CHAPTER THREE
The Noble Spirit
Northerners could come down in comfort and open the land indeed: setting up with their Yankee dollars the vast lumbering plants and mills in the Southern pine sections, the little towns which had been hamlets without change or alteration for fifty years, booming and soaring into cities overnight.
—William Cuthbert Faulkner
Pennsylvania lumberman Fenwick Peck first came to Hattiesburg in the fall of 1896. At the time, Captain Hardy’s young settlement of about fifteen hundred residents looked more like an old western frontier village than a burgeoning city of the New South. Its meager downtown featured a single hotel amid a handful of clapboard general stores, cobblers, and barbershops. The town had no electric lights, paved roads, or indoor plumbing. With no proper police department, public vagrancies such as street fights, untethered livestock, gambling, and prostitution were fairly common sights. To Scranton-native Fenwick Peck, a wealthy forty-two-year-old lumber tycoon who spent much of his time socializing in opulent homes and private clubs in New York City, Philadelphia, and Buffalo, the small village must have seemed tiny and backward. Surely a trip to Manhattan would have been far shorter and more luxurious than the thousand-mile journey to Hattiesburg. But such was the pull of Mississippi’s budding lumber industry. Peck’s arrival marked the beginning of rapid changes to come.1
By the time of Peck’s initial visit, Hattiesburg was already showing potential, though its future prosperity was hardly assured. Joseph T. Jones had only recently acquired the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad, and the region’s lumber trade had yet to fully blossom. The city itself, lacking resources and isolated in the Mississippi Piney Woods, lay in a precarious state. Just three years before Peck’s trip, the entire town had almost burned down. Filled with rickety wooden buildings and lacking a decent water system or fire department, Hattiesburg in 1893 experienced a string of midnight fires. The first started at a hotel in January and burned for over an hour. The second ignited at a livery stable in August and destroyed approximately $3,000 worth of property, including nine horses whose charred remains were found among the ruins. “A witness of the conflagration says it was one of the most horrible sights he ever beheld,” reported the New Orleans Daily Picayune. The most damaging fire occurred that autumn, when on October 11, a defective flue sparked a blaze that consumed more than two dozen buildings and caused over $75,000 in damages. “For a time,” the Daily Picayune exclaimed, “it looked like the whole town was gone.”2
The worst victim of the autumnal fire was the Wiscasset Sawmill, one of the city’s largest employers. A virtual tinderbox, the Wiscasset was filled with freshly cut timber and gas lanterns but equipped with neither hoses nor sprinklers. The October fire tore through the mill, reportedly incinerating more than two million board feet of lumber and causing over $30,000 in damage. The Wiscasset’s owners, lumbermen from nearby Meridian, were only partially insured and could not afford to rebuild, leaving hundreds of local men without jobs. Initially, the fire appeared to be a major setback for Hattiesburg. Fortunately for the young town, the blaze also sparked the attention of an opportunistic Yankee.3
About a year after the October fire of 1893, a Buffalo-based lumberman named Judson Jones Newman purchased the former site of the Wiscasset mill for $40,000. The veteran lumberman planned to build a larger and more modern sawmill. Completed in the spring of 1895, the J. J. Newman Lumber Company sawmill sprawled over approximately fifteen acres and was outfitted with the latest industrial technologies—new conveyors, electric lights, a sawdust exhaust system, and a modern, thirty-thousand-gallon automatic sprinkler system. All parties benefitted. Judson Jones Newman found a new source of timber to sell to his Northern clients, and Hattiesburg recovered hundreds of jobs. But Newman’s interest in the mill that bore his name was short-lived; about a year and a half after the J. J. Newman Lumber Company opened, Fenwick Peck bought him out.4
Peck was a third-generation lumberman. His family had been involved with the timber trade since the 1830s, when his grandfather moved from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania to open a sawmill. Born in 1854, Fenwick entered the family business after graduating from seminary school in 1875. He lived with his parents for much of his twenties, working closely with his father and uncle as he learned the trade. Fenwick’s diligence and ambition impressed his relatives and colleagues. As a young man, he was known to spend his days supervising production in the forests and sawmills and his nights inspecting records in the company office. In 1887, Fenwick and his father formed the Lackawanna Lumber Company, which became the most successful venture in the family’s history. Within five years, the firm’s capital stock increased from $200,000 to $750,000. When his father died in 1895, Fenwick assumed control of the company. The following year, he accepted an invitation from Judson Jones Newman, who was an investor in a neighboring sawmill, to visit Mississippi. As part of their journey, the lumbermen traveled to Biloxi to meet with the superintendent of the recently reorganized Gulf & Ship Island Railroad. The implications of a railroad from the forest to the sea would have been obvious to all.5
Fenwick Peck (whose stepmother, coincidentally, was named Hattie) was intrigued by a number of factors in the Mississippi lumber industry. First and foremost was the availability of timber. Railroads were just beginning to open the region for harvest, and most of the forest was virgin. Second, land surrounding Hattiesburg was both flat and cheap. Having spent much of his career harvesting trees in the Poconos Mountains, Peck must have appreciated the low elevations of the Mississippi Piney Woods; his own house in Scranton sat at a higher elevation than the tallest peak in the entire state of Mississippi. And because that flat land was blanketed by trees, it was unattractive to most Mississippi farmers and thus available for purchase for as little as $1.25 an acre. Another factor was the absence of harsh winters. Unlike Pennsylvania, Mississippi hardly ever froze or experienced snow, meaning that full-scale production could continue year-round. Lastly, southern Mississippi presented the ambitious lumberman with an entirely new type of opportunity. For years, the Peck lumber companies had been paying expensive shipping rates to Northern railroads. In the sparsely developed Mississippi Piney Woods, Fenwick Peck realized that he could simply build a railroad of his own.6
