September 1863, Countryside Surrounding Vicksburg
War destroyed all that was familiar to Mississippians; it collapsed the old certainties like bricks and boards and altered the physical profiles of things into narcotic-seeming visions. In a clearing outside of Vicksburg, an elegant bedstead sat on a fine carpet on the grass, accompanied by a table and chairs. The eerie outdoor room was the work of a Yankee officer, who dragged the furnishings from a deserted plantation. “I have a magnificent parlor here in the woods,” he wrote in his diary, as if it were an everyday occurrence to sleep on a feather mattress in a swamp.
The capital of Jackson was a barely recognizable heap of ruins nicknamed “Chimneyville” by its residents for the rows of burned-out lots where nothing was left standing but chimneys. Newly elected governor Charles Clark, a planter who had lost the use of a leg at Shiloh, advocated mass suicide over defeat as if it were a reasonable proposition. Better to drown in the cobalt waters of the Gulf than surrender to Yankees and let Negroes invert society, suggested Clark, eminent in his gray broadcloth.
“Humbly submit yourselves to our hated foes, and they will offer you a reconstructed Constitution providing for the confiscation of your property, the immediate emancipation of your slaves and the elevation of the black race to a position of equality, aye, of superiority, that will make them your masters and rulers,” Clark threatened. “Rather than such base submission, such ruin and dishonor, let the last of our young men die upon the field of battle, and when none are left to wield a blade or uphold our banner, then let our old men, our women and children, like the remnant of the heroic Pascagoulas, when their braves were slain, join hands together, march into the sea and perish beneath its waters.”
But such suicidal grandiosity hardly helped those Mississippians such as Newton who wished to survive, nor did it help Clark cope with the more tedious and inglorious emergencies he faced as governor in the fall of 1863. Federal flags now flew over Corinth, Natchez, and Vicksburg, from which the Yankees could ravage the state’s interior. Clark and the legislature were continually forced to flee for safety, from Meridian, to Columbus, to Enterprise, to Macon.
The cotton speculator and future governor James Lusk Alcorn described what one raid did to his region. The Yankees “made sad havoc on their march; burnt old man Shelby’s gun house also Hulls—and Hatchez—burnt all Hull’s fence, killed most of his stock, took all that they had left, clothes, bedding, burnt all his doors, broke out his window sash, and burnt two of his cabins … they broke all that fine furniture and threw it in the yard, searched the house and robbed it of ten thousand dollars in money … They took off about twenty of Hill’s negros, and killed a great amount of the stock.”
As the Vicksburg survivors made their way through the region, they came across odd drifting scraps of paper. These were the bits and pieces of Jefferson Davis’s collection of books and papers, shredded by the Yankee victors. A slave named Alfred led hundreds of Northern soldiers to the plantation where “Old Jeff’s” furniture, books, and wine were cached. For two consecutive days they took special pleasure in ransacking and wrecking the property of the Confederate president, until the flotsam floated through the woods for miles. Troopers stabbed at the volumes with the points of their bayonets “as often as they could find a piece of paper large enough to receive the point of a knife,” a caretaker wrote to Davis. When the frenzy was finally over, the Yankees rode away with hacked-up pieces of Davis’s carpets as saddle blankets and pieces of his curtains for tents.
To Major Walter Rorer of the 20th Mississippi Regiment, surreptitiously patrolling the area on horseback, it was as if all of society had been flipped upside down. Rorer was a fine example of an antebellum Mississippian, literate and valorous, a successful sawmill owner from Aberdeen who entered the army as a captain and rose in rank to lieutenant colonel, second officer of the regiment. He’d fought like a lion at the battle of Raymond, trying to halt Grant’s progress toward Vicksburg, for which he was cited for gallantry. “He was continually going up and down the line encouraging and directing the men as though no death messengers were nigh, exhibiting that noble daring and eminent tact which has rendered him so dear to every man in the regiment,” according to a report.
Rorer thought he was beyond shock, but what he saw when he rode out to survey the countryside under Yankee dominion gave him pause. He described his observations in a series of letters to a Virginia cousin. “I think any man would prefer death to such a life as many of those live who are left within enemy lines,” he wrote. “Every thing is taken from them before their eyes and given to their Negroes or taken by the soldiers, ladies dresses are given to Negro women, Negro men are dressed in Yankee uniform and formally mustered into the Service of the United States in the presence of their masters, and those families who are stripped of everything are limited to one suit of clothes and a daily ration that is issued to them by the federal commissary. It is a very wealthy country between the two rivers (Big Black and Yazoo) and some who were once worth a million are now worth nothing.”
