The State of Jones (20 page)

But the Unionist nature of the Jones County Scouts was perfectly obvious to the local Confederates who had to deal with them. To the avowed rebel Joel E. Welborn, former major in the 7th Mississippi Battalion, who was home on a medical discharge, it was common and unsettling knowledge that Newton Knight and the deserters were organizing “a company to resist the confederate forces.” Welborn demonstrated an odd combatant’s respect for Newton and his men. “My understanding was that they were Union soldiers from principle,” Welborn recalled. “… It was currently reported and generally believed that they were making an effort to be mustered into the U.S. Service. I was inclined to believe and think this from my acquaintance with several of his men, from intimate neighborship, from men who were regarded as men of honest conviction, and Gentlemen.”

That the Jones County Scouts considered themselves a military unit was evident from the way they organized themselves. They adopted the structure of any standard infantry company in 1863. After Newton was elected captain, the next order of business was to elect and assign rank to a half dozen other men who would help command the company. Newton started a muster roll, and atop it he wrote the names of his officers: J. M. Valentine was his first lieutenant, Simeon Collins second lieutenant, Jasper Collins was first sergeant, W. P. Turnbow was second sergeant, young Alpheus Knight was first corporal, and S. G. “Sam” Owens was second corporal.

According to Ben Sumrall, a relative of the band member Will Sumrall, Newton instructed the men not to destroy the property of anyone, not even their enemies, and not to kill anyone except in the defense of their lives or the lives of their company and families. They were given a password, which was “I am of the Red, White and Blue.” The response of the sentry guard was “I am a friend to you, come up to the camp and be recognized.”

Each of the men had horns, commonly used on their farms for
calling cattle or men to suppertime. The horns would be their signal callers: they would blow notes to summon one another or to warn of the approach of Confederates. They selected a nearby field, nicknamed Salsbattery, as their camp of instruction for drilling and military training. They also agreed to toil cooperatively in working and repairing one another’s farms. “They selected several camping places and would go from one field to another and work in a body,” according to Sumrall.

After taking the oath and receiving instructions, the men sang Union songs. According to one account, the men of the Knight band often sang anthems of the federal cause, including the famous “John Brown’s Body”:

Their meeting concluded, the men filed out of Smith’s Store and moved back into the woods to brace for the crackdown that was sure to come from Confederates in response to the killing of McLemore. As they slipped noiselessly into the thickets, they could perhaps already hear the baying of the dogs.

In Ellisville, there was
a frenzy of activity as rebel officials organized a hunt for McLemore’s killers. Uniformed members of Company F of the 26th Mississippi Infantry, who had been stationed in the area since August, streamed into town, along with mounted vigilantes with mule-drawn wagons loaded with crates full of dogs, wailing at their confinement.

Again, Newton was more afraid of bloodhounds than he was of rebels. He had heard stories, while under arrest, of what happened to deserters who were chased down by hounds. In one account that circulated, a deserter came home to Covington County, just west of Jones, and when conscript officers came looking for him, he fled to the swamps. The officers sent in the dogs, which finally cornered him in an old abandoned log cabin. The deserter had six bullets in his repeating revolver, but there were eight hounds. The fight lasted two hours. At the end of it, two hounds were still alive, and the man was so torn up and disfigured that his wife did not recognize his lifeless body when the conscript officers brought it back to her. Newton instructed his men that if they became trapped to shoot at the dogs first.

Slowly but surely, Newton’s company organized the county against the Confederacy. The blowing of horns from hilltops was a time-honored way for yeomanry to call one another to action. A horn hung on the wall in the home of every pioneer family in Jones, for signaling distress. The Knight company worked out a series of signals with the horn blasts, “which each and every member of the Company understood,” according to Tom Knight. Horn blasts told the men when a relative needed help, when it was safe to visit their homes, and when to gather for an ambush.

Newton’s horn was distinct from all the others, solid black, with a unique sound recognizably his, “so that when he received any news about the cavalry coming in, he would go to a certain place with which all were familiar and blow his horn, and soon the other members of the company would gather around him for orders.” The sound of horns resounded through the Piney Woods: three short blasts called the men together for attack orders. The horns would echo down the line through the hill country.

