The State of Jones (28 page)

The rebel quartermaster for Mississippi and east Louisiana reported that as far as he could tell, the Confederacy had lost complete control of the area. The deserters had “overrun and taken possession of the country, in many cases exiling the good and loyal citizens or shooting them in cold blood on their own door-sills.” The rebel tax agent in Jones was ordered to leave, at peril of his life. He was not heard from again. The tax agent in neighboring Covington County was not only warned to cease collecting tithes but to distribute what he had seized to the local families. He continued his duties only “at risk of his life and property.”

A rebel lieutenant named W. C. Parsons of the 12th Louisiana wrote his own observations of the subversives operating in Jones in a report to the regional provost marshal: “They are committing every kind of outrage—driving all the loyal citizens out of the county, and killing all those who have acted as guides to our forces. They have killed several citizens, and eight men belonging to our forces sent there to arrest them.”

Newton and his allies had reached the high watermark of their war. The Confederacy had virtually lost southeast Mississippi: the entire lower third of the state was in the hands of Unionists and renegades. They controlled Jones, Jasper, Covington, Perry, and Smith counties and exhibited such far-flung mobility that they apparently came and went from Hancock and Marion counties freely. Their loose alliances with other bands extended over a wide swath of territory to the north; there is evidence that they even collaborated with men in Greene and Lauderdale counties, where disaffection seemed to be spreading rapidly.

Robert S. Hudson, a fire-breathing circuit court judge who traveled through several counties from Leake to Yazoo in March 1864, was aghast to observe a mobile community of guerrillas and disloyal men who seemed to filter from county to county with impunity. Hudson wrote several letters to President Jefferson Davis of almost
hysterical agitation, warning that the deserter problem was liable to cost him the entire state, if not the war. He urged Davis and his aides to deal with the deserter problem “with an iron hand and hearts of stone.”

Hudson described Unionists who “gave parties for deserters & danced over the fall of Vicksburg & all our defeats. They are all rotten as hell … There are hundreds of others, settled in the hills and swamp, and unless you get them out they will destroy you. They are abolitionist, spies, deserters, liars, murderers, and every thing foul & damnable.”

They were also elusive, and cunning. “They are sly & shy and skilled in hiding and woodsing,” Hudson said. “Let me again urge you by all that is sacred & manly, noble and generous to put every element at work that can arrest them and this hellish tide.”

“The state,” Hudson advised Governor Charles Clark, “is now under the tacit rule of deserters, thieves, and disloyal men and women.”

A rebel officer named Wirt Thompson, a captain in the 24th Mississippi, returned home to Greene County on a furlough in late March to discover he had to fear for his life. Saboteurs had wrecked and looted the region’s entire infrastructure. It was apparent to Thompson that they had a clearly organized command structure and good weaponry, and he even heard a rumor that an American flag had been raised over the courthouse in Jones.

Thompson was so moved that he wrote a long missive to James A. Seddon, the Confederate secretary of war.

“The whole southern and southeastern section of Mississippi is in a most deplorable condition, and unless succor is sent speedily the country is utterly ruined, and every loyal citizen will be driven from it or meet a tragic and untimely fate at the hands of those who are aiding and abetting our enemies,” Thompson wrote.

It was Thompson’s advice that the Confederacy would need a full-scale military operation to reclaim the region; nothing less than a brigade of “well-drilled infantry troops” could wipe the Unionists out.

Lieutenant General Leonidas Polk had already reached the same conclusion. He wrote to Jefferson Davis describing the intolerable state of affairs. The Jones Countians were “in open rebellion, defiant at the outset, proclaiming themselves ‘Southern Yankees,’ and resolved to resist by force of arms all efforts to capture them.”

Polk decided to settle the problem once and for all: he ordered elements from two of the most battle-hardened regiments in the whole of the Confederate army, the “Bloody” 6th Mississippi and the intensely loyal 20th Mississippi, to conduct an expansive sweep of lower Mississippi, combing the several counties between the Pearl and Tombigbee rivers for deserters.

