The State of Jones (18 page)

What clothes they did have swarmed with lice—one soldier described standing over a fire and hearing them pop like corn. Men tried turning their shirts inside out, which they called “executing a flank movement,” but they were never free of pests, which in turn made them sick. Measles disabled men as often as bullets.

Camp life was spiritually desolate as well as physically debilitating. Regiments flattened everything in their path; each stopping place became an indistinct landscape with trees hacked down for miles, the ground deadened, the grass browned and gouged by boots and hooves into a sepia expanse, atop which shabby tented villages sprouted. Men turned foul tempered and hard-hearted, their only diversions gambling, drinking, and fighting. “You have no idea how demoralizing camp life is and how difficult it is for one to preserve his consistency of life and his inward purity of heart,” the cavalryman Nugent wrote home. “Oaths, blasphemies, imprecations, obscenity are hourly ringing in your ears until your mind is almost filled with them.”

Every soldier in the Confederacy understood the impulse to go AWOL, just for relief from the physical discomfort. Certainly the thought of desertion occurred to Nugent, whose wife and baby were now behind Grant’s enemy lines in the town of Greenville on the banks of the Mississippi River. Nugent’s once-fanciful feeling that he would “like to shoot a Yankee” had curdled into a hard realism and conviction that war was sacrilege. “God grant I may never see another war and never participate in one! Blood, butchery, death, desolation, robbery, rapine, selfishness, violence, wrong: a disregard for everything holy or divine, and a disposition to destroy,” he wrote to his wife. All that prevented Nugent from bolting was what bound all men to their units, in all wars: responsibility to the soldier next to him and fear of disgrace. Nugent may have been tempted and even
entreated to come home, but he wrote to his wife that he couldn’t leave the army “without being everlastingly dishonored and disgraced, thus involving you & my innocent little babe in my own personal ruin.”

As a wealthier member of the officer class, Nugent could at least purchase comforts. For the yeoman and foot soldier, there was no such relief. Their pay of just eleven dollars a month in near-worthless Confederate scrip was six months in arrears, and the disparity between their circumstances and the perceived advantages of the officers was yet another factor that bred thoughts of disloyalty, especially when the high command seemed insensible to the hardships of soldiers on the ground. Some senior officers had a shameless habit of dining luxuriously and staging gaieties while their men suffered. “The General officers are all the time giving their attention to parties, balls &c and neglect their troops,” Nugent wrote. Rorer of the 20th Mississippi made the same observation from his camp in Canton, Mississippi, in November of 1863. “Parties and balls are quite the rage here at present. I am rather at a loss to know how people can reconcile it to themselves to spend their time in gayety and dissipation as many of them are doing … Our Army here is cursed with incompetent and drunken officers, yet there is no way to get rid of them.”

The men in the ranks clearly resented their condition, and they made their complaints plainly audible to Rorer during a parade drill that was viewed by the ladies of Canton. As they marched, Rorer heard a number of them ill-temperedly snarl that the organdy-clad belles “had better be at home knitting socks for the army.” From that he inferred that many of them needed socks.

Officer incompetence manifested itself in senseless marching, a source of the bitterest complaints. One cavalry unit from Jones County was marched and countermarched so brutally in the fall of 1863 that a man died. The outfit was sent in pursuit of Union raiders who had torn up the Mobile and Ohio Railroad and spent three days and nights tramping in sleet and rain, with no cover, from
Okolona to Oxford to northern Tennessee. “We had no shelter at all: just stayed outside the town by open fires,” the cavalryman recalled. “Newt Bryant, from Old Sharon Church in Jones County, froze to death … We had marched all day in the sleet. When we stopped for the night he was so tired that he went off and went to sleep on some cotton seed and froze.”

Next they were shipped to Selma, Alabama, packed so densely in boxcars that the men who couldn’t fit inside were ordered to ride on the tops of the trains. They had to lie down flat and hold tight to keep from slipping off the edges, while sleet mixed with cinders flew into their faces and burned their eyes. At Selma, they were loaded onto a passenger steamship en route to Montgomery. One night a man slipped overboard in his sleep and had to be abandoned because it was too dark for a rescue effort. They assumed he had drowned, but he turned up a day later wet and barefoot. His messmates told him he’d let a perfect opportunity to desert go by. “Why in hell didn’t you go home?” they asked him. “Everybody thought you were dead!”