Peck bought a controlling share of J. J. Newman Lumber and began injecting capital. He expanded the mill and acquired over six hundred square miles of forested land. The following year, Peck organized the Pearl & Leaf River Railroad. The company laid tracks between downtown Hattiesburg and the nearby town of Sumrall—about eighteen miles away—where Peck constructed another J. J. Newman Lumber sawmill. The Pearl & Leaf River Railroad, Hattiesburg’s third major line, traversed some of the richest pine forests in North America and attracted dozens more lumber investors to the Piney Woods. By the time the railroad changed its name to the Mississippi Central in 1904, twenty-six mills were operating along its tracks, and the firm was grossing approximately $300,000 in annual lumber freight revenue.7
Fenwick Peck’s expansion of J. J. Newman Lumber spurred Hattiesburg’s growth from a rural backwoods village into a modern city of the New South. As one local noted in 1898, “This is by far the largest industry in our town,” observing that “by this mill alone fifteen hundred men, women and children are fed and clothed.” When Peck first arrived in 1896, Hattiesburg was home to just over fifteen hundred people. A decade later, his firms alone employed more than sixteen hundred, and the town’s population had increased to approximately nine thousand.8
J. J. Newman Lumber Company sawmill. (McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi)
Peck was merely one of several dozen wealthy Yankees to invest in Mississippi’s burgeoning lumber industry. One historian has estimated that by 1905, Northern lumbermen had invested a total of over $24 million in Mississippi sawmills. Southerners also built sawmills, but even these, which were generally much smaller, needed railroads capitalized by Northerners to ship their timbers. In 1905, at least 120 sawmills were operating along the three major railroad lines that passed through Hattiesburg—the New Orleans & Northeastern, the Gulf & Ship Island, and the Mississippi Central—all of which were constructed by Northerners or Europeans.9
Over the following years, the global demand for longleaf pine skyrocketed, drawing sawmill builders to the Piney Woods like prospectors to a gold rush. By 1910, longleaf pine comprised over a third of all timber cut in the United States. Timber from the Piney Woods could be found in Philadelphia window frames, New York City utility poles, Chicago railway ties, and California homes. Moreover, longleaf pine was used in German railroad cars, Australian fishing boats, Uruguayan warehouses, and the Panama Canal. Lumber export records from the era show pine cargos leaving from the Gulf Coast to places as far flung as Barcelona, Copenhagen, Vera Cruz, Buenos Aires, Genoa, Montevideo, and Queenstown, New Zealand.10
When Captain William Harris Hardy took his lunch break in the summer of 1880, Mississippi’s lumber industry employed 1,170 people and produced less than $2 million worth of products. Three decades later, a modernized state lumber industry provided thirty-seven thousand jobs and generated over $42 million worth of annual goods. Located deep in the Piney Woods at the intersection of three major railroads, Hattiesburg sat at the epicenter of the timber boom and offered more opportunities in lumber than anywhere else in the state. And so the people came, and Hattiesburg grew.11
For tens of thousands of white Mississippians, sawmill jobs offered a fundamentally different existence than life on the farm. As late as 1900, over 70 percent of white Mississippi men still worked in agriculture. Although some of these white farmers did quite well, the vast majority struggled. Like African Americans, thousands of white Mississippians worked as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. They too entered exploitative farm labor arrangements that led to cyclical poverty and instability. Everything depended on the harvest, which itself was never dependable. Natural disasters, falling cotton prices, a crooked landowner, and scores of other misfortunes could deliver tragic setbacks, negating thousands of hours of field labor. White farm families could work all year only to be left with nothing to show for their labor. “On a farm,” explained the son of a white Hattiesburg migrant, “you didn’t know if you were going to get anything or not.”12
Sawmill work offered a more reliable exchange of labor and capital. Unlike on the farm, work always resulted in pay. Some sawmills had commissaries that overcharged for goods and drew workers into debt, but most mills paid wages, unimpressive though they often were. In 1910, Mississippi’s sawmill employees were paid an average of $377 a year, far less than people working manufacturing jobs in the North. But those wages, however meager, paid rents, bought food, and clothed children. Most importantly, those wages freed them from the land and offered a sense of security and stability. The men who entered the mill each day left the mill each night confident that their labor would result in pay. Among a generation who had come of age in the wake of destroyed society, that peace of mind was no small thing.13
For whites, a life in the lumber industry could offer a number of lucrative possibilities. Some “would migrate from mill to mill,” remembered one local sawmill worker, periodically changing jobs and employers in search of better wages. Others enjoyed upward mobility within individual companies. With the best jobs reserved for them, white workers could eventually obtain better-paid positions such as millwright, saw flier, sawyer, sizer feeder, or pipefitter. Some white sawmill employees advanced into managerial positions. Hundreds more worked as engineers, bookkeepers, administrators, or lumber dealers. With massive orders, it was common for mills to sell to one another. At the height of the boom, Hattiesburg had at least thirty lumber wholesale offices.14
