CHAPTER ONE
Visionaries
The Yankee has done a great many things that he should not have done, and left undone things that he should have done, but he has made the flowers bloom, the corn to tassel, homes to flourish and business prosper in this section.
—New Orleans Daily Picayune, 1893
On a scorching summer afternoon in the year 1880, a burly, middle-aged, Confederate veteran named Captain William Harris Hardy took a lunch break in a dense Mississippi forest. The pathless woods stretched for miles in every direction, enveloping the captain under an endless canopy of pine needles. A few small homesteads dotted the forest, but no large group had ever settled the remote area, not even Native Americans, who had found little use for the land. A previous traveler once described the region as “a picture of desolation,” noting, “Every day adds to the stagnation of the mind.” And the forty-three-year-old Hardy had been in the forest for weeks, surveying the area for railroad construction.1
On that particular afternoon, Captain Hardy’s lunch break was prompted by the sound of flowing water. Thinking that a river or waterfall would offer a brief respite from the monotony of the forest, Hardy walked toward the trickle and came upon a small creek. “The crystal clear water running over a white sandy bottom was a refreshing sight,” he later recalled. On the creek bank sat a fallen log that Hardy used as a bench while eating his meal. Hot and tired, the captain took a moment to enjoy his break. He stretched his long legs and lit a cigar, smoking and thinking as he studied a map of the state.2
Hardy’s employer, the New Orleans & Northeastern Railroad, was part of a European-owned railroad syndicate planning an ambitious new route between Cincinnati and New Orleans. Named for its two terminal cities, the Queen and Crescent City Route would move goods between the Gulf of Mexico and Ohio faster than any other railway. Cargo arriving in Cincinnati could then be dispersed on existing tracks throughout the Northeast, giving New Orleans rapid access to places such as New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. The route promised to greatly enhance Deep South commerce, but it would have to cut through approximately 150 miles of the dreadfully thicketed Piney Woods of southeastern Mississippi. In much of the region, the pine trees and undergrowth were so dense that one could not roll a ball more than ten yards without bumping a trunk. Surveying the area for railroad construction was a daunting assignment.3
But there was something about that place near the creek that struck Captain Hardy during his lunch. He lingered on the spot, studying his map, watching the water, and staring into the forest. After finishing his meal, the captain took a short nap on a bed of fallen pine needles before moving on through the woods. Hardy spent the ensuing months completing his work for the railroad, but he never forgot about that particular spot, and he later filed an application to purchase a plot of land near the creek. When his federal land grant was accepted in the spring of 1882, Hardy founded a new town near the site of his lunch. Ever the romantic, the captain named the settlement Hattiesburg in honor of his wife, Hattie.4
Captain Hardy was a self-made man. Born in 1837 in Lowndes County, Alabama, he first arrived in Mississippi in 1855 on the heels of a major setback. The young man was just one year shy of graduating from Tennessee’s Cumberland College when a dreadful case of pneumonia forced him to withdraw from school. The cold air, a doctor advised him, could worsen his condition and possibly even lead to death. So the young student reluctantly rode home toward an uncertain future in the Alabama cotton belt. Hardy’s family, who had paid his tuition by selling “everything on the farm that was not actually needed,” was heartbroken. His mother cried at the news of his withdrawal. After a few shiftless weeks, Hardy traveled into Smith County, Mississippi, where he had a cousin who might be able to help the young man find a job.5
Like many southern sons who would never inherit great wealth, William Harris Hardy had seen higher education as a promising means toward a better future and was disappointed by having to withdraw from college. But Hardy was resilient. The bout with pneumonia may have forced him to leave school, but it would not dictate his future. Diploma or not, the young social climber arrived in Mississippi determined to succeed.
Captain William Harris Hardy, founder of Hattiesburg. (McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi)
During a horse swap, Hardy met a man who offered him a job running a local school. He accepted the position and taught for about a year. Hardy was the first teacher in that part of Smith County and proved popular among local families. But he did not want to be a teacher. Desiring greater social status and influence, Hardy arranged to apprentice at a local law office, and in less than a year, he managed to pass the state bar exam. He took a job at a firm in Raleigh, Mississippi, and after a few years, he opened his own practice.6
In the fall of 1859, Hardy met a young woman named Sallie Johnson at the Mississippi State Fair. “I had never in my life seen so beautiful a girl,” he later recalled. “It was a case of love at first sight.” After a brief courtship, the pair married the following year. Hardy was smitten with his new bride. Affectionate and warm, he doted on her constantly. By all accounts, they were madly in love. The young couple was just embarking on a promising new life together when the South seceded from the Union, and America went to war. Hardy was not a member of the wealthy plantocracy that owned most of Mississippi’s slaves, but he believed in the Confederate cause and answered Jefferson Davis’s call to protect the Southern way of life.7
Hardy had the stature and bearing of a born leader. Standing six feet, two inches tall, he weighed over two hundred pounds and possessed a booming voice that later earned him a reputation as an impressive orator. Those qualities helped the charismatic attorney recruit a force of eighty men primed to fight the Yankees. On May 31, 1861, Hardy was commissioned a captain in the Confederate Army, a post that paid him a respectable salary of $130 a month. He and his men were mustered into the 16th Mississippi Infantry and given the nickname the Smith County Defenders.8
The Smith County Defenders arrived in Manassas, Virginia, shortly after the First Battle of Bull Run. They served in the hottest theater of the Civil War, fighting in the grueling battles for Northern Virginia alongside legendary Confederate generals Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and James Longstreet. The 16th was the only Mississippi regiment to participate in the celebrated Valley Campaign of 1862, when Stonewall Jackson’s infantry divisions became the fabled “foot cavalry,” gloriously routing Union forces up and down the Shenandoah Valley.9
But glory eluded those men in the following days. Although Captain Hardy missed much of the fighting due to illness, the rest of the Smith County Defenders saw far too much of the war. They fought at Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the Battle of the Wilderness, four of the deadliest conflicts to ever occur on American soil. Nearly sixty thousand Confederate soldiers spilled blood during those haunting battles in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Captain Hardy withdrew from the army before the end of the war, but the remaining members of the Smith Country Defenders were among the troops who surrendered with General Lee at the Appomattox Court House in April of 1865. The survivors trudged home to a broken society.10
Postwar Mississippi was a godforsaken place. The war had destroyed the state’s infrastructure. Thousands of railroads, mills, factories, bridges, streets, and buildings had been demolished by Union and Confederate troops alike. The population itself was even more bereft. Mississippi’s villages and towns were littered with widows, orphans, and broken men. Approximately one-third of white male breadwinners had been injured, crippled, or killed. According to one estimate, in 1866, the state spent one-fifth of its revenue on artificial limbs. The people were left poor and disillusioned. Some had lost everything—homes, warehouses, wagons, furniture, clothing, art, jewelry, and family heirlooms. In Hinds County alone, an estimated $25 million of property (nearly $370 million today) had been lost or destroyed. Fields lay barren. Barns were burned. In less than six years, Mississippi had lost more than half its pigs and approximately 44 percent of its livestock. In 1860, Mississippi’s farms were collectively worth $190,760,367. A decade later, they were valued at just $65,373,261 and produced less than half as much cotton. As one historian recounted, Mississippi’s “disbanded Confederate soldiers returned to their homes to find desolation and starvation staring them in the face.”11
To make matters worse for the defeated Confederates, Union troops occupied the state. As part of the Fourth Military District of the occupied South, Mississippi was filled with the despised Yankee soldiers and Republican politicians whom locals scornfully dubbed scalawags and carpetbaggers. Northern Republicans had not only defeated Southerners in battle, now they were imposing new laws during this process of Reconstruction.