Home beckoned to every man in the ranks, often via a letter from a destitute wife pleading for help, yet furloughs were granted so sparingly they were almost nonexistent. Men longed for home to the point that they actually wished to be struck by a Minié ball. A foot soldier wanted to be wounded “just severely enough to send me home for 60 or 90 days, I would kindly welcome such a bullet and consider the Yankee who fired it as a good fellow.” A story circulated of a soldier who stood behind a tree during a pitched battle and waved his arms up and down, hoping to catch a bullet. When an officer asked him what he was doing, he supposedly replied, “I’m feeling for a furlough.”

Desertion was the ultimate furlough. Among the hundreds of men lurking with Newton in the Jones County swamps was one deserter who feigned his own death to get out of the army. He cut his fingers with a knife, rubbed blood on his saddle, shot a hole through his hat, and left his horse with the saddle on. He would stay with Knight and the other men until the war ended.

Confederate authorities were not insensible to the reasons for desertion; they understood it was a problem with myriad causes and no easy solution. But by August, a month after Vicksburg, as it was apparent that large numbers of AWOL men had no intention of coming back, the high command also realized the scale of the problem. It would clearly weaken the war effort if it wasn’t resolved—in addition to Vicksburg, awful casualties at Gettysburg and Port Hudson that summer had left a critical shortage of Southern troops.

They responded with a dual approach. First, they invited the missing men with pardons. Next, they started shooting them. On August 5, 1863, Jefferson Davis announced a twenty-day amnesty period: all men who reported back for duty could do so with no penalty. But those who failed to report within that window would do so at peril of execution. By the fall, firing squads were causing comment in rebel units.

In September, a Confederate surgeon witnessed nine executions in a single day in Virginia. The surgeon noted that among those sentenced to death was a soldier who had lost his willingness to fight after reading anti-Confederate newspaper articles. “He was a very intelligent man and gave as his reason for deserting that the editorials in the Raleigh ‘Standard’ had convinced him that Jeff Davis was a tyrant and that the Confederat cause was wrong. I am surprised that the editor of that miserable little journal is allowed to go at large. It is most unfortunate that this thing of shooting men for desertion was not begun sooner. Many lives would have been saved by it, because a great many men will now have to be shot before the trouble can be stopped.”

But executions hardly were a solution to the manpower crisis, and Confederate authorities sought a middle way. The Volunteer and Conscript Bureau under Brigadier General Gideon Pillow was empowered to hunt absentees and march them back to duty at gunpoint. If nothing else, this would give Pillow something to do. Owner of one of the wealthiest estates in Tennessee, called “Clifton Place,” Pillow was a near cartoon of arrogance and ineptitude. As a major
general in Mexico he’d fought with gusto but took credit for battles he did not win and was rumored to be so unwitting that he dug a trench on the wrong side of a parapet. Grant considered him a buffoon, and in fact it was Pillow’s presence at Fort Donelson that convinced Grant to storm it and win his first great victory of the war. Grant had known Pillow in Mexico and “judged that with any force, no matter how small, I could march up to within gunshot of any intrenchments he was given to hold.” As Grant menaced the fort, Pillow abandoned his men, among them Walter Rorer and the men of the 20th Mississippi, and made an ignominious escape by boat at night. Grant joked to his prisoners, “If I had captured him, I would have turned him loose. I would rather have him in command of you fellows than as a prisoner.”

But Pillow attacked his new job with zeal and recognition of the complexity of desertion. He detached a fleet of respected front line officers from their units and sent them to their home counties to round up missing men. His hope was that these officers would sway the disaffecteds and appeal to their latent loyalties, in a way that the local bureaucrats in charge of policing conscription couldn’t. If the deserters still resisted, the officers were to bring the men in by force.