Rorer’s sense of disorientation grew when he visited his home in Aberdeen on furlough in August, in the wake of the Vicksburg defeat. The passenger trains were so crowded with fleeing civilians that Rorer couldn’t get a seat, so he hopped a freight train instead. He arrived eight miles from Aberdeen at dark, borrowed a mule from an acquaintance, and made his sad, plodding way toward town.
I arrived before ordinary bedtime, but I could not hear a sound or see a light, the town seemed almost a city of the dead, I rode along the deserted streets to the principal hotel, the streets are brown and beautifully shaded; but their appearance made me sad indeed; arrived at the hotel, I found nothing but a Negro asleep on a bench, I roused him up, but he was a strange Negro and did not know me. The old hotel, that had been a home to so many of us, had changed owners and was almost deserted, the joyous crowd that once thronged its halls, will be seen there no more, they lie dead on a thousand battlefields. I do not know when I ever felt more depressed … the absence of all the familiar sounds, and being in the midst of an almost deserted city at night, is enough to inspire sad thoughts at any time, and more particularly when our beloved country is bleeding, as it were, at every pore.
But Newton had little sympathy for planters who bemoaned their lost world or were plundered by Yankees. Rebel forces were perpetrating equally savage violence on the countryside, if not worse. Union troops patrolling the Louisiana side of the Mississippi River were aghast to find that rebel raiders had slain or set fire to everything in their path that might be put to use—including the slaves, who were shot or burned alive to prevent them from defecting. A Yankee cavalry commander reported,
The rebel atrocities committed the day before were such as the pen fails to record in proper language. They spared neither age, sex, nor condition. In some instances the negroes were shut up in their quarters, and literally roasted alive. The charred remains found in numerous instances testified to a degree of fiendish atrocity … Young children, only five or six years of age, were found skulking in the canebrake pierced with wounds, while helpless women were found shot down in the most inhuman manner. The whole country was destroyed, and every sign of civilization was given to the flames.
With both sides determined to starve and burn the other out, swaths of the state were destitute, and yeoman families like Newton’s were caught squarely in the middle. Corn was up to four dollars a bushel and far beyond the means of soldiers’ families.
Newton’s wife, Serena, was on the brink of starvation and struggling to feed her children. She moved through an endless ring of chores on the Knight farm, a circuit of heavy manual labor from field to storehouse to smokehouse to corncrib. When a fence rail broke, there was no one to mend it for her. When the livestock strayed, there was no one to help her search it out. She wielded the heavy ax herself, yoked the animals, and drove the heavy plow. Night brought no relief from work, for once the children were asleep she sat up late at the spinning wheel, or shelled corn, or darned and laundered their fraying clothes.
Her continual physical exhaustion was compounded by anxieties—over what weather might do to her meager crops, whether she would be able to feed and clothe the children for another month, whether Newton would come home safely. Things began to wear out, with no way to replace them. Without Newton to tan, there were no new shoes. Pieces of farm equipment broke, with no way for her to fix them.
Serena wasn’t just tired; she was beset by loneliness. Her spirituality gave her some solace, but it became impractical to go to church. The farm animals needed a rest from farm work, so travel was just too difficult. Church attendance had dropped all over the state, as families lost their mules and horses to the Confederacy. “The ways of Zion languish and mourn,” wrote the Mississippi Synod. “Pastors are parted from their flocks, God’s worship interrupted or forbidden, while from many churches God’s people are exiled sheep scattered without their shepherd.”
All in all, Serena probably endured as many hardships as Newton himself. At least as a Confederate conscript he’d had fellowship, something to eat, clothes to wear. His wife did not even have that much. Serena’s only company was a household full of needy children, none of whom were old enough to help her.
Nor could she expect any sympathy or support from the Confederate government. The bureaucracy was oblivious if not outright hostile to her deprivations; it expected her to sew flags and garments for the army and turn over her foodstuff and cloth without complaint, at risk of being labeled treasonous herself. Another yeoman wife, this one in North Carolina, summed up the state of women like Serena in a letter to her governor beseeching him for relief.