Hattiesburg’s sawmill workers arrived from a variety of locales. Most white migrants were originally from Mississippi or the bordering states of Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana. Smaller numbers arrived from other Southern states such as Texas, Georgia, or Virginia. The major difference between the black and white migrants was that some whites came from the North. Unrestricted by Jim Crow, dozens of white migrants arrived in Hattiesburg from places like Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Vermont, and parts of Canada. There was even one local family who came from Norway.15
The expansion of Mississippi’s timber industry created thousands of additional jobs. Sawmills and railroads needed machine shops that specialized in metal parts of locomotive and sawmill equipment. In 1890, an enterprising man from Louisville, Kentucky, named George Komp arrived in Hattiesburg to organize one such firm. By 1905, his Komp Machine Works was the largest machine shop in the state. Hattiesburg was also home to the Davis & Company Foundry and Machine Shop and the Watkins Machine and Foundry Shop. Dozens of other companies manufactured timber products such as wagon wheels, cabinets, and doors. Hattiesburg also had a few smaller non-timber-related firms, including the Hattiesburg Compress, the Dixie Mattress Company, Swift and Company’s Packing House, and the Meridian Fertilizer Company. Over the years, these smaller companies combined with sawmills and railroads to offer thousands of additional wage-labor jobs that drew people to Hattiesburg.16
These industrial jobs were often dangerous and unpleasant. The dangers of sawmill work were visible in the population. “If you were sitting in a car beside the street,” recalled an early Hattiesburg migrant, “chances are that one man out of every five that passed by you either had one leg or one eye or one arm or fingers gone, or something of the sort, from working in a sawmill.” Railroad work was also hazardous. In 1911, the Mississippi Railroad Commission reported 1,072 injuries and 83 deaths. Other industrial jobs offered a litany of dangers. Machinists lost fingers, wood workers inhaled sawdust, and fertilizer employees breathed chemicals. Yet even with the hazards, these wage-labor jobs offered many white workers the best opportunities they had ever known.17
The wages paid by Hattiesburg’s new firms cascaded across town. The workers and their families needed basic goods and services such as sugar, butter, yeast, bacon, haircuts, and shoe repairs, and as Hattiesburg expanded, hundreds of entrepreneurs opened new businesses that catered to the workers and their families. Reliant on sawmill workers as customers, the livelihoods of these merchants were also intimately connected to the lumber boom. In 1903, the employees at J. J. Newman Lumber spent an estimated $30,000 a month in downtown stores. Hattiesburg’s swelling population also needed schools, churches, hospitals, banks, and legal services, creating demand for teachers, preachers, doctors, bankers, and lawyers.18
One of Hattiesburg’s first attorneys was none other than its founder, Captain William Harris Hardy, who first moved to town in the fall of 1899. His wife Hattie had died of uremia four years before and never lived in the city that bore her name. But the captain once again found love. In the spring of 1900, the sixty-three year-old Hardy married a much younger woman named Ida May, and the pair settled together in a new house near Hardy’s downtown law office. They had two children in Hattiesburg before moving to the Mississippi coast six years later, where Hardy accepted a judgeship. He spent the final decade of his life living near the coast before succumbing to a heart attack in February of 1917 at the age of eighty. (Joseph T. Jones, the man who more than anyone had fulfilled Hardy’s vision, died in Buffalo earlier that same winter.)19
Dozens of other white professionals and entrepreneurs moved to Hattiesburg and established prosperous lives. Dr. T. E. Ross came on horseback from Neshoba County to open Hattiesburg’s first hospital. William Sion Franklin (W. S. F.) Tatum arrived in 1893 and erected a new sawmill along the tracks of the New Orleans & Northeastern Railroad. John McLeod came from Purvis and opened a large downtown department store. Thomas Smiley Jackson moved from McComb to open a shoe store and then later a grocery. Louis Faulkner left a teaching career in Pennsylvania to take a managerial position with the Mississippi Central Railroad. Perhaps the greatest success story was that of Paul Johnson, who migrated to Hattiesburg from Scott County to work at the J. J. Newman Lumber sawmill. Johnson used his wages to put himself through law school in Jackson and eventually returned to Hattiesburg in 1903 to start a law practice. He went on to a prominent career that included several judgeships, two terms as a United States congressman, and a victorious campaign for the governorship of Mississippi in 1939.20
Most of the migrants did not envision great wealth or affluence; they just wanted a better future for their families. In Hattiesburg, sharecroppers who had struggled with the unpredictability of farm life could find consistent wages; people who had once run dying country stores could open thriving downtown groceries; underpaid and overworked rural teachers could take salaried positions as clerks or managers; and families who had struggled for generations could break cycles of poverty to provide better opportunities for their children. Whether they were worn-down farmers, laid-off rivermen, country doctors, or Northern transplants, between 1890 and 1910, approximately fourteen thousand white migrants poured into Hattiesburg and its environs. Together they crafted a new society.21
