The State of Jones (24 page)

Sherman’s purpose in marching to Meridian, a hub of storehouses and railroads just fifteen miles from the Alabama border, was as simple as it was savage: to gut the state. He proposed to burn rails, gins,
houses, barns, fences, and fields. He would cut an inland swathe of 150 miles, straight eastward across the length of Mississippi. He left Vicksburg on February 3 with a column of twenty thousand troops carrying light rations and armed with pickaxes and other tools of destruction. At the same time, he ordered seven thousand cavalry under General Sooy Smith to drive south from Memphis.

These movements froze the Confederate commander, Polk, who lapsed into confusion. Polk was the six-foot-tall former Episcopal bishop of Louisiana, and though his men called him “The Bishop,” they quickly lost faith in him. Portly, with bad teeth and mutton-chops, he struck Walter Rorer of the 20th Mississippi as “a man who loved good living before the war and would have no objection to it now if he could get it … I think him a good man and a true one, but can not by any means think him a preeminent man.”

Polk fretted over Sherman’s destination, concerned that his real aim was the crucial port of Mobile. He shifted his men around un-certainly—Rorer’s unit was ordered to advance to Jackson, only to be ordered to fall back without firing a shot, despite the fact that they could see the enemy campfires. Finally, Polk ordered a complete withdrawal from Mississippi. It was an order issued out of caution: Polk believed he could better protect the factories of Alabama, and block an advance on Mobile, by evacuating to Demopolis, Alabama. Columns of men filed out of Meridian carrying stores and marched toward the state border.

They made a slow, bitter night march through dense pine barrens and across the Tombigbee River. Artillery and baggage trains constantly stuck in the mud, behind which columns of men came to a halt and were forced to wait for long hours in mud and standing water. Frigid men built fires while they waited and stamped their feet beside the flames, and soon others fell out of ranks to warm themselves and refused to move when their companies did, dissolving the columns into chaos. The lines of stragglers stretched for miles.

Men gathered pine knots and built bonfires at the bases of trees. Some of the pines were dead, and as the flames leaped upward they
caught at the bark and spiraled, turning the trees into huge columns of fire. The road was illuminated for miles with these towers of flame, as well as smaller lights of campfires, making an eerie and “grand sight,” Rorer observed.

By daybreak, Rorer’s 20th Mississippi had moved just two miles, and it would take them fourteen more days to complete their journey. Some of the men were without shoes, and Rorer could not fathom how they continued to stand, much less walk. “The men suffered a great deal, many making the latter half of the trip barefooted, those who were barefooted were mostly boys, they would make the marches on dark nights when it was so cold I could scarcely ride,” he wrote.

Mississippi troops were furious on the retreat, shamed and reluctant to leave their home state undefended, with its regnant old oaks hanging heavy over the dark green river bends and sandbars, the gorgeous riverside cities, and the purple- and black-tinged bayous. Officers watched the columns thinning before their eyes as men dropped out of ranks, many of them never to return. “Now the whole State was to be abandoned without a single blow,” wrote Captain John B. Love of the 15th Mississippi Infantry. “No wonder the hearts of her sons burned within them; and no wonder if they learned to distrust the policy that gave their homes to the torch and their families to the tender mercies of the foe … So many had left the regiment that some companies were slimly represented … I doubt if I ever see one of them again but these men are neither traitors nor deserters.”

Meanwhile, the advancing Yankees laid waste to everything they came across. Each day, large parties were sent out to destroy dwellings, tracks, roads, bridges, and fields, until the entire horizon was left flattened and smoking. Soldiers burst into homes and seized every article and morsel, sometimes even sweeping food off of plates. Sherman tried to control pillaging and ordered that occupied homes weren’t to be burned and civilians weren’t to be molested, but some of his soldiers were intent on punishing Southerners for their treason. A soldier named Lucius Barber of the 15th Illinois
observed, “The country was one lurid blaze of fire; burning cotton gins and deserted dwellings were seen on every hand. I regret to say it, but oft-times habitations were burned down over the heads of occupants … I have seen the cabin of the poor entered and the last mouthful taken from almost starving children.”

