The State of Jones (14 page)

With the mass desertions and troop shortages after Corinth, officers cracked down. Early in 1863, shortly after the new year turned, General Dabney Maury answered Welborn’s report by urging that “the most energetic measures” be taken to bring in the missing men from Jones County. The local provost marshal, John H. Powell, received an order: round up the deserters for return to their units.

Powell, the turncoat secession delegate who had been rewarded with the job of county provost, wasn’t happy about the duty. He knew better than anyone how difficult it would be to bring in such men since his son-in-law, Jasper Collins, was one of their leaders, which put him in an extremely awkward position. On February 1, 1863, he wrote to Governor John J. Pettus questioning how he was supposed to accomplish the job and suggesting that he was entitled to extra compensation. “Give me some instructions what to do, whether I am in authority or no,” he wrote, “and Tell me whether I am in titled to Any pay for my services or not.”

Somehow, Powell got the job done. Over the next few weeks, the
majority of men were taken into custody and sent back to duty. If they came peaceably, they were treated as mere stragglers, allowed to return to their companies without a court-martial or severe punishment. This was the case with most of the AWOL soldiers in Newton’s unit.

But Newton wasn’t taken without a fight. He was seized, roped like a kicking steer, thrown into a wagon, and carted off to military prison. In addition, Newton was court-martialed, and probably tortured. According to his neighbors, the rebels “got holt of him and they tyed him and drove him to prison” and “there they cruelly treated him for some length of time.” Newton must have violently fought arrest, because this kind of treatment was reserved for the most defiant resisters.

Most likely, Newton was flogged. We don’t know all the forms of punishment that he endured, but we do know that it was standard for resisters to be stripped publicly and whipped in front of the entire brigade, a ritual excruciating for all concerned.

One Confederate described such a scene. “We are all drawn up in line and the poor man is tied to a pole about fifty yards in front of us. His hands are stretched above his head and his shirt stripped to the waist … The word being given, the executioner began his disgusting work, the wretched man wincing and his flesh shrinking neath every blow which one after another were delivered in quick succession until 39 were rec’d by the culprit. In truth it is a horrid sight, and the executioner was so overcome by his feelings that as soon as his work was done his eyes filled with tears and he wept—he wept!”

Newton was given a choice: fight for the Confederacy or face a firing squad. It was no longer the empty threat it had been earlier in the war. In early 1863, as rebel authorities grappled with the mounting problem of men leaving the ranks, deserters were indeed being shot. General Robert E. Lee believed firmly in firing squads as a deterrent and thought they had a “beneficial effect” on discipline. As commanding general of the army he would urge President Jefferson Davis to employ discipline more “uniformly” as the war went on.

At the prison camp at Tupelo, a hole was dug, and the condemned deserter was ordered to sit with legs dangling over it. A line of soldiers took up positions in front of him and fired. The body fell into the already-excavated grave, which was then filled with earth.

Newton agreed to return to his unit rather than face an open grave. He was reduced in rank to private and escorted back to his company under guard, listed as “present” but “in arrest” on his company muster roll of February 28, 1863. But he was hardly chastened. He had every intention of deserting again at the first opportunity. His feeling for the Confederacy, previously moral suspicion and gut resentment, had now deepened to abiding enmity. His capture and humiliation had irretrievably torn him loose from the Southern cause.

On December 30, the 7th Mississippi Battalion was dispatched to reinforce a Confederate strong point at Snyder’s Bluff, a ridge just above the confluence of the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. The line of defenses had come under heavy assault from William T. Sherman. “I want all the troops I can get,” Confederate commander John C. Pemberton had wired urgently. The position, with sixteen guns and a long seam of entrenchments, was a vital one, for its purpose was to protect the most strategically valuable of all Mississippi cities: Vicksburg. Sherman was attempting to reach Vicksburg by punching through the Chickasaw Bayou.

Newton was not sorry to arrive late on the dispiriting scene. The other men of the 7th Mississippi Battalion had celebrated New Year’s Eve in a chill fog and had made their beds in wet leaves during the weeklong assault by Sherman. Surgeons worked by lantern as they amputated, while abandoned dead moldered in the field. Ill-tempered rebel soldiers in the trenches glared at the slaves who worked with shovels to shore up the works, cursing the “damned niggers” who expected to be freed when President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation took effect on New Year’s Day.