To command the special operation, Polk selected a stony-eyed colonel from the 6th Mississippi, and a native of the Piney Woods who had risen above his country roots, Robert Lowry. There was hardly a more aspiring or devoted officer in the Confederate army. The peacetime lawyer and legislator had begun the war as a private. He still bore the scars of Shiloh on his arm and on his chest: his unit had gone into the battle with 425 men and emerged with just 115. Lowry experienced a metamorphosis after Shiloh; promoted to the rank of major, he had ascended steadily until he commanded the entire regiment. He was one of the South’s fightingest officers, campaigning at Corinth, Port Hudson, Port Gibson, Bayou Pierre, Champion Hill, and Vicksburg, and he would be promoted to general in 1865.

In Lowry, the Confederacy had called a response down on the heads of Newton and his men that would make their previous conflicts seem like skirmishes. Lowry was bringing with him crack infantry, cavalry, and ropes for more hanging. “The most rigid and summary punishment is necessary to correct these evils,” Lowry announced.

March 1864, Smith County, Mississippi

T
he flag was a hopelessly makeshift
rag, “a rather ludicrous representation,” sneered one of Lowry’s men, who confiscated it from a Unionist in the Piney Woods. It was roughly made, with hand-drawn stars, the sketched outline of an eagle, and stamped with the letters “U.S.A.”

There was nothing ludicrous about the sentiment behind it, however. To soldiers and citizens alike flags signified possession. They were the ensigns of cause and the colors of armies; they told which side a man was on, to what corps, division, and brigade he belonged, and the bloodstains on them were emblems of reputations. A raised standard meant triumph, a lowered one meant grief. The poet Walt Whitman, who was working as a hospital orderly that April, marveled at the blood spent to save a single regimental square of cloth.

“It was taken by the secesh in a cavalry fight, and rescued by our men in a bloody little skirmish. It cost three men’s lives, just to get one little flag, four by three,” he wrote. “Our men rescued it, and tore it from the breast of a dead rebel—all that, just for the name of
getting their little banner back again … There isn’t a reg’t … that wouldn’t do the same.”

The flag seized by Lowry’s men belonged to a local Smith County mill owner named Hawkins, who flew the “ludicrous” symbol from his establishment as a signal for convening assemblies of Unionists and fugitive deserters. Hawkins, encouraged by Sherman’s Meridian campaign, had believed that the Union presence in southeastern Mississippi was a permanent one and that the Confederates had been driven from the state for good. As Lowry’s men occupied the county, the flag was hastily lowered and hidden. “It was concealed on the person of Mrs. Hawkins, who would not deliver it until after much persuasion and few threats,” a rebel reported. We can only imagine the terrified stubbornness of the woman, surrounded by combat-hardened infantrymen, her husband taken into custody as a traitor.

To Lowry’s men, the flag signaled the depth of local disloyalty. The mere existence of such a scrawled and tattered rag angered them; it suggested the resisters had “hung out the banners on the outer walls,” as one of Lowry’s men said. It also demonstrated that they were dealing with “bitter, stubborn resistance.”

Lowry’s punishment was swift, and brutal. On March 28, just a day after he arrived in the Piney Woods, he wrapped nooses around the necks of two Unionist leaders and left them dangling in the trees. A third man was shot down while trying to escape. Several others were arrested, including Hawkins, and held for trial.

Next, Lowry restored the Smith County sheriff to his office. Then, to make sure that the entire countryside was aware of his presence, he posted a stern notice to the citizenry. The following leaflet was distributed to the local villages.

“I came among you a few days since for the purpose of correcting evils which had well-nigh destroyed your county,” Lowry wrote.

That Lowry meant to impose order, and was not to be trifled with, was evident from his appearance. He was a burly man who conveyed heavy-handedness as he stalked and pranced on horseback across the countryside, the picture of rebel command in his fluttering caped overcoat and slouch hat, elegant braided quatrefoil on his sleeves, and an oval of buttons glinting on his double-breasted jacket. He wore his hair swept well back from a thick-jowled face, and his cleft chin was habitually upturned. But his most prominent feature was the crooked M of his upper lip, which seemed permanently twisted in an expression of disdain, accentuated with a dense, bristling mustache. He exuded authority.

For three weeks, Lowry dashed about the Piney Woods, chasing down men. In a sweep of Smith County alone, he captured 350 prisoners. He found the area teeming with missing conscripts, either shirking on their farms or hiding in the woods, and local rebels powerless over them. He observed “the entire demoralization of the
whole country,” he reported to headquarters. “Loyalty to the [Confederate] Government is punished by death or banishment from home, and the deserters are organized for defense against the cavalry or plundering upon good and loyal citizens.”