Led by a group nicknamed the Radical Republicans, the federal government passed three constitutional amendments designed to establish and protect the basic rights of newly freed African Americans. The Fifteenth Amendment gave black males the right to vote. Outnumbering whites in thirty-three of Mississippi’s sixty-one counties at the beginning of 1870, recently emancipated black males elected dozens of African American legislators to national and state offices. During Reconstruction, Mississippi produced the first two black United States senators in American history—Hiram Revels in 1870 and Blanche K. Bruce in 1875. Black Mississippi communities also enjoyed scores of local political victories. In 1870, Mississippi’s 117-member state legislature included thirty black elected officials. Three years later, fifty-five African Americans were serving in the Mississippi House of Representatives, with nine more in the state Senate.12
Thousands of white Mississippians resented the carpetbagging Republicans and despised any notion of black equality. White Mississippi Democrats yearned for the day when they could restore the old Democratic order and return to the days of total white supremacy. Some disgruntled whites used violence to reestablish racial control. Through paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan, they terrorized black Mississippians and their Republican allies. But as a tactic for their reactionary agenda, violence had its limits. Organized attacks further validated the federal presence and offered the potential to attract even more federal involvement. While some Mississippi white supremacists went on the attack, a more careful contingent of white Mississippi Democrats, including William Harris Hardy, awaited a permanent restoration of local white political power. They were led by a man named Lucius Q. C. Lamar.13
Georgia native Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar had been a dedicated Confederate. Born in 1825, he had spent his twenties moving between Georgia and Mississippi engaged in a variety of careers, including attorney, college professor, and cotton planter. At the age of thirty-one, Lamar was elected to the United States House of Representatives from Mississippi’s First Congressional District. He did not serve long. In 1860, Lamar resigned from the House to join the Mississippi Secession Convention. After helping draft Mississippi’s Ordinance of Secession, he served as lieutenant colonel in the 19th Mississippi Infantry and was later the Confederacy’s minister to Russia. Following the war, Lamar joined the faculty of the University of Mississippi and practiced law in Oxford. In 1872, he became the first Mississippi Democrat elected to Congress since secession.14
About a year after returning to Congress, Lamar performed a remarkable public gesture by delivering a lengthy eulogy for Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts who in 1856 had been famously assaulted in the Senate chamber by South Carolina’s Preston Brooks. As one of the framers of Radical Reconstruction, Sumner was a longtime opponent of southern Democrats and a staunch advocate of black rights. When he died of a heart attack on March 11, 1874, the executive committee of the National Civil Rights Council recommended that black residents in “every city and town in the country drape their houses and churches in mourning.” Needless to say, Sumner was not a popular man among most white Southerners.15
Nevertheless, just weeks after Sumner’s death, Lucius Q. C. Lamar stood in front of his congressional colleagues and delivered a heartfelt tribute to his longtime adversary. “Charles Sumner in life believed that all occasion for strife and distrust between the North and South had passed away,” Lamar told his fellow representatives. “Shall we not, while honoring the memory of this great champion of liberty, this feeling sympathizer with human sorrow, this earnest pleader for the exercise of human tenderness and heavenly charity lay aside the concealments which serve only to perpetuate misunderstandings and distrust, and frankly confess that on both sides we most earnestly desire to be one?”16
This was no small gesture. The former Confederate leader had stood in public to commemorate the life and career of a man who for over twenty years had been one of the South’s most powerful political opponents. Lamar’s impassioned speech reportedly drew tears from the eyes of both Democratic and Republican congressmen. The legend of Lamar’s homage reached mythical proportions. One writer later recounted that Lamar’s speech “touched the freezing hearts of North and South, unlocking their latent stores of kindly and generous feeling and kindling anew in them the fast-failing fires of love.” Decades later, future president John F. Kennedy stressed the speech’s importance in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Profiles in Courage, writing, “Few speeches in American political history have had such immediate impact.”17
But Lamar’s speech was about more than rhetoric alone. The Mississippi congressman understood that Sumner’s death presented a political opportunity for white southern Democrats. The war had been over for nearly eight years, and much of America had lost its taste for Reconstruction. Sumner himself even called for withdrawing federal troops. Lamar’s eulogy posthumously glossed Sumner’s stance toward reconciliation in a symbolic effort to help persuade Republicans that the South was ready to stand on its own. But the public acquiescence was also designed to serve Lamar’s own ends; at home, the congressman would soon help lead an effort to eliminate black political power and remove the Republicans from office.