Sherman had shelled and assaulted the entrenchments from Christmas Day to New Year’s, when he finally decided the line was
unbreakable. In a dense fog, he loaded his wounded onto hospital boats and departed, as a Union band played “Dixie.” As they moved away, the Confederate musicians answered them sarcastically, playing “Get Out of the Wilderness.” But the Yankees would be back.

Newton and the other men of 7th Mississippi Battalion remained at Snyder’s Bluff through the winter of 1863 in a state of alert, as the Union forces under U. S. Grant conducted various operations aimed at breaching the defenses of Vicksburg; all of them were unsuccessful. The
New York Times
announced that Grant was “stuck in the mud of northern Mississippi, his army of no use to him or anybody else.” Grant’s lack of success became a standing Southern joke. “Why is a hundred-dollar Confederate note like Vicksburg to the Yankees? Because they pass it but can’t take it.” The repeated failures injured Grant’s reputation, and some advisors urged the president that he be replaced for incompetence. Lincoln refused. “I think Grant has hardly a friend left, except myself,” he said.

On April 30, Sherman returned and assaulted Snyder’s Bluff again, backed by a federal squadron that hurled artillery and left men covered in dirt and bits of shale. This was just a feint, however, to distract from the real event: Grant now marched on Vicksburg from the hilly southeast rear and threatened the city’s back door. On May 17, the 7th Mississippi Battalion was urgently ordered to evacuate Snyder’s Bluff and move into Vicksburg itself. Pemberton was drawing in his forces; every man would be needed to help fend off Grant’s troops, which had battered their way into the hills ringing the landward side of the city.

Soldiers hurriedly spiked the big guns and rushed to fill every available wagon with munitions and stores and round up all the livestock from the countryside. By 2:30 a.m. the 7th Mississippi Battalion was filing into Vicksburg. By 8:00 a.m. they tramped through the center of town—and went straight into the main entrenchments.

It’s unclear how much of the ordeal of the next few weeks Newton underwent. Sometime in this period, he deserted the Confederacy again, and for the last time. We know he was with his unit and in
arrest on February 28, 1863, but his record from then on is a void. What’s certain is that the men of the 7th Mississippi Battalion went into the Vicksburg trenches on May 18 and emerged as skeletal prisoners of war on July 4. Newton’s closest friends and family members suffered the full range of its horrors. It seems plausible that he did too, especially given that he was under arrest.

As the sky changed from black to gray in the dawn of May 18, Newton and the men of the 7th Mississippi Battalion, heavy legged and laden with gear, dropped into rifle pits. With that, they were thrust into the most harrowing siege of the war.

Once in the city, there was no getting out.

For a solid year
, Grant had tried various approaches to Vicksburg like a man rattling angrily at a series of locked doors. The seemingly impregnable city sat on a ledge above the Mississippi, crowned with guns and protected by a series of natural barriers. On the riverfront, a fast current swept around a fishhook-shaped bend, banked in places by limestone bluffs. On the landward side behind the city, a series of deep gorges and foothills of yellow clay naturally lent themselves to entrenchments. An observer described the topography: “After all the big mountains and regular ranges of hills had been made by the Lord of Creation, there was left on hand a large lot of scraps, and these were dumped down on Vicksburg into a sort of waste heap.”

The city itself was substantial, if seamy and slum ridden in sections. Rounding the broad bend in the river, boats came upon a metropolis that sprawled for a mile along the east bank and ascended the bluffs in steps. A heavy traffic of steam packets dropped goods and people onto wharves, including thousands of cotton bales to be shipped to textile mills, as well as a diverse array of fortune hunters, opportunists, planters and their puff-sleeved, broad-skirted wives, itinerant gamblers, piratical boatmen, and whores. It was the most mixed population in the South outside of New Orleans. Criminals
prowled the tenements in the low hills, which the resident aristocracy, among them Jefferson Davis, tried to cleanse periodically with hangings or tar and featherings. The cardsharps were outnumbered only by the stray dogs, which scavenged in the streets and became such a nuisance that in 1860 the local populace drowned 129 of them in the river.

