The State of Jones (38 page)

By one account, a day later the school, which still smelled of fresh-cut pine, went up in a bonfire. The embers were still glowing as word spread that Newton Knight had set the fire “because he wished the Negroes to have equal opportunity,” according to one of his descendants.

Newton stopped talking to his neighbors over the school. It was the last straw for him—he had come to feel estranged from most local whites and more comfortable among blacks, with whom he shared an understanding of Unionism and democratic ideals. Martha Wheeler, the former Knight slave, said, “He had a complete break with the whites because he undertook to send several of his Negro children to a white school he had been instrumental in building.”

In 1873 Ames ran
for governor of Mississippi, campaigning on one part ambition and one part conviction that he had a “mission with a capital M” in protecting the rights of freedmen. “I found that the Negros who had been declared free by the United States were not free, in fact they were living under a code that made them worse than slaves,” Ames said. “… They had no rights that were respected by white men.” Ames believed that he could be of practical use “in securing their actual freedom.”

His opponent in the gubernatorial election was James Lusk Al-corn, the sleek cotton trader and former Confederate whose pose as a conciliatory moderate had helped him to win the governorship in 1870. But Ames viewed Alcorn as a turncoat and an opportunist, evidence of which was his refusal to crack down on the Ku Klux Klan.

Ames shuddered at what had happened during one year of Al-corn’s tenure alone: by his count, thirty Negro schoolhouses and churches were burned down and sixty-three men killed. One of the
very worst outbreaks of Klan violence occurred in 1871 in Meridian, where a large population of ex-slaves had formed a strong Loyal League. The Klan used the trial of three blacks for arson as an excuse for a rampage, opening fire in the courtroom and killing the Republican judge as well as several spectators, throwing one defendant from a roof and slashing the throat of another. Over three days they cut down “all the leading colored men of the town with one or two exceptions.” They left twenty-five black corpses in the street.

Ames ran on a state ticket that included three black candidates for high office, and he promised the safeguarding of rights, public education, and a program of public works. Black voters responded by sweeping him into office decisively. Alcorn’s own field hands voted against him. They also elected ten new black state senators and fifty-five black representatives to the state legislature, along with fifteen carpetbaggers. White Republicans like Newton were crucial to the victory; they helped to organize and protect black voters. In Jasper County, Ames edged out Alcorn by eight votes, 642 to 634. “The negros did go up there and vote at the election just as the whites,” remembered Ben Graves.

As Ames began his governorship, he must have seemed incapable of failure to Newton. He was just thirty-eight, but his record suggested enormous capabilities. The son of a Maine sea captain, he had graduated fifth in his class at West Point and served dauntlessly through sixteen major Civil War battles. He earned the Medal of Honor for his actions at Bull Run, where he fought to the point of fainting despite being shot through the thigh, and he was at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, where he led a brigade on the front line for three straight days. By the end of the war he was a brevetted major general and “the closest thing to a Galahad” in the Union army.

An aide-de-camp said of him, “He was the beau ideal of a division commander, and as such there was no more gallant and efficient officer in the armies of the Union. Every one who rode with him soon discovered that Ames never hesitated to take desperate chances
under fire. He seemed to have a life that was under some mystic protection. Although he never permitted anything to stand in his way, and never asked men to go where he would not go himself, still his manner was always cool, calm, and gentlemanly. Under the heaviest fire, when men and officers were being stricken down around him, he would sit on his horse, apparently unmoved by singing rifle ball, shrieking shot, or bursting shell, and quietly give his orders, which were invariably communicated in the most polite way, and generally in the form of a request.”

