The State of Jones (27 page)

Harper’s Weekly
illustrates the first black vote, November 1867.

Newton Knight and his grandson John Howard. “Do you know who I am?” he asked his mixedrace grandchildren. “I’m your grandfather.”

An artist’s rendering of the KKK’s campaign of terror and intimidation against black voters in postwar Mississippi.

It was dangerous work—more dangerous than perhaps Maury had expected. Knight and his men baited the cavalry, hoping to lure parties of them deeper into the swamp and cut them off. One night, a company of cavalrymen on picket in the Bogue Homa Swamp glimpsed firelight in the distance, about half a mile away. Four men were sent to reconnoiter and edged cautiously toward the firelight with their guns cocked. They came within a few paces of the fire when they saw that it was abandoned. Just then, they sighted another fire, still another half mile off. “It was very evident that the tories were trying to decoy us into the swamp and away from our camp,” a trooper reported. “Our force being so small, the Lieutenant thought we had better return to camp, which we did.”

Another, better-laid trap succeeded. Some of the area farmwives invited the troopers to a dance party at Levi Valentine’s. The cavalrymen arrived to find a Negro fiddler sawing on his instrument and friendly local girls eager to waltz. But as they cavorted, the Jones County men crept up on the guards for an ambush. As the cavalrymen realized the trap, chaos erupted. The women fled out the back door, while the rebels bolted toward the front porch, where Newton’s men met them with a brace of gunfire. Two cavalrymen and one guerrilla were killed in the exchange.

Yeoman wives continued to aid the Unionists clandestinely, as did their children. They hid them, fed them, armed them, and helped them melt into the woods. One widow provided them with fifty pounds of lead with which to make buckshot for their shotguns.

Seventeen-year-old Sil Coleman and his younger brother Noble, the sons of Tom Coleman, slain by Sheriff Kilgore before the war, were firm allies of the Knight band, idolizing the men and often riding with them. Their teenaged sister Cornelia carried food to their swamp encampments, swimming the Leaf River on horseback holding baskets of provisions above her head. Young Martha Knight was another reliable supporter of the band, often carrying baskets to
her brother disguised under piles of corn shucks. One afternoon she crossed paths with a Confederate patrol but managed to fool them by scattering the shucks and calling for hogs.

The yeoman loyalty to the Knight band was based on kinship, hunger, and resentment of the Confederate cavalry. Maury, who had grown wealthy as a Mobile trader before the war, was an uneven officer who was twice accused of drunkenness, and he allowed his men to carouse and purloin goods from the local populace, enraging them. Another Confederate officer who visited the county a month later observed that the disaffection in Jones was at least in part exacerbated by “the many outrages that have been committed by many small commands of cavalry sent into this country,” which had improperly robbed and stolen from those who could ill afford it.

The stealing sat bitterly with people who were already on the brink of destitution and had nothing left to give. Colonel William Nugent of the 28th Mississippi had vividly observed the poverty of the Piney Woods when he rode through the area that January while returning from a furlough.

“As I have often said a large portion of Mississippi territory is almost worthless,” he wrote to his wife, Nellie.

It was small wonder that the yeomanry was more loyal to Newton’s men, who shared their lucre from raids such as the ones on Paulding and New Augusta with penniless local families. Many of those families contended that Newton Knight was all that saved them from starvation, and their gratitude lasted for generations afterward.

Newton was credited with a grim joke about the privations of the county after one skirmish with Confederates left men dead on a field. “They’ll never come up with the Resurrection,” he supposedly said of the corpses. “The ground’s too poor to sprout them.”

Under the circumstances, Maury was bound to fail. He rounded up only a small handful of twelve to fifteen deserters, three of whom resisted arrest. These men received the full wrath and frustration of the Confederate troopers. Maury ordered them hanged.

On a Saturday morning the three men, Morgan Mitchell, Jack Smith, and Jesse Smith, were placed into a wagon under a party of guards and driven along an old trade road to an oak grove near Errata, Mississippi. As word circulated that the deserters were to be executed, rebel soldiers gathered for the event as if for a political rally. Young J. C. Andrews, the teenaged Confederate conscript who worked at the mill, witnessed the event. A pole was set between two trees, and the wagon with the condemned men was driven beneath it. Nooses were placed around the necks of the prisoners, the ropes thrown over the pole. A blast from a bugle sounded. The wagon lurched, the men writhed, “and three miserable wretches were launched into eternity,” one of Maury’s troopers reported.