The men traveled in parties of six to eight to avoid capture. At night, scouts and pickets hid in the crotches of trees or crouched in the brush, disguising themselves as black tree stumps. Their hideouts were seemingly inaccessible islands in the swamp, with crossings
only a backwoodsman like Newton, who knew every trail of the county, could find. They chose lairs with deep cover and narrow access. Devil’s Den was one of these, a cave set in a deep hollow below some high chalk bluffs of the Leaf River, concealed by briars and vines and reachable only through a passage in a ravine. Another sanctuary was a patch of high ground in the midst of a horseshoe-shaped lake, surrounded by thirty acres of mire and quicksand, accessible only by a narrow spit opposite the Leaf River. It became known as Deserter’s Lake.

The Confederates were frustrated by these guerrillas who were ever-moving targets, unwilling to show themselves and engage in a traditional gunfight. Only occasionally could they pin them down. On November 1, 1863, Newton and some of his men were caught in a running skirmish through the fields of a farmer named Levi Valentine, an old neighbor of the Knights. A detachment from the 26th Mississippi managed to inflict some casualties, and John H. Harper, who had been maimed at Corinth, was killed in a shootout before the band drove the rebels back into Ellisville. There, the soldiers enlisted the aid of Joel E. Welborn as a guide. But when the rebels returned in hopes of mounting a counterattack, Newton and his men had evaporated back into the swamps, untraceable.

The men hid out in the swamps night and day, living off wild hogs, trout, and roasted possum, a delicacy. Sometimes they snuck into barns to sleep on some hay or a pine floor, but such surreptitious visits were dangerous. The Confederates staked out their farms, and on January 10, 1864, caught a young member of the Jones Scouts named Tapley Bynum, who gave in to temptation and slipped home to see his wife and newborn baby daughter. Bynum had just a few minutes with his family before he heard a noise at the gate and peered out the door. He bolted from the porch as a posse of cavalrymen rode through his fence. They shot him down in the yard.

Newton made the Confederates pay. A company from the 26th Mississippi was encamped near the property of Sally Parker, the sister of Jasper Collins and a staunch ally who often cooked hot
meals for the Scouts. Newton and thirty of his men stole through the woods and encircled the rebel camp. Shotguns thundered and smoke billowed from the tree line as they ambushed the Confederates. The official Confederate report read, “In a skirmish with Torys, camped on Tallahala Creek near Ellisville, we lost one man killed and two severely wounded.”

But mostly Newton, now wanted for murder and treason as well as desertion, kept completely out of sight. He quit seeking shelter in barns and made his home deeper in the woods and in the swamps. He didn’t go home; there was no home to go to. Newton’s wife Serena and the children were still living with family while Newton moved around for protection. He never knew who might be a Confederate informant, and the government was now offering rewards for rounding up deserters.

Newton was used to the swamp by day, but at night, alone, it was a surreal new world. Cypress hung heavy over shallow pools, and the moon cast long shadows over strange life-forms. Will-o’-the wisps and glowworms shined with an eerie incandescent light, their contours crisscrossing and blurring into one another. The bulrushes looked like animals, and the birds overhead sounded like war. The moss dangling down into the swamp seemed twined and ropelike. Tangled limbs of oak and tupelo crowded the sky and made it blacker. The ground, softly carpeted by lichen, moss, and fern, felt alive and crawling—in fact, the entire swamp seemed to be in motion. Even the vegetation appeared to be dangerously moving, writhing. Moss waved, vines curled like the poisonous snakes in the water, and the huge frogs dipping up and down in the water could easily, to a man in the grip of fear, look like the noses of alligators.

