July 1865, Ellisville
Newton Knight had become the man to see in the Piney Woods. His new status in the first uneasy weeks of the so-called peace was plain in the sheen of the good horse he rode in open daylight down the broad streets of Ellisville and the authority with which he came and went from the Union headquarters, where officers jotted out orders for him and called him “Captain.”
Ten thousand Union soldiers, many of them blacks who had mustered into U.S. Colored Infantry regiments during the war, occupied the towns and villages of Mississippi’s interior to enforce order, a daily affront to rebels and a reminder of their defeat. A detachment of the 70th U.S. Colored Infantry set up camp in Ellisville in full view of the white portico of the Deason home. Local Confederates stared balefully at the occupiers, and at Newton, as he conducted his official business with them.
Their bitterness was heaped on top of scarcity—the state was prostrate. Whole villages had been burned to the ground, until even the roads were black with ash. In Lake Station, the destruction was so complete there was no sign it had ever been there. A resident tried “to get someone to make an affidavit that his town had existed” before the war. Corinth was a “bruised and battered village surrounded by stumpy fields, forts, earthworks, and graves,” where “lonely white women crouched shivering over the hearth,” according to one traveler. In Natchez, multimillionaires had become paupers. One planter, his sons killed and servants fled, chopped down the oak trees in front of his manse to sell as firewood to passing steamers. “I must live,” he said. After five years of war Mississippi had become the poorest state in the Union. The whole town of Okolona could be purchased for five thousand dollars, and so many planters were ruined that in December the Vicksburg Herald advertised forty-eight plantations for sale or lease.
A third of Mississippi’s Confederates, some 28,000 men, had died during the war. Entire companies had been slaughtered: Of the 123 men who had marched off with the Vicksburg Cadets, just 6 returned. In Aberdeen, the home of Walter Rorer, a visitor asked a local planter named Charles Langworthy the whereabouts of his five boys.
“Where is John, your oldest son?”
“Killed at Shiloh.”
“Where is William?”
“Died of smallpox.”
“And the other boys?”
“All were killed …”
Langworthy had two daughters; both were in mourning, their husbands dead as well.
Those who came back were maimed—more than half of Mississippi veterans had lost a leg or arm. Men hobbled home with sleeves and pants legs flapping, like scarecrows emptied of their straw, vacant cloth bunched and pinned to their sides. The male populace was so mutilated that in 1866 one-fifth of the state budget would be needed to purchase artificial limbs. As the sickened and disfigured veterans shuffled over the blackened roads on foot, many of them all the way from Atlanta or Mobile, still more of them died by the roadsides. Indeed, in some places it was more common to see a dead man than a squirrel or bird.
In Jones, it was rare to find a fence standing or a field with crops growing. The corn “was so rotten even the horses wouldn’t eat it,” according to a Piney Woods farmer. Local families were so penniless that yeoman wives clawed the soil from the floors of their smokehouses and boiled it for the salt. Small children tried to shove handfuls of dirt in their mouths. “After the war this country was as flat, I reckon, as ever one country could be,” recalled Ben Graves.
Newton worked to get the county back on its feet. He emerged from his meetings with U.S. Army officers favored with an official appointment as “commissioner to procure relief for the destitute,” which empowered him to requisition thousands of pounds of supplies from the federal supply depot at Meridian. On July 16, 1865, a Union captain signed a bill of lading for Newton, who shipped the following goods by the M&O Railroad:
2400 pounds bacon
2000 pounds of flour
1250 pds hard bread
400 pounds of beans
82 pounds of soap
82 pounds salt Molasses
Newton delivered wagons full of the bacon, beans, flour, and salt to the starved citizens of Jones. Word of his role as a provider must have spread rapidly, because five days later a Union officer asked him to perform a similar service in Smith County. Captain John Fairbanks, a young Bostonian stationed with the 72nd U.S. Colored Infantry in the county seat of Raleigh, enlisted Newton’s help there in aiding a local widow and her children, who were suffering badly from hunger:
Mr. N Knight
I understand that you are commissioner to prove relief for the destitute in a part of Jones County and as Mrs. Davis has reported to me as being in a very destitute condition I would request it of you as a favor if you would see that she is supplied as she has no one to look out for her and has a family to support. Yours respectfully, J. Fairbanks Capt. 72 commanding at Raleigh
Newton must have performed the errand without hesitation, because three days later Fairbanks turned to him again, this time with a more substantial mission. He wanted Newton to assist a local black family in reclaiming their children from a grudging former master.
A Smith County planter was holding two children against their will and preparing to move away with them. It was a common problem in the summer of 1865: ex-slaveholders refused to turn loose the men and women they still considered property, especially children. Under new federal regulations, whites were supposed to sign contracts with their black employees, but some defiant planters resisted this transition to free labor and found a loophole in the fact that no contracts were required for children. Planters began to separate black children from their families so they could be worked as slaves.
It was a testament to Newton’s muscle in the Piney Woods that the parents believed he could get their children back. Fairbanks gave Newton the military authority to do so in a written order:
Raleigh, Miss. July 24 1865
Mr. Knight,
Sir this colored man informs me that you will get his two children for him and I hereby impower you to do so as I am informed that the man they live with is about to leave the county and it is right that the families be kept together and as there is no written contract between them it is best that the two children be retained by their father.
Yours respectfully J. Fairbanks 72nd (USC Inf) comdg Raleigh
Newton delivered the children back to their parents, according to his son just one of many instances in which he settled sensitive matters between whites and former slaves. At around this same time, Newton received another entreaty to rescue a captive black child, this one held by a recalcitrant Smith County family named Mayfield. “I remember seeing an old Negro man and his wife come crying one day to see my father and to get his assistance in effecting the release of his boy,” Tom Knight recalled. The couple begged Newton to help them; now that they were free they wanted to leave the plantation, but Mr. Mayfield refused to allow their boy to go.
The Mayfields, John and his son Tom, were ruined; their large prewar plantation once worth almost $25,000 was reduced to a stub-bled wasteland valued at just $1,500. One can only imagine the unreasoning wrath of John and the humiliation of his heir to this spoil, teenager Tom—inheritance gone, position gone, authority gone—as the dirt-farming deserter Newton Knight prevailed in the matter of the boy.
“He [Mayfield] wanted to keep the boy as he was raised on his place and he felt he had a right to keep him,” Tom Knight remembered. “But my father told him that as long as the Negroes were slaves he had a right to keep him, but since they had been freed he had no further right to hold the Negroes or their boy.”
Newton’s interference infuriated local Confederates, and he soon found that his new position as a government man and public protector of blacks was hardly less dangerous than his old one of fugitive. Confederate marauders continued to roam the state through the spring and summer of 1865, murdering freedmen and attacking Unionists. “Mississippians have been shooting and cutting each other … to a greater extent than in all the other states of the union put together,” a federal inspector reported.
Newton had reason to fear for his life when he rode into Ellisville on business. According to one family account, his appearance in town one Saturday in the immediate postwar period nearly provoked a race riot. The usual white loiterers hung around outside the general store, sunburned men with plugs of tobacco in their cheeks, farmers in frayed homespun, and unrepentant veterans who persisted in wearing their gray. But also loafing and strolling along the sidewalk were newly freed blacks, “decked out in the best they had, and putting on an air of importance.” Emotional crosscurrents collided in the street: Unionists and blacks were exultant, while the Confederates still choked on the bile of military surrender.
The sight of Newton and some of his men trotting down the street on horseback, showing off the fresh mounts and saddles they had been given as rewards for their Union loyalty, sent the blacks “into a state of jubilancy … song and laughter, and cheers broke out from the congregation.” But not everyone in town was happy to see Newton, or his black friends, celebrating in the street. Suddenly, a pistol shot rang out. “The songs died, the grins vanished, and so did the Freedmen.”
Newton further inflamed Confederate feelings against him when he used his influence to get rebel bureaucrats turned out of their jobs. He petitioned the new provisional governor, William Sharkey, to discard the results of the Confederate elections that had been held in October 1864, arguing that the rebels had denied citizens the right to vote. He proposed that all new county officers—loyal ones—be appointed. Newton reminded the governor that the Jones County Scouts had held “true and loyal to the Union,” even when the name of Jones was “cast out as evil throughout the land,” and had suffered for their allegiance.
“We stood firm to the Union when secession swept as an avalanche over the state,” the petition said. “For this cause alone we have been treated as savages instead of freemen by the rebel authorities.”
Newton’s was the first signature. His was followed by sixty more, including those of Jasper Collins, Will Sumrall, and several other members of the guerrilla band. Their plea was successful: Sharkey followed Newton’s recommendation and appointed Jasper’s elder brother Vinson as judge of probate. He named another of Newton’s allies, Thomas Huff, as the new Jones County sheriff.
The local rebels were beside themselves to see men they considered low criminals gain ascendancy. A faction of Newton’s old enemies soon retaliated. Joel E. Welborn, the secessionist surgeon John M. Baylis, and members of the Fairchild and McGilvery families wrote their own petition to Sharkey, smearing Newton and his men. They were nothing more than “outlaws who have been engaged in murder and pillage during the war, and who have stated frequently that they would not submit to authority of any kind.” Vinson Collins, they contended, was “by relationships and sympathy … heart and hand with those who have been guilty of those acts of outlawry.” Sharkey was not persuaded. He decided to let the appointments stand until new elections were held in the fall.
The feuding continued. Next, Newton wielded his authority against Amos Deason. Backed by an order from a Union officer, Newton impounded a sizable store of Confederate wool and denim cloth held by Deason, which the merchant no doubt hoped to sell for profit.
July 31, 1865 Headquarters Post at Raleigh
Capt. You will sease a civilian lot of wool and cloth that is in Jones Co. said to be Confederate property now in the [possession] of A Deason and report the same to thease headquarters without delay. I am sir
Very Respectfully your
Obd Servt
H. T. Elliot, Lieut. 50 USCI
It must have been a moment of exquisite justice for Newton, and an insult beyond galling for the merchant prince of Ellisville. Instead of sneaking around the side of the house as a guerrilla, Newton stalked up the elegant steps, and perhaps even across the pinewood floors that had been discolored by Amos McLemore’s blood, and seized the cloth as the sanctioned arm of military power. For years, Confederates had seized goods from yeoman farmers and left them with nothing, and now the situation was reversed.