Instead of cutting the bodies down, the troopers left them dangling in the air, as a gruesome reminder of rebel authority. They remained suspended until Monday, when their wives were finally permitted to come and retrieve them for burial.

On March 12, Colonel Maury decided his assignment was concluded, and he and his men moved to the Leaf River for the trip back to Mobile. First, he paused in Ellisville to pen a self-congratulatory account of his actions to General Dabney Maury. “I am satisfied that there no longer remains any organization of deserters in this county, although some few have to be hunted out with dogs,” he wrote. It was his opinion that Jones had been home to about 150 “resident” deserters, and he had cleared out all but 20 or so.

But Confederate commanders who read Maury’s letter had reason to be worried, for it was clear that Maury’s cavalry hadn’t destroyed the Jones County Scouts, only temporarily dispersed them, and that they retained their insolence. “They brag that they will get Yankee aid and return,” Maury confessed.

In actuality, Maury was probably lucky not to have been killed. The guerrillas were so guileful and skilled at maneuvering in the swamp, Maury admitted, “their leaders twice got them in position to ambush me” before he managed to escape. And just as Maury prepared to depart, he received a dispatch from a local officer. “Don’t leave a company in Jones County,” it warned him. The implication was clear: an undefended company would be wiped out.

Maury had merely driven the deserters southward, to a refuge called Honey Island, a grassy atoll in Hancock County almost on the coast between two branches of the Pearl River, where its bayou waters eddied into the Gulf. In this hidden stronghold, Newton and his fellow guerrillas rested and replenished themselves on two thousand stolen beef cattle that grazed there. It was a haven for other fugitives, too, particularly runaway slaves who milled about the bayous in large numbers.

At the end of March, a rebel informant named Daniel Logan tracked the Jones County men to Honey Island. Logan reported to
the Confederate provost marshal for the district that the deserters had recongregated there and were as active as ever, terrorizing the entire region from Jones to Marion County on the Louisiana border.

Honey Island may have also been a contact point for the Yankees. According to a Knight family account, it was at Honey Island that Newton and his men received arms and provisions from federal sources. The Jones Countians then floated the gear upstream on the Pearl by flatboat, then on to Jones, where they cached it in Devil’s Den.

Federal steamboats occasionally plied the bayous around Honey Island, and that same week, on April 4, one named the
Lizzie Davis
hazarded the shallow waters. A major named Martin Pulver of the 20th Infantry, Corps d’Afrique, landed three companies of his black troops, and the men traversed the island and marched up the Pearl to salvage another Union steamer, the
J. D. Swaim
, which had been mudbound there for two years. There is no mention in Pulver’s report of contact with Southern Unionists on the expedition, but Pulver did return with sixty-four escaped slaves who had been hiding out there.

But contact with the Yankees was extremely hazardous and intermittent. At around this time, Newton launched efforts to have his men sworn in officially as federal troops by dispatching Jasper Collins on a marathon journey to Memphis. Collins’s errand was an arduous one; he traipsed miles across the war-torn countryside, only to be greeted at Memphis by a Union officer who referred him to higher authorities in Vicksburg. Collins then made his way to Vicksburg, where he met with a staff officer (possibly General Stephen Hurlbut), who gave him some “orders and instructions” to carry back to the Knight company “of a military character.” These presumably involved ways in which the Jones resisters could best aid the Union cause.

Newton also sent a separate courier to New Orleans, where, he later claimed, a Union officer arranged to ship them four hundred rifles. Members of the Scouts also believed that a company of Yankees was dispatched to Jones County to swear them in but was unable to break through. There is no evidence that such a mission actually took place, and this belief may have been wishful thinking. The Union army had larger battles to fight than the one in Jones, and the Scouts largely had to fend for themselves.

Newton and his men were soon back in Jones and in control of the region again. No Confederate could operate there without feeling menaced. Sheriff William H. Quarles of Smith County reported that he had been “ambushed and shot” near his plantation by guerrillas; “no man’s life is safe who dares speak out against them.” On March 21, 1864, Jones County’s Confederate clerk, E. M. Devall, wrote to Governor Clark in a similar state of anxiety. The Knight men had so intimidated the local Confederate bureaucrats, he said, that it was impossible to do any state business at all.

“They have gone so far as to press wagons and teams and have halled [sic] away a good deal of the tax in kind from the different places in the adjoining counties, not only the deserters in this county, but others,” he wrote. “Deserters have joined them from different counties and have stopped the government agents from driving stock
out of the country.” The guerrillas, he reported, had “resolved not to pay any tax neither state, county, nor confederate.”