The State of Jones (19 page)

McLemore replied just as threateningly. “I know my business,” he said, “and I expect to attend to it.”

On the night October 5, Newton settled the business for both of them. One of the stations McLemore established for collecting stragglers was in northwest Jones County near a church named Big Creek, in the heart of the Knight family territory. Local oral tradition holds that McLemore and his men rode through Newton’s province that day, looking for his hideout, intending to arrest him. This provoked Newton, who allegedly scrawled a note to McLemore threatening to fill him “full of lead.” Newton supposedly told others, “His is the first name I’ve got carved on my gun barrel. I have sent him word that I will tolerate no meddlin’, but if meddlin’ is what he wants to do then I can stop that.”

Newton knew that McLemore made it a habit to stay at the Ellisville home of his friend Amos Deason when he was in Jones County. Deason, the merchant turned state legislator, made his parlor a social center for high-ranking Confederate officers. Uniformed men came and went regularly from the home, which, with its beautiful portico and façade, stained pine panels shipped from Mobile, and painted weatherboarding that resembled marble, looked like a mansion next to the rude farmhouses.

The night of October 5 was a stormy one, and McLemore and six or eight officers tied up their horses and trooped up Deason’s front steps for a hot dinner and a night’s rest. McLemore and his men were soaked from patrolling in the rain and too muddy for the parlor. They moved into a bedroom, where the fire was built up as they shed
their sodden broadcloth coats and forage caps and damp boots. The men then arranged themselves around the hearth.

Outside, Newton and two of his fellow deserters crept toward the well-lit house. Newton climbed the fence, rather than use the gate, so that it wouldn’t creak. He could hear McLemore in conversation from deep inside the house. Behind the imposing façade, the residence meandered in typical Southern clapboard style, a warren of rooms connected by breezeways, built for coolness. Newton and his men slid along the outer walls, toward the sound of McLemore’s voice.

Only Newton Knight and his two accomplices knew the truth of the next few minutes and the dark event that took place. According to Knight family tradition, one of the two men who accompanied Newton was his young cousin and close friend Alpheus. The three men drew broomstraws, to see who would accost McLemore. “They intended to stop him from spying out what little liberty they had, and did,” Newton’s son Tom wrote.

Alpheus pulled the short straw. But as the young man started to move toward the bedroom, Newton whispered and pulled him back—he didn’t trust his aim. Instead, it was Newton who eased around the house, toward the firelight glowing and the drifting sound of the Confederates conversing.

Inside, the rebel officers sat and stood around the fire. McLemore sat in a rocking chair facing the fire. Suddenly the bedroom door slammed open, as if from a gust, and a figure loomed in the frame. A blast rang out. McLemore was lifted by the force of the gunshot and dropped to the floor like a heavy lifeless sack, a hole in his chest. As his blood began to seep into the floorboards, the other officers scattered in panic. Some grabbed for their firearms and rushed from the room after the assailant, not waiting to pull their boots on. But the shooter escaped into the squalling night.

No one in the room could identify the attacker. Their senses were concussed, their ears ringing, and their eyes filled with the bitter cordite smoke. According to a local newspaper report, “Some six or
eight persons were in the house at the time of the shooting, but at last accounts no clue to the murderer. It was supposed to be the act of a deserter.” The
Louisville Daily Journal
only suggested that the killing was a result of the fact that McLemore “was on duty at Ellisville, Miss., gathering up conscripts and deserters.”

No one was ever charged with McLemore’s murder, but it was accepted in Jones County that Newton was the man who had gunned him down. Newton apparently didn’t deny his involvement to his son T. J., who claimed to have a firsthand account from his father, albeit a vague one on the subject of who pulled the trigger. “One of the three shot him and he died,” Tom related.

