The State of Jones (34 page)

Ten thousand Union soldiers, many of them blacks who had mustered into U.S. Colored Infantry regiments during the war, occupied the towns and villages of Mississippi’s interior to enforce order, a daily affront to rebels and a reminder of their defeat. A detachment of the 70th U.S. Colored Infantry set up camp in Ellisville in full view of the white portico of the Deason home. Local Confederates stared balefully at the occupiers, and at Newton, as he conducted his official business with them.

Their bitterness was heaped on top of scarcity—the state was prostrate. Whole villages had been burned to the ground, until even
the roads were black with ash. In Lake Station, the destruction was so complete there was no sign it had ever been there. A resident tried “to get someone to make an affidavit that his town had existed” before the war. Corinth was a “bruised and battered village surrounded by stumpy fields, forts, earthworks, and graves,” where “lonely white women crouched shivering over the hearth,” according to one traveler. In Natchez, multimillionaires had become paupers. One planter, his sons killed and servants fled, chopped down the oak trees in front of his manse to sell as firewood to passing steamers. “I must live,” he said. After five years of war Mississippi had become the poorest state in the Union. The whole town of Okolona could be purchased for five thousand dollars, and so many planters were ruined that in December the
Vicksburg Herald
advertised forty-eight plantations for sale or lease.

A third of Mississippi’s Confederates, some 28,000 men, had died during the war. Entire companies had been slaughtered: Of the 123 men who had marched off with the Vicksburg Cadets, just 6 returned. In Aberdeen, the home of Walter Rorer, a visitor asked a local planter named Charles Langworthy the whereabouts of his five boys.

“Where is John, your oldest son?”

“Killed at Shiloh.”

“Where is William?”

“Died of smallpox.”

“And the other boys?”

“All were killed …”

Langworthy had two daughters; both were in mourning, their husbands dead as well.

Those who came back were maimed—more than half of Mississippi veterans had lost a leg or arm. Men hobbled home with sleeves and pants legs flapping, like scarecrows emptied of their straw, vacant cloth bunched and pinned to their sides. The male populace was so mutilated that in 1866 one-fifth of the state budget would be needed to purchase artificial limbs. As the sickened and disfigured
veterans shuffled over the blackened roads on foot, many of them all the way from Atlanta or Mobile, still more of them died by the roadsides. Indeed, in some places it was more common to see a dead man than a squirrel or bird.

In Jones, it was rare to find a fence standing or a field with crops growing. The corn “was so rotten even the horses wouldn’t eat it,” according to a Piney Woods farmer. Local families were so penniless that yeoman wives clawed the soil from the floors of their smokehouses and boiled it for the salt. Small children tried to shove handfuls of dirt in their mouths. “After the war this country was as flat, I reckon, as ever one country could be,” recalled Ben Graves.

Newton worked to get the county back on its feet. He emerged from his meetings with U.S. Army officers favored with an official appointment as “commissioner to procure relief for the destitute,” which empowered him to requisition thousands of pounds of supplies from the federal supply depot at Meridian. On July 16, 1865, a Union captain signed a bill of lading for Newton, who shipped the following goods by the M&O Railroad:

Newton delivered wagons full of the bacon, beans, flour, and salt to the starved citizens of Jones. Word of his role as a provider must have spread rapidly, because five days later a Union officer asked him to perform a similar service in Smith County. Captain John Fairbanks, a young Bostonian stationed with the 72nd U.S. Colored Infantry in the county seat of Raleigh, enlisted Newton’s help there in aiding a local widow and her children, who were suffering badly from hunger:

Newton must have performed the errand without hesitation, because three days later Fairbanks turned to him again, this time with a more substantial mission. He wanted Newton to assist a local black family in reclaiming their children from a grudging former master.

A Smith County planter was holding two children against their will and preparing to move away with them. It was a common problem in the summer of 1865: ex-slaveholders refused to turn loose the men and women they still considered property, especially children. Under new federal regulations, whites were supposed to sign contracts with their black employees, but some defiant planters resisted this transition to free labor and found a loophole in the fact that no contracts were required for children. Planters began to separate black children from their families so they could be worked as slaves.

It was a testament to Newton’s muscle in the Piney Woods that the parents believed he could get their children back. Fairbanks gave Newton the military authority to do so in a written order:

Newton delivered the children back to their parents, according to his son just one of many instances in which he settled sensitive matters between whites and former slaves. At around this same time, Newton received another entreaty to rescue a captive black child, this one held by a recalcitrant Smith County family named Mayfield. “I remember seeing an old Negro man and his wife come crying one day to see my father and to get his assistance in effecting the release of his boy,” Tom Knight recalled. The couple begged Newton to help them; now that they were free they wanted to leave the plantation, but Mr. Mayfield refused to allow their boy to go.

The Mayfields, John and his son Tom, were ruined; their large prewar plantation once worth almost $25,000 was reduced to a stub-bled wasteland valued at just $1,500. One can only imagine the unreasoning wrath of John and the humiliation of his heir to this spoil, teenager Tom—inheritance gone, position gone, authority gone—as the dirt-farming deserter Newton Knight prevailed in the matter of the boy.