Deason challenged the seizure, and for the next three weeks charges and countercharges flew back and forth. Three different officers wrote out orders for Newton to hold the cloth in his possession until the question was legally settled. Finally, Newton’s actions were upheld as proper under military orders, and the cloth became the property of the U.S. government.
But the Confederates exacted a unique form of payback. In the autumn of 1865 the unregenerate John Baylis and Joel Welborn launched a campaign to symbolically purge all traces of Unionism from Jones County. They petitioned the legislature to change the county name from Jones to Davis, and the county seat from Ellisville to Leesburg, in honor of the Confederate president and general. The gesture was plainly intended “for a slur on so many union people living here,” said resident Maddie Bush.
Baylis, Welborn, and 104 other Confederate citizens, including a dozen men who had served with McLemore, declared themselves mortified by the county’s Unionist activities. The county name had become “notorious if not infamous at least to sensitive ears.” The signees asked that the petition be recorded by the legislature so there would be no doubt they were loyal Confederates.
We therefore would petition your honorable body to change the name of our county seat to that of Davis, and the name of our county seat (Ellisville) to that of Leesburg, hoping that … its past history and name may be obliterated and buried so deep that the hand of time may never resurrect it, but by chance posterity should learn that there was a Jones county and the black part of its history, we would ask (not egotistically) that this petition, together with the names of those annexed, may be regarded by the Journals of both houses, that their mind (posterity) may be disabused of any on our part of any of its dark deeds, and it duty bound will ever pay.
The Confederates won the battle over names. In a disturbing sign of what was to come, in December of 1865 the legislature erased Jones County’s name from the official record, and for the next three years, it was known for one of the most famous traitors in American history. That the legislature ratified the censure of Jones was a measure of resurgent Confederate political strength—and reflected the statewide view of Jones as a den of traitors and serfs.
The Daily Picayune newspaper noted the change sarcastically. “It is no very high compliment either to Mr. Davis or Gen. Lee. Jones is the poorest county in the State.”
If Newton had allies among the Union officers, the Confederates had developed a more powerful ally in the North. Namely, President Andrew Johnson.
Johnson, sworn in as president on April 15, 1865, the day Lincoln died, initially seemed to identify with yeomen like Newton. A native of Tennessee and a tailor who had risen above meager beginnings, he had frequently lauded “honest yeomen” and had thundered against “the slaveocracy”—a “pampered, bloated, corrupted aristocracy.” When he first took office as president, he declared: “I hold this: … treason is a crime, and crime must be punished.” But Johnson’s threats were empty. Though he verbally thundered against the South, he denied that the states had “surrendered their right to govern their own affairs.” In fact, he enabled the states to resume their constitutional rights as quickly as possible and believed that the “old southern leaders … must rule the South.”
Behind this Orwellian logic was Johnson’s virulent racism and intractable personality. His mouth was grimly bowed and a pugnacious chin jutted from a weathered face, framed by coarse gray hair and eyebrows. He embraced emancipation only up to a point; he had owned a few slaves before the war, and he was wholly opposed to black suffrage, insisting that “white men alone” should manage government.
Johnson argued that blacks were the natural enemies of poor whites. “The colored man and his master combined kept the [poor white man] in slavery by depriving him of a fair participation in the labor and productions of the rich land of the country,” he lectured a group of Northern blacks that included Frederick Douglass. Douglass countered by saying that blacks had far more in common with yeomen, and he envisioned a union of yeomen and former slaves in “a party among the poor.” But Johnson, incapable of seeing other points of view, clung to the notion that the black man was inherently slavish and would “vote with his late master, whom he does not hate, rather than with the non-slaveholding white, whom he does hate.” Given a choice between empowering blacks or forgiving the planter aristocracy, Johnson chose the latter.
Johnson had announced his plan for Reconstruction at the end of May 1865: he issued a general amnesty and restored all confiscated land to rebels who took an oath of allegiance to the Union and promised to support emancipation. About 15,000 Southerners were excluded from this general amnesty, mainly wealthy planters and senior Confederate officials. But these men could apply individually for pardons, and by the end of 1865, Johnson was granting them wholesale, “sometimes hundreds in a single day.” He also appointed provisional governors in the rebel states who were sympathetic to his policy of general amnesty, and William Sharkey was one of these.
Sharkey, a planter and prewar anti-secessionist, filled his administration almost entirely with pardoned Confederate leaders in the belief that they would help restore order. Next, he called for a provisional legislature. The body that convened in July was also made up largely of former Confederates, and it promptly sought legal ways to return blacks to servitude, while debating whether they were obliged to recognize the Union at all.
Incredibly, Sharkey also allowed former rebels to rearm themselves and form military units. By mid-August of 1865, white Mississippians were nervously complaining of lawlessness and insolence among the four hundred thousand freed blacks in the state, many of whom roamed the countryside looking for food and work. Also, tensions were rising between white citizens and black occupying troops. “The negroes are bold in their threats, and the people are afraid,” Sharkey said.
What seemed to threaten Mississippians the most was their loss of authority over a black population that outnumbered them. In November of 1865, the Jackson Daily News instructed the postwar state government: “We must keep the ex-slave in a position of inferiority. We must pass such laws as make him feel his inferiority.”
Editorials in newspapers railed against the impudence of “idle darkies” who crowded the sidewalks and elbowed whites and who failed to tip their hats and show proper obeisance. “Take off your hat, you black scoundrel, or I’ll cut your throat,” a state legislator snarled at his former slave when he entered a room without doffing his cap. It was one more example of “the infernal sassy niggers.”
The Confederate militias immediately started committing “outrages” against Southern Unionists and blacks. The vengeful mood against free blacks became such that a helpless federal official lamented that the lives of mules were more valued in Mississippi, because the “breaking of the neck of the free Negro is nobody’s loss.”
When Union general Henry Slocum, the federal commander of the Department of Mississippi, saw what was happening, he issued a general order prohibiting these armed companies, characterizing the men who formed them as “outlaws” who have “scarcely laid down the arms with which they have been opposing our Government.” But Sharkey appealed to Andrew Johnson, who backed him and the Southerners. The military, Johnson declared, was in the state “to aid but not to interfere with the provisional government.”
Thus, even though Mississippi was still under military occupation, federal soldiers like those stationed in the Piney Woods who were Newton’s allies found their hands half tied in dealing with a surly, defiant citizenry, among whom the popular refrain was that they had not been beaten, only outnumbered. Midwestern boys enervated from the war and anxious to muster out were charged with preserving order in an atmosphere of strong drink and antagonism, even as they had been stripped of real authority by the president and the governor. At least in the war they had been able to do something about the wrongs they perceived.
An Iowan named Lewis F. Phillips stationed on the Mississippi-Alabama border described his postwar duty as a trial in which the local populace tried to poison him with a toxic mixture of “pine top” bootleg and buttermilk, local girls treated him spitefully, telling him “they would no more touch a blue sleeve than a rattlesnake,” and the ex-planter class viciously persecuted former slaves.
One day when Phillips was on duty, a crew of black field hands came to the Union encampment from a distant plantation to show the soldiers the livid welts laid on their backs by a former master who still considered them his property. “Some of the old planters were now more savage with the Negroes than when they had a property interest in them and were cutting them up with the lash at a fearful rate,” Phillips observed.
Phillips and a squad of soldiers decided to pay the planter a visit, “to read him the law.” But the truth was that Phillips had no orders to make an arrest and could only hope to intimidate the planter. As the Yankees rode through the pleasant countryside, they stopped at various plantations along the way and found that virtually every man of the house had been slain, wounded, or captured. They spent half a day at the manor home of the lash-wielding planter, “telling him of the error of his ways and what would happen to him if he didn’t be good.” On the way back, Phillips and his men ran into a parade of bedraggled, emaciated Confederate soldiers making their way home. “They were not ‘whipped,’” they informed the Yankees, but only “overpowered.”
Phillips camped in the village of Uniontown, where the largest hotel still flew the Confederate Bonnie Blue flag, waving cheekily over Main Street. An irascible and inebriated Union colonel decided to teach the hotel proprietors a lesson and instructed his artillerists to wheel their guns directly in front of the hotel and fire a thundering salute. The explosions shattered every pane and teacup on the premises. “When we were done firing every glass that had been in that side of the house lay down on the ground,” Phillips wrote.
There was nothing to do but drink. One evening Phillips watched a man stagger down the street and pause in front of a cigar store, where he tried to pry the cigar out of the hand of a wooden Indian. Phillips heard him muttering: “All the niggers were free and now By God he’d free the Indian.” He tore the Indian down and kicked it into the street.
It was in this potent, uncertain environment that Newton and the Jones County Scouts were mustered out of service. On September 10, 1865, they followed orders and turned their arms over to Captain A. R. Smith of the 70th U.S. Colored Infantry in Ellisville, although they retained their personal shotguns.
The timing of the Jones County Scouts’ disbanding could not have been worse; the white militias empowered by Sharkey were rampaging. Major General Carl Schurz, a former Union officer who would become secretary of the interior, took a trip to Mississippi to aid in Reconstruction. He observed that the armed bands of whites “indulged in the gratification of private vengeance, persecuted helpless Union people and freedmen, and endeavored to keep the Negroes in a state of virtual slavery.”
In Mississippi’s October elections, impenitent rebels were swept back into the state’s highest offices. A former Confederate brigadier general, Benjamin G. Humphreys, who had fought in the peach orchard at Gettysburg, was elected governor. Humphreys still wore a torn and bullet-riddled Confederate army coat, which he ostentatiously bragged had been “thrice-perforated” by Yankee Minié balls. Humphreys won by a landslide. Three days after the election President Johnson approved his application for a pardon, allowing him to take office.