I set down to rite you afew lins and pray to god that you will oblige me i ame apore woman with a posel of little children and i wil hav to starv or go neked me and my little children if my husban is kep a way from home much longer … i beg you to let him come … i have knit 40 pare of socks fo the sogers and it take all i can earn to get bread … if you cud hear the crys of my little children i think you wod fell for us i am pore in this world but i trust rich in heven i trust in god … and hope he will Cos you to have compashion on the pore.
Instead of aid from the government, Serena received only harassment, or worse. The rebel officers who came hunting Newton may have physically abused her—it was not uncommon—when they didn’t ransack her storehouse or ruin her crops. Women who refused to tell the whereabouts of their men sometimes found themselves knocked to the ground with rifle butts. Her Confederate neighbors also deliberately set out to ruin her, as revenge for being married into a Unionist family. Even when Serena did have corn, she often could not find anyone to mill it for her, because Confederates ran the gins.
The brutally punishing attitude of rebels toward a Unionist spouse was reflected by the experience of one Alabama yeoman’s wife, who was left to cope with persecution in her local community after her husband escaped to the federal lines. She was set upon by Confederate soldiers, who tossed her spinning wheel, dresser, and dishes in the yard “as far as they could throw them.” They yelled at her “that her god dam’d Yankee husband had escaped from their prison and had gone to the Yanks.”
With the river ports and market towns in the hands of the Yankees, lines of wagons moved toward them, full of hungry yeoman wives, so desperate they were willing to defy Confederate law to trade goods. William L. Nugent’s cavalry unit caught a half dozen weathered farm women attempting to reach Union lines in hopes of bartering for needed supplies. They had traveled one hundred miles with a single bale of cotton in each wagon. The Confederates confiscated their meager goods and imprisoned two of them. To Nugent, who wrote about the incident to his own refined young wife, they seemed unwashed slatterns.
Think of a female with the dirty colored tobacco streak around her mouth & on her lips, squirting discolored spittle all around her … you must, though, add to the pitiable picture a tousled head, unwashed face, drabbled dress, (no corsets) heavy shoes, a guffaw laugh, and sidelong leer. A dirty baby, too, is no infrequent addition to the scene … We have two of these women in the Guard House for practicing their tory principles and keeping our people in dread. The Yankees have unhinged things terribly here.
But nothing unhinged Mississippi like desertion. Against this mural of ruin, Newton and his fellow Johnnies, bedraggled in clothing stained the color of dirt, staggered home from Vicksburg. Deserters swarmed over the state, until in some counties, blacks found that the woods were “so full of runaway white men that there was no room for them.”
Grant had made a shrewd decision to accept surrender with parole. As he predicted, the released and disillusioned soldiers became a crisis for the rebel army: a month after Vicksburg fewer than fifteen hundred of thirty thousand had reported for duty. All across the South, in Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana, men were missing from their units. In Mississippi, there were at least five thousand deserters, stragglers, and absentees, according to an inspecting officer for the Conscription Bureau. Men were leaving the rebel army faster than they were being rounded up, the officer noted with alarm.
The Confederate high command did its part to transform these parolees into disloyals. Amazingly and perhaps intentionally, the Confederate staff lost the official parole rolls. The high command used this as an excuse to violate the parole agreement and began attempts to force men back into the ranks whether or not they had been exchanged. For many soldiers, despair turned into open rebellion. Thousands of poor whites followed Newton Knight and became self-described Unionists.
Many of them went home to rural counties to find disaffection had already set in there. Reports of armed bands of deserters resisting Confederate authority had been pouring into the Mississippi governor’s office since the spring of 1863: Scott, Lawrence, Leake, and Marion counties all requested military aid to deal with the festering issue. In Simpson County, a band of twenty-five deserters busted out of the local jail and attacked citizens who had aided in capturing them. A similar account came from Gainesville, a town on the banks of the Pearl River in Hancock County, where deserters were so resistant that local authorities couldn’t confront them “without endangering their lives.” One man who lent his horse for an action against the deserters was “severely beaten and brused,” a Confederate official complained, adding, “It is not safe for any officer to ride through the country alone not knowing what minute that he may be waylaid and shot down from the wayside.”