“He [Mayfield] wanted to keep the boy as he was raised on his place and he felt he had a right to keep him,” Tom Knight remembered. “But my father told him that as long as the Negroes were slaves he had a right to keep him, but since they had been freed he had no further right to hold the Negroes or their boy.”

Newton’s interference infuriated local Confederates, and he soon found that his new position as a government man and public protector of blacks was hardly less dangerous than his old one of fugitive. Confederate marauders continued to roam the state through the spring and summer of 1865, murdering freedmen and attacking Unionists. “Mississippians have been shooting and cutting each other … to a greater extent than in all the other states of the union put together,” a federal inspector reported.

Newton had reason to fear for his life when he rode into Ellisville on business. According to one family account, his appearance in town one Saturday in the immediate postwar period nearly provoked a race riot. The usual white loiterers hung around outside the general store, sunburned men with plugs of tobacco in their cheeks,
farmers in frayed homespun, and unrepentant veterans who persisted in wearing their gray. But also loafing and strolling along the sidewalk were newly freed blacks, “decked out in the best they had, and putting on an air of importance.” Emotional crosscurrents collided in the street: Unionists and blacks were exultant, while the Confederates still choked on the bile of military surrender.

The sight of Newton and some of his men trotting down the street on horseback, showing off the fresh mounts and saddles they had been given as rewards for their Union loyalty, sent the blacks “into a state of jubilancy … song and laughter, and cheers broke out from the congregation.” But not everyone in town was happy to see Newton, or his black friends, celebrating in the street. Suddenly, a pistol shot rang out. “The songs died, the grins vanished, and so did the Freedmen.”

Newton further inflamed Confederate feelings against him when he used his influence to get rebel bureaucrats turned out of their jobs. He petitioned the new provisional governor, William Sharkey, to discard the results of the Confederate elections that had been held in October 1864, arguing that the rebels had denied citizens the right to vote. He proposed that all new county officers—loyal ones—be appointed. Newton reminded the governor that the Jones County Scouts had held “true and loyal to the Union,” even when the name of Jones was “cast out as evil throughout the land,” and had suffered for their allegiance.

“We stood firm to the Union when secession swept as an avalanche over the state,” the petition said. “For this cause alone we have been treated as savages instead of freemen by the rebel authorities.”

Newton’s was the first signature. His was followed by sixty more, including those of Jasper Collins, Will Sumrall, and several other members of the guerrilla band. Their plea was successful: Sharkey followed Newton’s recommendation and appointed Jasper’s elder brother Vinson as judge of probate. He named another of Newton’s allies, Thomas Huff, as the new Jones County sheriff.

The local rebels were beside themselves to see men they considered
low criminals gain ascendancy. A faction of Newton’s old enemies soon retaliated. Joel E. Welborn, the secessionist surgeon John M. Baylis, and members of the Fairchild and McGilvery families wrote their own petition to Sharkey, smearing Newton and his men. They were nothing more than “outlaws who have been engaged in murder and pillage during the war, and who have stated frequently that they would not submit to authority of any kind.” Vinson Collins, they contended, was “by relationships and sympathy … heart and hand with those who have been guilty of those acts of outlawry.” Sharkey was not persuaded. He decided to let the appointments stand until new elections were held in the fall.

The feuding continued. Next, Newton wielded his authority against Amos Deason. Backed by an order from a Union officer, Newton impounded a sizable store of Confederate wool and denim cloth held by Deason, which the merchant no doubt hoped to sell for profit.

It must have been a moment of exquisite justice for Newton, and an insult beyond galling for the merchant prince of Ellisville. Instead of sneaking around the side of the house as a guerrilla, Newton stalked up the elegant steps, and perhaps even across the pinewood floors that had been discolored by Amos McLemore’s blood, and seized the cloth as the sanctioned arm of military power. For years, Confederates had seized goods from yeoman farmers and left them with nothing, and now the situation was reversed.

Deason challenged the seizure, and for the next three weeks charges and countercharges flew back and forth. Three different officers wrote out orders for Newton to hold the cloth in his possession until the question was legally settled. Finally, Newton’s actions were upheld as proper under military orders, and the cloth became the property of the U.S. government.

But the Confederates exacted a unique form of payback. In the autumn of 1865 the unregenerate John Baylis and Joel Welborn launched a campaign to symbolically purge all traces of Unionism from Jones County. They petitioned the legislature to change the county name from Jones to Davis, and the county seat from Ellisville to Leesburg, in honor of the Confederate president and general. The gesture was plainly intended “for a slur on so many union people living here,” said resident Maddie Bush.

Baylis, Welborn, and 104 other Confederate citizens, including a dozen men who had served with McLemore, declared themselves mortified by the county’s Unionist activities. The county name had become “notorious if not infamous at least to sensitive ears.” The signees asked that the petition be recorded by the legislature so there would be no doubt they were loyal Confederates.

The Confederates won the battle over names. In a disturbing sign of what was to come, in December of 1865 the legislature erased
Jones County’s name from the official record, and for the next three years, it was known for one of the most famous traitors in American history. That the legislature ratified the censure of Jones was a measure of resurgent Confederate political strength—and reflected the statewide view of Jones as a den of traitors and serfs.