Humphreys and the legislature that convened on October 16 set about restoring the old antebellum order. The people of Mississippi had abolished slavery “under the pressure of federal bayonets,” Humphreys said, and the Negro was free whether they liked it or not and entitled to certain protections. But that by no means meant the Negro deserved citizenship or equality. The “purity and progress” of Mississippi society depended on keeping blacks where they belonged according to the “law of God,” Humphreys said: on the plantation where white bosses could guard against “the evils that may arise from their sudden emancipation.”
One Delta planter put it less delicately. “I think God intended the niggers to be slaves. Now since man has deranged God’s plan, I think the best we can do is keep ’em as near to a state of bondage as possible … My theory is, feed ’em well, clothe ’em well, and then, if they don’t work … whip ’em well.”
Mississippi’s legislature began writing the notorious set of laws known as the “Black Codes.” Though euphemistically labeled a “civil rights act,” the laws collectively denied blacks their hard-won freedom and enslaved them again: freedmen were prevented from voting, assembling, renting or owning land, or quitting their jobs. Perhaps worst of all, under an “apprenticeship law” all blacks under age eighteen who were without means of support were required to be “apprenticed”—i.e., enslaved—to whites without pay.
A purposely overbroad vagrancy law defined any blacks whom whites might find troublesome or inconvenient as criminals: “All rogues and vagabonds, idle and dissipated persons, beggars, jugglers, or persons practicing unlawful games or plays, runaways, common drunkards, common night-walkers, pilferers, lewd, wanton, or lascivious persons, in speech or behavior, common railers and brawlers, persons who neglect their calling or employment, misspend what they earn, or do not provide for the support of themselves or their families, or dependents, and all other idle and disorderly persons, including all who neglect all lawful business, habitually misspend their time by frequenting houses of ill-fame, gaming-houses, or tippling shops, shall be deemed and considered vagrants.” Insulting gestures and preaching without a license were also crimes. The penalty was imprisonment and a fine of fifty dollars, and those unable to pay could be hired out to whites.
The state legislature also refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which abolished slavery, claiming it would empower “radicals and demagogues.” The gesture sent a message to the rest of the country: Mississippi Confederates would govern their state without interference from federal law. (Not until 1995 would Mississippi ratify the Thirteenth Amendment.) Unionists like Newton must have wondered what the three hundred sixty thousand Union lives lost in the war had been sacrificed for.
By the end of 1865, in fact, Confederates had even distorted the meaning of “Unionism.” Former Confederate officers, even generals like Humphreys, were claiming the mantle of Unionism as their own and twisting the term to describe themselves as moderates: “Union man” had come to mean simply someone who had opposed secession back in 1861, “regardless of subsequent service for the Confederacy.” As one Union officer put it: “There is no such thing as loyalty here, as that word is understood in the North.” The sophistry of those Confederates belittled men like Newton, who had suffered such wrath for pledging allegiance to the United States of America.
To a prominent Northern writer named John Townsend Trowbridge, who toured the state in the summer and winter of 1865-66 as part of a larger journey across the battlefields of the South, Mississippi’s Confederates were remorseless. Trowbridge blamed the fact largely on Andrew Johnson’s leniency. “The beautiful effect of executive mercy upon rampant Rebels was well illustrated in Mississippi,” Trowbridge wrote.
Trowbridge arrived just as the Black Codes went into effect. One plantation owner told him, “I’d have been willing to let my plantation go to the devil for one year, just to see the free niggers starve.”
During a midnight journey from Corinth to Memphis Trowbridge stumbled into an encampment of freedmen, a dozen or so people in “miserable conditions, wretchedly clad” who invited him to share a campfire that blew smoke in a circle and offered him what they had—an apple—which was more generous hospitality than any he had received from whites. The freedmen had worked all summer for a planter in Tishomingo who had refused to pay them.
As he rode a train to Memphis he gazed out of the window at more ragged freedmen and overheard fellow passengers remark, “They’ll all be dead by spring” and “Niggers can’t take care of themselves.”
From Memphis, Trowbridge went to Vicksburg by riverboat, the parlor of which was so wreathed in tobacco smoke that it dimmed the light of chandeliers. The majority of passengers were planters going downriver to their estates, and Trowbridge found them to be “hard swearers, hard drinkers, inveterate smokers and chewers, wearing sad-colored linen for the most part, and clad in coarse ‘domestic’: slouching in their dress and manners, loose of tongue, free hearted, good humored, and sociable.” They bought glasses of whiskey from decanters for twenty-five cents a shot, which they tossed down freely from noon until bedtime. Their talk was only of “mules, cotton, niggers, money, Yankees, politics, and the Freedmen’s Bureau—thickly studded with oaths.” There were a handful of Tennesseans onboard, who envied the Mississippians “their Rebel State government, organized militia, and power over the freedmen.”
At one landing, Trowbridge saw a burned plantation reduced to nothing but fifty standing chimneys. “Yankee vandalism,” a woman said. At another landing, he learned that four men in Confederate uniform carrying Spencer rifles had just robbed a store kept by a Union man and murdered a Negro.
But the strongest impression left by the riverboat trip came when a well-dressed, light-skinned black couple boarded the craft and asked for a stateroom. The captain exploded in rage: “God damn your soul! Get off this boat!” A chorus of furious passengers cried out, “Kick the nigger!” and “He ought to have his neck broke!” The couple disembarked, and their trunk was pitched to shore after them.
Along the way Trowbridge conversed with the planters, exchanging views on emancipation and free labor. By the end of the journey he had decided, “It was impossible to convince these gentlemen that the freedmen could be induced to work by any other means than by despotic compulsion.”
The Union troops who had been Newton’s allies were gradually mustered out of the state, leaving only a small federal presence in Mississippi, a few battalions of infantry, and agents from the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, the division of the War Department that now governed the relationships between former slaves and white employers. The woefully understaffed and embattled head of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Mississippi, Colonel Samuel Thomas, was overwhelmed by the size of the problem he faced.
Most Mississippi whites, Thomas reported, “cannot conceive of the negro having any rights at all. Men who are honorable in their dealings with their white neighbors will cheat a negro without feeling a single twinge of their honor; to kill a negro they do not deem murder; to debauch a negro woman they do not think fornication; to take property away from a negro they do not deem robbery. They still have the ingrained feeling that the black people at large belong to the whites at large.”
To Newton, it must have suddenly seemed like the Confederacy had seized control of the governments in Jackson and Washington, D.C. He retired to his hilltop acreage for much of 1865 and 1866 and kept to himself, laying low, tending his crops, and rebuilding his farm on the county border. For Newton to continue fighting, surrounded as he was by rebels, would have been useless, even suicidal. One of Newton’s great talents as a soldier was that he had a sense of when to go on the offensive and when to assume a defensive strategy.
Newton persuaded Rachel to leave Jackie Knight’s old plantation and follow him, to help on the farm and sharecrop. According to Rachel’s granddaughter, “After emancipation my grandmother and her family moved from the old slave plantation in Jones County to Jasper County … they went with one of the younger Knights who did not believe in slavery.”
Newton installed Rachel and her children in a barn until he could complete a cabin for her, built of split cypress boards. He raised the log-and-plank home not far from the one he shared with Serena, and he gave Rachel some acreage to work as her own.
Newton had another good reason to devote himself to his farm: he had enmeshed himself in a tangled domestic situation. Somehow, during his career as a fugitive, he had found enough unguarded time to father children by the two women in his life at the same time.
Newton had continued his wartime affair with Rachel, and sometime between 1863 and 1865 she had his child, a daughter named Martha Ann, named, presumably, after his loyal younger sister. Among the freedmen Newton and Rachel’s relationship was an open secret.
“Rachel was considered his woman,” the former Knight slave Martha Wheeler said, “and he moved her to his place.”
But on Serena’s return to Jones County, Newton had reunited with her. In 1864 Serena too bore him a daughter, whom they also named after his sister Martha Ann. Serena shortly became pregnant again, and a son named Joseph Sullivan Knight was born in 1866. Newton seemed intent on following the Knight family tradition of leaving a double-digit number of heirs.
It’s not clear how much Serena knew, or how she felt about Rachel’s appearance on the farm as a sharecropper. But Newton’s divided loyalties seem to have tilted in favor of his white family for a time—Rachel would not bear another child by Newton for four years, until 1869. She and Newton may have temporarily given up their affair as hopeless or simply too dangerous. Under the draconian Black Codes, interracial marriage was not only banned but penalized with a life sentence in the state penitentiary. Nevertheless, Rachel seems to have committed herself to Newton, and to working on his farm.
Newton’s 170 acres became an informal if perhaps fraught collective. The Knights, black and white alike, went about the laborious job of reclaiming the land that had gone to weeds. Newton’s farm had never been worth much, just $300 before the war, but now it wasn’t even worth a third of that—it would only be valued at $120 in 1870. It would take him a decade of relentless clearing and cultivating to build it to 320 acres.
Foot by foot, the Knights cleared fields, felled trees and unearthed stumps, and turned the thorny undergrowth into neat furrows. They planted corn, and apple trees, because Newton loved the fruit. He raised a new plain log home with a large rock fireplace and a high-galleried porch, not far from the ashes of his first home.
But persistent droughts made recovery from the war hard. Newton’s wartime neighbor Ben Graves recalled weather that seemed almost biblically punishing. “It seemed there came a drought every year … After the war the elements seemed to set in against us, for about 3 years the crops were a failure. We had 12 weeks of drought one year.”
Newton’s white children toiled side by side in the fields with Rachel’s. His eldest sons did the same heavy work as Rachel’s son Jeff. Clearing even a single new acre required the labor of the entire family: blacks and whites, adults and children alike, would bend over crosscut saws until a tree was felled, and then cut it into logs, after which the logs were rolled on top of sticks for carrying. It took a team of six or eight adults to lift the logs and carry them away, for hewing into boards or split rails for fences.
But not all of Newton’s children were happy to be sharing the homestead with Rachel and her children as their equals. Tom grew increasingly resentful as he got old enough to understand the true nature of the arrangement, perhaps influenced by Serena’s feelings on the matter. “The attitude of his mother caused Tom to have little, or no use for Rachel and her white daughters,” a descendant observed. But Tom obeyed Newton’s wishes and understood that they were there by virtue of “his will.”
