The State of Jones (9 page)

McLemore, Deason, and Baylis were all close to the crooked, fat-walleted Joel E. Welborn. The fifty-one-year-old Welborn’s adroit land trading made him huge profits, apparently by defrauding
his neighbors. Welborn was continually in court over land deals for which he collected large sums yet failed to surrender titles. In 1859, the local board of police charged him with fraud. By then, he already owned his staggering $36,000 in real estate.

Other members of their informal society included a merchant and future tax collector named William Fairchild and Jones County sheriff Nat Kilgore. These men would become the local enforcers of Confederate authority in Jones County. Their Holy Trinity was God, Mammon, and Slavery.

The young Newton Knight couldn’t have been further from these men socially or politically. He regarded the McLemores, Welborns, Deasons, and Kilgores as arrogant barons and minders of other people’s business, and he surely thought of them when he heard Psalm 18:27: “For thou dost deliver a humble people; but the haughty eyes thou dost bring down.”

Even before the war came to Jones County, class warfare and local feuding already existed between members of the Knight family and this clique. In 1858, when Newton was twenty-one, his hard-drinking uncle Daniel Knight assaulted Joel Welborn on three different occasions, for which he was hauled into court and fined. That same year, Sheriff Kilgore killed Daniel Knight’s brother-in-law, Tom Coleman, after Coleman resisted arrest on a gambling charge. Kilgore horsewhipped Coleman and stabbed him in the neck in Jackie Knight’s yard, where he had gone for protection.

The McLemores and Deasons in turn regarded Newton as poor white trash, an impression he didn’t particularly contradict. In a portrait of him as a young man, Newton seems intentionally to repudiate the convention of white respectability, presenting himself as slightly slovenly and rebellious: his disheveled black hair curls around his ears, his beard is untrimmed, and his suit coat is bunched and wrinkled. What’s unmistakable about him are his broad shoulders and outthrust chest and his straight, upright posture. He was one of the strongest men in Jones County—and the tallest—and proud of it. He could lift a three-hundred-pound hog to his shoulders, and
one can imagine him, like Abraham Lincoln, picking up a heavy ax by the handle and holding it horizontally without a quiver.

The portrait captured the conflicting facets of his emerging personality: the maturing Newton was a mix of tough and straitlaced, a ruffian yet a devout Christian, a fierce combatant when riled, but with a reputation for tenderness, a loner yet a generous neighbor whom others could count on for help. While his relatives drank hard, he abstained and was moderate in his habits. Nor did he cuss. “Never did hear him swear an oath,” his sister Martha said of him. “He always meant business. When he was to do anything he did it in a nice, smooth way.”

Like his father, Newton aspired to be nothing more than a dirt farmer and a good provider for his family. In 1858, at the same time his uncle Daniel was feuding with Welborn, Newton courted and wed a plain farmer’s daughter named Serena Turner, a poorer relation of the Welborns. Newton was not considered a catch. He was “no-account” because he didn’t possess a single slave. “If a girl’s parents owned negroes, she didn’t recognize Newt Knight any more than she would a Negro,” said Ben Graves.

Newton and Serena struck out on their own, moving a mile north of the Jones County line, into Jasper County. There, he built a small cabin with unpainted pine beams, cleared eight hundred dollars worth of land, and set about supporting his family, which grew quickly. Newton and Serena’s oldest son, George Mathew “Mat” Knight, was born in 1859, and twin boys, Thomas Jefferson and William E., came in 1860. By that time, Newton’s worldly wealth amounted to all of three hundred dollars. Planters would have described his home as “rigid in economy” if they were being polite, “impoverished” if not.

The joys of newlywed life were undercut by the constant concerns and drudgery of farming. According to his family, Newton was a gentle, conscientious father. But his marriage, though it eventually produced nine children, does not seem to have been a love affair, and his life with Serena would be difficult.

In photographs, Serena appears melancholic. She was angular, with a thin face, downturned mouth, and large ears that stood out asymmetrically on her head. She wore her hair center-parted and pulled back tightly into a bun, which accented her jug ears and long neck. She was grim faced and prematurely weary, no doubt from unrelieved toils in the fields, at the stove, and late into the night at the spinning wheel and loom. Altogether Serena resembled her house: she was “rigid in economy,” a portrait of a woman who spent her entire life working.