After the Civil War, William and Sallie Hardy moved to Paulding, Mississippi, where the captain resumed practicing law. Captain Hardy hated Reconstruction. Even worse than the humiliation of Northern occupation were the threats to the Southern racial order. Hardy ardently believed in the natural inferiority of African Americans and offered no repentance for slavery. In fact, he stressed its morality. “There was no place on earth,” Hardy once wrote, “where the negro was treated so kindly as among the better class of Southern people during the days of slavery.” According to Hardy, emancipation actually hindered the character of black Mississippians. “The ‘new negro,’ ” he later claimed, “has not the general intelligence, nor the politeness and refinement, nor the industry, nor the love of truth and virtue, of the ‘old negro’—the slave.”18
Hardy was surrounded by like-minded allies. In 1871, groups of white citizens in nearby Meridian organized an attack on local black citizens. During the ensuing Meridian Race Riot—an extended two-year campaign of racial terrorism—local Klansmen murdered more than 170 African Americans. The widespread violence attracted the attention of the federal government and helped serve as a basis for the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, which was designed to disband the terrorist organization.19
Although the victims of the Meridian Race Riot were predominantly black, Hardy blamed local African Americans for instigating the violence. “The negroes were insolent and overbearing,” the captain later recounted, “and white men and white women got off the sidewalk rather than be jostled or pushed off by half-drunken negroes.” Hardy also cited dissident local black residents who, he claimed, assaulted a white sheriff, threatened to kill white citizens, and refused to help a white store owner extinguish a fire. There is no evidence that Hardy was directly involved in the violence at Meridian, but he clearly sympathized with the white murderers. Later in life, he called the Ku Klux Klan “a necessity of the times” and “a great boon to an impoverished people.” Despite condoning violence, Hardy also recognized that widespread attacks could attract an even larger federal presence, a point reinforced by the federal response to the Meridian Riot. Real change required a political solution.20
In the meantime, tragedy reshaped the captain’s life. In the late summer of 1872, Sallie, his beloved wife, contracted malaria and died after a miserable ten-day fight. After Sallie passed, Hardy moved to Meridian, where he continued practicing law and began writing editorials in the Meridian Tri-Weekly Homestead. Hardy’s columns in the paper became increasingly brazen, denouncing federal occupation and Republican rule and calling for the impeachment of the Republican governor, Adelbert Ames, a native of Maine and former general in the Union Army. Hardy was not alone. Across Mississippi, dozens of other local daily newspapers began similarly embracing a harder line against the state’s Republicans.21
In the summer of 1875, the year after Lucius Q. C. Lamar delivered his eulogy to Charles Sumner, several Mississippi cities experienced acts of loosely organized racial violence. Rumors of black insurrection and fears of greater Republican control sparked small-scale skirmishes in Vicksburg, Yazoo City, and Friar’s Point. Fearing outright revolt, Governor Ames began organizing the state militia, which further aggravated white Democrats. By late summer, some newspapers and white Democratic leaders were openly advocating outright rebellion. That October, the Hinds County Gazette told its readers that Governor Ames had raised a “Raiding Army” and quoted the governor as saying, “Hell must be inaugurated in Mississippi.” “Ames is organizing murder, civil war, respite and anarchy,” the Gazette warned its readers. “Let every white man arm and equip and be ready for action at a minute’s notice.”22
A week later, the Hinds County Gazette openly advocated violence to overthrow Republican rule. Referring to the Election Day of 1875 as “the grand battle,” the Gazette asserted that “the imbeciles and thieves must be overthrown—good honest government must be restored” and that “every Democrat and Conservative in Hinds County should make his arrangements to devote to his country all the twelve working hours of the 2d day of November. Nothing should keep him from his voting place.” Other Mississippi newspapers offered similar calls for political violence. The Macon Beacon told readers, “Every man should do his duty in the campaign.” The Jackson Clarion reported, “Ames is organizing a war of races.… The time has arrived when the companies that have been organized for protective and defensive purposes should come to the front.”23
That November, Mississippi Democrats reclaimed political power through widespread voter fraud and violence. Across the state, small paramilitary groups stuffed ballot boxes, seized armories, and intimidated Republican voters. The sheriff of Yazoo County so feared the power of these white supremacist renegades that he refused to call his regular militia against them to avoid the risk of open warfare. At West Point, white Democrats paraded two cannons through the streets. Two days later, Lowndes County Democrats pulled a twenty-four-pound cannon to the court house and fired it across town in broad daylight, “breaking and shattering the glass in adjacent buildings.” As one historian has observed, the Democratic Party “had become as much a military as a political organization.”24
Threats of violence kept thousands of black Mississippi voters away from the polls. As the Hinds County Gazette noted, “There was an immense deal of quiet intimidation. The blacks were given to understand that they must elect a better set of men to office.” Real violence ensued as well. A dispatch from Columbus reported, “Every negro found on the streets was arrested and tack[ed] up. Four negroes refusing to be arrested were shot and killed.” In other places, white Democrats used economic intimidation to keep black voters away from the polls. For example, in Aberdeen County, 190 prominent white landowners signed pledges not to enter into labor contracts with known Republican voters. “Whoever eats the white man’s bread,” the pledge declared, “must vote with the white man or refrain from voting at all.”25
Lucius Q. C. Lamar served as the de facto orator of the Mississippi Revolution of 1875, as it came to be known. He spent that fall “rushing from meeting to meeting to meeting,” wrote one historian, “arousing the wildest enthusiasm.” “Lamar was the most popular speaker in the campaign of 1875,” observed another historian. “Every community wanted him.”26
Captain Hardy, who in 1873 had remarried a woman named Hattie Lott, later claimed that he hosted Lucius Q. C. Lamar in Meridian. Hardy revered the Mississippi statesman and later paid homage to this hero by naming his and Hattie’s first son Lamar. Hardy also made his own contributions to the revolution. His editorials in the Meridian Tri-Weekly Homestead helped plant the seeds of local rebellion, and the captain spent the weeks before the election traveling to other counties to encourage groups of white citizens to mobilize against the Republicans. Years later, a family friend fondly remembered Hardy’s influence in nearby Kemper County, where the captain appeared just before Election Day to inspire local residents to “prepare for action.”27
Mississippi’s well-armed Democrats swept the state elections of 1875. The violence and intimidation aimed at black voters was, of course, in violation of the Fifteenth Amendment. But the federal government, fatigued from fourteen years of war and occupation, stood idly by as white Democrats expelled black voters from the polls and retook political power in Mississippi. The results were implausible for a truly democratic election. In some places, Republican candidates counted fewer than ten votes among thousands of ballots. Even in majority-black counties, Democrats enjoyed enormous margins of victory. For example, in Yazoo County, where African Americans outnumbered white residents by approximately two thousand, the Republican Party received support on only seven ballots. The Mississippi Revolution of 1875 was a decisive assault in the war to restore white supremacy. “In the domestic history of Mississippi,” wrote one of Lucius Q. C. Lamar’s biographers in 1896, “the year 1875 is the supplement of 1861. It is the year of redemption, the year in which a great political revolution reclaimed the prize of state sovereignty.” Collectively referred to as the Redeemers, white Mississippi Democrats had virtually eliminated black political power.28