Newton was not the only man in Jones who swore he would rather die than rejoin the Confederate army again. A large band of seventy-five to one hundred or so deserters already prowled through the thickets of the county, with hundreds more lurking deeper in the swamps, led by Jasper Collins and his brothers. The men loosely cooperated in evading Confederate authorities and filched supplies from the homes of loyal rebels. Their presence provoked a typical letter to the governor, this one sent on June 1, 1863, from Company K of the 8th Mississippi Infantry. The men of Company K, known as the “Ellisville Invincibles,” were the most zealous Confederates in Jones, battle-tested veterans who had fought at Perryville. They were incensed at the reports of shirking and thieving they received from home and requested special duty to go back and round up the absentees. Second Lieutenant Harmon Mathis informed the governor that he and his men “all are desirous of being detached to Jones County, Miss. for the purpose of apprehending [and] arresting a body of deserters now lurking in said county … there is between seventy-five and one hundred deserters who are lying out in the swamps and prowling from house to house stealing everything they can get their hands on.”
The desertion problem had begun even before Vicksburg, but it bloomed into a perpetual crisis after. Why did deserters risk dishonor, imprisonment, and even execution rather than go back? The plain fact is that without conviction to carry a man, service in the Southern army was insufferable. Living in a swamp was in some ways preferable. It wasn’t just the ordeal of combat, it was the Southern soldier’s everyday existence, of comfortless exhaustion, chronic exposure, pauper’s pay, and rancid diet, and all of it enforced by tyranny from above.
There was no soap, and clothing rotted on their bodies from living outdoors; men didn’t change shirts for weeks at a time. Uniforms were worn so threadbare it became a source of joking. “In this army, one hole in the seat of the breeches indicates a captain, two holes is a lieutenant, and the seat of the pants all out indicates that the individual is a private,” a Confederate wrote. Overcoats and blankets were so hard to find after the first year of the war that men cut holes in pieces of scavenged carpet and slipped them over their heads for warmth. It was an army that went everywhere on foot, and yet by the winter of 1863 reports of shoeless men leaving smears of blood on the ground came from all over the service.
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.
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.”
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.”
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”:
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
His soul is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His soul is marching on
He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord.
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.
Newton would have learned how to hunt in the swamp for coon and opossum at night in the heat of the summer, when they were hidden and sleeping. Swamp possums were round, long-bodied little animals, of a whitish color, with noses like pigs, and they burrowed among the roots and in the hollows of the gum tree. They were clumsy but deceitful and cunning creatures that would feign their own deaths at the tap of a stick, only to scamper away. Newton also would have learned how to make a fish trap, a box made of notched boards and sticks, between two and three feet square, baited with a handful of wet meal and cotton wadded together. A fish swimming through the upraised door toward the bait would strike one of the small sticks and turn a handle, and the door would fall shut.
But Newton’s most reliable ally and source of sustenance was Rachel. It was during this time, when he was a fugitive and she remained in bondage to his family, that their partnership began. According to Knight family tradition, it was Rachel who helped hide Newton when it became too dangerous for him to go back to Serena and his children. They had an agreement: she would provide him with food, and he would work to secure her freedom.
The young woman knew both the ways of the swamp and the kitchens of Confederates. Rachel ferried food, clothing, and information to Newton. She regularly crossed the boundaries between Confederate households, the slave cabins, and the hidden civilization in the swamp, carrying news to Newton and keeping him apprised of rebel movements, information she may well have overheard in the loyal kitchen of Jesse Davis Knight. For the rest of the war, Rachel would operate as Newton’s “intelligence,” according to a family member. She became Newton’s spy, his eyes and ears.
Rachel showed Newton and his men methods of poisoning or killing the dogs that pursued them. She ground up red pepper into a fine powder and scattered it to foul the noses of the hounds and taught Newton to dig up wild onions or garlic and rub them on the soles of his shoes and then cross a road backward, to baffle the dogs. She supposedly told Newton, “There’s lots a’ ways to choke a dog ’sides on butter.”
The deserters’ wives also conspired to wound or kill dogs. The hounds were kept ravenous, so that they would hunt, since a dog with a full stomach would only sleep. According to one account it was Rachel who taught the local women how to hide glass splinters, strychnine, and other poisons in the dog food.
But sometimes the men were cornered and alone in the swamps and had to hope their trigger fingers were faster than the jaws of the mastiffs. “Some of them died of lead poisoning,” Newton said, laconically.
Outwardly, Rachel and the other slaves of Jones County went about their business, doing their chores and obeying Confederate laws. But these were phantom gestures, veneers, as they awaited their liberation. The men and women in the slave quarters surely felt a personal stake in the survival of Newton and his band and guarded against their recapture. There was not a black in the Piney Woods unaware that Newton had run away from the army and was willing to fight to free slaves from bondage.
