The State of Jones (11 page)

Plain folk of Jones County had little at stake in the slave and cotton economy and even less in the political affairs of planters. And Southern pride on its own was a thin reason to go to war. When it came time to vote, the men of Jones County cast their ballots overwhelmingly for the moderate “cooperationist” candidate John H. Powell, who also just happened to be Jasper Collins’s father-in-law. The flame-spouting merchant-slaveholder John M. Baylis got just 24 votes, to 374 for Powell. Jones County was firmly Union. Powell was sent off to tell the convention so.

But when Powell arrived at Jackson in early January 1861, he found the city already celebrating as if secession were a foregone conclusion. Every hotel was “filled with excited visitors,” and “crowds lined the streets to cheer a military parade” and to salute a new flag—with fifteen stars, one for each slave state. Amid the exultation, Unionists were once more shouted down as “cowards” and “submissionists” who would place the state under Northern tyranny.

A voice of dissent sounded like a whisper amid the din. Had secession been put strictly to a popular vote, it probably would not have passed. But the delegates in Jackson did not represent what was popular, only what was powerful: the “Bourbons” who were the wealthiest men of the state. The same men who controlled the state’s religion, economy, and culture also controlled politics and the state convention.

Mississippi’s Declaration of Secession was a document written by and for the planters. It announced their interests in the very first sentence: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of the commerce of the earth.”

The Declaration continued: “These products [of slave labor] are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.” For Mississippians, the cause of the Civil War could not have been
plainer: it was a war over slavery. The Bourbons equated slavery with civilization and universal freedom with barbarism.

In the state capital, Powell was one small rural delegate among powerful Mississippians such as James L. Alcorn, cavalier handsome with his trim bow of a mustache, rich gold watch chain, and an ivory-handled walking stick, his wife Amelia on his arm, lace at her throat and wrists. Or the orator Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, an almost infernal-seeming figure, with his burning almond-shaped eyes, straight black hair whipped back from an eager face, whiskers plunging to a black necktie, his mouth a quick red slash.

As Powell walked among these impassioned men in the stately marble-columned capitol building and saw the galleries in the assembly hall overflowing with avid secessionists, he lost his nerve. He forsook the will of his constituents and voted
for
secession—along with the overwhelming majority of delegates. The vote was 84 to 15.

Many other anti-secession delegates betrayed their constituents and voted for the ordinance. Some of them did so because they were swayed by the moment, others were perhaps bribed with the promise of advancement, and still others had been told that a later referendum would enable the people to ratify or reject the ordinance. But there would be no referendum. On January 9, 1861, Mississippi became the second state to secede, after South Carolina.

At the public announcement of the vote in Natchez, fire bells tolled and twelve guns saluted. In Jackson, ladies presented to the convention a Bonnie Blue flag that bore a single white star on a field of blue.

Immediately the wheels of Southern independence started turning. The clause in the state constitution requiring elected officials to take an oath of allegiance to the United States was deleted. Congressmen and senators were summoned home from Washington. The state seized control of all federal property within its boundaries, including the regulation of the Mississippi River. The new flag was hoisted over the capitol building and became a symbol of Southern rights, inspiring the song “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” which became one of the most popular of the Confederacy:

But back in Jones County, those who had voted for Powell were outraged. “Fact is, Jones County never seceded from the Union into the Confederacy,” Newton insisted sixty years later, still arguing the matter. “Her delegate seceded.” In Ellisville, an effigy of Powell was strung up and burned. An incensed Riley Collins called a meeting at the old Union Church in Jones County and gave a fiery speech, railing against the “injustice” of secession. Riley Collins urged the men of Jones “not to fight against the union, but if they had to fight to stay home and fight for a cause in which they believed.”

Word reached Powell that it was literally unsafe for him to return home. “It woulda been kinder unhealthy for him, I reckon,” Newton said. Powell remained in Jackson for a full month, until the formation of the Confederate States of America. He would soon be rewarded for his secessionist vote: he was appointed the Confederate provost marshal of Jones County, responsible for arresting deserters, disloyalists, and traitors.

But in April 1861, the controversy over secession finally subsided, after rebels fired on the federal property at Fort Sumter. It was replaced by a wave of Confederate patriotism. Lincoln had called for 75,000 militiamen to suppress the Southern insurrection. His efforts at appeasement had failed; as he took office in March 1861, Congress had just sent to the states for ratification a proposed Thirteenth Amendment that protected slavery in the Southern states. Lincoln supported the proposed amendment and vowed not to fire the first shot: “The government will not assail
you,”
he told the insurgent states. “You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors.” But Lincoln also made it clear that he would defend federal property.

There was a groundswell of support for the new nation, and formerly peaceable men became belligerently pro-Confederate. They were above all Southerners, whose home and honor were now being threatened by Northern aggressors. In Greenville, a plantation hub in the Mississippi Delta with planks for sidewalks and just five hundred white residents, a previously ambivalent twenty-nine-year-old lawyer named William L. Nugent suddenly caught the martial spirit. Nugent had the scholarly, contemplative temperament of an amateur poet and a limpid appearance: smooth haired, silky bearded, and gray eyed. He often packed a violin with his clean linens. He was recently wedded to one of the heiresses of the area, Eleanor “Nellie” Smith, daughter of a prominent judge and planter, and he had mixed feelings about secession. Not anymore. “I feel that I would like to shoot a Yankee,” he wrote his bride in August of 1861.