When the corn came in they would shuck it in the crib and then shell it at night by the fireside and put it in sacks, and the following day carry it on horseback to the mill, to be ground into meal. The nearest rail town was thirty-eight miles away, by ox wagon, so they did most of their marketing at an old post office-country store six miles away, where there was a water-powered gristmill. Sometimes, if there were a spare dozen eggs, Rachel would walk the six miles to the store to trade them for sugar or coffee.
There was never enough food to fill all of the bellies, just the lean game that Newton hunted, or the chickens they raised, with corn pone made with salt water in a skillet and garden vegetables. The Knight children were so perpetually famished that they searched the meadows for nut grasses, which they would chew to supplement their thin meals, along with muscadines, persimmons, and hickory nuts.
The new homestead sat on a spit of land above a verdant, heavily wooded hollow, and Newton wore a footpath down the hill to a cold spring that rushed at the foot of it. He would loft his shotgun into the crook of his elbow and wander off down the path to hunt alone for a day at a time. Or sometimes he simply strolled down to the spring, where he liked to go for the quiet. He tried “to forget the past” and forgive his grievances against his old enemies, he told his son Tom.
He wanted to “live peaceful with men as far as possible.”
Mississippi’s lawmakers had gone too far with the Black Codes. To Northerners they seemed to be trying to alter the outcome of the war, behaving as victors rather than the defeated. “The men of the North will convert [their] state into a frog pond before they will allow such laws to disgrace one foot of soil in which the bones of our soldiers sleep and over which the flag of freedom waves,” wrote the Chicago Tribune. Congress agreed: it denied Mississippi readmission to the Union and placed the state under rigid federal military rule again.
Congress was also fed up with President Johnson, whose sore-headedness over black citizenship caused a total breach with the legislature. In April of 1867 lawmakers wrested Southern policy making away from him, passing a comprehensive new Reconstruction Act: Southern states were required to adopt black suffrage and to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment before applying for readmission to the Union. Also, Confederates were barred from holding office. The measure passed over the veto of an irate Johnson, who railed that it operated “in favor of the colored and against the white race” and that the South was being trodden underfoot “to protect niggers.”
To Newton, the new radical Reconstruction policies at last seemed to promise “the end to rebel rule,” as one Raleigh newspaper put it. But more than that, it was a breathtaking expansion of country, and Union. “We have cut loose from the whole dead past,” wrote Wisconsin senator Timothy Howe, “and have cast our anchor out a hundred years.”
As the climate became more favorable, Newton rode down from his hilltop to support his man in the 1868 presidential election, General U. S. Grant, who was running at the head of the Republican ticket against the unremarkable Democratic governor of New York, Horatio Seymour. Another fierce Grant supporter was Jasper Collins, who was such an ardent admirer of the Union general that he named one of his sons Ulysses.
But Newton and his fellow Republicans encountered furious resistance in a political season that was continually intemperate and even deadly. Mississippians had always been notorious for settling matters with violence, eye gouging, crotch kicking, stabbing, and shooting; one British tourist observed that even casual conversations had the “smack of manslaughter about them.” The political stakes drove opponents to new levels of shrill contention: newspapers railed against “ranting niggers” and “stinking scoundrels,” and the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups made their first appearance in the Piney Woods, dedicated to foiling the “incredible scheme of granting suffrage to the half brutish blacks,” which would be the “high water mark of political insanity.”
The champions of Anglo-Saxon superiority, who posed as destroying angels, were men of all classes: planters, farmers, and merchants. They were men anchored in a tradition of slavery and soured by crop failures and the state’s inability to recover from the war, and they scapegoated blacks for Mississippi’s ills. Their ethic of vigilantism coupled with racial hatred led them to join rifle clubs named things like “Sons of the South.” Their aim was to restore social order as they pictured it should be, and that meant punishing blacks for insolence and driving out the Northerners and radical Republicans who were the agents of change.
The Piney Woods had less Klan activity than many other areas, because of the relatively small population. Nevertheless, it was present. “It did not seem that the ku klux klan roamed around this country unless some Negro misbehaved,” recalled Ben Graves. “They were organized to make Negros and carpetbaggers stay in their places. The carpet baggers were men that came here from the north, that come to put devilment in the negro’s head. He would tell the Negro that he was as good as the white man … They thought the Negro and them would take the country … That was what organized the ku klux klan, to see that the carpet bagger and the Negro did not take the county. They were all that saved it.”
In Covington County, a “White Cap Klan” meted out formal judgments against “objectionable negros” and polled the membership on whether an offender should be punished with violence or merely intimidated into “good behavior.” They used ritualistic ceremonies to frighten superstitious local blacks: they would approach in a dead silence and ride in a circle around the victim, wordless but making mysterious motions. Some of their methods were no more than Halloween charades: a sheet-clad goblin would call for a drink of water and down a whole bucket, a sleight of hand performed with a rubber bag under the sheet.
In Paulding in Jasper County, a former slave named Jane Morgan who lived in a community of freedmen on an old ruined plantation watched as Klansmen kidnapped two of her friends. “Once de Ku Kluxes cum to our place and take two of our niggers off,” she remembered. “We never knowed dey had done nuthin’ but we sho never seen dem niggers no more—no sire we ain’t.”
The Klan activity was a response to the fact that in nearly every county, black Republicans and their white allies were forming grassroots Union Leagues or Loyal Leagues for the purpose of enlisting new members and organizing their vote. The clubs offered education in citizenship and protection in numbers. Their members were bound by political and sometimes religious affinity, often led by black preachers or educators, and fostered by white carpetbaggers or Southern abolitionists like Newton. Newton was almost certainly active in a Union League club. A Democratic state senator, W. D. Gibbs, recalled that both Jones and Jasper counties had Loyal Leagues and that one political meeting of black voters in Jasper numbered three hundred men.
“Of course the colored people up to that time were thoroughly united under the loyal leagues, and under the influence of those men from the North, who came down there and took part in the politics of the state, and those southern men who joined with them,” Gibbs said. “… They were as much subject to their leaders in politics as to commands as they were subject to their masters before the war. It is their natural disposition, being an ignorant people, to be led. They were naturally attracted to these men, on account of the gratitude they felt to the republican party of the North for what they considered their actual enfranchisement.”
The first meeting of the Loyal League Club of Jones was probably held in secrecy in a barn or a church, or perhaps even in a swamp hideout for reasons of safety. Descriptions of other Union League clubs suggest the scene: At the front of the darkened room stood a pine table, and next to it a chair. Someone would have brought copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, which were placed on the table with a Bible. Beside the table stood an official United States flag, attached to a pole whittled out of a tree branch.
Newton would have been one of the few white men at the meeting, if not the only one. It was a small congregation, and nervous, given the attitude of ex-Confederates toward blacks congregating in political meetings. The men in the room ranged from seventeen-year-old boys to old men, and most of them had likely helped the Jones County Scouts in one way or another during the war. Joe Hatton would likely have been there.
The meeting opened with a recitation from the Bible and a brief prayer. Then, in their first order of business, members may have voted to stockpile weapons and resume drilling in order to defend themselves against the KKK and rifle clubs, who were becoming increasingly antagonistic. New names were discussed for membership into the League, and there was a discussion, too, of which local men to beware of. Most of the meeting was devoted to political education. Newton might have read aloud from an old issue of a newspaper. They discussed their legal rights against white employers and the individual rights clauses of the Constitution and traded the names and whereabouts of sympathetic agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Leaguers agreed to convene monthly, and the meeting adjourned after everyone sang “Battle Cry of Freedom.”
By Election Day, matters were so tense that Newton took his shotgun when he went to vote at Smith’s Store, and so did a number of his men. They ran into a band of Democrats, and a murderous dispute threatened to break out. “I remember when there was an election once Newt belonged to the Republican party, he called himself a union man and was a full-fledged Republican,” Ben Graves recalled. “… Him and his crowd carried their guns to this election. Very few Democrats voted. I thought they were going to have a fight at Smith’s old store … Newt’s crowd had their guns and hid them out when they could and they tot up a big argument and used pretty rough language.” But they quashed the quarrel before any serious trouble could break out, probably thanks to the authoritative presence of old Vinson Collins.
Grant won with less than 53 percent of the vote—the Klan effectively suppressed the black vote in large swaths, but Unionist strongholds put him over the top. Newton’s feelings on hearing of Grant’s victory weren’t recorded, but relief was surely one of them, and more than that, hope for his two families. Four days after the election another idealist dirt farmer, this one in South Carolina, expressed sentiments that Newton undoubtedly shared: “I am … a native borned … a poor man never owned a Negro in my life … I am hated and despised for nothing else but my loyalty to the mother government … But I rejoice to think that God almighty has given to the poor … [a] Gov. to hear to feel to protect the humble poor without distinction to race or color.”
Grant’s election meant a victory for Newton personally: he again became one of the most influential men in the Piney Woods. Grant appointed Adelbert Ames, a Union war hero, as Mississippi’s provisional governor, and Ames began awarding state offices to Union loyalists and blacks. Newton’s former comrade Will Sumrall became assistant U.S. marshal for Jones County. The onetime guerrilla and Unionist Prentice Bynum was named clerk of the circuit court. Another ally, B. A. Mathews, became a probate judge.
It seemed to Newton and his friends that they would be able to remake the state. In 1870 Mississippi at last approved a new constitution that abolished the Black Codes and upheld federal laws guaranteeing civil and voting rights. Blacks won election as sheriffs, mayors, and magistrates, and by 1873 there would be sixty-four black men occupying seats in the statehouse. The former slave John Roy Lynch became a justice of the peace in Natchez and would eventually rise to speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives. The now heavily Republican state legislature also selected two new U.S. senators. One was the minister and teacher Hiram Revels, sent, in a spectacular bit of social justice, to complete the term Jefferson Davis had left unfinished. The other was Adelbert Ames.
