The State of Jones (3 page)

Newton’s own convictions about the war stemmed from a combination
of politics and faith. He was a Unionist in principle, and he had opposed the state’s Ordinance of Secession. He also questioned the fundamental religiosity of slavery and the underlying basis of the war. In his worship he was a Baptist, and some evidence suggests he was a Primitive, one who tended to believe in the equality of souls, including those in bondage. As he read in his Bible, Acts 17:26: “And God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.”

Newton had resisted serving the Confederacy, to the point that he courted arrest. He declared to the conscription officers that he didn’t want to fight and instead volunteered as a battalion hospital orderly. In that way, he hoped to avoid killing men and care for them instead, and to reconcile his conscience with his actions. “I told ’em I’d help nurse sick soldiers if they wanted,” he remembered.

His defiance didn’t sit well with the Welborns. At one point, according to a fellow soldier, “the captain threatened to have him shot.”

Knight simply didn’t feel any common interest with the merchants and planters who made up the officer class and who had pressed him into service. The man who had forced Newton into uniform, fifty-one-year-old Major Joel Welborn, was a moneyed, well-connected land speculator with a reputation for crooked dealing back home. Welborn was among the richest men in Jones, the owner of an ever-expanding empire of real estate with a personal worth of $36,000. A year earlier, he had been accused by his neighbors of fraud for abusing his position as swamp commissioner to seize as many as 25,000 acres of land and resell it.

Newton was a yeoman farmer who had left behind a homestead and acreage worth just $800, on which he struggled to feed his wife, Serena, and three infant sons. Yeoman farmers depended upon their own sweat and toil and took pride in their independence. But the planter-merchants were contemptuous of small farmers like Knight in civilian life. A prominent Mississippi attorney turned cavalryman, William L. Nugent of the 28th Mississippi, patronizingly described
“the humble tiller of the bleak hillsides of the interior” who “eked out a miserable existence.” General Dabney Maury more bluntly called them “the worst class in our population.” Colonel Robert Lowry of the 6th Mississippi referred to them as “ignorant persons” despite the fact that he had grown up among them, as his neighbors.

These elites were just as infuriatingly arrogant in the military. Many of them seemed to view their officer status as a prerogative, and the men in the ranks as vassals. They could afford luxuries such as tents with flaps that closed, changes of underclothes, and lavish fare like wheat biscuits. “We are treated here worst than dogs,” wrote J. B. Shows of Company C of the 7th Battalion angrily to his wife in Jones County. One enlisted man described Confederate officers ordering infantrymen around “as if they were a lot of negroes. I am in favor of discipline but not of tyranny.” Still another wrote in his diary, “I only hope that a false patriotism will never again induce me to put myself at the mercy of such damnable despotism as governs the army.”

The chronic hardship of camp life for the Confederate private exacerbated his resentment at conscription. The pay was only eleven dollars a month—when the men received it, which was seldom—not enough to purchase a clean shirt. As their clothing tattered, so did their morale. One angry Confederate soldier “chafed from morning till night” at the “starvation, rags, dirt and vermin” and the “insuperable obstacles to decency by which I was surrounded” and blushed with mortification at his own appearance.

Newton therefore felt little loyalty to his superiors. The sinewy physical giant who wished to remain in the rear frustrated his officers. But if they wanted to shoot him, at the same time they needed him. Newton was popular and held sway over the men, enough so that upon conscription Welborn had designated him fourth sergeant of the company. In fact, Newton showed the makings of a good soldier: he had an unbreakable constitution, an unerring eye through a gun sight, and a capacity for hard marching. He performed his
duties well enough that he was shortly promoted to third sergeant, though that may have had as much to do with the sickness in the company. As a sergeant, Knight was required to study Hardee’s
Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics
and learned how to issue basic drill commands: “Attention, company! Shoulder—arms!”

Knight’s dual roles as sergeant and hospital orderly kept him busy given the poor health of the unit as it moved toward Corinth. Among his responsibilities was dosing his comrades with the standard, crude army remedies for their ills. “I went around giving the sick soldiers blue mass and calomel and castor oil and quinine,” he said. “That was about all the medicine we had then.”