Mississippi’s Redeemers set the stage for similar Democratic uprisings across the South. During the election of 1876, political corruption ran rampant across Dixie as black voters were threatened with violence and ballot boxes were stuffed with illegal votes. Because of widespread fraud, electoral returns in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida were hotly contested, resulting in a nationwide controversy over the presidential contest between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio and his Democratic opponent Samuel Tilden of New York. Tilden carried the entire South except for the disputed states of South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida, which were worth a combined nineteen electoral votes. Those states, along with a disputed electoral vote in Oregon, held the key to the presidency. Tilden had a nineteen-point lead in the Electoral College. If he took even one of the contested Southern states, the Democrats would take the White House. If Hayes won all three, then he would become the nineteenth president of the United States.29
Sensing opportunity, Lucius Q. C. Lamar led Southern Democratic congressmen in brokering a deal. In exchange for Democrats conceding the election in the disputed states, Republicans agreed to withdraw the remaining troops from Dixie and to help fund the construction of a southern transcontinental railroad (which never fully came to fruition). South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida went Republican, and Hayes won the presidency. The following year, the occupying troops left the South. Reconstruction was over, leaving Mississippi’s white Redeemers free to craft a new society as they pleased.30
Like Lamar, many white Mississippi leaders were captivated by the possibilities of railroads. During most of the antebellum era, Mississippi cotton planters had relied primarily on steamboats to transport cargo up and down the Mississippi River. By the 1850s, however, cotton farms had spread farther into Mississippi’s interior. Moving crops from the interior to the Mississippi River could be a complicated process requiring numerous modes of transportation. Transferring bales of cotton between wagons, docks, and boats could result in an over-handled and devalued crop. Moreover, the state’s smaller inland rivers were prone to dramatic water level changes that could stall shipments. Railroads, unlike rivers, could provide reliable service virtually anywhere and deliver goods directly from the mill or the compress to the market. And so between 1850 and 1860, tracks slowly crept across the Mississippi landscape as the state’s railroad mileage increased from 75 to 872. Then, of course, came the war.31
The completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 marked the beginning of an American railroad renaissance. Between 1870 and 1890, America’s railroad mileage increased from 52,922 to 163,597, an average of fifteen miles per day over twenty consecutive years. Roughly thirty thousand miles of these tracks were laid in the South. But Southerners did not control these new lines; Yankees and Europeans did. By one estimate, Northerners and Europeans controlled nearly 90 percent of Southern railroad mileage in the late nineteenth century. Railroads were extraordinarily expensive to build, and the former Confederacy was broke. With most of its wealth lost in the war and Emancipation and lacking the capital to build railroads on their own, Southerners, along with the federal government, sold or gave millions of acres of land to Northern and European industrialists to lay railroad tracks across the surface of the postwar South.32
Captain Hardy was one of thousands of Southerners who took jobs with the Northern- or European-owned railroad companies. Besides modernizing the region, railroads also offered exciting new opportunities for people like Hardy by extending prospects of prosperity beyond the plantation. Hard working and dependable, Hardy served the New Orleans & Northeastern Railroad in several capacities, including as surveyor of land for track construction, the job that sent him stomping deep into the Mississippi Piney Woods during the summer of 1880. He also worked as a general counsel, a part-time fundraiser, and even an engineer. The company was so impressed by Hardy’s intellect and diligence that it placed him in charge of its most ambitious new project, the construction of a bridge across Louisiana’s 630-square-mile Lake Pontchartrain.33
Railroad companies had for years dreamed of a bridge over Lake Pontchartrain to speed travel in and out of New Orleans. But such a bridge would have to cross approximately six miles of the lake. No one had ever before built a railroad bridge that far over water, let alone in the middle of the hurricane-ridden Gulf Coast South. News of the plan to bridge Lake Pontchartrain aroused skepticism among professional engineers and architects. The track, many argued, would surely collapse under the enormous weight of a locomotive.34
But Captain Hardy disagreed with the experts and set out to prove them wrong. Both engineering interests and personal pride were at stake. Many of the project’s detractors held advanced engineering degrees and hailed from privileged backgrounds. As a self-educated college dropout from the Alabama Cotton Belt, William Harris Hardy was still trying to prove his mettle in a rapidly modernizing world. Just as when he rode down from the Smoky Mountains nearly thirty years before, Captain Hardy was determined to succeed against the odds.
To bridge Pontchartrain, Hardy designed a twenty-one-mile-long overpass that stretched more than three times the distance between the lakeshores. He intuitively realized that if the bridge’s landed sections were fixed and immovable, they would help stabilize the overwater section and absorb some of the stress of a locomotive’s weight. To support the overwater section, Hardy ordered more than fifteen million feet of lumber from a nearby creosoting factory. Because the lake averaged only ten to fifteen feet in depth, it was relatively easy to install railroad trestles on the lake bed. Hardy’s Pontchartrain bridge was locked into place by inflexible landed foundations and supported underneath by a virtual underwater forest.35
His plan worked splendidly. On the evening of October 15, 1883, the first train to cross Lake Pontchartrain steamed into New Orleans. Captain Hardy was vindicated. The self-taught engineer had just fashioned the world’s longest working railroad bridge. Built for approximately $1.3 million, the bridge offered an unprecedented path across Lake Pontchartrain, thus completing a crucial portion of the New Orleans & Northeastern Railroad’s Queen and Crescent City Route. The new line trimmed shipment times, offered passengers easy access to the other side of the lake, and earned the captain and his employer a great deal of prestige. Decades later, New Orleans rum runners paid tribute to the captain by nicknaming the overpass “Hardy’s Moonshine Bridge.”36
A few months after the completion of Hardy’s bridge, a train from Cincinnati arrived in New Orleans in just twenty-eight hours. For more than eighty years, steamboats had been delivering people and cargo between the Queen and Crescent cities. Paddlewheel engineers and captains had tirelessly chased speed records up and down the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. But steamboats were no match for trains. With the completion of the Queen and Crescent City Route, a locomotive could travel from New Orleans to Cincinnati and back before a steamboat covered even half the distance between the cities—and only then if the steamboat traveled at record speed for two days, avoided snags and sandbars, and managed not to explode on the way, which many overworked steamboats were liable to do. Whereas Southerners had once been reliant on Mother Nature’s natural highways, railroads allowed them to devise their own. Locomotives were the future, the backbone of a New South.37