According to the Union government they were already free. Word of the Emancipation Proclamation had reached Jones County, and possibly so did word that in January of 1863 the Union forces occupying Corinth had held emancipation ceremonies, led by chaplains. Thousands of freedmen and women who had made their way to federal encampments were declared liberated—and then armed with pistols.
Mississippi slaves in the path of Yankee troops rejoiced at their arrival, demonstrating that they were acutely aware of their personal status. A twenty-four-year-old Yankee captain from Iowa who marched through the Jackson area in the late spring of 1863 was practically mobbed by overjoyed freedmen. “Passed by many a fine deserted place,” he wrote in his diary. “The colored people manifested great joy at our approach, and told us they prayed constantly for our success and had been praying for this time for many years. Many a god bless you was sent after us as we passed them.”
Men and women who had previously seemed subservient were no longer. In Vicksburg, no sooner had the Confederates under Pemberton surrendered than slaves in the town declared themselves no longer bound. One woman announced “her intention of going to search for her sons, as she was free now … she would not wait a day.” Another woman demanded wages from her mistress—and was turned out of the house for it.
Even small children were aware of what was at stake in the war. In Lauderdale County, Mississippi, a young girl named Susan Snow became infuriated when she heard white children singing a song in praise of Confederate president Jefferson Davis:
Ol’ Jeff Davis, long an’ slim,
Whupped ol’ Abe wid a hick’ry limb.
Jeff Davis is a wise man an’ Lincoln is a fool,
Ol’ Jeff Davis rides a gray an’ Lincoln rides a mule.
As soon as the children had finished singing, Snow hopped up and chanted in reply:
Ol’ Gen’l Pope, he had a short gun,
Fill it full of gum,
Kill ’em as dey come.
Call a Union band,
Make de rebels understand
To leave our land,
Submit to Abraham.
Unbeknownst to Snow her mistress had come out to the porch and heard her song. “Ol’ mistis was standin’ right behin’ me! She grabbed up de bresh broom an’ she laid it on me. Ol’ mistis made me submit. I caught de feathers, don’t you forgit it.”
As the Yankee occupation of Mississippi broadened, thousands upon thousands of freed slaves made an army in their own right as they moved toward Union lines. Once there they took an increasingly vital role in the Union war effort: according to one estimate there were twenty thousand black refugees in the Vicksburg area alone, doing hard labor for the North instead of the South. John Eaton, the chaplain of the 27th Ohio appointed superintendent of the freedmen by Grant, organized work programs for which they could earn wages, plowing on abandoned plantations leased to Northern speculators or wielding axes in woodyards.
Eaton described the waves of humanity that flowed toward the Union positions in Mississippi: they came “in rags or silks, feet shod or bleeding; individually or in families; and pressing towards the armies characterized as Vandal Hordes. Their comings were like the arrivals of cities. Often they met prejudices against their color, more bitter than they had left behind. There was no Moses to lead, nor plan in their exodus. The decision of their instinct or unlettered reason brought them to us. They felt that their interests were identical with objects of our armies. This identity of interest, slowly but surely, comes to be perceived by our officers and soldiers, and by the loyal public.”
Some of the freedmen were determined to do more than work—they wanted to fight. In the spring of 1863, freedmen began to volunteer in the first black regiments, mustered by General Lorenzo Thomas and led by volunteer white officers. By the end of the year about fifty thousand freedmen would be serving in the Union army, most of them in the Mississippi Valley. Southerners reacted to the arming of freed slaves as if it were an act of barbarism. The poetical Lieutenant William Nugent of the 28th Mississippi Cavalry saw it as “flagrant, unwarranted and demoniac violations of the usage of a civilized warfare,” as he wrote to his wife.
As the Union soldiers became increasingly accustomed to working with liberated slaves, their views continued to evolve. “I don’t care a damn for the darkies,” wrote an Illinois lieutenant, “but I couldn’t help to send a runaway nigger back. I’m blamed if I could. I honestly believe that this army has taken 500 niggers away with them … I have 11 negroes in my company now. They do every particle of the dirty work. Two women among them do the washing for the company.”