Sherman’s columns marched the 150 miles to Meridian in under two weeks, reaching the outskirts of town on the afternoon of February 14. There was nothing left to hinder the Yankees but some Confederate cavalry, who harassed them with a brief skirmish, and some trees that had been felled by retreating rebels. The residents of Meridian hid behind locked doors and peered through their windows as the Yankees walked through their front yards and occupied the town.

A well-to-do Meridian woman, Mrs. Ball, described the wrecking and ransacking that ensued in a letter to her mother in Mobile, which found its way into a newspaper. “After the skirmishing stopped, the mob ran around going into houses, breaking open doors, trunks, locks &c. tearing up and destroying everything they could,” she wrote. “Caught all the chickens in the place in half an hour.” Five men entered her home and demanded her keys, as well as any arms, gold, and silver she had. Men carried off blankets and the sacks of flour in her pantry. A Yankee captain paused to admire a small child named Mary and told her that if she would only go home with him, she would not be in any more war. She replied, “No: I am a rebel, and I do not want to be with the Yankees.”

The Confederate arsenal and warehouses were burned to the ground, as were all of the public buildings. Every store, as well as the printing office and the town’s three hotels, Ragsdale’s, Terrill’s, and the Burton House, were in cinders. There was not a milk cow or horse left in the town, or for ten miles around for that matter. “Oh, such destruction! I do not believe you or anyone else would know the place. There’s not a fence in Meridian. I have not one rail left.”

The Yankees occupied Meridian for six days—“They stayed here from Sunday until Saturday morning, and it appeared like a month,” Mrs. Ball wrote—and by the time they were done with the residences, some women were left with only the dresses on their backs.

Meridian was merely the orbit point for Sherman’s troops. They reached out into the countryside and systematically tore up the Mobile and Ohio Railroad for fifty miles. Their destruction extended on each point of the compass, north to Lauderdale Springs, east to Alabama, west all the way back to Jackson, and as far south as Quitman, only thirty miles from Jones County, which they “devastated.” Every unit was assigned a portion of track to destroy. The men pulled up ties and rails, heaped them into piles, and made bonfires of them. When the rails were red hot, they bent them around trees to render them unsalvageable. The twisted metal shapes were dubbed “Sherman’s neckties.”

“For five days 10,000 men worked hard and with a will in that work of destruction with axes, crowbars, sledges, clawbards, and with fire, and I have no hesitation in pronouncing the work as well done,” Sherman wrote remorselessly in his official report. “Meridian, with its depots, store houses, arsenal, hospitals, offices, hotels, and cantonments no longer exists.”

There was some malice in the destruction wrought by the Yankees, who like their commander were war-sick and bent on punishing Southern arrogance for perpetuating the conflict. The days when Union soldiers were curious or charmed by the graciousness of the region were long gone, replaced by boiling resentment. A Northern soldier summed up their mood when he wished for the “chance to try our Enfields on some of their villainous hides and let a little of that high Blood out of them, which I think will increase their respect for the northern mud sills.”

One of Sherman’s men torched a home over the head of a Southern woman who had spat in his face. When she fled to the home next door, he touched his torch to that home, too. The Yankees, bone chilled and stiff after two weeks of living outdoors in temperatures that left an inch of ice in their water buckets, stripped every home of featherbeds, blankets, quilts, and clothes and wielded their axes on buildings indiscriminately for firewood.

The destruction was fearsome, and Sherman in his official report seemed to take pleasure in the numbers that described the scale
of it: fifty-three bridges and culverts burned, nineteen locomotives and twenty-eight rail cars torched, 6,075 feet of trestlework and fifty-five miles of road destroyed. He bragged that his campaign had “stampeded” Polk into Alabama, leaving him to “smash things at pleasure, and I think it is well done … Our loss was trifling, and we broke absolutely and effectually a full hundred miles of railroad at and around Meridian. No car can pass through that place this campaign. We lived off the country and made a swath of desolation 50 miles broad across the State of Mississippi, which the present generation will not forget. We bring in some 500 prisoners, a good many refugee families, and about 10 miles of negroes.”