Settlers arrived in Dixie’s new railroad towns like sweet ants on a chocolate bar. Between 1880 and 1890, the populations of Atlanta, Chattanooga, and Little Rock nearly doubled. Birmingham grew from 3,086 to 26,178 residents. Richmond added nearly eighteen thousand people. And Memphis and Nashville together attracted over sixty-two thousand new residents. Between these larger cities grew hundreds of mid-sized railroad towns such as Meridian, Mississippi; Asheville, North Carolina; Knoxville, Tennessee; and Macon, Georgia. The railroads began to define life in Dixie as Southerners attached their lives to the tracks.38
The area around Captain Hardy’s new town of Hattiesburg was chock-full with growth. As one local man recalled, “From New Orleans to Meridian was a beehive of activity. Literally thousands of people were employed.” “Of all the little towns and villages located between Meridian and lake Pontchartrain,” noted the New Orleans Daily Picayune a few years later, “Hattiesburg has advantages inferior to none.” The Queen and Crescent City Route created unprecedented opportunities in the dense Mississippi Piney Woods, including Hattiesburg’s first brush with fame.39
For a brief moment in the summer of 1889, Captain Hardy’s young town became the epicenter of the international sports world when it hosted America’s last bare-knuckle heavyweight boxing championship. Originally scheduled for New Orleans, the match between champion John L. Sullivan and challenger Jake Kilrain was moved to Hattiesburg when Louisiana governor Francis T. Nicholls forbade the bout under pressure from local citizens who objected to the brutality of bare-knuckle fighting. The fight’s planners quickly enacted a backup plan.40 A Mississippi sawmill owner (and future Hattiesburg mayor) named Charles W. Rich constructed a makeshift boxing ring on his property just outside Hattiesburg, and the fighters, trainers, managers, and a horde of spectators all secretly boarded a train in New Orleans that whisked them across Lake Pontchartrain on Hardy’s Moonshine Bridge and up the Queen and Crescent City Route to Rich’s property. An estimated three thousand passengers paid $15 each for a spot on the train. Dozens more hid on the tops of passenger cars as stowaways, causing conductors to halt partway to throw them off. Those who paid got their money’s worth. The epic match lasted seventy-five rounds, spanning two hours and sixteen minutes, before Kilrain’s corner threw in the towel. Hundreds of newspapers recapped the momentous fight, and John L. Sullivan became America’s first sports superstar. More significantly for the Mississippi Piney Woods, the match further demonstrated the tremendous potential of railroad travel.41
Hattiesburg was strategically located—and not only for fugitive fight promoters. Captain Hardy had founded his town at a major intersection of Deep South commerce and travel, within one hundred miles each of Jackson, Mobile, and New Orleans, three of the Deep South’s most important cities—Jackson, Mississippi’s state capital; Mobile, Alabama’s largest port; and New Orleans, at the time the second-busiest port in the United States. Within twenty years of Hardy’s backwoods lunch, major railroad lines from each city would run through downtown Hattiesburg; it was precisely this unique geographic potential that had caught the young surveyor’s eye while studying his map in the summer of 1880. The surrounding forest offered additional advantages.42
Hattiesburg was birthed by railroads, but it was lumber that would make her boom. Captain Hardy had established his new town in the middle of one of America’s last great untouched forests—the Mississippi “Piney Woods,” part of the 250-million-acre longleaf pine–wiregrass ecosystem that once covered much of the southeastern United States. Billions of pine trees sprawled across the rolling hills of southeastern Mississippi, sprouting from the sandy orange soil and stretching up to 150 feet into the sky. The density of the virgin forest complicated Captain Hardy’s railroad work, but it also captured the attention of nearly every lumberman in North America.43
The American lumber industry was on the brink of a major transformation. The vast forests of eastern white pine that once covered much of New England and the Great Lakes regions had been under assault since the colonial era, when the British Royal Navy had harvested the massive 200-foot-tall trees for use in their man-of-war battleships and restricted their removal for other purposes. After American independence, settlers on the frontier were free to use the sturdy northern pines to construct their homes and for products such as buckets, shelves, and trunks. Throughout the nineteenth century, eastern white pine supplied much of the timber for American growth.44
Lumber harvesters with virgin longleaf pine, 1904. (McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi)
By the turn of the twentieth century, nearly two hundred years of harvest had exhausted many of the North’s great pine forests. In 1896, the Chicago Tribune declared the forests of Michigan and Wisconsin “practically stripped,” with Minnesota likely sharing a similar fate. “In from ten to fifteen years,” the paper warned, “the last white pine forests in the United States will have disappeared.” A growing conservationist movement argued that timber extraction had to be curtailed. But America still needed lumber. In fact, it needed it more than ever.45
As the century turned, electricity, the telegraph, and eventually the telephone brought millions of wires into an increasingly urbanized American landscape. Something was needed to hold those wires off the ground. Very quickly, engineers discovered that southern longleaf pine was the best wood for utility poles. Fire resistant, tall and narrow, but also heavy and strong, longleaf pine (also known as yellow pine) is capable of holding thousands of pounds of wires, lights, and metal clasps. To this day, it remains the most widely used lumber for wooden utility poles.46
Entire sections of the Mississippi Piney Woods—as well as vast tracts in Florida, Alabama, and other Southern states—were virtually reassembled in the frenzied metropolises of America. Turn-of-the-century city planners in places such as New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago hungered for yellow pine. The New York City Board of Electrical Control observed that their city looked like “a forest of tall poles.” One historian estimates that in 1910, the Illinois Central Railroad delivered more than five hundred million feet of Southern lumber to Chicago alone. The popularity of longleaf pine timbers commanded the attention of America’s lumber barons. Those able to extract and deliver large quantities of pine stood to make a fortune. As Kansas City lumberman R. A. Long declared, “No great body of timber has ever made or promises to make as good a percent of profit for its investors as has yellow pine.”47
Mississippians had been harvesting small quantities of longleaf pine for decades, but the state’s timber industry had always been limited by proximity to water. Before railroads, tree harvesters loaded the large trunks onto oxen-pulled wagons and then guided the large animals through the forest to the river, an extremely arduous task. But this was just the first step.48 Once the logs reached the water, they were guided down shallow rivers by skilled raftsmen who walked along the shore using long poles to control the floating timbers. Those early lumber drives must have been quite a scene, featuring dozens of unkempt rivermen driving thousands of fallen trees down slow rivers like herds of cattle across the plains. By 1880, Mississippi raftsmen were regularly conducting log drives in southeastern Mississippi. There is an excellent chance that Captain Hardy witnessed one of these lumber drives during his months surveying land in the Mississippi Piney Woods. In fact, according to at least one source of local lore, a forest of felled longleaf pine timbers glided past him during his lunch break on that summer afternoon in 1880.49