During the first decade of the twentieth century, Hattiesburg transformed into Mississippi’s fastest growing and most modern city. Local businessmen replaced the downtown’s fire-prone clapboard buildings with multistory brick storefronts. City officials used increased tax revenues to erect utility poles and install new sewage and water systems. Police and fire departments, established in 1903 and 1904, respectively, helped clean up the city streets and protect against fire. Dozens of other new facilities enriched local culture and commerce. By 1905, Hattiesburg’s downtown included a city hall, a court house, an opera house, and scores of new businesses, including six hotels, a bottling works, a billiard hall, and dozens of restaurants, groceries, drugstores, laundries, tin shops, barbershops, and butchers. “From a dense pine forest, much of which twenty-five years ago had never been seen or traversed by man, to one of the wealthiest, most populous and prosperous sections of the state,” bragged a local newspaper editor in 1905, “such is the record of Hattiesburg, typical of the New Era of the New South.”22
In 1906, Hattiesburg received its first tall building when Gulf & Ship Island Railroad proprietor Joseph T. Jones opened the five-story Hotel Hattiesburg. Featuring a barbershop, a train depot, and the city’s finest restaurant, the new guesthouse quickly became the crown jewel of Hattiesburg’s growing downtown. Over the next three years, the construction of two additional large buildings—the five-story Ross Building and the six-story Carter Building—provided a modest skyline. Between the rising structures stood rows of two- and three-story brick storefronts, newly paved streets, and the bustle of a thriving modern downtown. “Hattiesburg, the beautiful Queen of the Pine Belt is in all respects the model city of the state,” raved a Jackson writer in 1907.23
The earliest available images of Hattiesburg come from postcard photographs taken during this era. The images depict horse-drawn carriages clopping up and down muddy streets, white businessmen in dark suits and bowler hats shuffling between banks and offices, white women wearing high-waisted white dresses and broad straw hats strolling through downtown, and casually dressed laborers loading wagons or climbing ladders. “Hattiesburg is a beautiful city,” read one of the postcards. “We have fine streets, big industries, high buildings, [and] pretty girls.”24
These migrants carved new residential neighborhoods out of the forest. Most of the new homes were modest, one-story dwellings with small front and back porches where locals could briefly escape the southern Mississippi heat. The most affluent whites—successful entrepreneurs, high-ranking sawmill employees, lawyers, and doctors—lived in extravagant, two- and three-story homes featuring manicured lawns, wraparound front porches, second-story balconies, and backyard quarters for black servants.25
Downtown Hattiesburg in the early 1900s. (McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi.)
Affluent white residents led efforts to build beautiful new churches. Whereas Hattiesburg’s original churchgoers once met in rickety clapboard structures, the expanding congregations of the early twentieth century built themselves elaborate cathedrals. The congregation of the Main Street Methodist Church financed a red-brick Gothic-revival structure, complete with pointed arches, parapet gables, rose-colored stained-glass windows, and a three-story bell tower. Not to be outdone, members of the Main Street Baptist Church soon thereafter relocated into a brick church featuring gaudy, Greek Corinthian columns and a large sanctuary capped by a fabulous glass-dome ceiling. Across Hattiesburg, brick and mortar replaced wood and nails as the migrants settled into new lives and built permanent places of worship.26
Hattiesburg’s white leaders parlayed the city’s economic growth into improved educational opportunities for white children. The city’s first school was built with a $15,000 bond measure passed in 1893, and a series of smaller neighborhood schools followed. By 1909, Hattiesburg had seven schools serving 1,300 white pupils. As with housing and jobs, local whites consolidated the best educational opportunities among their own children. Not only were black students excluded from white schools, at one point the Hattiesburg Board of Education also considered a proposal to provide a separate school for “Italian, Syrian and Russian Jew children.” Hattiesburg was never home to a large number of European migrants, but the proposal, which never came to fruition, indicates the importance of ensuring that only local white American children enjoyed the best advantages. All local black schools were severely underfunded. In 1911, city officials opened a new 21,000-square-foot downtown high school, complete with electric lights and an eight-hundred-person auditorium. For most of the next fifty years, thousands of white adolescents enjoyed school lessons, track and field competitions, class plays, oratorical contests, literary societies, choir concerts, and candy sales in their lively new high school. No black student ever attended.27
In 1910, local municipal leaders entered Hattiesburg into a statewide competition to house the newly planned Mississippi Normal College for teachers. Competing against several other cities, Hattiesburg’s civic leaders lobbied hard to convince the Mississippi Normal College board that their town was the best site for the college. These efforts were bolstered by resources provided by the city’s Northern benefactors. Fenwick Peck’s J. J. Newman Lumber Company offered to donate an additional 640 acres to the campus, and his Mississippi Central Railroad promised to construct a spur line to deliver building materials. When representatives from the Mississippi Normal College board visited Hattiesburg, they were hosted at Joseph T. Jones’s Hotel Hattiesburg, where they enjoyed a sumptuous dinner of shrimp cocktail, baked snapper, beef tenderloin, French coffee, and imported cheeses. The college board came away impressed and named Hattiesburg as the site of the new school. Mississippi Normal (now the University of Southern Mississippi) opened in 1912 with 227 white students.28