Newton now had influential friends not just in the statehouse, but the nation’s capital. He was confident enough of their backing that he devoted the next three years to pursuing some dangerously controversial public issues. The first was a small matter, but one that burned: he and his allies petitioned the state to restore the names of Jones County and Ellisville. The legislature approved and the short, inglorious reign of Davis County and Leesburg was over.
Next, Newton felt confident enough to press a case on behalf of himself and his men for compensation as Union soldiers. In 1871 three staunch Republicans in Washington personally took Newton’s case to Congress and introduced bills in the Senate and House of Representatives in his behalf. The bills called for “the relief of Newton Knight and others, citizens of Mississippi” in return for their “services as officers and members of Knight’s company, United States infantry.” It requested payment of $21,150 for fifty-five men, first and foremost $2,000 for Newton.
Newton didn’t include all of the 125 or so men who had fought with the Scouts. Instead he made a list of those he felt had served most reliably throughout the war, and perhaps those who were most needy. He left off some men because “they did not hold out faithful and the Capt would not send their names,” according to Jones County probate judge B. A. Mathews, who helped Newton pursue the claim.
The legislators who took up Newton’s cause in Congress were classic Republican abolitionists, or “carpetbaggers.” They each saw something worthy in the plight of the Mississippi dirt farmer and “Southern Yankee” who had been so isolated among rebels during the war. Representative Legrand W. Perce was a Chicago lawyer and ex-Union colonel who had helped capture a supply train during the war and stayed in Mississippi after serving in the Gulf district to establish a law practice in Natchez, where he was elected to Congress for two terms. Albert Howe was a Massachusetts abolitionist and a Yale graduate and another Union officer who settled in Mississippi and won postbellum office; he was also a particular friend of Adelbert Ames’s.
George Washington Whitmore’s support of Newton was more coincidental; a lawyer and representative from the first congressional district in Texas and a former slaveholder, he had no apparent connection to Mississippi and introduced his bill because Perce had arrived on the floor too late to do it himself and handed the task off to his colleague. But Whitmore shared this much with Newton: he too had suffered persecution and imprisonment as a Unionist in the South, and therefore he understood the price the Jones County Scouts had paid for their loyalty. Whitmore had argued stridently against Texas secession as state legislator and remained such a voluble Unionist during the war that Confederate authorities finally arrested him in 1863 and jailed him for nearly a year—without formal charges or trial.
Parochial Republicans also supported Newton’s case by writing letters in his behalf and attesting to his loyalty. Among them was a feisty, colorful judge named William M. Hancock, who kept his courtroom in order with a pistol. Hancock handwrote a letter in Newton’s behalf to Perce, assuring him that the case was worth supporting. “He is an honest and clever man and is a staunch Republican and during the Rebellion was a union man and the recognized leader of the union party in this county and it was generally reported that he held a military office in the U.S. military service,” Hancock wrote to Perce. “You may rely upon any statement he may make to you in regard to any matter he may write to you about.”
Eventually even the illustrious Ames took a personal interest in Newton. Ames introduced yet another bill in Newton’s behalf on the floor of the Senate on December 18, 1873. He would become so involved in the effort to recompense him that copies of Newton’s roster and a flurry of communications still survive in his personal papers. But the Republican lawmakers failed to get the measure passed. It was shuffled from one committee to another—Judiciary, to Military Affairs, to Claims—with no action. Despite a raft of evidence—Newton provided General McMillen’s name and the written orders he received from Union officers who occupied Jones just after the surrender—Northern legislators were simply dubious that a band of poor white Southern farmers had aided the Union.
Despite the federal government’s failure to recognize his allegiance, Newton would demonstrate it again and again during Reconstruction—even at peril of his life. He would be one of the few white native Mississippians to remain loyal and useful to Ames during the next few years, years in which the federal government abandoned both men and unreconstructed Confederates sought to control the state with a campaign of murder and terror disguised as politics.
Newton’s boldest public act in the years 1871 to 1873, and one on which he staked his personal safety, was a campaign to organize and build an integrated school. Newton’s children were now of schooling age, and he was just as concerned with Rachel’s family as Serena’s. He had gradually come to feel as married to Rachel, if not more so, and they were in the midst of rapidly expanding their family. By 1875 Newton and Rachel would have five children together: Martha Ann (1865), Stewart (1869), Floyd (1870), Augusta Ann (1873), and Hinchie (1875).
For Klanners and white supremacists, black education was a focus of special fury. It was the generous Mississippian who viewed education for blacks as anything but useless, if not trouble. “A monkey with his tail off is a monkey still,” the Natchez Courier opined.
In Okolona, an Episcopal minister who tried to teach some young blacks had four shots fired at him. On the night of March 9, 1871, in Aberdeen, a Northern teacher named Allen P. Huggins was called out of his house by a circle of white-robed men. They were “gentlemanly fellows, men of cultivation, well-educated, a much different class of men than I ever supposed I would meet in a K-Klux gang,” Huggins said, but their message was not gentle. They told him they did not like his “radical ways” and the fact that he had instituted public schooling and was trying to “educate the Negroes.” He had ten days to leave the state or they would kill him.
Huggins replied he would leave when he was ready. In response, one of the men undid a stirrup leather from his horse and began to beat Huggins with it, saying he was “just such a man as they liked to pound.” On the seventy-fifth blow, Huggins passed out. He came to with pistols aimed at him and a chorus of voices warning him that if they laid eyes on him after ten days, he was dead. The beating left Huggins hobbled for a week but unbowed; he testified to the event before Congress and returned deputized as a U.S. marshal and began to round up Klanners for arrest.
In the summer of 1872 Newton was also deputized marshal, and though no record survives to tell us why, it’s likely that Klan violence had visited the Piney Woods and that he acquired a badge to deal with it. A certificate shows that on July 6, 1872, he received an appointment as U.S. marshal for the “Southern District, Miss.” His son Tom remembered that Newton “was appointed Provost Marshal … with authority to call out troops of the United States Infantry to put down riots or any other troubles he could not stop … he served for several years during these reconstruction days.”
At first, Newton’s neighbors had sought his advice and cooperation in building a new school. Every two or three miles in Jones and Jasper counties there was a family with children, including those of some of the men he had ridden with in the war. He and his old friends decided to split the cost and the work of raising the schoolhouse. “He was a kind-hearted man, and he was a man of good judgment, and was looked upon as being the leader of his community in matters of schools and other local affairs,” Tom Knight remembered. Newton hewed beams and split logs for benches and contributed to the hiring of a teacher at a salary of ten dollars a month, the cost of which would be shared equally, along with his board.
On the first day of the term, Newton sent his children to school—and Rachel’s children went with them. Parents who accompanied their young to the schoolhouse door were startled to see Rachel’s son Jeff and daughters Georgeanne and Fannie file into the building. When some of the white parents angrily asked Rachel’s children what they thought they were doing, they replied that their mother had sent them.
The teacher flatly announced that he refused to instruct them. Rachel’s children were ordered out of the building. “Go home and tell your mother the school doesn’t accept Negroes,” they were told.
Newton was apparently outraged by the insult: he had put his sweat and labor into building the school for the common benefit of the neighbors’ children, yet they refused the same benefits to his and Rachel’s children. Rachel had protected the lives of some of those white men during the war. Their edict against race mixing in the classroom seemed the height of moral hypocrisy: plenty of Piney Woods yeomen had sired children with Negro blood—racial intermingling was surely all right with them when it came to sex. The difference was that they refused to take responsibility for their progeny, while Newton took care of his.
By one account, a day later the school, which still smelled of fresh-cut pine, went up in a bonfire. The embers were still glowing as word spread that Newton Knight had set the fire “because he wished the Negroes to have equal opportunity,” according to one of his descendants.
Newton stopped talking to his neighbors over the school. It was the last straw for him—he had come to feel estranged from most local whites and more comfortable among blacks, with whom he shared an understanding of Unionism and democratic ideals. Martha Wheeler, the former Knight slave, said, “He had a complete break with the whites because he undertook to send several of his Negro children to a white school he had been instrumental in building.”
In 1873 Ames ran for governor of Mississippi, campaigning on one part ambition and one part conviction that he had a “mission with a capital M” in protecting the rights of freedmen. “I found that the Negros who had been declared free by the United States were not free, in fact they were living under a code that made them worse than slaves,” Ames said. “… They had no rights that were respected by white men.” Ames believed that he could be of practical use “in securing their actual freedom.”
His opponent in the gubernatorial election was James Lusk Al-corn, the sleek cotton trader and former Confederate whose pose as a conciliatory moderate had helped him to win the governorship in 1870. But Ames viewed Alcorn as a turncoat and an opportunist, evidence of which was his refusal to crack down on the Ku Klux Klan.
Ames shuddered at what had happened during one year of Al-corn’s tenure alone: by his count, thirty Negro schoolhouses and churches were burned down and sixty-three men killed. One of the very worst outbreaks of Klan violence occurred in 1871 in Meridian, where a large population of ex-slaves had formed a strong Loyal League. The Klan used the trial of three blacks for arson as an excuse for a rampage, opening fire in the courtroom and killing the Republican judge as well as several spectators, throwing one defendant from a roof and slashing the throat of another. Over three days they cut down “all the leading colored men of the town with one or two exceptions.” They left twenty-five black corpses in the street.
Ames ran on a state ticket that included three black candidates for high office, and he promised the safeguarding of rights, public education, and a program of public works. Black voters responded by sweeping him into office decisively. Alcorn’s own field hands voted against him. They also elected ten new black state senators and fifty-five black representatives to the state legislature, along with fifteen carpetbaggers. White Republicans like Newton were crucial to the victory; they helped to organize and protect black voters. In Jasper County, Ames edged out Alcorn by eight votes, 642 to 634. “The negros did go up there and vote at the election just as the whites,” remembered Ben Graves.
As Ames began his governorship, he must have seemed incapable of failure to Newton. He was just thirty-eight, but his record suggested enormous capabilities. The son of a Maine sea captain, he had graduated fifth in his class at West Point and served dauntlessly through sixteen major Civil War battles. He earned the Medal of Honor for his actions at Bull Run, where he fought to the point of fainting despite being shot through the thigh, and he was at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, where he led a brigade on the front line for three straight days. By the end of the war he was a brevetted major general and “the closest thing to a Galahad” in the Union army.