Even William T. Sherman, who “was no professed friend of the Negro,” viewed the freedmen as valuable additions to the service, though menial ones. “Every Negro who came within our lines—and there were hundreds of them—was enrolled on the quartermasters books, clothed, fed, and paid wages, the price of his clothing being deducted,” recalled aide Wickham Hoffman. “They were proud of being paid like white men.” Hoffman was struck by the energy with which they trundled wheelbarrows filled with earth, at the double-quick.
Rachel and the unliberated slaves in the Piney Woods interior would also have received word through the grapevine of the battle in June of 1863 at Milliken’s Bend, where black troops proved that they were good for more than shoveling or laundering. The arming of freedmen had been a controversial exercise, primarily because white officers did not believe they could fight. Nevertheless, Grant saw that with black troops to guard garrisons, he could free up white units to campaign.
But at Milliken’s Bend, a Union position on the Mississippi just a few miles above Vicksburg, black troops proved their mettle, as they fought and died equal to the bravest men of either side. Initially part of Grant’s supply line during his drive on Vicksburg, the garrison at Milliken’s Bend had become largely irrelevant, and Grant left it in the hands of five regiments of black troops, mostly raw recruits, as he went on about the business of besieging the city.
On June 5, a Confederate brigade under H. E. McCulloch attacked, aiming to take the bend in order to drive cattle across the river to the rescue of the starving troops there. The rebels charged at dawn, crying, “No quarter!” The fighting was hand-to-hand, from trench to trench, men savagely raking at one another with bayonets. The inexperienced black troops were pushed to the river, where they stood their ground and finally repulsed the Confederates with the help of fire from two federal gunboats. The casualties were staggering: of the 1,061 black soldiers who fought, 652 were killed, wounded, or missing, along with 160 white officers. Rear Admiral David Porter surveyed the battlefield and reported to Grant that it was “quite an ugly sight. The dead Negroes lined the ditch inside the parapet or levee, and were mostly shot on top of the head. In front of them, close to the levee, lay an equal number of rebels stinking in the sun.”
One white officer leading a regiment of black troops, Captain M. M. Miller, formerly of Yale University and Galena, Illinois, wrote an account of the engagement for his local paper in which he passionately praised his soldiers. “We had about 80 men killed in the regiment and 80 wounded so you can judge what part of the fight my company sustained! I never felt more grieved and sick at heart than when I saw my brave soldiers slaughtered—one with six wounds, all the rest with two or three, none less than two wounds. Two of my colored sergeants were killed, both brave, noble men; always prompt, vigilant and ready for the fray. I never more wish to hear the expression ‘the nigger won’t fight.’ Come with me a 100 yards from where I sit and I can show you the wounds that cover the bodies of 16 as brave, loyal and patriotic soldiers as ever drew bead on a rebel. The enemy charged us so close that we fought with our bayonets hand to hand. I have six broken bayonets to show how bravely my men fought.”
Milliken’s Bend was a negligible fight strategically; soon after it was over, the garrison was abandoned. But the troops who fought there won the first significant victory over bigotry in the Union service—and they did so a full six weeks before the 54th Massachusetts would make their legendary assault at Fort Wagner. Charles A. Dana, the assistant secretary of war, later remarked, “The bravery of the blacks at Milliken’s Bend completely revolutionized the sentiment of the Army with regard to the employment of Negro troops.”
It was under these conditions, then, of emancipation, mass slave defections, inductions into Union uniform, heroism, terror, vengefulness, and atrocity, that the slaves of the Piney Woods aided Newton Knight and his band. They undoubtedly saw it as their contribution to the war effort, their way to get into the fight. According to numerous accounts, Joe Hatton, who lived in the household of Newton’s uncle William Knight, believed that as “a useful messenger” for the Jones County Scouts, he was working “in the service of his peoples” and may have even considered himself a fellow soldier of Newton’s.
It was a fearful risk, as accounts from other slaves in nearby counties who aided deserters reflect. “I remember how the men would hide out to keep from going to war,” remembered a slave named Jeff Rayford. “I cooked and carried many a pan of food to these men in Pearl River swamp. This I did for one man regularly. All I had to do was carry the food down after dark, and I was so scared I was trembling, and while walking along the path in the swamp, pretty soon he would step out from behind a tree and say: ‘Here, Jeff.’ And then I would hand it to him and run back to the house.”