It’s impossible to say what Newton did, or didn’t, feel for his wife. But what is certain is that at some point in these years of early adulthood, he met the woman whom by every account he did love, and for whom, in the blast of war, he developed an unrestrained intensity of feeling, so much so that he eventually broke every rule of decorum and abandoned all familiar society for her: Rachel.

He first saw her
in the home of his grandfather, perhaps serving at the table during a family gathering. According to Knight family lore, she was a witchy, hazel-eyed creature who cast a spell over him. This may not have been pure exaggeration: there is no definitive picture of Rachel, but two separate branches of her family possess photographs they claim to be of her. Although each portrays a very different face, both suggest Rachel could well have had a mesmeric quality.

One depicts a slim-shouldered, fair-skinned young woman with long, center-parted curling hair bundled behind her neck. The other shows a somewhat darker woman who was also lustrous haired, copper hued, and blaze eyed, with pupils that radiated energy, including one that seems slightly askew. In either case, Rachel was clearly of mixed European, African, and American Indian descent, the latter influence strikingly evident in her children as well, who tended to be beautiful. Oral tradition passed down to her descendants has it that she was partly Creek or Choctaw.

She was a girl from Macon, Georgia, the daughter of a slave named Abram. When she entered Jackie’s household in about 1855 or 1856, she was just sixteen or so, but she was already a mother. She brought with her an infant daughter named Georgeanne, and she was pregnant again; in 1857 she would deliver a boy whom she named Edmund. They were probably the result of the sexual attentions of a white master or young man in the Georgia household she came from.

According to one account, Jackie bought Rachel and her child at auction, in either Mobile or New Augusta. This seems improbable. By 1855 Jackie was more than eighty years old and surely too frail for an arduous springboard wagon trip. More likely, Rachel passed to Jackie Knight through his Georgia family connections, probably his brother James, who lived in the Macon area, a coincidence hard to ignore. According to Rachel’s granddaughter Anna (daughter of Georgeanne), Rachel was “sold at auction to a man named Knight who was going to Mississippi to find virgin territory where he and his family could colonize.”

Rachel was reputed to be a house slave, and a family favorite, which meant she was at the top of the enslaved social order. On the bottom rung were field hands, many of whom Jackie had bought at auction in Mobile, where the largest slave houses sold as many as seventy to one hundred human beings in a day. A “likely ploughboy” went for $850 to $1,050, the field girls cost $1,300, and mature men $1,500. The auction houses kept the chattel bound in leg irons and shackled to rings in the floor until they were dressed for exhibition, where they were advertised in various terms calculated to appeal to the wants of the buyer: there were “fancy girls” and “likely boys” and “bright mulattos” and “jet black negroes.”

Rachel must have been apprehensive about being sold into Mississippi. She had heard horror stories of the treatment slaves could receive on larger Mississippi plantations, especially those in the fertile Black Belt, where field hands worked cotton for eighteen hours a day under the lash of bullwhips wielded by overseers and “slave
breakers,” white men hired to maximize labor and destroy the will of insolent blacks. A young antislavery Presbyterian minister named John Hill Aughey who preached in central Mississippi claimed he never met an overseer “that didn’t travel with a whip, pistol and knife.”

Frederick Law Olmsted witnessed slaves at their labors on a sprawling Mississippi cotton plantation: “They are constantly and steadily driven up to their work, and the stupid, plodding, machine-like manner in which they labor, is painful to witness. This was especially the case with the hoe-gangs. One of them numbered nearly two hundred hands (for the force of two plantations was working together), moving across the field in parallel lines, with a considerable degree of precision. I repeatedly rode through the lines at a canter, without producing the smallest change or interruption in the dogged action of the laborers, or causing one of them, so far as I could see, to lift an eye from the ground … I think it told a more painful story than any I had ever heard, of the cruelty of slavery.”

In Holly Springs, Mississippi, a planter punished his slaves by slitting the soles of their feet with his bowie knife. In Rankin County, a slave named Vinnie Busby watched her master, one Colonel Easterling, throw her mother across a barrel and whip her unmercifully. He also beat her father to a pulp on a regular basis for trying to visit his family from a neighboring plantation. “When he would ketch him he would beat him so hard ’till we could tell which way he went back by de blood. But pa, he would keep a comin to see us an a takin de beatins.”