The details of McLemore’s murder generated debate, argument, and ghost stories. The specific details of that night became confused by the agendas of those doing the telling. To Confederate loyalists, the killing of McLemore was an act of cowardice. In their version, McLemore was sitting in a rocking chair when Newton crept up to a window, poked his gun barrel into the room, and shot him in the back of the head. It’s an unlikely account: in the first place the window was undoubtedly closed, since it was a stormy October night and the officers were drying themselves by the fire. In the second place, McLemore fell to the floor across the room from the window.

A more likely scenario was published in the
Clarion-Ledger
on the anniversary of McLemore’s death on October 5, 1967: Newton must have kicked open the bedroom door and fired almost point-blank at McLemore, who was either standing before the fireplace or just rising from a rocking chair. Bloodstains discovered on the underside of the floorboards during a modern restoration of the house indicate that McLemore bled on a spot between the door and the fireplace. All that can be said for sure is that a deserter, probably Newton Knight, shot McLemore by the fireside in the Deason home while he was visiting with fellow officers.

The Deason house, which still stands in Ellisville and is held by a historical trust and is under renovation, is said to be haunted, and local children and construction workers alike insist they’ve witnessed
odd occurrences. Bloodstains are said to be visible in the floorboards when it rains (not true), the door through which Newton fired supposedly flies open and closes on its own at eleven o’clock, the hour at which McLemore was shot (sort of true), and laborers on the restoration project say some of their work mysteriously comes undone (true). Until 1967, the house was inhabited by Deason’s descendants, Welton and Frances Smith, who did their best to dispel the more lurid stories—the tale of the reappearing bloodstains was impossible, since the original flooring had long ago been covered over with new planks and carpet, they pointed out. However, they acknowledged that the door occasionally
did
open of its own accord. “I think it’s the hinge,” Welton Smith said.

In October of 1863 McLemore wasn’t a ghost but a vividly bloody corpse, and a highly political one, a senior Confederate officer who had been murdered while on duty. It was a breathtakingly militant act and a declaration of open hostilities against the Confederacy. There can have been no question in Newton’s mind of the consequences: he’d crossed over, he was no longer a mere deserter but an enemy combatant. If caught he’d be hanged, shot, or worse.

It was also a declaration of independence of sorts, a statement by Newton that the Confederacy had no authority in Jones County. Previously, the deserters in Jones were shirkers and thieves, unpatriotic nuisances whose worst offense was that they peripherally hurt the war effort. But “the killing of a senior Confederate officer engaged in an activity that was vital to the ability of the Confederate government to wage war was a distinct departure,” as neo-Confederate historian and McLemore’s descendant Rudy H. Leverett observed.

What changed in Jones County? One answer is, Newton Knight came home. What seems clear is that with Newton’s reappearance in the county, deserter activities took on a more belligerent aspect: men weren’t merely evading service, they had begun defying tax seizures, actively resisting capture with force of arms, and now they had murdered an officer. Newton and his fellow deserters had become “a quasi-political force.”

Something in Newton himself had surely changed, too. Prior to the summer of 1863, he was an independent farmer who wished to be let alone and a reluctant conscript who tried to refrain from fighting by tending to fellow soldiers as a medic. But the Newton Knight who returned to Jones County after Vicksburg was a strike-first killer and a dedicated enemy of the Confederacy who turned his gun on other men. His transformation was surely the result of a concentrated gathering of his various thoughts and emotions over the thirty-three months since the war broke out: the awfulness of battle, arrest, punishment; his urgency as a fugitive; and the realization that he had more in common with the slaves he had met in the swamps, who treated him better and showed him more basic humanity, than the Confederate authorities who claimed to be his countrymen. Whom, by rights, should Newton Knight have felt more loyalty to?

October 13, 1863, Jones County, Mississippi

A week after the
killing of McLemore, men came out of the woods as if through a sieve. A throng of deserters, Unionists, and disillusioned yeomen gathered in a plank-floored trading post a few miles north of Ellisville, called Smith’s Store, for a clandestine meeting. Fifty to sixty men crowded inside the store, cradling their guns, mostly double-barrels, though some had the four-and-a-half-foot-long En-field rifles they had borne for the rebel army. They had come to declare their independence from the Confederacy and to pledge their armed service to the Union.