An aide-de-camp said of him, “He was the beau ideal of a division commander, and as such there was no more gallant and efficient officer in the armies of the Union. Every one who rode with him soon discovered that Ames never hesitated to take desperate chances under fire. He seemed to have a life that was under some mystic protection. Although he never permitted anything to stand in his way, and never asked men to go where he would not go himself, still his manner was always cool, calm, and gentlemanly. Under the heaviest fire, when men and officers were being stricken down around him, he would sit on his horse, apparently unmoved by singing rifle ball, shrieking shot, or bursting shell, and quietly give his orders, which were invariably communicated in the most polite way, and generally in the form of a request.”
Now Ames was the picture of a young statesman, with long brunet hair swept behind his ears, the luxuriant drooping mustache of a tycoon, and thought-shadowed eyes, perhaps the lingering effect of so much war. Though not strictly handsome, he cut a commanding figure, and he had swept up one of the belles of Washington, D.C., in Blanche Butler, the daughter of the Union general and conqueror of New Orleans Benjamin Butler. She began to visit the Senate gallery, where Harper’s Weekly sketched Ames bending over her. As his wife she would support his political career devotedly though she despised Mississippi, which she considered the home of pestilence, lard, traitors, and socialite cats. “All are lynx-eyed, and one is always polite and kindly, but constantly on guard,” she said.
But though Ames prevailed in the election, Republicanism was still under threat in the state. On the same day Ames and his allies were elected, Mississippi also sent the cinder-eyed Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar to the U.S. House of Representatives. The classic Mississippi Bourbon, a former Confederate general and defender of slavery, railed against “strangers” like Ames. Lamar labeled the new governor’s Republican majority the “blackest tyranny that ever cursed this earth.”
Lamar typified the long-held attitude of white conservatives to interfering outsiders. It was summed up by The Nation, which warned, “If any man from the North comes down here expecting to hold and maintain radical or abolitionist sentiments, let him expect to be shot down from behind the first time he leaves his home.”
Newton was not a stranger, but he held radical and abolitionist sentiments, and for that, his enemies tried to assassinate him. As Ames took possession of the governor’s office, Newton began to go to Jackson on state business for three and four weeks at a time. In addition to his duties as a U.S. marshal, according to his son Tom, he acquired a position as federal revenue collector, and it became a common sight to see him on the exchange platform at the Newton Station crossroad, waiting for the rail car to the capital. But his habits attracted attention.
As Newton idled on the platform one afternoon, two men eyed him, and he overheard them talking. “That’s Newton Knight, let’s go get some more men and take him out and kill him,” one said. Certain they meant to return with a gang to waylay him, Newton hurriedly hid himself behind some cotton bales on the loading platform. When the train arrived he dashed out from behind the cotton and ran for the rail car like a hobo. Just when he leaped on the train, a half dozen men arrived to ambush him. As the train pulled away, he heard one of them say, “If we don’t catch him this trip we’ll get him on the return.”
Newton related the episode to Ames, who gave him a pistol and advised him to buy a new double-barrel while he was in Jackson. Ames also suggested he trick his pursuers by getting a haircut and a shave. Newton did as Ames recommended: a barber cropped his long hair to his collar and removed his heavy whiskers, leaving just a mustache. The transformation in his appearance was startling. “When he stepped from the train at Newton with his new gun shining no one seemed to know him, neither did they ask any questions,” his son recounted. Newton was so altered that when he arrived at home, even “we children did not know him,” Tom wrote.
After this incident Newton began traveling incognito. For the first time in his life, Newton wore “store-bought shirts, finely tucked down the front,” a gray fedora, and boots that shined like a pool of oil in the morning sun.
It seemed that every gun-packing backwoodsman with a grudge in the Piney Woods wanted to take him on. One of Newton’s old foes paid a local tough to accost him, under the guise of offering him a drink. The fellow played drunk, waving a bottle of whiskey around his head as he invited Newton to partake. Newton declined—he didn’t drink. But the man insisted, and kept waving the bottle, until Newton suspected he was looking for an opportunity to smash him with it. Newton stared the man down with his chill blue eyes, tracking the movements of the bottle. Unnerved, the man said, “God, Newt Knight, don’t you ever wink your eyes?”
“Not when I’m looking at your sort of cattle,” he said.
Newton believed one attempt on his life came close to succeeding. He was doing some trading at a general store in Ellisville when two men approached him, offering hearty handshakes and claps on the back. They were “mighty glad” to see the great Newton Knight, they said, who was talked about as the bravest man who had ever lived. They introduced themselves as photographers and said they had heard tales of his daring, how he had eluded the cavalry. They wanted to capture the famous man on film, and they had brought a camera to take his portrait. They suggested he pose for them in the woods where he had ranged. Newton, flattered, agreed. The men hiked over to the woods on the edge of town and pressed on into the thickets. Finally, they stopped and asked Newton to strike a pose. Newton, growing suspicious, cradled his shotgun while they set up the camera.
One of them suggested Newton pose without his gun. Why didn’t the great man hand over the firearm?
“No, I’ll give my gun to no man,” Newton said, “but I will give you both barrels of what is in it if you don’t leave here and do it now.”
Newton drove his wagon back to his hilltop farm, where he told his family he wouldn’t be going off into the swamp “to have his picture made no more.” Too many so-called friends had betrayed him; from now on he would be mistrustful. He was becoming increasingly wary, and he cautioned his children against strangers who seemed overly friendly.
“Never allow any man to hug you … for he is likely pretending to be your friend when he really intends to do you harm and deceive you,” he said.
All that protected Newton was his lingering reputation as a dangerous man to deal with and his status as a federal agent. According to a descendant, “It was well known, and well understood, that if this man were openly slain, the Federal Government would take action, since he was an officer. Or a few of his old gang who remained faithful, would retaliate.”
Still, Newton felt threatened and knew his life hung in the balance. He grew so guarded he even began to carry a pistol to church.
“It’s best to go prepared for trouble,” he told his son, “and not wait until you get into it, when it’s too late.”
In October of 1875, Governor Ames sat in his ornate, chandeliered office and read a letter in a scrawled, barely legible hand. The grammar was irregular and the spelling uneven—it was addressed to “Mr. Alebert Ames”—but the mistakes only conveyed the letter’s sentiments more powerfully. It was from one of his black constituents in Newton’s territory, Jasper County:
October 16, 1875
Mr. Alebert Ames, to your honor, Dear Sir: I write you these few lines to inform you that old Griffin Bender, a rank old Demicrit, reside in Jasper County. He was at Newton Station on that day, and he remarked to Dempsey Bender, one of his old slaves, that the demicratic party was agoing to carry this election, and he said, with threght [threat] of violence and interdation [intimidation], that if they failed they intended to have blood—blood; and, Mr. Govner Ames, I don’t think that you ought alouw such to go on in Mississippi; and, govner, the colard sitezens of Jasper County don’t think that you’ll let the demicrats trample on the rights of the republicans of Miss. in that kind of a manner because they are prencablely [principally] colard men. Now, govner, all we want is a fair chance in the world. To your honr you unacqunted colard frind,
N. B. BLACKMAN
Ames was receiving hundreds of letters like it from all over Mississippi, and had been for weeks. They all reported the same thing: ex-Confederates and conservative Democrats were planning to retake the statehouse by force, using violence and intimidation against black voters. The Democratic campaign chairman, a former Confederate general named James Z. George, was turning the state elections of 1875 into a farce and doing it so successfully that it would become notorious as the “Mississippi Plan” and emulated by states throughout the South.
All over Mississippi white men were organizing, joining rifle clubs, and forming White Leagues pledged to preserve the color line. One of the more politically subtle groups was the taxpayers’ league, a collection of planters and businessmen who blamed Ames for skyrocketing land taxes and the presence of blacks in office and vowed to rid the state of “Republican corruptionists.” The movement was led by, among others, the ex-Confederate William L. Nugent, who had become a dedicated white supremacist. The subtext of the taxpayers’ league was clear: it wanted to replace the Ames administration with what one pundit called “Ku Klux democracy.”
Nugent had lost his wife, Nellie, whose health failed in 1866, but he had remarried and gradually rebuilt his life, launching such a prosperous law practice that in 1872 he moved into one of the largest mansions in Jackson, an edifice with pillars and wrought-iron balconies. In one of his most famous cases, Nugent defended a local theater that had denied seating to blacks. In January of 1875 Nugent helped organize a taxpayers’ league statewide convention. Men pounded the lectern as they called for the ouster of Republicans who inflicted tax burdens on them, especially taxes that went to educating the Negro. To Ames’s critics, Mississippi’s problems came down to just two things, carpetbaggers and Negroes. Run the Yankees out of the state and restore the racial hierarchy, and all would be well. These “White Liners” could cloak their politics in discussions of tariffs, but Ames perceived their real cause: “The true sentiment of the assembly was ‘the color line,’” he said.
Ames’s government, like any, had its flaws. The state’s economy was bedeviled by chronic crop failures, and the Republican Party was rent by factionalism fueled by James Alcorn. Nevertheless, despite being met by opposition from antebellum leaders at almost every turn, Ames had accomplished much: he Johnny Appleseeded public education, built free hospitals, and was helping to lift Negroes from tenancy, and doing so in a state that was still razed by the war. If taxes were high, it was because every road and bridge needed to be rebuilt, and Mississippians desperately needed free schools and health care, without which they would never recover.
The first sign of serious trouble for Ames had come the previous summer in Vicksburg, where whites were livid over the marriage of a Negro legislator to the daughter of a local planter and the presence of several blacks on the Republican ticket in upcoming local elections. On July 4, 1874, a mob of Vicksburg White Leaguers shot up an Independence Day rally of black Republicans, killing several, and took over the city by force. Ames wrote to President Grant begging for federal troops to quell the riot. But Grant, fearful of political backlash, advised Ames to settle the matter locally and refused to interfere. Incredibly, on the very anniversary of his siege victory at Vicksburg, Grant effectively returned the city to his old enemies.