Julia Stubbs, a slave in Simpson County, recalled how she collaborated with the local farmwives to aid deserters hiding from the Confederate cavalry hunting them. “During de war deir wuz a heap o’ deserters hid out. De Calvarymen would ride through a hunting ’em. We could might nigh alwas’ hear ’em a coming long fo’ dey got in sight, de womens would blow a horn sos dey could hide from ’em. I’se carried food to de woods to de deserters. Sometimes we would have to take it a long ways an’ agin dey would be near by.”
No one risked more than Rachel. As a fugitive, Newton was both vulnerable and reliant on Rachel, and according to their descendants he would not have survived the war without her. It was a constant temptation for the fugitive to return to the known and comfortable, and Rachel’s cabin in the half-abandoned slave quarters must have offered a rare refuge. In turn, Rachel may have seen the angular, black-haired, buccaneering Newton as a champion who emboldened her to act.
Frederick Douglass described an escapee’s poignant glimpses of “civilization” and the mixed feelings they provoked. “Peeping through the rents of the quarters, I saw my fellow-slaves seated by a warm fire, merrily passing away the time, as though their hearts knew no sorrow. Although I envied their seeming contentment, all wretched as I was [in the swamp], I despised the cowardly acquiescence in their own degradation which it implied, and felt a kind of pride and glory in my own desperate lot. I dared not enter the quarters—for where there is seeming contentment with slavery, there is certain treachery to freedom.”
It’s entirely possible that Rachel and Newton gave each other a sense of bravery, and cause. The affair between them apparently began in this netherworld of wartime resistance and hiding. Love was surely an accident; they were constrained and facing several dangers, and the Civil War was not an event that gentled the emotions. What began as an alliance at some point deepened, and the experience must have been unsettling for two people who needed every ounce of calculation and self-possession for survival. But war was also distilling. Among the effects of what W. H. Auden called “the nearly religious mystery” of romantic love is a sharpening of self-definition. “You find out who you are when you are in love,” Auden observed. And when you are at war.
At almost every turn, every day, the events of the Civil War demanded that Newton and Rachel decide who they were: was Newton a coward or traitor, Unionist or rebel? Was Rachel a bondswoman or free soul, a passive victim or an active fighter? Attraction must have been one more desperate factor in an existence already reduced to daily urgency. With the old society smashed to pieces around them and death a Minié ball or a rope end away, what did vows mean? To whom did they truly belong?
There is precious little direct evidence of their relationship, no love letters or locks of hair. All that’s left are legions of great-great-grandchildren, who received whispers and faint impressions of the original relationship: Newton loved Rachel “deeply” and felt “responsible” for her. She felt “protective” of him and “sheltered” him. Their descendants are not always in agreement in the details passed down to them, but they are unanimous on one fact: at some point, Newton came to belong more to Rachel than to his own wife, Serena.
The relationship may also have begun to blossom in the absence of others. In midwar, Serena finally found it impossible to subsist in Jones County and left Mississippi for a period to live with relatives in Georgia, although it’s not clear when or for how long. She must have done so because she was no longer able to support the family, once the rebels had burned them out. On an undated Confederate document, she was listed as “destitute.” She may have also fled because of the danger of Newton’s activities, or because she didn’t understand his transformation into an anti-Confederate Unionist leader and a comrade of blacks.
More significantly, Jesse Davis Knight was dead. He was slain not by a bullet in battle, but by one of the most commonplace killers in the army: measles. He fell ill in the fall-winter of 1863 while in Georgia with the 27th Mississippi Regiment, and it worsened into pneumonia. He expired December 17, 1863, in the Institute Hospital in Atlanta and was buried in a soldiers’ graveyard in Marietta, Georgia. However, he must have visited home shortly before his death: Rachel became pregnant again and would bear Jesse Davis’s daughter, a mulatto infant named Fannie, in the spring of 1864. It was Rachel’s first child since shortly before the war began. With most of the able-bodied white men away in uniform, she apparently had been spared their sexual attentions.
Rachel had been raped, seduced, or sexually exploited by a white man but perhaps never before loved by one. What few cases of interracial romance she and Newton might have heard of had ended tragically: if a white man acted on romantic feelings for a black woman, he found himself an outcast in white society. Most of Newton’s comrades viewed such a romance as “illicit and immoral”; while they could comprehend the sexual urge, they couldn’t comprehend how a white man and black woman could be “faithful, loyal, and true” to each other.
