The State of Jones (37 page)

“Of course the colored people up to that time were thoroughly united under the loyal leagues, and under the influence of those men from the North, who came down there and took part in the politics of the state, and those southern men who joined with them,” Gibbs said. “… They were as much subject to their leaders in politics as to commands as they were subject to their masters before the war. It is their natural disposition, being an ignorant people, to be led. They were naturally attracted to these men, on account of the gratitude they felt to the republican party of the North for what they considered their actual enfranchisement.”

The first meeting of the Loyal League Club of Jones was probably held in secrecy in a barn or a church, or perhaps even in a swamp hideout for reasons of safety. Descriptions of other Union League clubs suggest the scene: At the front of the darkened room stood a pine table, and next to it a chair. Someone would have brought copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, which were placed on the table with a Bible. Beside the table stood an official United States flag, attached to a pole whittled out of a tree branch.

Newton would have been one of the few white men at the meeting, if not the only one. It was a small congregation, and nervous, given the attitude of ex-Confederates toward blacks congregating in political meetings. The men in the room ranged from seventeen-year-old boys to old men, and most of them had likely helped the Jones County Scouts in one way or another during the war. Joe Hatton would likely have been there.

The meeting opened with a recitation from the Bible and a brief prayer. Then, in their first order of business, members may have voted to stockpile weapons and resume drilling in order to defend themselves against the KKK and rifle clubs, who were becoming increasingly antagonistic. New names were discussed for membership into the League, and there was a discussion, too, of which local men to beware of. Most of the meeting was devoted to political education. Newton might have read aloud from an old issue of a newspaper. They discussed their legal rights against white employers and the individual rights clauses of the Constitution and traded the names and whereabouts of sympathetic agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Leaguers agreed to convene monthly, and the meeting adjourned after everyone sang “Battle Cry of Freedom.”

By Election Day, matters were so tense that Newton took his shotgun when he went to vote at Smith’s Store, and so did a number of his men. They ran into a band of Democrats, and a murderous dispute threatened to break out. “I remember when there was an election once Newt belonged to the Republican party, he called himself a union man and was a full-fledged Republican,” Ben Graves recalled. “… Him and his crowd carried their guns to this election. Very few Democrats voted. I thought they were going to have a fight at Smith’s old store … Newt’s crowd had their guns and hid them out when they could and they tot up a big argument and used pretty rough language.” But they quashed the quarrel before any serious trouble could break out, probably thanks to the authoritative presence of old Vinson Collins.

Grant won with less than 53 percent of the vote—the Klan effectively suppressed the black vote in large swaths, but Unionist strongholds put him over the top. Newton’s feelings on hearing of Grant’s victory weren’t recorded, but relief was surely one of them, and more than that, hope for his two families. Four days after the election another idealist dirt farmer, this one in South Carolina, expressed sentiments that Newton undoubtedly shared: “I am … a native borned … a poor man never owned a Negro in my life … I
am hated and despised for nothing else but my loyalty to the mother government … But I rejoice to think that God almighty has given to the poor … [a] Gov. to hear to feel to protect the humble poor without distinction to race or color.”

Grant’s election meant a victory for Newton personally: he again became one of the most influential men in the Piney Woods. Grant appointed Adelbert Ames, a Union war hero, as Mississippi’s provisional governor, and Ames began awarding state offices to Union loyalists and blacks. Newton’s former comrade Will Sumrall became assistant U.S. marshal for Jones County. The onetime guerrilla and Unionist Prentice Bynum was named clerk of the circuit court. Another ally, B. A. Mathews, became a probate judge.

It seemed to Newton and his friends that they would be able to remake the state. In 1870 Mississippi at last approved a new constitution that abolished the Black Codes and upheld federal laws guaranteeing civil and voting rights. Blacks won election as sheriffs, mayors, and magistrates, and by 1873 there would be sixty-four black men occupying seats in the statehouse. The former slave John Roy Lynch became a justice of the peace in Natchez and would eventually rise to speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives. The now heavily Republican state legislature also selected two new U.S. senators. One was the minister and teacher Hiram Revels, sent, in a spectacular bit of social justice, to complete the term Jefferson Davis had left unfinished. The other was Adelbert Ames.