Now Ames was the picture of a young statesman, with long brunet hair swept behind his ears, the luxuriant drooping mustache of a tycoon, and thought-shadowed eyes, perhaps the lingering effect of so much war. Though not strictly handsome, he cut a commanding figure, and he had swept up one of the belles of Washington, D.C., in Blanche Butler, the daughter of the Union general and conqueror of New Orleans Benjamin Butler. She began to visit the Senate gallery, where
Harper’s Weekly
sketched Ames bending over her. As his wife she would support his political career devotedly though she despised Mississippi, which she considered the home of pestilence, lard, traitors, and socialite cats. “All are lynx-eyed, and one is always polite and kindly, but constantly on guard,” she said.

But though Ames prevailed in the election, Republicanism was still under threat in the state. On the same day Ames and his allies were elected, Mississippi also sent the cinder-eyed Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar to the U.S. House of Representatives. The classic Mississippi Bourbon, a former Confederate general and defender of slavery, railed against “strangers” like Ames. Lamar labeled the new governor’s Republican majority the “blackest tyranny that ever cursed this earth.”

Lamar typified the long-held attitude of white conservatives to interfering outsiders. It was summed up by
The Nation
, which warned, “If any man from the North comes down here expecting to hold and maintain radical or abolitionist sentiments, let him expect to be shot down from behind the first time he leaves his home.”

Newton was not a stranger, but he held radical and abolitionist sentiments, and for that, his enemies tried to assassinate him. As Ames took possession of the governor’s office, Newton began to go to Jackson on state business for three and four weeks at a time. In addition to his duties as a U.S. marshal, according to his son Tom, he acquired a position as federal revenue collector, and it became a common sight to see him on the exchange platform at the Newton Station crossroad, waiting for the rail car to the capital. But his habits attracted attention.

As Newton idled on the platform one afternoon, two men eyed him, and he overheard them talking. “That’s Newton Knight, let’s go get some more men and take him out and kill him,” one said. Certain they meant to return with a gang to waylay him, Newton hurriedly hid himself behind some cotton bales on the loading platform. When the train arrived he dashed out from behind the cotton and ran for the rail car like a hobo. Just when he leaped on the train, a half dozen men arrived to ambush him. As the train pulled away, he heard one of them say, “If we don’t catch him this trip we’ll get him on the return.”

Newton related the episode to Ames, who gave him a pistol and advised him to buy a new double-barrel while he was in Jackson. Ames also suggested he trick his pursuers by getting a haircut and a shave. Newton did as Ames recommended: a barber cropped his long hair to his collar and removed his heavy whiskers, leaving just a mustache. The transformation in his appearance was startling. “When he stepped from the train at Newton with his new gun shining no one seemed to know him, neither did they ask any questions,” his son recounted. Newton was so altered that when he arrived at home, even “we children did not know him,” Tom wrote.

After this incident Newton began traveling incognito. For the first time in his life, Newton wore “store-bought shirts, finely tucked down the front,” a gray fedora, and boots that shined like a pool of oil in the morning sun.

It seemed that every gun-packing backwoodsman with a grudge
in the Piney Woods wanted to take him on. One of Newton’s old foes paid a local tough to accost him, under the guise of offering him a drink. The fellow played drunk, waving a bottle of whiskey around his head as he invited Newton to partake. Newton declined—he didn’t drink. But the man insisted, and kept waving the bottle, until Newton suspected he was looking for an opportunity to smash him with it. Newton stared the man down with his chill blue eyes, tracking the movements of the bottle. Unnerved, the man said, “God, Newt Knight, don’t you ever wink your eyes?”

“Not when I’m looking at your sort of cattle,” he said.

Newton believed one attempt on his life came close to succeeding. He was doing some trading at a general store in Ellisville when two men approached him, offering hearty handshakes and claps on the back. They were “mighty glad” to see the great Newton Knight, they said, who was talked about as the bravest man who had ever lived. They introduced themselves as photographers and said they had heard tales of his daring, how he had eluded the cavalry. They wanted to capture the famous man on film, and they had brought a camera to take his portrait. They suggested he pose for them in the woods where he had ranged. Newton, flattered, agreed. The men hiked over to the woods on the edge of town and pressed on into the thickets. Finally, they stopped and asked Newton to strike a pose. Newton, growing suspicious, cradled his shotgun while they set up the camera.