Institutionally structured concubinage with white men was common in Rachel’s world, but love was not. Black women were reputed to be promiscuous, as opposed to the prudish white women who were symbols of purity, and consequently they were targets of force and also of “seduction under the implicit threat of force.” In fact, many masters believed that it was this system of sexual force that protected the purity of white Southern women. According to the Yazoo planter James J. B. White, “everybody who has resided in the South long enough to get acquainted with ou’ people and thar ways must know that the nigro women have always stood between ouah daughters and the superabundant sexual energy of ouah hot-blooded youth. End white mens’ right to do as they pleased with black women,” he said, “and ouah young men’ll be driven back upon the white ladies, and we’ll have prostitution like you all have it in the North, and as it is known in other countries.”
For a slave woman like Rachel to fall in love with a white man, even an antislavery yeoman like Newton, was anything but the norm. Still, such relationships existed. Defining these relations as love rather than as exploitation can all too easily ignore the power that white men could wield over black women. Yet to deny that love existed ignores the reality of human feelings. The Virginia slave Harriet Jacobs took a white lover to ward off the violent advances of her master, justifying it by saying: “There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment. A master may treat you as rudely as he pleases, and you dare not speak…. It seems less degrading to give one’s self, than to submit to compulsion.”
Given the social taboo against interracial romance, Newton and Rachel’s relationship must have involved deep emotional confusion and perhaps even been “marked by a self-contempt projected onto the other.” As the scholar Eugene Genovese notes, “the tragedy of miscegenation” lay in the “terrible pressure to deny the delight, affection, and love that so often grew from tawdry beginnings. Whites as well as blacks found themselves tortured as well as degraded.”
Only a planter with enough wealth and social standing could thwart custom and didn’t have to hide his slave mistress. David Dickson of Georgia, one of the most celebrated leaders in the movement to reform Southern agriculture, lost his wife, took up with a mistress, and accepted outcast status to live openly with her and their children. The first mayor of Memphis, Marcus Winchester, had a beautiful free quadroon mistress whom he married and took to Louisiana, and his successor, Ike Rawlins, also lived with a slave mistress. Richard Mentor Johnson, the vice president of the United States during the Martin Van Buren administration, never married and had a long-term relationship with Julia Chinn, a mulatto he inherited from his father’s estate. A wealthy planter from Kentucky, Johnson made no attempt to conceal the relationship: their two daughters were raised and educated as his children, and on several occasions he insisted on their being recognized in society. After Chinn died, he had other mulatto mistresses, thus providing his political enemies with a steady supply of ammunition to use against him.
But such conduct invited backlash, even explosions of rage. Henry Hughes of Mississippi, for instance, condemned these unions by saying, “Hybridism is heinous. Impurity of races is against the law of nature. Mulattoes are monsters. The law of nature is the law of God. The same law which forbids consanguinous amalgamation forbids ethnical amalgamation. Both are incestuous. Amalgamation is incest.”
Relationships such as Newton’s with Rachel were the very things many white Southerners believed they were fighting the war to prevent. Later in the conflict, when large numbers of Confederate prisoners were taken in Sherman’s Atlanta campaign, Yankee troops questioned the rebels as to their motives for fighting so bitterly. They answered, “You Yanks want us to marry our daughters to the niggers.”
To the Mississippi cavalryman William Nugent, the war had become a sacred crusade to rescue civilization from the “unholy alliance” between crude Northern tartars and the bestial Negroes. As Yankees poured into the interior of the state after Vicksburg, Nugent wrote to his wife lamenting the tactics employed by Grant and the grave consequences of a defeated South.
If the Yankees should force surrender, “Our land will be a howling waste, wherever it has been invaded & we will be forced to abandon it to the freed Negroes & the wild beasts,” he warned. “… The commerce of the South will be nothing and certainly no one, unless his pretensions be very humble, will be content to live in a land where the intermixture of races will breed a long train of evils.”
The alliance between Newton and Rachel could not have been more perilous. What enabled two people to cross every permissible emotional line, even under the threat of mortal danger? The answer can only be conjectured, but a variety of forces surely had something to do with it: The cataclysmic nature of the war, the dissolution of old Mississippi around them, the unfamiliarity of the shattered countryside. The blank lack of a tomorrow.
None of the old rules applied—except perhaps those they clung to from the Bible. The first book of Samuel, 16:7, told them: “For the Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” Acts 17:26 said: “And God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.”
Or perhaps it simply had to do with their fearless natures. “Do you know,” Newton liked to say, with a slow smile, “there’s lots of ways I’d ruther die than be scared to death.”