Railroads made Mississippi lumbering safer and more efficient. Lumber transportation was never accident free (in fact, it remains one of the state’s most dangerous industries), but the railroads gave timber harvesters more control. Rather than work at the whim of the weather and the river currents that frequently created deadly logjams, railroads allowed harvesters to neatly stack and secure their timber on freight cars. The trains also enabled harvest in places without rivers. That was important. Once tracks were laid, lumber from deep inside the Piney Woods could be shipped to virtually anywhere on the globe. Railroads opened Mississippi’s interior for timber extraction, sparking an enormous lumber boom and creating new avenues of economic opportunity. If Mark Twain was accurate in once calling the Mississippi Basin the “Body of the Nation,” then railroads became its arteries and veins, pumping longleaf pine timbers from Dixie’s interior across America.50
Captain Hardy did not merely work for other people’s railroads. He also planned one of his own. This new line was rooted in an old idea. For years, Mississippians had dreamed of a railroad that could deliver goods to a port city on the Gulf of Mexico. Believing that a Mississippi harbor could offer natural advantages over New Orleans and Mobile, a group of antebellum Mississippians, Jefferson Davis among them, planned a railroad through the interior of the state to the Gulf of Mexico that would give Mississippi planters and manufacturers direct access to the global marketplace (a particularly important consideration when secession became a genuine possibility). “Our position,” asserted the road’s commissioners in 1858, “compels us to be parties to the important transactions of which the Gulf of Mexico is the destined theatre. Let us sustain the part which nature seems to have designed for us.” But the initial plan for this “Gulf & Ship Island Railroad” stalled during the war and Reconstruction.51
Thirty-two years after its initial conception, William Harris Hardy joined a group of decorated Mississippi Civil War veterans to revive construction of the Gulf & Ship Island. Wirt Adams, the company’s new president, was the most well known of the group, having led the First Mississippi Cavalry at the battle of Shiloh and later become a brigadier general. Colonel William Clark Falkner, Gulf & Ship Island’s vice president, was known for his role with the 11th Mississippi Infantry in Northern Virginia; at Manassas, wrote a dispatcher, his unit “covered themselves in glory” while helping form the line of defense that earned General Thomas Jackson the nickname “Stonewall.”52
After the war, each man returned to positions of influence in Mississippi. Adams resumed life as a planter before entering public service as the state revenue agent and postmaster. Falkner, a renaissance man, rebuilt a house destroyed by federal troops, ran a plantation, organized a small railroad, and took what one writer described as a “self-assumed position of leadership in his own area of the state.” Colonel Falkner also resumed a promising literary career. He published several successful novels, each of which later influenced his great-grandson and namesake, the novelist William Cuthbert Faulkner. The younger Faulkner, who returned the letter “u” to the family name, grew up telling teachers that he “wanted to be a writer like my great-granddaddy.” In 1929, William Cuthbert Faulkner published the novel Sartoris, his first to feature the ghostly patriarch Colonel John Sartoris, a character based on his great-grandfather.53
Wirt Adams incorporated the new Gulf & Ship Island Railroad on March 4, 1882. Hardy, by then a well-reputed railroad man because of his experiences with the New Orleans & Northeastern, was recruited onto the board of directors the following year. Hardy instantly recognized the tremendous potential of the railroad. Shortly after joining the board of directors, he purchased land on the Mississippi coast and established a new town named Gulfport. The planned railroad was slated to run between Hardy’s two new towns of Hattiesburg and Gulfport, passing through an area described by the New Orleans Daily Picayune as the “richest pine lumber section of the world.” There was immense opportunity here. Hardy and his colleagues stood to make a fortune if they could finish the railroad connecting the virgin forest to the sea.54
The Gulf & Ship Island board of directors scrambled to finance their project. Although none of the primary officials on the board could access enough capital to finish the railroad on their own, they each offered important expertise or connections. Hardy and Falkner were both experienced with railroad finance and construction. Wirt Adams lacked his colleagues’ railroad experience, but he did have important political connections. The group spent the next two years pooling resources, recruiting investors, selling bonds, and securing a mortgage. In 1884, the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad acquired a workforce when it signed an agreement with the Mississippi State Penitentiary board to lease the labor of hundreds of “able-bodied” prisoners, almost all of whom were black.55
In 1876, the year after Mississippi’s white Democrats won their “Redemption,” the state legislature passed the Leasing Act and another statute commonly known as the “Pig Law.” The Pig Law specified that anyone convicted of stealing a commodity valued at $10 or more could be sentenced to up to five years in prison. Within two years, the state’s prison population quadrupled, with black prisoners comprising approximately 85 percent of the inmates. The Leasing Act authorized the Mississippi Penitentiary to lease those prisoners to private firms.56
Companies and individuals had leased black laborers since slavery, but this new convict-lease system was different. In the antebellum era, slave owners expected their human chattel to be returned alive and in good working condition. After Emancipation, companies that leased black laborers had less incentive to provide proper food and healthcare; the burden of death belonged only to those black workers and their families. Access to food and shelter was inconsistent and medical attention was virtually nonexistent. Black workers were subject to excruciatingly long hours, back-breaking labor, and brutal punishments, including whipping meted out by mounted white overseers. Another common punishment was to put black workers in “sweat boxes,” coffin-like cells with an air hole the size of a silver dollar, for days at a time. Runaway workers were beaten, tortured, or killed. In 1882 alone, starvation, disease, industrial accidents, and the sheer cruelty of overseers claimed the lives of 126 of Mississippi’s 735 black convict-laborers.57
Construction of the new Gulf & Ship Island Railroad began in 1886. The initial progress was encouraging. By March of 1888, workers had laid twenty-two miles of track, graded another seventy miles of road, and cut enough ties for the next twenty miles. Amid a region saturated with Northern investors, the Biloxi Herald celebrated the possibility of a railroad built and owned by Mississippians. The new line, the paper delightedly told readers, “promises to be the crowning glory of grand southern enterprises.” Weeks later, the Herald reported promising news of the growing local lumber industry. “The logging business is booming,” the newspaper told readers. The railroad seemed on the cusp of fulfilling its promise.58
The string of setbacks that followed was sudden and unexpected. On May 1, 1888, Wirt Adams was killed in a street duel by a newspaper editor who had accused him of lying under oath. The death of Adams forced Hardy to assume a greater role in raising capital to help finance the railroad. Without additional capital, the railroad could not be finished, and Hardy spent the ensuing summer traveling to attract investors in New York and London. “I must not fail,” Hardy wrote to his wife Hattie. “Everything is at stake.” But Captain Hardy despised the metropolises of the North Atlantic and the wealthy men who controlled their banks, and he returned unsuccessful. Few details are known of his fruitless attempts to recruit investors, but the would-be fundraiser came home bitter and without having secured the much-needed capital to continue construction.59