Six months later, emboldened white supremacists inflicted worse slaughter on Vicksburg. A mob forcibly turned the black Republican sheriff Peter Crosby out of office. The overthrown sheriff, on orders from Ames, mustered a band of five hundred freedmen to help him take back his post, but as they marched on the town a heavily armed white militia headed by a Confederate cavalry colonel, Horace Miller, met them at a bridge on the outskirts. The leader of the black militia, a Union veteran named Andrew Owen, advised his outnumbered and outgunned men, “Boys, go back peaceable and quiet.” As they turned their backs and began to disperse, a white fired into them. The shot touched off a massacre; for the next three days vigilantes hunted blacks down through the woods, where their bodies remained, their families too afraid to claim them.
Grant finally acted, dispatching a small unit of federal troops to restore order. But the damage was done: Ames’s enemies now knew that he had weak backing from the federal government. They smelled blood. The Vicksburg riots had shown “the absence of all the elements of real authority” in the Ames administration, L. Q. C. Lamar said.
By March of 1875, Ames was convinced the Democratic Party in Mississippi had metastasized into a paramilitary organization that meant to retake the state with bullets. Anticipating trouble, Ames was able to get a bill through the legislature authorizing him to organize two regiments of militia and purchase four Gatling guns.
But Ames had trouble raising a trustworthy regiment of white men. Some refused to serve because they feared reprisals from the Klan. Others Ames didn’t trust to side with blacks against their own race. Ames sought only the most deeply committed men. One of the few he trusted was the longtime Union man from the Piney Woods, Newton Knight. On March 18, Ames personally signed a commission appointing Newton a colonel in the 1st Infantry Regiment. As a white officer leading blacks Newton could expect bloody reprisals from his old foes; nevertheless, he took his place in the militia alongside black officers, who commanded about half the companies.
Newton may have tried to help raise other men to serve Ames’s need. An undated fragment of a note from Ames’s black lieutenant governor, A. K. Davis, to Newton suggests that he was responsible for some sort of mustering. “The governor wants you to appoint good men,” it read.
All that summer and fall, gangs of heavily armed whites broke up political meetings, made threats, and generally terrified black communities.
Miss., Noxubee County, Macon, Miss.
Governor Ames, Esq.:
Dear Sir: I write you a few lines on the state affairs of Nox. Co., Miss. Last Saturday, the 30th, the democrats was in Macon town in high rage, raring around and shooting off their cannons all up and down the street, and shooting all their pistols also … there was Richard Gray shot down walking on the pavements, shot by the democrats, and he was shot five times, four times after he fell, and was said shot because he was nominated for treasurer, and, forther more, because he made a speech and said he never did expect to vote a demicratic ticket, and also advised the colored citizens to do the same. Although we had W. M. Connor for our sheriff, and he have never presented to do anything about it, and I would like to know if we colored republican population have not as much right to beat our drums in a civilization manner as the democrats is to shoot up and down the streets in Macon town, and shoot our colored population down when they gets ready, and nothing done about. I write to you to know where is the law, and what authority is for us, and I believe you are the man for just, and I do say we colored republican are very disgrossly emposed upon with protection, and all other violation of laws. The demicrats ranges through in house. I am not writing to you to be writing; I am speaking of what I know and see. Please read this and spend your opinion on it.
Respectfully,
THE COLORED PEOPLE
But the extent of Ames’s powerlessness was being demonstrated almost daily. The sheriff of Yazoo City was Ames’s good friend Albert Morgan, a carpetbagger and a valorous Union veteran from Wisconsin who had done the seeming impossible: he had helped three hundred or so black families buy their own land and opened schools for their children. Compounding these offenses, Morgan had married a beautiful mulatto schoolteacher from the North named Carrie Highgate, making him a special target of White Line ire. On the first day of September, the town bells began to ring, and Yazoo City was soon full of armed men on horseback. They poured gunfire into a Republican rally, wounding several people, and put Morgan on the run for his life. Bands of men galloped about with ropes hitched to their saddles, firing in the air, “and when the niggers would see the ropes tied to their saddle, that was enough for them, they did not want anything more.” Morgan finally escaped after several days in hiding, thanks to a friend who met him in the woods with a horse waiting. Morgan rode away through the night and would not return to Mississippi.
“My friend, I fought for four years; was wounded several times; suffered in hospitals, and as a prisoner; was in twenty seven different engagements to free the slave and save our glorious Union—to save a country such as this!” Morgan wrote to Ames. “I have some love left for my country, but what is a country without it protects its defenders? … to be butchered here by this mob after all I have done here is too cruel.”
To Ames, it seemed like the war all over again. “In ’60 and ’61 there were not such unity and such preparation against the government of the U.S. as now exist against the colored men and the government their votes have established,” Ames remarked.
Just three days later another brutal assault took place in Clinton, a small town just fifteen miles from the governor’s mansion in Jackson. On September 4 a gang of white riflemen opened fire on a political rally of 1,200 Republicans led by a black state senator named Charles Caldwell. As Caldwell pleaded for calm, bullets tore through the crowd, and seven or eight people fell dead. This time, Republicans fought back, and two white men were killed in a blast of returned fire. Spectators screamed and fled into the woods, and for the next few days, periodic violence raged around Clinton. Large posses of armed white men arrived from surrounding counties by train, to join in chasing down blacks and shooting them. A black Republican named E. B. Welborn said, “They just hunted the whole country clean out, just every man they could see they were shooting at him just the same as birds.”
A black Republican named Square Hodge was found dead in the swamp missing his entrails, one arm, and his head. Lewis Russell was marched a quarter mile into the woods and riddled with bullets by twenty guns. Nor were blacks the only ones to die. A band of fifty whites seized a carpetbagger who taught black schoolchildren, William Haffa, and executed him. Then they went next door and forced two black Republicans to stand on a tree stump and emptied their guns into them as if they were a firing squad.
Senator Caldwell escaped before they arrived at his door. His wife, Margaret Ann, was told by the men who stood on her porch, “We are going to kill him if it is two years, or one year, or six, no difference; we are going to kill him anyhow. We have orders to kill him, and we are going to do it because he belongs to this republican party, and sticks up for these Negroes … We are going to have the south in our own charge … and any man that sticks by the republican party, and he is a leader, he has got to die.”
Margaret Caldwell testified that men were “shot to pieces” by the vigilantes. “They were around that morning killing people before breakfast,” she said. The death toll was thirty. About five hundred survivors, including Caldwell, fled to Jackson, where they congregated around the federal buildings and pleaded for protection.
White Democrats openly celebrated Clinton as a great victory. The Jackson Daily Clarion declared: “This lesson of Anglo-Saxon supremacy, written in blood, will ever remain the most important of many lessons taught in the modest college town of Clinton to the rising young manhood of a proud and untrammeled Commonwealth.”
Ames again beseeched the president for help. “A necessity of immediate action cannot be overstated,” he wrote. There was a small force of five hundred or so U.S. troops in Mississippi, divided between posts in Jackson, Holly Springs, and Vicksburg. Ames begged to use them—they could not intervene without direct orders from Grant.
Grant declined. The victor in an epic war had become a tired, calculating politician. Grant sensed that the mood of the country had shifted, as had his own, to apathy. “The whole public are tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South,” he complained. “… The great majority are ready now to condemn any interference on the part of the government. I heartily wish peace and good order might be restored without the issuing of a proclamation.” What’s more, a delegation of Ohioans had advised Grant that federal intervention in the South was so unpopular it could throw Ohio to the Democrats in the next election. Grant did the political math and decided that white Ohio, where Republican Rutherford Hayes was running for governor, was more important than black Mississippi.
Ames was alone with his troubles; there would be no federal troops to prop him up. Since the federal government lacked the will to protect Mississippi’s blacks, they would have to protect themselves. Ames had hesitated to arm a black militia for fear of igniting a race war that would be “felt over the entire south.” But now he ordered a thousand Springfield breech-loading muskets and authorized the mobilization of three Negro units. Among the columns were men who had been driven out of Clinton, including Charles Caldwell.
In early October, Caldwell led a small wagon train of men and armaments in a march across the countryside near Jackson. Word that black troops were armed with Springfields and bayonets so outraged whites that they threatened to hang Ames from a post in the governor’s mansion. As the election approached, Ames feared that the small regiments of black troops would only be butchered. He flinched. A group of Democrats, led by James Z. George and including William L. Nugent, proposed a “peace” settlement and met with Ames at the mansion. He agreed to disband the black militia.
The peace was one-sided. County by county, Ames lost control of the state. In Jasper County, a black activist named Sandy McGill was slain by the Klan when he refused to cease political organizing, despite threats. “He was a leader among the negros and they killed him because he defied them and made his boast,” Ben Graves remembered. McGill and his brother-in-law, a man named Bill Henderson, were on McGill’s porch and waiting when the Klan rode into his yard. A white neighbor watched the riders stalk past the house, “one horse right after the other,” in a slow procession. McGill and Henderson refused to flee. Instead, they raised their weapons and triggered off a round. “They didn’t wait for the Ku Klux to fire; they fired on them,” Graves said. The two men were quickly overrun on their porch. Henderson managed to get away into the woods, but McGill was caught. “I think they beat him dead with a mall,” Graves remembered.
How Newton reacted to these atrocities is conjecture; there is no record of his feelings. But they must have cut him deeply—and implanted a cold fear for Rachel and her family.
The Democratic activist W. D. Gibbs campaigned through Jasper and Jones counties in 1875, pausing in Paulding to deliver what must have been a speech loaded with meaning before the Loyal League. Later, during an investigation of the election by the U.S. Senate, Gibbs denied terrorizing blacks and insisted the only guns Democrats had brandished were for squirrels.
Gibbs claimed that his appeal to black voters was perfectly free of intimidation. “I satisfied them, to the best of my knowledge and ability, the interests of the white man and the black man in Mississippi were identical.” Senate investigators asked:
Q: That was the line of your argument?
A: That was the line of my argument.
Q: You made no threats at all?