That same autumn, Hattiesburg officials held a contest to nickname their rapidly growing town. A local man won a small amount of gold for his suggestion of “the Hub City,” a moniker that remains to this day. Soon thereafter, the Henry L. Doherty & Co. utility company donated a fifty-foot “Hub City” electric sign that locals erected atop the new, five-story Ross Building. Lit by 1,400 electric lights, the $3,000 sign was first illuminated during a ceremony on Thanksgiving night in 1912. The Hattiesburg High School Glee Club sang “America the Beautiful” as thousands of locals gazed up at the beaming new fixture. A Hattiesburg News editorial promised readers that the sign was the “one thing in which Hattiesburg beats the world,” predicting that “globe trotters will tell about this sign to the far ends of the earth.” One reporter, remembering the town’s humble origins, observed, “The people are now catching a vision seen by that noble spirit, the founder of Hattiesburg, Captain W. H. Hardy.”29
Life in the Hub City was not without its challenges. In 1906 and 1908, the city was hit by a pair of natural disasters. The hurricane of 1906 came ashore near Biloxi and traveled all the way to Kentucky, killing over 130 Gulf Coast–area residents, knocking down acres of trees, and causing tens of millions of dollars in damages. Two years later, a cyclone tore through the Piney Woods, killing approximately 150 people. That same spring, J. J. Newman Lumber experienced the second of two major fires, which led to temporary layoffs and threatened to displace the economic backbone of Hattiesburg.30
But the people of Hattiesburg persevered. Flooded streets were cleared and fallen homes rebuilt. When the cyclone hit, locals helped erect temporary tents for the homeless and raised thousands of dollars in aid. The fires at J. J. Newman were particularly worrisome because each blaze presented Fenwick Peck, who was fully insured, with an opportunity to rebuild his mill elsewhere. But local officials successfully lobbied the firm to stay in Hattiesburg, offering to help rebuild the mill and guaranteeing multiyear tax breaks to keep J. J. Newman in the Hub City. Each incarnation of the sawmill was larger and more technologically advanced than the last, ensuring new opportunities that continued to draw thousands more white migrants based on the strength of the booming lumber industry and the promise of life in the Hub City of the New South.31
Those lives were filled with the basics of modern America—Coca-Cola, trolley cars, and Sears catalogues—and capped by the distinct customs that characterized white communal life in Hattiesburg. On Saturday mornings, local whites shopped at downtown stores, stopping in the streets to wave and chat with friends and neighbors. On warm Sundays, large crowds of Hattiesburgers in their best suits and dresses congregated on the downtown shores of Gordon’s Creek, standing in bunches to watch the baptisms of their children. On summertime weekday evenings, hundreds of whites headed out to the ball fields, gathering on the sidelines to watch lumber company baseball clubs compete in spirited contests. At Christmastime, crowds of white customers shopped late into the evenings, taking advantage of extended store hours to buy toys for their children and splurge on their sweethearts. Every Fourth of July, Hattiesburg’s white business leaders adorned the downtown in red, white, and blue banners for the city’s annual Independence Day parade. On those summer days, hundreds of local whites assembled in throngs several rows deep along the city streets, waving miniature American flags as they watched a parade of merchants compete for the annual prize of Best Company Float. As Hattiesburg grew, the new migrants congregated to establish new traditions that came to define their modern lives.32
Not all of their acts were performed with such a blithe spirit. On June 4, 1902, a black Hattiesburg convict named Will Smith picked his lock while working on a downtown chain gang and fled into the nearby forest. Although leasing convicts to private companies had been outlawed, in large part because of the practices of the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad, the state and many municipalities still used convict labor for public works projects. News of Will Smith’s escape spread quickly through Hattiesburg, galvanizing local whites into action. Led by a team of bloodhounds, a party of white residents chased Smith six miles into the forest before they caught him and returned the prisoner to his chains. For many, the chase was like a sport, an exciting haul into the woods after a runaway black convict. “The chase was a beautiful one,” enthused a reporter from the Hattiesburg Daily Progress. “That nigger ran, that nigger flew, that nigger tore his shirt in two.”33
Another hunt occurred the following day. On June 5, 1902, a white woman named Mrs. Gardner reported to her husband that she had been raped by a biracial man on the Pearl & Leaf River Railroad (the original name of Fenwick Peck’s Mississippi Central Railroad). Mrs. Gardner did not know her alleged rapist; the only clue she could provide was his mixed race. This left a lot of possibilities. White men had been fathering children with black women for generations, and Mississippi at the turn of the century was home to approximately ninety thousand people of mixed race (approximately 10 percent of all non-whites). Nevertheless, as word of the assault spread through town, dozens of local whites formed a makeshift posse to hunt down the mixed-race perpetrator. Their purpose was no great mystery. “If found,” the Hattiesburg Daily Progress flatly told readers, “he will very likely be lynched.”34
As reported in the Hattiesburg Daily Progress, the mob was a few hours into their search when Mrs. Gardner’s husband, Ed, caught sight of a mixed-race man named Walter Bankhead and inexplicably identified him as his wife’s attacker. Despite Bankhead’s pleas of innocence, the white men delivered their black prisoner to the jail, where Mrs. Gardner confirmed Bankhead as her accused attacker. The crowd then returned home to rest and spread word of the impending lynching. Later that evening, a three-hundred-person mob arrived at the Hattiesburg jail to kill Walter Bankhead in what would have been Hattiesburg’s fourth lynching.35
