The State of Jones (25 page)

Had the Confederate guard known what was in the gun, he’d have been more cooperative. Newton packed each of his barrels with double loads of lead balls, heavy charged with powder behind them.
There were thirty-six pieces of shot in Newton’s gun—it was his way of evening the odds against the entire Confederate army. All of his men had learned to pack their guns the same way, using any kind of lead they could find; Minié balls, rifle bullets, or homemade scraps they melted down. Once, they hauled one of their victims to a doctor with eleven wounds. The surgeon said to them, “You must be right smart shooters to hit one man 11 times with rifle bullets.”

The recalcitrant rebel guard stood before the locked door of the Confederate commissary and tax-in-kind depot in Paulding, Mississippi. Newton had learned via the grapevine that the storehouse contained a huge mound of cornmeal intended for shipment to troops. Newton had ridden into Paulding with two hundred men and half a dozen ox-drawn wagons he commandeered from local farmers. But now the raid was faltering, because the guard refused to open the door, despite the shotgun.

“Open the door,” Newton said.

“I’ve got no orders to open the door,” the guard said.

“Bring me an ax,” Newton called to one of his men.

A Jones Scout hefted an ax out of a wagon and handed it to him. Newton stalked around to the side of the warehouse, lifted the blade, and stroked it into the side of the pine-timbered building with a
crack.
He pried it loose, then sank it once again into the pine, dislodging a chunk of wood.

The doorkeeper hollered out, “Don’t do that, Captain Knight! I will open the door for you.”

Newton replied, “I asked you to open the door but you said you had no order to open up, so you need not bother yourself. I will soon have a door open around here.”

Newton hacked at the wall until he had cut a hole in the building large enough to walk through standing up. His men drew the wagons around and began shifting loads of corn from the warehouse into the wagon beds. While they worked, Newton strode over to the local saloon and summoned the bartender. “Don’t let my men have any whiskey,” he said. “If you do, I’ll shoot you.” A raid on the Confederate
warehouse in broad daylight was hazardous enough without his men getting drunk for the return trip.

As the men continued shuttling corn out of the warehouse, a group of empty-eyed, ragged, beggar-like men and women approached Newton. They were Irish indigents, despised by the local Confederates because their men refused to serve in the army. They were out of bread and their families were starving. Could Newton and his men give them some supplies from the warehouse? “They were pretty hard off,” Newton remembered. “They didn’t want to fight, and the Confederates wouldn’t give ’em or sell ’em anything.”

The wagons were brimming and heavy on their axles with sacks of corn. As the Jones County men were mounting their horses and climbing onto the buckboards to depart, Newton halted them. He turned to the Irish. “Take all you want,” he said. The families eagerly helped themselves to all of the corn they could carry. When their arms were full, Newton said the Lord’s Prayer.

The wagon train then resumed its slow procession out of Paulding and back toward Jones County, where the men “distributed corn out to all who needed it,” Newton recalled. They stashed the rest at their various headquarters in the woods, to which they retreated as rebel troops descended on the county in response to a call from the Paul-ding sheriff. The rebels recovered most of the wagons, but men and corn had vanished into the dense underbrush and reed brakes.

The Paulding raid established Newton’s legend as a swamp pirate, though Newton didn’t regard it as his greatest feat. “Shucks, that warn’t much of a job,” he said later. But it stirred indignation among Confederates, for though it was a small raid it was a humiliating one that came immediately on the heels of the larger humiliation of Sherman’s incursion. Meridian was still smoking when Confederate officials received the official report of Newton’s caper on March 3, 1864. Whether or not Newton was in literal touch with Union commanders, he seemed to be speaking to them—and perhaps imitating them.

Word of the events at Paulding came from a Confederate lieutenant
named A. H. Polk, who was sent to survey the damage wrought by Sherman. During his reconnaissance, Polk discovered that the entire area from Meridian to Jones County had become hazardous ground because of Unionists. He described what he found:

Within the week, the Piney Woods Unionists launched a far more serious attack on a Confederate installation in New Augusta that demonstrated just how brazen they had become. Fifty Jones guerrillas collaborating with allies from neighboring Perry County assaulted the old conscription station where Amos McLemore had headquartered. Two men calling themselves “captains,” including one named Landrum from Jones, led the party. This may have been Thomas Landrum, a yeoman farmer and neighbor of the Knights and a Unionist who would join the Yankee forces in New Orleans later that spring.

The men had marked on their hats “U.S. Victory or Death.” They surrounded the home in which the local conscription officer, Captain John J. Bradford, of the 3rd Mississippi Regiment, was staying. In broad daylight they called him outside and took a vote on whether to hang him. He was “paroled” after he promised to quit the conscription
service and swore never again to enter the county or to in any way aid in attacks against them.

They took three more prisoners at gunpoint, liberated the local slaves, and seized a dozen horses, government stores, ammunition, and cooking utensils. They issued provisions to destitute families in the neighborhood. And before they left, they made a triumphal brag, according to the official Confederate report: “They stated they were in regular communication with the Yankees, were fighting for the Union, and would have peace or hell by August. They told the negros they were free.”

The rebel high command was finally driven to act. General Dabney H. Maury in Mobile ordered his younger cousin, Colonel Henry Maury, to carry out his previously suspended assignment: he was to go into Jones County and smash up a “body of armed traitors,” now rumored to be five hundred strong. “They have been seizing Government stores, have been killing our people, and have actually made prisoners of and paroled officers of the Confederate army,” General Maury wrote incredulously. They had even threatened to cut the M&O rail line, which was so continually besieged by guerrillas that it couldn’t operate without an armed guard—the railroad had requested seventy-five men from the Confederate army to help protect it.

The cavalrymen went by rail to Shubuta and from there they moved into Jones, which they found to be in “open rebellion.” The adjoining counties, Perry, Greene, and Covington, were “in just as bad a condition,” they discovered. Colonel Henry Maury decided to make an impression on the local populace: he burned the house of an unnamed “leader of the Tory gang” and announced to the families of the guerrillas that all who would come in voluntarily would be pardoned; but those he caught, he would hang on the spot.

Over the next several days, Maury and his men drove through the swamps on horseback. The cavalrymen rose at dawn each morning to “Boots and Saddles” and scoured the swamps and pine barrens in formation; infantry took the middle of the woods on foot, combing the underbrush, while the cavalry rode at the edges so as to cut off any routes of escape. But their efforts yielded few returns.

(
Left
) Newton Knight in his prime, “just a fightin’ fool when he got started.” (
Middle
) An image of the slave woman believed to be Rachel Knight by some of her descendants. According to family oral tradition, she was part Choctaw. (
Right
) A possible alternative portrait of Rachel Knight. Some family members, however, believe the young woman in this image to be Rachel’s granddaughter, Lessie.

Messmates shared the rituals of camp life.

A Confederate field hospital.

Confederate general Earl Van Dorn proposed to write his name in fire at Corinth.

General Sterling Price, CSA, in whose ranks Newton Knight served at Corinth before deserting.