Newton now had influential friends not just in the statehouse, but the nation’s capital. He was confident enough of their backing that he devoted the next three years to pursuing some dangerously controversial public issues. The first was a small matter, but one that burned: he and his allies petitioned the state to restore the names of Jones County and Ellisville. The legislature approved and the short, inglorious reign of Davis County and Leesburg was over.

Next, Newton felt confident enough to press a case on behalf of himself and his men for compensation as Union soldiers. In 1871 three staunch Republicans in Washington personally took Newton’s
case to Congress and introduced bills in the Senate and House of Representatives in his behalf. The bills called for “the relief of Newton Knight and others, citizens of Mississippi” in return for their “services as officers and members of Knight’s company, United States infantry.” It requested payment of $21,150 for fifty-five men, first and foremost $2,000 for Newton.

Newton didn’t include all of the 125 or so men who had fought with the Scouts. Instead he made a list of those he felt had served most reliably throughout the war, and perhaps those who were most needy. He left off some men because “they did not hold out faithful and the Capt would not send their names,” according to Jones County probate judge B. A. Mathews, who helped Newton pursue the claim.

The legislators who took up Newton’s cause in Congress were classic Republican abolitionists, or “carpetbaggers.” They each saw something worthy in the plight of the Mississippi dirt farmer and “Southern Yankee” who had been so isolated among rebels during the war. Representative Legrand W. Perce was a Chicago lawyer and ex-Union colonel who had helped capture a supply train during the war and stayed in Mississippi after serving in the Gulf district to establish a law practice in Natchez, where he was elected to Congress for two terms. Albert Howe was a Massachusetts abolitionist and a Yale graduate and another Union officer who settled in Mississippi and won postbellum office; he was also a particular friend of Adelbert Ames’s.

George Washington Whitmore’s support of Newton was more coincidental; a lawyer and representative from the first congressional district in Texas and a former slaveholder, he had no apparent connection to Mississippi and introduced his bill because Perce had arrived on the floor too late to do it himself and handed the task off to his colleague. But Whitmore shared this much with Newton: he too had suffered persecution and imprisonment as a Unionist in the South, and therefore he understood the price the Jones County Scouts had paid for their loyalty. Whitmore had argued stridently
against Texas secession as state legislator and remained such a voluble Unionist during the war that Confederate authorities finally arrested him in 1863 and jailed him for nearly a year—without formal charges or trial.

Parochial Republicans also supported Newton’s case by writing letters in his behalf and attesting to his loyalty. Among them was a feisty, colorful judge named William M. Hancock, who kept his courtroom in order with a pistol. Hancock handwrote a letter in Newton’s behalf to Perce, assuring him that the case was worth supporting. “He is an honest and clever man and is a staunch Republican and during the Rebellion was a union man and the recognized leader of the union party in this county and it was generally reported that he held a military office in the U.S. military service,” Hancock wrote to Perce. “You may rely upon any statement he may make to you in regard to any matter he may write to you about.”

Eventually even the illustrious Ames took a personal interest in Newton. Ames introduced yet another bill in Newton’s behalf on the floor of the Senate on December 18, 1873. He would become so involved in the effort to recompense him that copies of Newton’s roster and a flurry of communications still survive in his personal papers. But the Republican lawmakers failed to get the measure passed. It was shuffled from one committee to another—Judiciary, to Military Affairs, to Claims—with no action. Despite a raft of evidence—Newton provided General McMillen’s name and the written orders he received from Union officers who occupied Jones just after the surrender—Northern legislators were simply dubious that a band of poor white Southern farmers had aided the Union.

