halleck, “Citizens south of us are leaving their homes and Negroes coming in wagonloads. What shall I do with them?”

Newton dodged Confederate units, which dueled with Yankee patrols for possession of the roads. Civilian Mississippians, livid at the occupation of their home soil, were ever watchful for stray Yanks and deserters. William Nugent wrote to his gentle young wife, Nellie, that if any passed near Greenville, “take double barrel shotguns & pepper them like smoke. Kill, slay & murder them.”

Patrollers with packs of dogs ranged through counties looking for fugitives, forcing Newton to go five and six nights without sleep, for fear of being captured. He scouted the countryside from treetops and sat in a cradle of branches, frozen, as Confederate cavalrymen bounded past him. The woods resounded with the deep-chested baying of bloodhounds on the chase. According to the Unionist preacher John Hill Aughey, who himself became hunted, men on the run were “never for an hour out of the hearing of howling hounds or yelping dogs.”

Newton was more afraid of the dogs than any reptile or swamp predator. Patrollers used two types of dogs in pursuit. The traditional bloodhounds had thick jowls, pendulous ears, and long snouts and could track the redolent emanations of a human fugitive with a twenty-four-hour head start. But they were mere guides compared
to the man hunters that ran with them, crossbred mastiff-bulldogs trained to lunge reflexively at any prey. Tensile and snap jawed, they chewed their victims into red indistinguishable pulp. A treed fugitive had just two choices: to be torn bloody or wait for the patrollers to arrive and surrender, to be manacled and imprisoned.