The better Vicksburgians lived on the heights. There the city took on a more imposing appearance, with wide sidewalks covered by the galleries of three-story buildings. Manor houses sat in the shadow of the domed, massive-pillared Warren County courthouse, with its four-faced clock, and the tower and steeple of St. Paul Catholic Church, which offered a kind of skyline. They also offered excellent targets for the sights of the Yankee gunboats. One of Grant’s gunboat shells struck the courthouse dome like a bull’s-eye and dropped through to the floor.

By the spring of 1863, Vicksburg was still a fortress, but an isolated one. Union forces had seized every other Confederate asset along the Mississippi River: Forts Donelson and Henry, Island Number Ten, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Natchez had all fallen. Vicksburg, 225 miles above New Orleans, was the last citadel and stronghold; take Vicksburg and the entire Mississippi River would be in Union control, and the Confederacy literally would be split in two.

Vicksburg was the key, Abraham Lincoln said. “The war can never be brought to a close until the key is in our pocket.” The president of the Confederacy agreed, though in slightly different terms. “Vicksburg is the nail head that holds the South’s two halves together,” Jefferson Davis said.

This was why Grant had maneuvered so incessantly against the town, at one point even attempting to dig his way past it by canal. Grant’s most trusted officers, like Sherman, had questioned the wisdom of his latest campaign: had any part of it failed, the Union army would have been cut off in enemy territory. “I tremble for the result,” Sherman said. “I look upon the whole thing as one of the most
hazardous and desperate moves of this or any other war.” But Grant had presided over a series of successful maneuvers. Federal gunboats had made a daring river run past the Vicksburg guns to ferry troops, and his men had marched and fought their way two hundred miles through the Mississippi marshes, winning five pitched battles in seventeen days at Port Gibson, Raymond, Jackson, Champion Hill, and the Big Black River. By the afternoon of May 18, Sherman gazed across the heights at the so-called Gibraltar of the South, straight at the point where the men of Jones County were entrenched. He turned to Grant. “Until this moment I never thought your expedition a success,” he said. “I never could see the end clearly until now.”

The Confederate troops in Vicksburg had been dealt a series of backward-reeling blows, inexorably driven into the trenches. The state capitol at Jackson had been sacked, and Grant’s young thirteen-year-old son Fred had rushed up the building steps hoping to grab a Confederate flag as a souvenir. Now a cordon of Union bluecoats seventy thousand strong was fatally encircling Vicksburg, inside of which Pemberton’s troops were penned up, many of them disheartened after the series of defeats. They had streamed into town, “wan, hallow eyed, ragged, footsore, bloody … humanity in the last throes of endurance,” one Vicksburg woman wrote. Trailing them were siege guns, ambulances, and wagons “in aimless confusion.” A band played “Dixie” and “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” but it sounded disconsolate.

For the next forty-five days the fate of Vicksburg obsessed all Southerners. The Confederates tended to blame their predicament on their commander, Pemberton, who, despite a beard of heroic length and curliness, had a reputation for placidity. One rebel officer said of him, “General Pemberton tried to do his best, but he was always doing nothing.” But this was at least partly Southern bias: Pemberton’s critics alternately suspected him of disloyalty and incompetence because he was by birth a Philadelphian. A West Pointer, he had betrayed his family when he acquiesced to his Virginia wife in joining the South, and he had two younger brothers in
uniform for the Union. Perhaps the worst that could be said of Pemberton was that he tended to be paralyzed by intolerable conflicts. His vacillations were a result of contradicting orders and advice: his colleague General Joe Johnston suggested he abandon Vicksburg, while President Jeff Davis insisted he stay and fight. He had done all he could to fortify Vicksburg, and his biggest mistake was probably to invest too much hope in aid from Johnston, who had a force of about thirty thousand in northeast Mississippi but no feasible way of cutting through. Everyone in Vicksburg, led by Pemberton, continued to believe he would come to the rescue.

It was Pemberton’s misfortune to face the most implacable, plain-spoken, clear-minded, authoritative, bloodily businesslike commander of the entire war in Grant. This poorly groomed, stubble-jawed man, in his wrinkled, slump-shouldered uniform, had no discernible vanity or flamboyant feature of generalship. What he did possess was field vision, the ability to sense a weak point and go at it, and an unyielding willingness to fight for just as long as it took to win. After the first day’s defeat at Shiloh, he had simply said through teeth gritted around a cigar, “We’ll lick ’em tomorrow.”