In December of that same year, the Mississippi State Penitentiary Board of Control cancelled the railroad’s convict-lease. Spurred by complaints from people living near the railroad construction, the penitentiary board launched an investigation into the railroad’s labor practices. What they discovered was appalling. In a report to the state legislature, Mississippi Penitentiary superintendent W. L. Doss condemned the railroad for inhumane treatment of workers, subletting laborers without authority, failing to provide convicts with proper medical care, and falling behind on payments to the state. When the state recovered the black prisoners, the men were found with “only one suit of clothing,” and even it was “not very good.” Most importantly, hundreds of men working for the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad had gone missing. Some had escaped, but others had been killed by the overseers or by the work itself. A state House of Representatives investigating committee heard one witness testify that he had seen an overseer “club the convicts over when their legs were all swollen up, when they said they were not able to work.” A former guard for the railroad later testified, “We saw enough of the brutal flogging business when the Gulf and Ship Island railroad was being graded with convict labor to last us the balance of our life.” Over the course of less than three years, 225 of the black workers employed by the Gulf & Ship Railroad had died or disappeared. Between sixty and eighty men had perished in 1888 alone.60
Hardy dismissed the impact of the lease cancellation, waiving his right to appeal and insisting that he would finish the railroad anyway. “The Gulf and Ship Island Railroad [and] its success does not depend upon the convict labor and it will go on,” he told the Meridian News just days later. To the Biloxi Herald, he said, “I hope to have my road opened to Hattiesburg by the 1st of June next, in time for the excursions to the seashore.” But Hardy’s bravado could not alter his reality. The railroad was in serious trouble. Cheap black labor was essential to the initial plans, and the leaders of the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad simply could not finish their line without it. As a reporter later noted, “But for the howl that was made about the cruelties that were alleged to be practiced by the ‘drivers’ and overseers, the road would long since have been completed.”61
The following autumn, Colonel Falkner, the railroad’s vice president, was shot and killed in the streets of Ripley, Mississippi. Hardy was devastated. “I am so sad,” he wrote to Hattie. “He was my best friend. Oh when will this flow of blood cease.” Already limping toward completion, the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad had lost much of its leadership. With its management decimated, its finances floundering, and its workers gone, Hardy desperately tried to secure more investors. “I must have it built if I lose everything I have,” he panicked in a letter to Hattie, “otherwise my reputation is ruined.” Despite overtures to investors in Denver and Chicago, Hardy could not secure the necessary capital to continue, and the railroad fell into forfeiture. He and his fellow Confederates had failed, leaving the once-promising line lying unfinished in the forest. As it turned out, the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad needed a Yankee to complete the job.62
Four years later, in 1896, a Pennsylvanian named Joseph T. Jones assumed control of the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad. Nature had taken a toll. Because of “ravages of time and floods,” reported one inspector, “I am told that the grading in most places had been practically washed away.” Some portions of the road’s track and bridges were usable, but much of the grading would have to be redone. Nevertheless, it still offered enormous potential. Mississippi’s lumber boom was in its infancy, and a railroad from the Piney Woods to the coast promised to attract the attention of America’s lumbermen. Conceptually, the idea for the line remained sound.63
A native Philadelphian, Joseph T. Jones had made his fortune in the short-lived western Pennsylvania oil boom. Having first struck oil in Venango County in 1867, Jones’s Bradford Oil Company controlled five hundred wells by 1890. In 1895, Jones learned of the fledging Gulf & Ship Island Railroad through a railroad engineer who lived just across the Pennsylvania border in western New York. After a trip to Mississippi the following year, Jones organized the Bradford Construction Company to take control of Gulf & Ship Island Railroad. He and several Northern investors organized a new board of directors—which excluded Captain Hardy—and hired a young Gulf Coast–based attorney named Eaton J. Bowers as the road’s general counsel.64
Eaton J. Bowers and Joseph T. Jones were an interesting pair. Born two months after the end of the Civil War, Bowers was the son of a notoriously brutal Confederate veteran who hated Yankees, belonged to a Klan-like terrorist organization, and proudly told his son that he had killed Northerners during and after the war. But the son did not share his father’s disdain for all things Yankee. Like many New South visionaries, the younger Bowers saw great opportunity in working with Northern capitalists.65
Unlike Captain Hardy’s Confederate cohort, Jones possessed the finances to finish the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad. Through his Bradford Construction Company, Jones secured a $500,000 mortgage with the Manhattan Trust Company. According to one relative, he also spent at least $100,000 of his personal wealth to help complete the line. Jones’s firm spent an additional sum of almost $200,000 to dredge a half-mile-wide channel and construct a one-hundred-yard-long dock into the Gulf of Mexico, thus fulfilling the longstanding dream of Mississippi’s first deep-water port. Extending the railroad’s original vision, Jones’s firm laid new tracks all the way to Jackson, stretching the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad through approximately 150 miles of the Mississippi Piney Woods. Excitement returned to the forest.66
On August 27, 1900, the first train from Jackson pulled into the Gulfport Gulf & Ship Island depot at approximately two o’clock in the afternoon. With the road finished and the forest open for harvest, the possibilities for the local lumber industry seemed almost limitless. Even outsiders took note. The Louisville Courier-Journal proclaimed, “There is no question but this is the finest yellow pine region in the world, and that the building of this railroad will open it up to the markets at home and abroad.” “Gulfport is on something of a boom,” the Washington Post told its readers. “The fact that it is the terminal of the Gulf and Ship Island will make it an important lumber shipping point for years to come.” The Nashville American similarly noted, “The road opens to the lumber trade a virgin pine forest. It is estimated that within the next five years more than a billion feet of timber will go to the North from cars hauled by this new line.”67
The completed Gulf & Ship Island Railroad surpassed every speculator’s wildest dreams. A 1902 report counted more than ninety sawmills along the line, collectively exporting “hundreds of millions of feet of lumber.” In 1904, more than 225 million board feet of lumber were shipped from Gulfport. The Wall Street Journal called Gulfport the “leading Southern port in regards to lumber shipments.” Two years later, the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad transported more than eight hundred million board feet of lumber and grossed approximately $2.5 million.68
Captain Hardy’s sleepy coastal settlement at Gulfport became one of the busiest lumber ports in the world. Stories of the city’s growth appeared in newspapers across the country. Ambitious locals began calling Gulfport the “Newport of the South.” Hattiesburg, sitting along the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad, also grew rapidly. By 1900, more than four thousand people had arrived in Captain Hardy’s young town. Dozens of other settlements—Howison, Wiggins, Maxie, McHenry, and McLaurin among them—formed along the tracks. As the Hattiesburg Progress noted in 1902, “Along the line of this road are prosperous villages, towns, and cities with churches, newspapers, factories and farms, where before were nought to be seen but unbroken pine forests, utterly worthless because there was no way of getting their product to the market.”69