Despite the federal government’s failure to recognize his allegiance, Newton would demonstrate it again and again during Reconstruction—even at peril of his life. He would be one of the few white native Mississippians to remain loyal and useful to Ames during the next few years, years in which the federal government abandoned both men and unreconstructed Confederates sought to control the state with a campaign of murder and terror disguised as politics.

Newton’s boldest public act in the years 1871 to 1873, and one on which he staked his personal safety, was a campaign to organize and build an integrated school. Newton’s children were now of schooling age, and he was just as concerned with Rachel’s family as Serena’s. He had gradually come to feel as married to Rachel, if not more so, and they were in the midst of rapidly expanding their family. By 1875 Newton and Rachel would have five children together: Martha Ann (1865), Stewart (1869), Floyd (1870), Augusta Ann (1873), and Hinchie (1875).

For Klanners and white supremacists, black education was a focus of special fury. It was the generous Mississippian who viewed education for blacks as anything but useless, if not trouble. “A monkey with his tail off is a monkey still,” the
Natchez Courier
opined.

In Okolona, an Episcopal minister who tried to teach some young blacks had four shots fired at him. On the night of March 9, 1871, in Aberdeen, a Northern teacher named Allen P. Huggins was called out of his house by a circle of white-robed men. They were “gentlemanly fellows, men of cultivation, well-educated, a much different class of men than I ever supposed I would meet in a K-Klux gang,” Huggins said, but their message was not gentle. They told him they did not like his “radical ways” and the fact that he had instituted public schooling and was trying to “educate the Negroes.” He had ten days to leave the state or they would kill him.

Huggins replied he would leave when he was ready. In response, one of the men undid a stirrup leather from his horse and began to beat Huggins with it, saying he was “just such a man as they liked to pound.” On the seventy-fifth blow, Huggins passed out. He came to with pistols aimed at him and a chorus of voices warning him that if they laid eyes on him after ten days, he was dead. The beating left Huggins hobbled for a week but unbowed; he testified to the event before Congress and returned deputized as a U.S. marshal and began to round up Klanners for arrest.

In the summer of 1872 Newton was also deputized marshal, and though no record survives to tell us why, it’s likely that Klan violence
had visited the Piney Woods and that he acquired a badge to deal with it. A certificate shows that on July 6, 1872, he received an appointment as U.S. marshal for the “Southern District, Miss.” His son Tom remembered that Newton “was appointed Provost Marshal … with authority to call out troops of the United States Infantry to put down riots or any other troubles he could not stop … he served for several years during these reconstruction days.”

At first, Newton’s neighbors had sought his advice and cooperation in building a new school. Every two or three miles in Jones and Jasper counties there was a family with children, including those of some of the men he had ridden with in the war. He and his old friends decided to split the cost and the work of raising the schoolhouse. “He was a kind-hearted man, and he was a man of good judgment, and was looked upon as being the leader of his community in matters of schools and other local affairs,” Tom Knight remembered. Newton hewed beams and split logs for benches and contributed to the hiring of a teacher at a salary of ten dollars a month, the cost of which would be shared equally, along with his board.

On the first day of the term, Newton sent his children to school—and Rachel’s children went with them. Parents who accompanied their young to the schoolhouse door were startled to see Rachel’s son Jeff and daughters Georgeanne and Fannie file into the building. When some of the white parents angrily asked Rachel’s children what they thought they were doing, they replied that their mother had sent them.

The teacher flatly announced that he refused to instruct them. Rachel’s children were ordered out of the building. “Go home and tell your mother the school doesn’t accept Negroes,” they were told.

Newton was apparently outraged by the insult: he had put his sweat and labor into building the school for the common benefit of the neighbors’ children, yet they refused the same benefits to his and Rachel’s children. Rachel had protected the lives of some of those white men during the war. Their edict against race mixing in the classroom seemed the height of moral hypocrisy: plenty of
Piney Woods yeomen had sired children with Negro blood—racial intermingling was surely all right with them when it came to sex. The difference was that they refused to take responsibility for their progeny, while Newton took care of his.