But in the hours since his arrest, Walter Bankhead, who claimed to have a reliable white alibi, had gained an important ally. Hattiesburg sheriff Thomas Batson resolved to uphold law and order by protecting the prisoner’s right to stand trial. Knowing that a mob was forming, Batson asked state officials to send two companies of militia to guard the prisoner. When the mob arrived at the jail that evening, they were turned back by the militia. Soon thereafter, Bankhead was transferred to Jackson to await trial. Although few doubted Bankhead’s guilt, some locals reluctantly recognized the sheriff’s obligation to uphold the law. “If, without overriding the law, the negro could have been put to death,” the Hattiesburg Daily Progress asserted, “[the sheriff] would not have objected in any way.”36
Five days after Walter Bankhead was nearly lynched, another black man named Will Dantzler confessed to raping Mrs. Gardner. Dantzler tried to retract his confession the next day, but his fate was sealed when Mrs. Gardner positively identified him as her attacker (her second positive identification that week). Will Dantzler was convicted of rape on June 30, 1902, and executed a month later by a jailhouse trapdoor hanging. Bankhead’s whereabouts at the time were unknown.37
The following summer, Sheriff Batson was powerless to stop an even larger mob from killing a black prisoner. On an August night in 1903, five hundred people armed with “crowbars, axes, picks, and sledge-hammers” broke into the Hattiesburg city jail and pulled accused murderer Amos Jones from his cell. Sheriff Batson once again tried to intervene but was grabbed and bound. Members of the mob then tied a rope around Amos Jones’s neck and dragged the black prisoner a half mile to a wooden bridge over Gordon’s Creek. According to at least one report, Jones was dead by the time the assembly reached the creek. Nevertheless, the mob strung his body high on a telegraph pole and “emptied their revolvers into it.”38
Between 1890 and 1910, white Mississippians lynched nearly 350 African Americans. The victims were usually accused of rape or murder and were killed by hanging, shooting, or both. Others were beaten to death. Some were burned alive. In 1901, a group of whites operating along the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad just south of Hattiesburg captured a black man, tied him to a stake, and watched him burn to death. As in the case of Amos Jones, it was common for members of a mob to shoot or maim bodies well past the point of death. In some cases, white Mississippians collected souvenirs from the corpses, carving a nose, an ear, a tongue, or a penis from the body of the alleged perpetrator.39
Though it is hard to fully explain such violence, it is crucial to keep in mind that lynchings of this type were not antiquated relics of the antebellum South. Although the South had a long history of mob violence, these turn-of-the-century lynchings—defined by race and characterized by spectacle and participatory violence—were modern acts conducted within the broader context of the rise of the New South. Mississippi’s bloodiest era of lynching occurred during the very same years of its initial industrialization and urban growth. Like the railroads and sawmills, lynchings were part of a societal transition. Turn-of-the-century lynchings served as a slight “revolt against modernity,” writes historian Amy Louise Wood, that helped define and strengthen the racial and social boundaries of a society in transition.40
The pressing need for those racial boundaries was constantly reinforced by contemporary perceptions of African Americans, especially black men, as vicious, immoral criminals who did not deserve or could not properly manage access to the same opportunities as whites. Southern public discourse regularly included discussions of what white Southerners perceived to be the diminishing character of African Americans. Black freedom, they often argued, needed to be held in check. “Every year,” the Hattiesburg Daily Progress told readers in 1902, “the negro becomes more unreliable and more worthless.” “The black ‘mammies’ and the ‘uncles’ and the sturdy young bucks and wenches of slavery time have vanished, supplanted by the present generation of worthless degenerates,” wrote the Saturday Evening Eye.41
In 1905, hundreds of white Hattiesburgers packed the city’s new auditorium to watch Thomas Dixon’s play “The Clansman.” The play, adopted from a novel of the same name that also served as the basis for the 1915 film Birth of a Nation, depicted Southern Reconstruction as an era in which recently emancipated African Americans raped, robbed, and killed innocent white Southerners until heroic members of the Ku Klux Klan overthrew Republican rule and disfranchised black voters. A local reviewer called the play “so much better than expected” and “a triumphal answer to the negrophiles, the negro-lovers, the advocates of either social or political equality.”42
This anti-black rhetoric was common among leading political figures. James Vardaman, Mississippi’s governor between 1904 and 1908, unabashedly promoted anti-black sentiment in extraordinarily racist editorials and speeches throughout his career. “The negro,” read one, “made greater moral and intellectual progress as a race during the period of slavery in America than he has ever accomplished before or since.” Vardaman referred to the black man of the new generation as a “lazy, lying, lustful animal which no conceivable amount of training can transform into a tolerable citizen” and openly defended the practice of lynchings. If ever faced with a “Negro fiend,” Vardaman noted, “if I were a private citizen I would head the mob to string the brute up, and I haven’t much respect for a white man who wouldn’t.” The owners of the Hattiesburg Daily News admired Vardman’s political rhetoric and leadership so much that they offered him the princely sum of $7,500 a year to become the newspaper’s executive editor when his term as governor ended.43
In media, literature, plays, and politics, Mississippi society at the time was inundated with messages of African American degeneracy. The point was constant and clear. For many whites, one of the challenges of the transition to modernity was living among a black population that was believed to be not only naturally inferior but also rapidly losing its capacity to function in a changing society. In response, hordes of white people in Hattiesburg and elsewhere worked together to perform their perceived civic duties of controlling and punishing African Americans through the daily rituals of Jim Crow and brutal acts of violence.