At night, the field hospital staff pitched a small tent, about fourteen feet square with about eight cots. There wasn’t much temptation for men to malinger with medical excuses, as there were no sheets or pillows, just rough-fibered army blankets, and no one had heard yet of sanitizing. Too long a stay on one of those cots was likely to give a man an infection if he didn’t already have one.

The next morning, after reveille, the doctors determined who was fit to march. Newton distributed bitter-tasting drafts, made of various powders stirred into tepid water. Often, medicines were unavailable, owing to the Union blockade, and ether and chloroform were too expensive to use on common soldiers. An array of small bottles was lined on temporary shelving, holding herbs and home remedies. There was Dover’s powder, quinine, rhubarb, Rochelle salts, castor oil, sugar of lead, tannin, sulphate of copper, sulphate of zinc, camphor, tincture of iron, camphorata, syrup of squills, simple syrup, and an assortment of alcohols—whiskey, brandy, port wine, and sherry. For those suffering with nervous disorders, there was the herb valerian, or perhaps some opium, to induce calm and sleep.

Newton changed bandages, read the Bible to men who requested it, and found water for the ailing. His disposition mattered more than medical knowledge. With death so common, doctors became calloused, and the soldiers resented them, believing they were butchers who “kills mores than they cour,” as an Alabaman put it. Captain
Walter A. Rorer of the 20th Mississippi, who had fought at Shiloh, flatly despised them. “There is nothing held by them so cheap as human life, and all seem to think if they do not murder men directly, they are not responsible,” he wrote. A compassionate orderly was a wounded soldier’s best friend.

But Newton knew he was going to have to fight eventually, whether he wanted to or not. The 7th Battalion was marching in a force of 22,000 men led by Van Dorn on a circuitous route to his great object, Corinth. As part of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Division, Newton was under the immediate command of General Sterling Price, another pugnacious staff officer who craved conflict. He had already led Newton into battle once, at Iuka two weeks earlier.

Price was a thickset Missourian who stood six foot two and weighed nearly three hundred pounds, with a face shaped like a lamb chop and swirls of white-gray hair at his temples that plunged downward into cottony sideburns. He struck one Mississippi lieutenant colonel as a “hale, hearty, handsome old farmer,” and his Missouri soldiers called him “Old Pap,” for his grandfatherly appearance. But he had a vehement temperament and was prone to grandiosity. A few months earlier, he had demanded preferment from Jefferson Davis by slamming his fist down on the presidential desk, shouting, “I will surprise you, sir!” His sense of entitlement was based on a widely varied career as a lawyer, hotelier, tobacco planter, congressman, veteran of the Mexican War, and governor of Missouri. He was portentous. When shown the fortifications of Corinth built by Beauregard, he said, “I only saw anything like them but once and I took them.” Although he initially opposed secession, he turned fanatic, and at the end of the war he would choose exile in Mexico over surrender.

In mid-September, Price had stormed his men into Iuka, swaggeringly advising his troops that if the Yankees had “the impudence to come near,” to shoot at their knees. But the battle had been a near disaster: they had almost been trapped by federal pincers led by Grant and General William Rosecrans.

Newton and the 7th Mississippi Battalion had been among the last to arrive on the field, shortly before nightfall. The firing had subsided, but he witnessed the toll of it in the dim twilight, and heard it too, from the thousands of wailing wounded. The moon had been full that night, shining on pale corpses and dark humps of dead horses. Confederate losses were as high as 520 killed and 1,300 wounded, while the Union reported 141 killed and 613 wounded. Before dawn, the men had been shaken awake with orders to withdraw. Price, badly outnumbered, had been fortunate that an entire arm of the Union force under General Edward O. C. Ord had remained idle due to an acoustic topographical fluke, unable to hear the sounds of battle from behind a hill. Price seized the opportunity to escape down an open road, and the sleepy, unnerved men went tramping back the way they came.

Ever since then, they had been on a wearisome circular journey. Price had given his men just two days’ rest before putting them on the rapid march again, this time to Ripley, twenty miles north, for a rendezvous with Van Dorn and the attack on Corinth. “Without waiting to fix things up and get together our old men we again started on a more foolhardy expedition than the last,” said one staff officer.