A: No threats at all.
Q: So far as you saw in that county, did you see any violence?
A: I did not see any violence.
Q: Did you see any intimidation?
A: I did not hear of any intimidation.
In Paulding, Gibbs claimed, there were even “a good many colored people out to hear me.”
But Ames’s friend Albert Morgan drew a different portrait of W. D. Gibbs’s “canvassing.” Gibbs had menaced Morgan during a conversation about the election, in which Gibbs made clear the true nature of his Democratic activism.
“No one objects to the nigros votin’ now,” Gibbs told Morgan. “But the white man objects to nigro rule, and won’t submit to it any longer. It’s time for yo’ to quit yo’r ship. It is sinking mighty fast, and it’ll keep on till it reaches bottom. With yo’r support we could carry the county without any trouble at all. But, with or without it, we have made up our minds that we can, and by the Eternal, we will carry the county next time … We won’t harm you all unless yo’ get in ou’ way.”
“Who do you mean by you all?” Morgan asked.
“Why! Yo’ all Yankees and nigros—yo’ party.”
Gibbs continued: “I hope yo’ll all stand from under. It’ll save we all a heapo’ trouble. I tell yo’ we all white people have made up ou’ minds that we can, and we are going to carry this county next time. Peaceably, if we can, but fo’cibly if we must.”
To reinforce the point, Democratic leaders paraded not with squirrel guns, but with cannon. In Meridian on the day registration began, voters were informed that if they didn’t vote the right way, the siege guns would be turned on them. In Noxubee, Oktibbeha, and Colfax counties the cannon were detonated “very often, as a means to annoy, frighten, and intimidate those opposed to them,” until in Colfax County there was almost “a reign of terror.” In Monroe County, Democrats boasted that “there will be no U.S. soldiers to protect the voters, and they will have it all their own way.”
As matters grew worse, the Republican majority splintered and voter support faltered. A Republican ally named J. B. Allgood wrote to Ames advising him that the Republican league there was dissolving. “If we can have no protection, it is to the interest of us to disband our organization,” he wrote. “The negro is unable to protect himself; ignorant, illiterate, poor, and dependant as he is, he is at the mercy of the white man. I would like to know if we can get any protection; if not, we should know it, and shape our course accordingly.”
By now Ames didn’t need to read letters to know what the Democrats were doing. They threatened to do violence to Ames himself. One night in Jackson a group of belligerent Democrats marched through the streets with a cannon drawn by mules and paused at the governor’s mansion. They jeered and roared at the windows—and then fired pistol shots at them. They disappeared for a time, but returned in the early hours of the morning, thoroughly drunken, and began firing again, and also detonated the cannon, rattling the windows. They debated whether to storm the manse and kill Ames on the spot, but decided not to. Instead they went to the offices of the Republican newspaper, the Jackson Pilot, and shattered the windows.
On November 1, 1875, the day before the election, Ames wrote to his wife, “The reports which come to me almost hourly are truly sickening. Violence, threats of murder, and consequent intimidation are co-extensive with the limits of the state. Republican leaders in many localities are hiding in the swamps or have sought refuge beyond the borders of their own counties.”
The Democrats won in a landslide. In Columbus, Mississippi, vigilantes set fourteen fires and killed four black voters, and mobs greeted others and made them vote Democratic at the end of gun barrels. In Claiborne County, a cluster of black voters had to pass through a gauntlet of eighty White Liners carrying Remington breechloaders; they opened fire on them at a blast from a bugle, wounding six. When a report of the incident was wired to General James Z. George, he responded approvingly, “Your dispatch satisfactory. Push on the column, but keep quiet.” The Republican vote count in Claiborne was expected to be more than 1,800. It was just 496.
In Aberdeen, a hundred mounted and uniformed men under former Confederate general Reuben Davis guarded the polls and threatened to “cover the yard with dead niggers in fifteen minutes” if any blacks tried to vote. Those who did were pistol-whipped, and the crowd dispersed. There were 1,400 Republicans in Aberdeen; just 90 cast votes. In Yazoo County, the Negro population was 12,000. There, Republicans got just 7 votes.
In Jones County, they got just 4.
As the returns came in on election night, Democrats carried sixty-two of seventy-four counties. A brass band led a parade to the house of James Z. George, who declared “the redemption of our common mother, Mississippi.” By the time all the votes were counted, the Democrats controlled the state legislature with a four-to-one majority.
The killing didn’t stop with the election. All over Mississippi jubilant White Liners continued to drive Republicans out of office by force and did violence to blacks who had defied them. They had a particular score to settle with State Senator Charles Caldwell, who had displayed such militancy during the Clinton affair.
They assassinated him at Christmastime. A group of vigilantes invited him to have a drink, and the clinking of glasses was the prearranged signal: he was shot through the back from a window. He was then dragged to the sidewalk, where he lay bleeding as a Clinton street mob fired thirty to forty more bullets into him. When the town bells pealed to announce his death, his wife Margaret took to her bed in grief. When Caldwell’s brother Sam rode into town to find his brother’s body, he too was shot dead.
Blanche Ames wrote her mother: “Those who have seen Caldwell’s corpse report that the body had to be tied together, while on his head and neck there was not a space where one could lay a hand.”
Ames too feared assassination. He hardly knew a man in Jackson who hadn’t either taken part in the terrors or sat idly by as they occurred. Vigilantes liked to demonstrate how defenseless he was by firing their guns near the mansion. “At night in the town here, the crack of the pistol or gun is as frequent as the barking of dogs,” Blanche wrote. “Night before last they gave us a few shots as they passed the mansion yard, by way of reminder.”
Ames barely lasted past the New Year. In February of 1876 the state legislature drew up thirteen articles of impeachment against him. One of them accused him of fomenting a race war by naming Charles Caldwell to the militia. James Z. George formed a committee of prominent men to press Ames for his resignation, and among them was William L. Nugent. The delegation confronted Ames and threatened him with removal. Rather than prolong the state’s agony, he resigned.
Newton left no record of his mood after the election of 1875, but it can be guessed at: Mississippi Republicans had lost all faith in politics. Grant’s refusal to send in troops had left them “to the tender mercies of the Ku Klux Klan,” as one Mississippian put it. The Reconstruction project had collapsed, and the state was in the hands of the same antebellum leaders who had driven the South into desolation. As the presidential race of 1876 approached, Newton had no hope that the law would protect him, or his friends and loved ones.
“The Negroes are now almost ready to take to the swamps, and unless the government send troops here at least a month before the election, the Negroes will not go to the polls,” one Republican activist wrote to Washington. “We look for the Government to stand by us and if it does not it can take these Southern States and do what it pleases with them.”
Ames departed for Washington, where he announced to anyone who would listen that Mississippi had been violently overthrown. A Senate select committee was convened to inquire into voting conditions in the state, headed by George Boutwell of Massachusetts. Ames, stiff with dignity yet seething, testified that James Z. George’s so-called Redeemers had won the state “due wholly to fraud, violence, and murder to such an extent and degree that the northern mind seems incapable of comprehending it.”
In the spring and summer of 1876 members of the Boutwell committee went to Mississippi to collect testimony firsthand, but they found many Republicans so traumatized they refused to cooperate. A party man from Macon named E. Stafford wrote a letter declining to appear, using searing language that surely reflected some of Newton’s own feelings.
“Very few from this county will go voluntarily before your committee, for two important reasons,” Stafford wrote.
First, they have no money to pay expenses … Secondly, they believe—not without reason—that it would not be safe to return, if they did go … Abandoned by the administration, and those whom we have fought the battles of the party to elevate to position and influence, this “conclusion” has its advantages—we may at least save our scalps, which are worth more to us and our families than the broken faith of a pack of ingrates. I have been brick batted, ku-kluxed, and struck by lightning, in the service of reconstruction in this state, and still live to see my bitter political enemies walk off with the rewards. I want no “committee” in mine.
Still, after devoting months to the task, the committee collected two volumes of documentary evidence, including testimony from witnesses such as Albert Morgan and Margaret Caldwell, the wife of the assassinated legislator. Stacks of pages described in gruesome detail the tactics that had been employed in the election of 1875. The report ended with a succinct conclusion that stated in unmistakable language that militants had retaken by force what Grant and Sherman had fought so bloodily for.
“The state of Mississippi is at present under the control of political organizations composed largely of armed men whose common purpose is to deprive the negroes of the free exercise of the right of suffrage and to establish and maintain the supremacy of the white-line democracy, in violation alike of the constitution of their own state and of the Constitution of the United States,” it read.
Not that it did any good. Even while the report was being written, Mississippi’s Democrats were once again employing gun blasts and suppression to sway the 1876 presidential race between Rutherford Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden. Mississippi’s White Line legislature issued a new decree aimed at black voters: they were required to disclose where they lived and were employed. Once again, thousands of fearful black voters stayed away from the polls. In Yazoo County exactly two Republicans cast votes. In Tallahatchie, the total was one.
When the national votes were tallied, it was the closest election in U.S. history. The deadlock created a constitutional crisis that lasted for months and was only settled, after protracted negotiation, by the Compromise of 1877. Democrats agreed to give Hayes the presidency, in exchange for his concession that federal troops would no longer intervene in the South. There would be no more meddling in Dixie’s domestic matters; Southern whites would settle “the Negro question” for themselves without any further federal help.
It had been a decade since the Civil War, and yet to Rachel, Newton, their children, and other freedmen it seemed that “the whole South—every state in the South—had got into the hands of the very men that held us as slaves,” as one black leader bewailed. The Nation magazine announced, “The Negro will disappear from the field of national politics. Henceforth the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him.”
For men like Newton and Ames, the dirt farmer and the patrician governor alike, it was a disaster, the wreck of all they had hoped for from Reconstruction. In fact, it was more than that: it was the true end of the war. “A revolution has taken place—by force of arms,” Ames had declared, as he watched events helplessly, “and a race are to be disenfranchised—they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom—an era of second slavery.” The Mississippi election of 1875 had been merely a continuation of the conflict they had fought a decade earlier and thought they had won. They were wrong. They had lost.