The next Hattiesburg lynching occurred on August 4, 1905. That evening, a thousand-person mob broke into the city jail and dragged out two black prisoners, Kid George and Ed Lewis. Earlier that day, George and another black man had escaped a local chain gang by stealing the revolver of their overseer and shooting the white guard. That afternoon, George was shot in the ear while trying to flee into the countryside and jailed along with Lewis, a black business owner who was accused of helping George remove his shackles. At nine o’clock that night, the mob used a makeshift battering ram to break into the city jail and remove the men from their cells. Some in the mob suggested that they start a fire to burn the black men alive, but that proposal was declined in favor of a more traditional lynching. The crowd marched the two men to a bridge, placed a noose around each of their necks, and then pushed them off the side, snapping their vertebras near the neck and killing them within seconds. “Those who were armed then proceeded to riddle the bodies with bullets,” reported one local writer.44
The 1905 lynching created a local controversy. Shortly after the murder, a contingent of Hattiesburg citizens organized a mass meeting to discuss the barbarity and illegality of mob violence. Led by several ministers and civic leaders, the group passed a series of resolutions denouncing mob violence as “savage and inhuman.” One local writer called the lynchers “cowards of the lowest type.” But responses were mixed. Another newspaper printed a very different editorial. “The Daily Progress,” asserted the city’s largest newspaper, “is not going to offer any apologies to the outside world for what was done in the city last night.… Those who perform the task are not to be condemned.” Three months later, four men were arrested for their participation in the murders, but each was quickly released, and none ever faced serious criminal charges.45
Twelve days after the initial 1905 lynching, the second escaped black convict was captured in a small turpentine camp about forty-five miles southeast of Hattiesburg. As this news spread, another lynch mob convened at a downtown depot in hopes of apprehending and killing the accused man. But Hattiesburg’s sheriff managed to evade the mob by personally taking custody of the prisoner and requesting a special military company to help deliver the fugitive to Jackson by bypassing the normal stop at Hattiesburg. That year, white Mississippians lynched twenty African Americans, an average of one every eighteen days. The murders of black residents in 1905 occurred more often than major holidays, full moons, or the first of each month—far too regularly to be considered abnormal parts of modern life in the Magnolia State.46
On March 12, 1900, Captain William Harris Hardy’s future wife, Ida May, founded an organization called the Hattiesburg United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). Established in the couple’s living room with thirty-eight charter members, the UDC helped lead local efforts to commemorate the lost Confederate cause. The UDC’s sibling organization, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), had been founded four years earlier, though that group played a lesser role in local commemorative activities. Men built the town, but it was women who shaped its memory. In addition to their common mission, the two organizations shared the same infamous namesake: officially, they were known as United Daughters of the Confederacy Nathaniel Bedford Forrest Chapter #422 and Sons of Confederate Veterans Nathan Bedford Forrest Camp #1353.47
Nathaniel Bedford Forrest made for an interesting choice as a namesake. Hailing from a modest background, Forrest accumulated a fortune in the Memphis slave markets. By the time the South seceded, the self-made businessman was worth an estimated $260,000 (over $4 million in 2018 dollars), nearly all of it derived from the slave trade. With an intense hatred toward Yankees and the threat they represented to his livelihood, Forrest joined the Confederate Army and quickly earned a legendary reputation on the battlefield. Despite having little formal training, he became one of the Civil War’s most dangerous combatants. He reportedly killed more than two dozen Union soldiers and survived several horses being shot out from under him. Forrest’s battlefield prowess earned him widespread accolades as he rose from enlisted private to brigadier general in just over a year, a feat unmatched by any other soldier on either side of the war.48
But the bursts of emotional adrenaline that made Forrest such an imposing warrior also limited his leadership. Anxious to fight and kill, he never fully grasped the tactical role of cavalry within the broader strategic movements of an army. And although his ferocity made him a phenomenal leader of deadly charges against ground forces, it also left him prone to reckless decisions. In April of 1864, Forrest ordered the murder of 292 surrendered black soldiers at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in one of the worst crimes of the Civil War. “The slaughter was awful,” wrote one Confederate sergeant to his sister. “The poor deluded Negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees, and with uplifted hands scream for mercy, but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. General Forrest ordered them shot down like dogs.” The murder of black soldiers may have brought Forrest some temporary personal satisfaction, but the massacre also galvanized both black and white Union soldiers. It was a powerful reminder of why they fought. For the rest of the war, black Union troops would often cry out “Remember Fort Pillow” before making a charge.49
Forrest had a hard time swallowing defeat. He never lost his passion for the Confederate cause, and for a brief time he even considered riding to Mexico to conduct guerilla attacks from across the border. Forrest did not enact his Mexico plan, choosing instead to settle down to become a farmer and make attempts at building railroads. But he did continue to promote white supremacy and resist black freedom by helping organize and lead America’s original Ku Klux Klan, a paramilitary offshoot filled with other bitter Confederate veterans who organized terrorist attacks against recently emancipated African Americans. Forrest was the Klan’s first Grand Wizard, and he is often credited with introducing the organization into Mississippi. More than anything, Forrest became a powerful symbol of white resistance to black citizenship and equality. As one of his biographers wrote, “As the Klan’s first national leader, he became the Lost Cause’s avenging angel, galvanizing a loose collection of boyish secret social clubs into a reactionary instrument of terror still feared today.” Both the Hattiesburg Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy decided on Forrest as the namesake for their commemorative organizations. As one of the most notorious white supremacists in American history, he called to them like no one else.50