On one occasion, Easterling punished a slave by hitching him to a plow “and plowed him jes’ lak a horse. He beat him an jerked him ’bout til he got all bloody an sore, but ole Marse he kept right on day after day. Marse kept on a plowin him till one day he died.”

Often the treatment slaves received was visible from their brands, scars, and burn marks—which were used to identify them when they ran away. The Southern newspapers were full of advertisements placed by owners seeking their fugitive property. The
Memphis
Daily Appeal
cited an Amos Timmons who was held in the city jail: he had a scar “running up and down the back of his neck, a scar on his left thumb, and one stiffened joint.”

A Mississippi slave’s quality of life depended entirely on whether he happened to be purchased by a humane owner or sold to a sadist. In either case, the element of random fortune only heightened the sense of bondage. “When you is a slave, you ain’t got no mo’ chance than a bullfrog,” said Virginia Harris of Coahoma County.

Sadists existed right in the vicinity of Jones County. In one notorious local incident, an area slaveholder named Bryant Craft caught a man named Jessie giving whiskey to the other Negroes and flogged him until the cloth of his shirt was embedded in his back. Afterward the tortured man crawled away to die, and he was lying by the side of an old dirt road when a horseman named Duckworth happened by. Duckworth took the slave home and tended to his wounds, greasing them with warm tallow, and then took him back to the Craft place, hoping to “reconcile” the master. Instead, Craft was enraged by Duckworth’s interference and struck Jesse down with a lethal blow. “Let that be an example to you,” he said to Duckworth.

In Jackie Knight, Rachel fell into the hands of an owner who treated the slaves with decency, which is to say he didn’t beat them without cause or work them half to death, or sell them away from their relations. He does not appear to have been arbitrarily cruel, and some of the men and women who worked for him may even have been fond of him. He made an effort to keep families together and to care decently for children, according to the young Martha Wheeler, who remembered him as quite elderly but “kind and good.”

As a Knight slave, Rachel joined one of the largest and closest-knit black enclaves in the area, one with its own customs and social order. At least fifty-three men, women, and children labored on behalf of the various Knights, perhaps more. The Slave Schedule of the U.S. Federal Census for 1860 listed twenty-two slaves living on Jackie’s place, but there may have been nearly twice that: Martha Wheeler remembered as many as forty when she was a child. Jackie may have
understated his holdings to avoid paying taxes. At any rate, he was far and away one of the largest slaveholders for miles.

Rachel moved back and forth between the Knights’ domestic circles. She appears to have spent some time in the home of Jackie’s daughter Altimirah Brumfield, who lived on the adjoining property, and whom she may have been fond of—one of Rachel’s granddaughters would be named Altimirah. Jackie frequently gave small slave children into the keeping of Altimirah and deeded three girls under the age of twelve to her. Perhaps Altimirah trained them as house servants, or perhaps she was simply kind.

Rachel was also in the household of Jackie’s second youngest son, Jesse Davis Knight, the thirty-nine-year-old aspiring planter and a future Confederate soldier. Known in the family simply as Davis, he was the closest of the Knight sons to his father in status. He had married well, to a Baylis named Sarah Elizabeth, and his father-in-law and neighbor George Baylis was a preacher and large landowner with fifteen slaves, whose property sprawled along an area known as Big Creek. Jesse Davis had a thriving farm worth eight thousand dollars on which he harvested forty bales of cotton, a huge amount for the area, and tended a herd of eighteen horses. He was prosperous despite ten mouths to feed and comfortable enough to house the local schoolmaster. Although Jesse Davis listed just four slaves among his property, his son John Melton Knight remembered twice as many in their domestic establishment. “All my people owned slaves, both sides,” John Melton recalled. “We had eight or ten of them when my grand-daddy was alive.” Some of them likely were on loan from Jackie, perhaps including Rachel.

Newton could not have failed to notice Rachel as she moved among the households of his close relatives. At Jackie’s place, she inhabited one of the cabins that sat just one hundred yards or so from the front porch. Newton and his cousins visited their grandfather, who was generous with them. On one occasion, he promised one of them a new colt when it was born. Newton was familiar with the servants, particularly those he had known as a child, such as
an elderly couple named Lewis and Kate. He would have been fully aware of the striking newcomer, an unusually eye-catching young woman near to him in age.