Pillow was especially concerned with the Piney Woods swamps and their environs. Men from across the lower South sought refuge there, because of the infinite number of hiding places offered by quagmires, marshes, and boggy islands unapproachable by horseback. It would require a man with intimate knowledge of the terrain to deal effectively with the deserters there. Pillow was determined to clear out the Piney Woods, and the man he selected for the job was Amos McLemore, a rising officer of the 27th Mississippi and the former Masonic leader and social arbiter of Ellisville.

August 1863, Ellisville

McLemore was coming home
to Jones County, and he was coming plumed and tasseled, with a major’s starred insignia on his collar tabs, double rows of gold buttons winking on his broad-breasted coat, a swirl of braid at his cuffs, and a walnut-gripped service pistol and curved, brass-hilted saber at his belt. It embarrassed McLemore that the Confederate high command had identified Jones as a hotbed of deserter resistance, and he intended to carry out his special assignment to round up Newton Knight and his fellow deserters by blade and pistol if necessary.

McLemore was handpicked for the job both for his knowledge of the area and the obvious toughness of his skin. He had charged into a sleet of bullets in the battle of Perryville, where 7,600 men were wounded in just six hours, among them himself and half his company. He recovered to fight at Murfreesboro, where he and the men of the 27th Mississippi lay in a shallow ditch for three days, pelted by icy rain and under bombardment, unable to make a fire for food or warmth. Though weak from exposure, they captured a Yankee battery and a company of sharpshooters. McLemore was rewarded with a promotion in the spring of 1863, making him the third-ranking officer in the 27th Mississippi, which went on to fight at Chickamauga without him.

McLemore arrived back in Piney Woods in mid-August and made his headquarters in the tumbledown little market square of New Augusta on the banks of the Leaf River. He was confident of success; he knew the lay of the land, and he knew many of the missing men personally.

He mustered a force of regular troops, local militia, and conscript officers and established a series of collection stations in surrounding counties for holding deserters. He also acquired a pack of bloodhounds. Then he rode out into the countryside and began hunting down men. In the space of just five weeks, McLemore was able to report that he had hauled in 119 men for return to their regiments.

A violent confrontation between McLemore and Newton was inevitable. They were diametrically opposed in purpose, and in personal attributes, and represented all that the other was fighting against. Newton must have viewed McLemore as the embodiment of the swaggering, slaveholding rebel elite. To McLemore, Newton was a dirt-farming slacker, if not a traitor. They shared only the conviction that the other’s presence in Jones County was intolerable.

Newton also viewed McLemore as corrupt. McLemore’s merchant set in Ellisville had become local agents for the Confederate government’s impressments, and they were suspected of abusing their powers. McLemore’s uncle by marriage, a local Baptist minister named William Fairchild, held the despised position of taxes-in-kind collector. He was an object of local hatred for his seizures from farming families purportedly for the rebel army. High-handed procurement methods employed by tax collectors were a source of continual resentment across the South, even among loyalists, and men who held the position were continually suspected of profiteering. A Jackson newspaper protested: “The Government has employed an army of Barnacles to go out in swarms like the locusts of Egypt, into every section and neighborhood.” It was a common belief among soldiers and their families that tax officers were enriching themselves on the job. One Mississippian wrote of swindlers “speculateing and extortioning on those who try to live honest … impressing officers have pressed that to which they have no right for the intention of speculation.”

Newton suspected that part of McLemore’s purpose in scouting the countryside was not just to scout deserters but to size up the holdings of local citizenry, in order to pass the information for seizure to Fairchild and his fellow collector, Sheriff Kilgore. “He would ride around in the county looking up the people’s fat cattle and hogs and would let one man by the name of Fairchild and another by the name of Kilgore know about them,” Newton’s son Tom recounted. Newton sent a message to McLemore warning him to stop informing. Newton and his men “got tired of him making himself a news
toter, and they ordered him to stop,” Tom wrote. “But he kept on carrying news.”

Newton and McLemore played a dangerous game of hide and seek in the woods, each trying to waylay the other. As the rebel officer scouted the county, his rides took him uncomfortably close to Newton’s property on the border of Jones and Jasper counties, and the two men exchanged menacing messages. Newton sent McLemore word “to leave their business alone.”