Capricious weather and the pace of the march told on the men. At first, it rained as Newton and comrades trudged over the steep hills of northern Mississippi. They arrived at Ripley footsore and mud soaked, and with ill will toward their commanders after marching for seven hours at a stretch, “at night thru rain and darkness so black you could scarcely see your hand.” They slept on wet ground, with no idea of why they were heading north with such urgency. “It is manifest that Gen Price is
fast losing
the
confidence
of all his soldiers,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Columbus Sykes, a cotton planter serving with the 43rd Mississippi in the same brigade as Newton, to his wife Pauline. Finally, the rain had cleared and a high, hot sun had dried the roads. By the evening of October 2, the trudging columns sent up swirls of choking dust that parched throats and made it hard to breathe.

Buck Van Dorn was a “harebrained” and “thick skulled” strategist, to borrow a description from historian Shelby Foote. He had been nearly thrown out of West Point before finishing fifty-second in his class of fifty-six, and he preferred horse racing to the drudgery of logistics, which made him ill suited to lead such a large coordinated attack. By the morning of October 3, 1862, his personal unevenness was catching up with him, and he would emerge from the impending battle facing charges of negligence. In Van Dorn’s haste to get to Corinth, he failed to take into account the undulating, heavily wooded terrain and how fatiguing such a forced march was as a preamble to battle. In his hurry, he also failed to ensure the men had adequate food and drink.

After mess, Newton and the men fell into a short, exhausted sleep. At 4:00 a.m. on the morning of October 3, they were awoken for the final leg of the march. As they covered the last ten miles toward Corinth, the sun drew up in the sky and the temperature reached ninety degrees. The sandy roads were so hot that the men could feel the heat through their boot soles, and dust rose up like smoke. To make matters worse, it was almost completely dry for several miles around Corinth. There was no water for the men to refill their canteens. After a scorching hike, the footsore, dry-throated troops approached the town. The 7th Battalion moved across a broad triangle of ground between the two train tracks, pressing through heavy woods and undergrowth, broken by occasional pastures. Ahead, they could see the outer breastworks of Corinth, full of Yankees.

With a hoarse shout of orders and a jangle of equipment, Newton and the rest of Company F formed their line of battle.

October 3, 1862, 9:00 a.m., Corinth

The 25,000 Union troops
garrisoned in Corinth were no happier or healthier than the rebels who had been there. General William Rosecrans, not satisfied with the already formidable defenses, put
the men to work with axes and shovels, building a ring of batteries, large earthen bulwarks mounted with twenty-pound Parrott guns, around the circumference of town. The approaches were littered with felled timber, called “abatis,” to slow attackers. The landscape was one of open desolation, fields of nothing but hacked-off tree stumps.

The northern men had suffered just as much from the heat and impure water of Corinth, with a sickness rate of 35 percent. Their rations were no better either; they existed on salt pork or beef unless they could supplement their diet from the surrounding countryside, already largely picked clean by the rebels. One Iowan who went foraging could find nothing but muscadine grapes. “Had grape pie for supper,” he reported.

Once again, the Tishomingo Hotel became a hospital, and the federal infantrymen believed their doctors were just as incompetent as the rebels did. To Hugh Carlisle of the 81st Ohio, they were perpetrators of malpractice and dispensed the same ineffectual powders no matter what the ailment. He refused to take his medicine. “You must think I am a damn fool,” the surgeon said to him.

“You must be a mind reader,” Carlisle replied.

Many of the occupiers of Corinth were seeing the Deep South for the first time, and they examined it with curiosity. Corinth was a hub for seized cotton, and huge poofed bales sat on the train platforms in front of the Tishomingo, ready to send north. The town was also a destination for “contrabands,” scores of slaves who fled or stole away from their plantations with the Yankee invasion of Mississippi and came to the Union lines seeking freedom. They staggered into Corinth in rags and on bare feet, or rode in bunches on mules and buckboards. “It is all humbug about Slaves liking to stay with their masters,” an Ohio colonel discovered. “Men and women and children run off whenever they get a chance.”