Gulf & Ship Island president J. T. Jones planned two beautiful new hotels, one each in Gulfport and Hattiesburg. The Great Southern Hotel in Gulfport opened first and quickly earned an impressive reputation. In 1906, a visiting writer from the Atlanta Constitution called it “without a doubt one of the best conceived and appointed hotels in the entire south.” Painted pine green and adorned with dark-red terracotta roof tiles, the Great Southern stood over a beautiful Gulf Coast beach. Its immaculate grounds were covered with palm trees, man-made fishing ponds, a clay tennis court, and a sloping sandy walkway to the sea. Jones installed an orchestra that was soon regarded as one of the finest ensembles in the South. Visitors arrived from across the country to spend time in the beautiful hotel by the sea. The Great Southern Hotel was particularly popular among visiting lumber barons from Northern states such as Wisconsin and Illinois. Yankees filled the hotel lobby with their Northern accents. “Sitting in the hotel at Gulfport listening to the crowd of lumbermen conversing,” observed a visiting New York Times reporter in 1901, “it is hard to realize that the stretch of water beyond is the Gulf of Mexico, and not Huron or Michigan.”70
Joseph T. Jones became something of a local icon. He became enamored with the developing coastal city and began spending about half his time in Gulfport, investing heavily in the city’s growth. The Pennsylvanian built an electric track between Gulfport and Biloxi that connected the two cities and increased local property values. He also helped develop the First National Bank of Gulfport, a new golf course, and a local yacht club, helping lay much of Gulfport’s infrastructure. Jones was one of Gulfport’s greatest champions. His ambition and optimism inspired locals. “So vivid was the beautiful picture that he drew,” reported the Hattiesburg Daily Progress of a 1902 Jones speech, “that it makes one’s heart go pit-a-pat.”71
On the evening of November 21, 1906, a prestigious group of Mississippi businessmen and politicians gathered in downtown Hattiesburg to celebrate the grand opening of the city’s newest hotel. Built by Joseph T. Jones for just shy of $300,000, the beautiful five-story Hotel Hattiesburg served numerous purposes. In addition to hosting out-of-town guests, it also housed railroad ticket offices, a barbershop, and the city’s finest restaurant. Soon considered one of the best guesthouses in the South, the Hotel Hattiesburg was the site of the most important local gatherings and celebrations. It was the fanciest place in town.72
Guests at the Hotel Hattiesburg’s grand opening enjoyed an exquisite dinner of broiled Spanish mackerel, braised beef tenderloin, roasted duck, Saratoga potatoes, French peas, and strawberry ice cream. The renowned Great Southern Hotel Orchestra arrived from Gulfport to play a private show, entertaining the audience with a medley of the latest Ragtime hits such as “Dixie Blossoms” and “Vanderbilt Cup” and nostalgic Old South songs including “Take Me Back to Old Virginia” and “Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground,” eclectic musical selections that straddled time and place, symbolizing a reunification of old with new and North with South.73
The evening’s guests included a collection of influential Mississippi leaders. In attendance were Governor James Vardaman, Congressman John Sharp Williams, and Congressman Eaton J. Bowers, the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad’s general counsel, who in 1903 had won a seat in the United States House of Representatives. Also attending was Captain William Harris Hardy, who twenty-six years before had envisioned this modern city where these men now gathered. But Captain Hardy had been unable on his own to realize the full extent of his New South vision. That night, Hardy and the other Mississippi leaders gathered to toast the man who had—the Pennsylvanian Joseph T. Jones.74
According to the Biloxi Herald, Jones offered the most “pointed and stimulating” toast of the evening. The Northern businessman praised the region’s rapid development and offered great hope for its future. He remembered his first impression of Gulfport as “the most uninviting spot for a city or a terminal that I had ever looked upon” and of southern Mississippi in general as a “poor spot.” But how things had changed. By 1906, the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad had opened the forest for harvest and transformed Hattiesburg, Gulfport, and the small lumber towns between them into bustling centers of commerce and progress. “The possibilities of the state are far beyond the comprehension of the majority of the people,” Jones praised. “The future of the state is so bright that words can not describe it.”75
The men at the Hotel Hattiesburg’s grand opening celebration must have been in a festive mood. The coming years would be kind to each of them. Their group included future judges, United States senators, and several individuals who would soon become quite wealthy. The most intimate details of the evening were unrecorded, but surely this was a night filled with toasts, handshakes, and hearty congratulations.
It would be interesting to know more about how the Mississippians interacted with the Pennsylvanian in their midst. Joseph T. Jones possessed one particular feature that none of them could have ignored. Anyone who saw Jones walk into a room or move about a party would have noticed a limp that hobbled the Northerner for the final fifty-two years of his life. In a region still full of men broken from the war, surely some locals would have contemplated the origins of that limp and wondered what the Pennsylvanian had been doing fifty years earlier when his entire generation went to war. Perhaps they already knew.76
Like William Harris Hardy, Joseph T. Jones had also once been a captain. And he had met Mississippians before. As commander of the H Company in the 91st Pennsylvania Infantry, Captain Jones had first crossed paths with Mississippians at Fredericksburg in December of 1862. Captain Hardy’s Smith County Defenders had been on the field as well, at one point fighting only about a thousand feet away. Five months later, both companies would be at Chancellorsville, and that summer, each unit would march to Pennsylvania. While Joseph T. Jones was defending Little Round Top at Gettysburg, the Smith County Defenders were fighting in Picket’s Charge, a bold but disastrous maneuver that felled half of the approximately 12,500 men who rushed desperately at Union lines. America was forever changed by these momentous battles, and every man who fought in them was forever changed as well. And both the 16th Mississippi and 91st Pennsylvania Infantries had been there, each desperately trying to blow the other off the face of the earth.77
Had Hardy not fallen ill, he and Jones would have met in battle. It is impossible to know if anyone mentioned those battles during the grand opening celebration at the Hotel Hattiesburg; one can only imagine how such a conversation might have gone. Regardless, forty-three years after Gettysburg, there sat Captains Jones and Hardy, two old veterans from opposing sides, toasting under the flag of the Army of Northern Virginia in a state whose people vowed to never forget.
Years later, a Mississippi governor fondly remembered the excitement of the railroad era. “Judge Hardy lived in an age when the possibilities of this country were unfolding themselves to the minds of men who had vision,” the politician sentimentalized. William Harris Hardy indeed had a vision, but it was Joseph T. Jones who had the means. The men were drawn together by the promise of the New South. Hattiesburg needed them both.78
The Northern carpetbaggers who arrived during Reconstruction to protect the promises of Emancipation for Mississippi’s freedpeople were persecuted, beaten, killed, and eventually run out of Dixie. But those who arrived in the wake of Reconstruction to lay the foundations of modernization were welcomed with open arms. Decades later, Samuel Holloway Bowers, Eaton J. Bowers’s murderous grandson and cofounder of the notorious White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, recalled, “The stable civilized carpetbagger movement, which I say was represented by Captain Jones and the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad, was able to make a coalition contact with responsible Southern lawyers. If the Old South was about honor, then the New South would be about pragmatic profits. Principles would be redeemed elsewhere.”79