Hattiesburg’s UDC was part of much larger trend. The national UDC, established four years before Ida May Harris’s chapter in Hattiesburg, had a membership by 1912 of over eighty thousand. The national UDC conducted a number of activities, including hosting annual meetings, holding reunion suppers, raising money for monuments and veteran retirement homes, and planning educational programs. Many of these efforts were rooted in historical mythmaking to promote present-day political agendas. As historian C. Vann Woodward observed, “One of the most significant inventions of the New South was the ‘Old South.’ ” White advocates of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy nostalgically stressed the morality and superiority of the Southern antebellum way of life. White Southern women, they argued, were more civilized, honorable, feminine, and morally adept than their Northern counterparts. Of course, many of these revisions centered on the war, which they refused to call the “Civil War,” preferring instead terms such as the “War Between the States” or even the “War of Northern Aggression.” The origins of that war, this new generation argued, were not grounded in agrarian slavery but rather in the superiority of white Southern people and their quest to secure states’ rights and protect their way of life against invasive Northern political, cultural, and economic systems. Across the South, the UDC led the new charge to redefine the cultural and historical memory of their defeated society and its Lost Cause of the Confederacy. It was quite like—and was often directly connected to—various cultural components of their Christian beliefs.51
Education was particularly important to the Hattiesburg UDC. In 1908, the UDC helped publish a special issue of the Hattiesburg Daily News (which had acquired the Hattiesburg Daily Progress the year before) that included an insert called “Our Women in the War,” which helped local whites learn more about the role of women in supporting the Confederate war effort. Members of the Hattiesburg UDC could also be found inside classrooms checking that the proper textbooks were being used, hanging Confederate flags and portraits of generals in classrooms and offices, and sponsoring student essay contests. It was essential to them to pass along an appreciation of this Confederate heritage to the next generations of white students. To that end, they offered small rewards to white students who wrote the finest essays celebrating the Lost Cause and encouraged young students to learn about and share stories of family members who fought for the Confederacy. In some classrooms, show-and-tell turned into neo-Confederate symposiums, with young students proudly rehashing the contributions of their Confederate ancestors. In later years, the senior class at Hattiesburg High School was known for putting on plays with alternative endings to the Civil War, including one fictional final scene in which white students in black-face makeup played enslaved African Americans joyously celebrating a Confederate victory in the “War Between the States.”52
The Hattiesburg Daughters were also involved with a number of national initiatives. Representatives from the Hattiesburg UDC regularly attended Confederate reunions in cities across the South, hosted statewide UDC meetings, and helped raise money to purchase and preserve Beauvoir, a house on the Mississippi coast that was the last home of Jefferson Davis and later became a retirement home for Confederate veterans and their wives. In 1906, the local Daughters also played a major role in organizing the national convention of the United Daughters of the Confederacy at Gulfport, where they helped secure the funding and approval to erect a new Confederate monument at Arlington National Cemetery.53
Like lynching, Lost Cause commemorative efforts were not merely antiquated relics of a bygone society. Confederate tributes operated as symbolic devices used against the backdrop of a transition to a new society that was extremely dependent on Northern investment. Remember that the capital foundations of Hattiesburg’s growth were provided by Yankees and Europeans, especially the Pennsylvanians Joseph T. Jones and Fenwick Peck. As some historians have suggested, this embrace of the Lost Cause during a moment of widespread Northern investment may have served as a tool for Southerners to ease the sting of Northern reliance. “Glorification of the Old South,” wrote historian James Cobb, “was at least in part a psychological device, designed to help humiliated southerners hold their heads up as they accepted much-needed investment capital from their Yankee conquerors.” As they took the sawmill and railroad jobs provided by Northerners, thousands of white Hattiesburgers huddled en masse in the shadows of marble Confederate monuments as a final cultural memory of Southern resistance.54
But that embrace of the Lost Cause also held an additional meaning. In commemorating the Lost Cause through their erection of monuments and their celebration of the barbarous Nathaniel Bedford Forrest, white Hattiesburgers were also helping to shape a modern white supremacy by paying homage to a failed nation whose primary objective was the maintenance of black slavery. And this message was not only enacted to promote lessons of racial hierarchy among white residents. Consider the view of Hattiesburg’s black men and women. Although UDC members incorrectly argued that the defense of slavery was only loosely connected to the war, no black citizens could have fully detached the incessant Confederate hagiography from the peculiar institution that created its wealth. The commemorations were haunting reminders of a horrific society that had held their ancestors captive. Yet local whites seemed so proud and nostalgic.55
Hattiesburg’s white migrants seemingly embodied change and modernity, embracing industrial opportunities and new lives in the rising tide of modern America as they moved further away from the annihilated antebellum system. Yet as Southern journalist W. J. Cash once wrote, “If the war had smashed the Southern world, it had left the essential [white] South mind and will … entirely unshaken.” Nearly fifty years later, the conquered Confederate cause still lived in their imagination. They crafted their new society in the cultural mold of the old, honoring their Lost Cause and stressing the immorality of African Americans to develop a novel ethos that helped assuage the humiliation of dependence on their former enemies while also promoting the violent white supremacist tactics that undergirded Jim Crow. Through politics, violence, culture, and history, the racial principles of the Old South were adapted to protect and enhance the white supremacy of the New South.56
In 1908, local whites celebrated the formation of a new county. For years, Hattiesburg’s new migrants had wanted to break free from Perry County, a relatively unimportant and sparsely populated antebellum county in which the Hub City had been founded. As early as 1889, the superintendent of Perry County schools complained to his supervisor that the people of Hattiesburg “have recently prevailed themselves of the provision of law and declared the town of Hattiesburg a separate school district, and secured teachers with a view to providing higher education than is afforded by the common schools in the county.” Locals temporarily created a separate judicial district, but it was not until 1908 that a new county, with Hattiesburg as its seat, was officially formed. During the process of choosing a name, political wrangling and old grudges eliminated the name “Hardy County” from contention. But local white leaders were eventually able to settle on a name of which they could be proud. On January 6, 1908, Forrest County officially became Mississippi’s newest territory.57
Two years later, the Hattiesburg UDC unveiled a marble Confederate monument erected beside the new Forrest County Courthouse. Dedicated to the “honor and memory of those who wore the gray,” the monument stood three stories tall and featured an armed Confederate soldier standing guard over a fellow infantryman and a Confederate heroine. The statue’s unveiling attracted an estimated eight thousand attendees to downtown Hattiesburg and reportedly brought tears to the eyes of nearly everyone in the crowd. One reporter called the ceremony the “greatest event in Hattiesburg history.” Another assured readers that “Forrest County, a mere baby in the state’s great sisterhood of counties, has started off right.”58