Sherman was not exaggerating about the legion of humanity that followed his army. Along the way his men had liberated some ten thousand enslaved souls from plantations. About half of these disappeared into the swamps and forests, to fight a more invisible war, or stayed in the area. The rest, mostly women and children, followed him back to Vicksburg, doubling the length of his columns. “I am afraid to guess at the number, but it was a string of ox wagons, Negro women, and children behind each brigade that equaled in length the brigade itself, and I had 12 brigades,” Sherman said. Along with them came about one thousand white refugees, as well as three thousand horses, mules, and oxen pulling an enormous quantity of seized wagons and vehicles.

Sherman brought back something else too: evidence of underground anti-Confederate resistance taking place in the swamps. In a letter to Major General Henry Halleck in which he described his campaign, Sherman included a curious item. He had received “a declaration of independence” from “certain people who are trying to avoid the southern conscription and lie out in the swamps,” he wrote. “I promised them countenance, and encouraged them to organization for mutual defense.” He was forwarding this document to Halleck, “for such action as you please.”

The fact that Sherman bothered to send the declaration to Halleck, the commander of the entire army, suggests how seriously he
took it. Ordinarily, Sherman sneered at professed Southern Unionists, whom he considered useless half cowards. Only six months earlier, after conquering Vicksburg, he had written to Halleck of his contempt for them. “The Union men of the South,” he wrote, “I must confess, I have little respect for this class. They allowed a clamorous set of demagogues to muzzle and drive them as a pack of curs. Afraid of shadows, they submit tamely to squads of dragoons, and permit them, without a murmur, to burn their cotton, take their horses, corn, and everything; and, when we reach them, are full of complaints … They give us no assistance or information … I account them as nothing in this great game of war.”

Evidently in Meridian, Sherman encountered a group that he believed
could
aid the Union war effort. It’s impossible to know whether the “declaration of independence” was from Newton and his men, because the document has been lost. But the Jones County Scouts’ campaign of violent opposition was surely what Sherman was looking for from Southern allies and would have won his support. Whoever the swamp deserters were, Sherman respected them enough to promise them “countenance” and forwarded their document up the chain of command.

It is quite possible that a member of Newton Knight’s company could have reached Sherman’s army to declare independence and request aid, such as arms and rations. Some of Sherman’s men came within twenty miles of Jones. The Yankees destroyed a railroad bridge over the Chickasawhay River below the town of Quitman, very close to Newton’s old territory in Jasper County.

Also, large parties of Sherman’s men were continually in the countryside scavenging for provisions. Sherman sent as many as one thousand troopers a day out to forage, and a number of these men became isolated from the main columns and were cut off. The foragers, who moved in parties of fifty to one hundred men, were the most exposed part of the army, preyed upon so constantly by Confederate cavalry that more Union soldiers were lost this way than in combat in the campaign. Yankees who were cut off undoubtedly found succor
with deserters and Southern Unionist guerrillas in the remote swamps that by now had become home to transients of every stripe, including Unionist followers of John Hill Aughey’s from up in Lauderdale County.

Somehow, Newton established enough of a reputation with Sherman’s men that just after the war, in July 1865, he would have a personal interview in Meridian with General William Linn McMillen, one of Sherman’s favorite subordinates. McMillen was a fast-rising infantry officer from Ohio who would fight ably from Bull Run through the capture of Mobile and earned special praise from Sherman. Though he was not with Sherman in Meridian, he had led a brigade in the siege of Vicksburg and would range through much of interior Mississippi between 1863 and his mustering out in August of 1865. After the war, Newton named McMillen as someone who could vouch for his company’s loyalty to the Union. McMillen thought well enough of Newton to give him his post office address in Columbus, Ohio.

Whether or not Newton was in direct communication with the Yankees at Meridian, he seems to have gotten something out of the campaign: ideas. The success of the Yankee raid was clearly inspiring. Over the next month, he and his followers would launch yet another series of effective partisan raids.

Every detail of the
twelve-gauge, muzzle-loading shotgun that Newton aimed at the Confederate guard shone with menace. It was so highly polished it seemed to have just come from the maker, the wooden stock well oiled and without a crack, the double barrels glaring like a pair of black eyes, the twin hammers cocked and ready to strike the nipple-shaped percussion caps, and the thin wooden ramrod clipped beneath the barrels to prime for reloading.