Everyone was rushing to arms to protect their homeland, and there were more volunteers in the state than Governor Pettus or President Davis could handle. In each district, a man was chosen to gather local volunteers and issue uniforms and preliminary orders. In the Piney Woods, the officious Amos McLemore became one of the most enthusiastic enlistment officers, opening his recruiting station in an old log house on a local creek, where a line formed of battle-hungry men. “They thought it was big to get the big guns on,” said Maddie Bush, a Jones Countian who became a corporal in the 7th Mississippi Battalion.

McLemore’s company of 134 was just the second of eight companies that would come from the area. He dubbed it “The Rosinheels,” a term for the rearing of an eager horse. The outfit became Company B of the 27th Mississippi Infantry, and it was full of McLemore’s cronies. Another member of the company was Jesse Davis Knight, who no doubt joined at the encouragement of his Baylis in-laws. The company was stocked with wholehearted rebels; it would lose only two men to desertion.

When mustering time came, runners went out all over the Piney Woods region, with word for men to gather their belongings and for
their families to prepare for a farewell feast and rally. It was a scene repeated across Mississippi: “Joyfully and with alacrity the young chivalric sons of the slave holding aristocracy responded to the call for volunteers,” recalled the minister Aughey, who witnessed the rush to volunteer. “The young ladies presented company and regimental flags of costly material, deftly embroidered by their own fair fingers with rare and significant designs, to every regiment as it left for the theatre of war. Upon their departure to the seat of war, they were given an ovation, barbecues were held, grandiloquent orations were pronounced, in which the superiority of the South over the North in valor, military skill, and chivalric spirit was announced in terms that admitted no contrary opinion.”

On the appointed day for muster, ox wagons approached from all directions at the appointed location at a local creek. The men who signed up were issued their uniforms, and officers formed them in a line. A drummer, fifer, and fiddler were appointed, and at an officer’s command the drummer stepped forward and rat-tat-tatted. As the men swung into drill motion with a clanking of weapons, the crowd chanted,

After the drill, the families sat down to a sumptuous banquet of chicken pies made with precious hand-ground wheat flour, biscuits, cornbread, barbecued beef and mutton, and boiled pork hams. The soldiers were served first, then their wives and children. When all the whites had eaten, their slaves were invited to take the leftovers.

At the finish of the dinner, officers commanded the men to form in line again. Like so many other Southerners, the men of Jones kissed their wives, formed companies, shouldered their gear, and marched away over the hills, and to war. The women left behind cleared the
tables and loaded the ox wagons for the long dispiriting drive home, back to their farm drudgery with no husbands to help.

Many of the men who marched away had opposed secession. But they found that in the wake of Fort Sumter, opposition to the Confederacy was virtually impossible: dissenters were no longer merely glared at, they were being arrested for treason and threatened with hanging.

Across the state, reports circulated of coercion. The
St. Louis Democrat
published a letter from a wealthy Mississippi planter to a Southern gentleman in New York warning that unless he speedily returned to demonstrate his loyalty, his land would be seized as that of a “disaffected person” and that he himself was “a Union man but dar not say so, for fear of mob violence.” In Tishomingo County, a twenty-two-year-old mechanic named E. J. Sorrell recalled that all Union men were “threatened in a general way.” In Corinth, according to Union activist M. A. Higginbottom, “it was a common expression that every man who would not take sides with the Confederacy ‘ought to be hung.’” The editor of the local Republican newspaper, James M. Jones, was “surrounded by infuriated rebels, his paper was suppressed, his person threatened with violence, he was broken up and ruined forever, all for advocating the Union of our fathers.” In Alcorn County, citizens threatened to put Mathew J. Babb in prison if he “did not cease talking against secession.” In Tippah County, farmer Samuel Beaty had his property destroyed by a mob. In Columbus, when Presbyterian minister James Lyon continually preached that slavery was sinful and railed against “blood and thunder” politics, Confederates retaliated by arresting his son Theodoric, court-martialing him, and sending him to prison in Virginia.

Unionists in the Deep South were in positions of thankless isolation, as the definition of loyalty was turned on its head. Allegiance to country was inverted into treason, and supporters of the Stars and Stripes ironically labeled un-American, as Southerners jeeringly called them “tories,” in reference to those who had supported Britain’s George III during the American Revolution.

John Hill Aughey, who would be imprisoned for his loyalty, wrote a letter to Secretary of State William H. Seward describing what the Unionists in Mississippi faced. “Our property is confiscated and our families left destitute of the necessaries of life, all that they possessed … Heavy iron fetters are placed upon our limbs and daily some of us are led to the scaffold or to death by shooting. Many are forced into the army, instant death being the penalty in case of refusal, thus constraining us to bear arms against our country, to become the executioners of our friends and brethren, or to fall ourselves into their hands.”

These loyalists received precious little congratulation then or later for their honorable stances, or for what they endured. An Alabama Unionist told a congressional committee in 1866, “You have no idea of the strength of principle and devotion these people exhibited towards the national government.”

Aughey, who had dared to cast his vote publicly against secession, was hounded. Aughey was doubly suspect because he was originally a Yankee hailing from New York, only a Mississippian by marriage. Aughey was an almost prettily handsome thirty-two-year-old, over six feet tall with a sweep of rich black hair and pronounced cheekbones, but there was nothing delicate about his moral disposition: slavery was sin, secessionists were traitors, and the newly formed Confederacy was unconstitutional. He continued to preach this message on his evangelical circuit around Choctaw and Attala counties, at peril of his life.

“It was now dangerous to utter a word in favor of the Union,” he wrote in a memoir of his experiences. “Many suspected of Union sentiments were lynched … Self constituted vigilance committees sprang up all over the country, and a reign of terror began.”