What, after all, was an army but a self-organized body of armed men? The Confederacy had created a vast army out of thin air in two years, but what made it more legitimate than an army of Southern Unionists? Nothing, as far as these men were concerned. They had neither voted for nor supported the new Southern nation. They did not view themselves as criminals or outlaws, but rather they were men who believed they represented the will of the majority in their region.

The men came from four surrounding counties—Jones, Jasper, Covington, and Smith—but their concerns were the same: they were tired of undemocratic seizures, of having their crops, food, mules, homes, and family members impressed by Confederate officials. And they had become convinced of the need to organize. With McLemore dead, the area would soon be infested with more rebel overlords looking for revenge, and the men at Smith’s Store were determined to oppose them.

Many of them were friends and kin: five Collins brothers were in the room, and so were five Knights. There was Newton and also his favorite cousins, Alpheus, Ben, and Dickie. At the front of the room, one of the elder Collins brothers, Vinson, acted as a justice of the peace. He led the men in swearing an oath: they vowed to aid “the United States government in putting down the rebellion.”

As an emblem of their official pledge to the Union, the men chose a name for their unit: they would be the “Jones County Scouts.” They specifically chose the name to describe the nature of their outfit: “scout” was the term the Union used to describe Southern spies and Unionists offering assistance.

Their first order of business was to elect officers. For their leader, they chose the man they regarded as the most fearless Unionist among them: Newton Knight. He was unanimously elected captain.

Years later, in applying for a Union pension, Newton was asked on whose authority he had formed the company. “The people of Jones County,” he answered. The unit was raised because “it was thought necessary for the protection of the loyal people for their safety,” he said. The men pledged “to stay together and obey all orders from the Government of the United States.”

Other men in Smith’s Store recalled making their pledge in similar terms. To Jasper Collins, the object of raising the company “was for protection and to be loyal to the U.S. government.” Jasper, always the most vociferous and politically involved of Jones Countians, had long been urging his fellow citizens to organize. He spoke of “the injustice that had been done to them and stated that they would not
fight against the Union but if they had to fight they would stay at home and fight for a cause in which they believed.”

Another company member, R. M. Blackwell, recalled that “we were sworn to support the constitution of the union.” J. M. Valentine remembered that they agreed to serve “for the defense of the union.”

Thirty years later, several citizens from Jones, Jasper, Covington, and Smith counties filed an affidavit in the pension case of Newton and his men, supporting their accounts and describing the forming of the company as a popular uprising of sorts, to fight back against Confederates plundering their communities. “Said company was raised at the instance of a
mammoth
mass meeting of the Union men of the aforenamed Counties. (of which there was a large majority at that
time
.) That thefts, robberies, rapes and murders were so common amongst us that it became an actual necessity for Union men to form an organization for their defense, and the Country at large. That Newton Knight were known to us at that time as a faithful and fearless Union man was unanimously chosen to command the said ‘Jones County Scouts,’ which was comprised of the best men in our Country.”

The nature of the swearing in and the motivations of those who joined the band would be argued for the rest of Newton’s life and beyond. To Newton’s Confederate enemies and critics, as well as skeptical historians, Knight and his men were desperados, less concerned with the fate of the country than with evading Confederate service and feeding themselves. Mississippi’s postwar neo-Confederate governor J. M. Stone, for one, refused to believe that the insurrection in Jones County was politically motivated, insisting the men were too ignorant. “A large portion of the population of the county was composed of illiterate persons who had been reared in the interior far from railroads and other means of transportation, and mainly without schools. Many of them declined to go into the army in the beginning, but so far as any formal withdrawal … no such thing ever occurred in Jones County … (they), with others who had refused to
go into the service, did join together in little bands to protect themselves against the conscript officers, and resisted the authority of the Confederate Government; but there was no general organization of such character.”