Yet it was a sublime place, not without its beauty. Newton discovered that within the swamp was a civilization that came alive at night. The more he penetrated its depths, the more of its life awakened; the birds and ducks seemed to “throng the morass in the hundreds of thousands,” their garrulous throats pouring forth with “multitudinous sounds,” wings fluttering and beaks plunging. Late
at night the illusory quality of the swamp only deepened; it seemed “all the fowls of the air, and all the creeping things of the earth, appeared to have assembled together,” filling the swamp with “clamor and confusion.” Another refugee of the Piney Woods marshes and bogs, a fugitive slave named Solomon Northup, himself an expert on survival, observed: “Even in the heart of that dismal swamp, God had provided a refuge and a dwelling place for millions of living things.”

Including other humans. During those long swamp-bound nights, Newton heard strange voices, familiar yet unfamiliar. They were the voices of black fugitives, also in hiding. At first, Newton would have been alarmed at these human whispers when he sought refuge in the swamp: they might mean the enemy. Another onetime fugitive, Frederick Douglass, described how a runaway responded to the sound of human voices in the swamp while being pursued: “I dreaded more these human voices than I should have done those of wild beasts.”

But the voices of fugitives became the voices of allies for Newton. They were men and women who like him were evading the Confederate army, which was aggressively impressing slaves to do the backbreaking labor involved in war, building fortifications, hauling goods, and burying rotting corpses. Many of them were lying out in the Piney Woods burrows until they could find a way to reach the Union lines in Vicksburg or Corinth.

The swamps had become a kind of highway for refugees. A Yankee soldier with the 6th Iowa watched bedraggled fugitives, both black and white, file into Corinth after fleeing the Confederate service and traveling through the swamps and counted six companies’ worth. “The rebels are pressing all able bodied men into the army, without regard to age, in Miss. and Alabama,” he wrote home. “All ‘Niggers’ with any white blood are declared liable to conscription … The men have been hunted by the rebels with bloodhounds for weeks, and are men that will fight till death in support of laws they so much need.”

We don’t know exactly whom Newton encountered during his stay in the swamp, but we know that he was aided and protected
by at least two members of the slave community—Rachel and a man owned by a branch of his family, Joe Hatton—and we can try to reconstruct his experiences based on the available evidence from other fugitive memoirs.

It was a fugitive slave who might well have stopped Newton as he groped his way toward the trunk of a fallen tree, thinking to sit or lie down. As he began to recline into it, a shadow—for it must have looked like a shadow—pushed him to the ground. The fugitive took a step backward, picked up a stick, and then poked the stump as if stoking a fire. There was a rustle, and the stump sprouted vines of water moccasins. This was how fugitives learned that water moccasins nested in the stumps of fallen trees, and whoever taught Newton this probably saved his life, for the moccasin’s bite was “more fatal than that of the rattlesnake,” as Solomon Northup noted.

Alligators were a nightmarish problem, but loud noises startled them and drove them into the deeper places, as Northup could have told Newton. But no matter how careful you were, there were times when you came face to face with these monsters before you knew they were there. If a man ran backward a few yards and then cut to the side, he could “in that manner shun them.” Straight forward, alligators could cover a short distance rapidly, but since they could not move side to side quickly, “in a crooked race there [was] no difficulty in evading them,” as Northup explained.

Newton would have come across men like Octave Johnson, a cooper by trade who ran away from a whip-handed overseer and lived for a year and a half in the bayou with a group of thirty other runaway slaves, ten of whom were women. Octave and his fellow fugitive stole food from a plantation four miles away, pilfered turkeys, chickens, and pigs, and sometimes even roped cattle and dragged them to their hiding places. They surreptitiously bartered for corn-meal with friends on the plantations and obtained matches from them. They slept on logs and burned cypress leaves at night to keep the mosquitoes away. They could have taught Newton how to make a dry bed on the damp grass with pine needles; how to hide in the
hollow of a cypress; how to kill the scent tracked by hounds by diving into the water.

Johnson could have shown Newton how to lure the dogs into the marshes, where they were bait for the alligators. This was a trick Johnson learned out of desperation, when he was hunted to the water’s edge by a pack of twenty dogs. He managed to kill a few of the hounds with his bare hands before he jumped into the fen in terror. The dogs followed him in—only to be set upon by the pale yawning maws of the alligators. It was in this death-defying way that Johnson learned alligators “preferred dog flesh to personal flesh,” he said.