One of them suggested Newton pose without his gun. Why didn’t the great man hand over the firearm?

“No, I’ll give my gun to no man,” Newton said, “but I will give you both barrels of what is in it if you don’t leave here and do it now.”

Newton drove his wagon back to his hilltop farm, where he told his family he wouldn’t be going off into the swamp “to have his picture made no more.” Too many so-called friends had betrayed him; from now on he would be mistrustful. He was becoming increasingly wary, and he cautioned his children against strangers who seemed overly friendly.

“Never allow any man to hug you … for he is likely pretending to be your friend when he really intends to do you harm and deceive you,” he said.

All that protected Newton was his lingering reputation as a dangerous man to deal with and his status as a federal agent. According to a descendant, “It was well known, and well understood, that if this man were openly slain, the Federal Government would take action, since he was an officer. Or a few of his old gang who remained faithful, would retaliate.”

Still, Newton felt threatened and knew his life hung in the balance. He grew so guarded he even began to carry a pistol to church.

“It’s best to go prepared for trouble,” he told his son, “and not wait until you get into it, when it’s too late.”

In October of 1875
, Governor Ames sat in his ornate, chandeliered office and read a letter in a scrawled, barely legible hand. The grammar was irregular and the spelling uneven—it was addressed to “Mr. Alebert Ames”—but the mistakes only conveyed the letter’s sentiments more powerfully. It was from one of his black constituents in Newton’s territory, Jasper County:

Ames was receiving hundreds of letters like it from all over Mississippi, and had been for weeks. They all reported the same thing: ex-Confederates and conservative Democrats were planning to retake the statehouse by force, using violence and intimidation against black voters. The Democratic campaign chairman, a former Confederate general named James Z. George, was turning the state elections of 1875 into a farce and doing it so successfully that it would become notorious as the “Mississippi Plan” and emulated by states throughout the South.

All over Mississippi white men were organizing, joining rifle clubs, and forming White Leagues pledged to preserve the color line. One of the more politically subtle groups was the taxpayers’ league, a collection of planters and businessmen who blamed Ames for skyrocketing land taxes and the presence of blacks in office and vowed to rid the state of “Republican corruptionists.” The movement was led by, among others, the ex-Confederate William L. Nugent, who had become a dedicated white supremacist. The subtext of the taxpayers’ league was clear: it wanted to replace the Ames administration with what one pundit called “Ku Klux democracy.”

Nugent had lost his wife, Nellie, whose health failed in 1866, but he had remarried and gradually rebuilt his life, launching such a prosperous law practice that in 1872 he moved into one of the largest mansions in Jackson, an edifice with pillars and wrought-iron balconies. In one of his most famous cases, Nugent defended a local theater that had denied seating to blacks. In January of 1875 Nugent helped organize a taxpayers’ league statewide convention. Men pounded the lectern as they called for the ouster of Republicans who inflicted tax burdens on them, especially taxes that went to educating the Negro. To Ames’s critics, Mississippi’s problems came down to just two things, carpetbaggers and Negroes. Run the Yankees out
of the state and restore the racial hierarchy, and all would be well. These “White Liners” could cloak their politics in discussions of tariffs, but Ames perceived their real cause: “The true sentiment of the assembly was ‘the color line,’” he said.

Ames’s government, like any, had its flaws. The state’s economy was bedeviled by chronic crop failures, and the Republican Party was rent by factionalism fueled by James Alcorn. Nevertheless, despite being met by opposition from antebellum leaders at almost every turn, Ames had accomplished much: he Johnny Appleseeded public education, built free hospitals, and was helping to lift Negroes from tenancy, and doing so in a state that was still razed by the war. If taxes were high, it was because every road and bridge needed to be rebuilt, and Mississippians desperately needed free schools and health care, without which they would never recover.