The State of Jones (22 page)

It’s entirely possible that Rachel and Newton gave each other a sense of bravery, and cause. The affair between them apparently began in this netherworld of wartime resistance and hiding. Love was surely an accident; they were constrained and facing several dangers, and the Civil War was not an event that gentled the emotions. What began as an alliance at some point deepened, and the experience must have been unsettling for two people who needed every ounce of calculation and self-possession for survival. But war was also distilling. Among the effects of what W. H. Auden called “the nearly religious mystery” of romantic love is a sharpening of self-definition. “You find out who you are when you are in love,” Auden observed. And when you are at war.

At almost every turn, every day, the events of the Civil War demanded that Newton and Rachel decide who they were: was Newton a coward or traitor, Unionist or rebel? Was Rachel a bondswoman or free soul, a passive victim or an active fighter? Attraction must have been one more desperate factor in an existence already reduced to daily urgency. With the old society smashed to pieces around them
and death a Minié ball or a rope end away, what did vows mean? To whom did they truly belong?

There is precious little direct evidence of their relationship, no love letters or locks of hair. All that’s left are legions of great-great-grandchildren, who received whispers and faint impressions of the original relationship: Newton loved Rachel “deeply” and felt “responsible” for her. She felt “protective” of him and “sheltered” him. Their descendants are not always in agreement in the details passed down to them, but they are unanimous on one fact: at some point, Newton came to belong more to Rachel than to his own wife, Serena.

The relationship may also have begun to blossom in the absence of others. In midwar, Serena finally found it impossible to subsist in Jones County and left Mississippi for a period to live with relatives in Georgia, although it’s not clear when or for how long. She must have done so because she was no longer able to support the family, once the rebels had burned them out. On an undated Confederate document, she was listed as “destitute.” She may have also fled because of the danger of Newton’s activities, or because she didn’t understand his transformation into an anti-Confederate Unionist leader and a comrade of blacks.

More significantly, Jesse Davis Knight was dead. He was slain not by a bullet in battle, but by one of the most commonplace killers in the army: measles. He fell ill in the fall-winter of 1863 while in Georgia with the 27th Mississippi Regiment, and it worsened into pneumonia. He expired December 17, 1863, in the Institute Hospital in Atlanta and was buried in a soldiers’ graveyard in Marietta, Georgia. However, he must have visited home shortly before his death: Rachel became pregnant again and would bear Jesse Davis’s daughter, a mulatto infant named Fannie, in the spring of 1864. It was Rachel’s first child since shortly before the war began. With most of the able-bodied white men away in uniform, she apparently had been spared their sexual attentions.

Rachel had been raped, seduced, or sexually exploited by a white
man but perhaps never before loved by one. What few cases of interracial romance she and Newton might have heard of had ended tragically: if a white man acted on romantic feelings for a black woman, he found himself an outcast in white society. Most of Newton’s comrades viewed such a romance as “illicit and immoral”; while they could comprehend the sexual urge, they couldn’t comprehend how a white man and black woman could be “faithful, loyal, and true” to each other.

Institutionally structured concubinage with white men was common in Rachel’s world, but love was not. Black women were reputed to be promiscuous, as opposed to the prudish white women who were symbols of purity, and consequently they were targets of force and also of “seduction under the implicit threat of force.” In fact, many masters believed that it was this system of sexual force that protected the purity of white Southern women. According to the Yazoo planter James J. B. White, “everybody who has resided in the South long enough to get acquainted with ou’ people and thar ways must know that the nigro women have always stood between ouah daughters and the superabundant sexual energy of ouah hot-blooded youth. End white mens’ right to do as they pleased with black women,” he said, “and ouah young men’ll be driven back upon the white ladies, and we’ll have prostitution like you all have it in the North, and as it is known in other countries.”

For a slave woman like Rachel to fall in love with a white man, even an antislavery yeoman like Newton, was anything but the norm. Still, such relationships existed. Defining these relations as love rather than as exploitation can all too easily ignore the power that white men could wield over black women. Yet to deny that love existed ignores the reality of human feelings. The Virginia slave Harriet Jacobs took a white lover to ward off the violent advances of her master, justifying it by saying: “There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment. A master may treat you as rudely as he pleases, and you dare not speak…. It seems less degrading to give one’s self, than to submit to compulsion.”

Given the social taboo against interracial romance, Newton and Rachel’s relationship must have involved deep emotional confusion and perhaps even been “marked by a self-contempt projected onto the other.” As the scholar Eugene Genovese notes, “the tragedy of miscegenation” lay in the “terrible pressure to deny the delight, affection, and love that so often grew from tawdry beginnings. Whites as well as blacks found themselves tortured as well as degraded.”

Only a planter with enough wealth and social standing could thwart custom and didn’t have to hide his slave mistress. David Dickson of Georgia, one of the most celebrated leaders in the movement to reform Southern agriculture, lost his wife, took up with a mistress, and accepted outcast status to live openly with her and their children. The first mayor of Memphis, Marcus Winchester, had a beautiful free quadroon mistress whom he married and took to Louisiana, and his successor, Ike Rawlins, also lived with a slave mistress. Richard Mentor Johnson, the vice president of the United States during the Martin Van Buren administration, never married and had a long-term relationship with Julia Chinn, a mulatto he inherited from his father’s estate. A wealthy planter from Kentucky, Johnson made no attempt to conceal the relationship: their two daughters were raised and educated as his children, and on several occasions he insisted on their being recognized in society. After Chinn died, he had other mulatto mistresses, thus providing his political enemies with a steady supply of ammunition to use against him.

But such conduct invited backlash, even explosions of rage. Henry Hughes of Mississippi, for instance, condemned these unions by saying, “Hybridism is heinous. Impurity of races is against the law of nature. Mulattoes are monsters. The law of nature is the law of God. The same law which forbids consanguinous amalgamation forbids ethnical amalgamation. Both are incestuous. Amalgamation is incest.”

Relationships such as Newton’s with Rachel were the very things many white Southerners believed they were fighting the war to prevent. Later in the conflict, when large numbers of Confederate prisoners were taken in Sherman’s Atlanta campaign, Yankee troops
questioned the rebels as to their motives for fighting so bitterly. They answered, “You Yanks want us to marry our daughters to the niggers.”

To the Mississippi cavalryman William Nugent, the war had become a sacred crusade to rescue civilization from the “unholy alliance” between crude Northern tartars and the bestial Negroes. As Yankees poured into the interior of the state after Vicksburg, Nugent wrote to his wife lamenting the tactics employed by Grant and the grave consequences of a defeated South.

If the Yankees should force surrender, “Our land will be a howling waste, wherever it has been invaded & we will be forced to abandon it to the
freed Negroes
& the wild beasts,” he warned. “… The commerce of the South will be nothing and certainly no one, unless his pretensions be very humble, will be content to live in a land where the intermixture of races will breed a long train of evils.”

The alliance between Newton and Rachel could not have been more perilous. What enabled two people to cross every permissible emotional line, even under the threat of mortal danger? The answer can only be conjectured, but a variety of forces surely had something to do with it: The cataclysmic nature of the war, the dissolution of old Mississippi around them, the unfamiliarity of the shattered countryside. The blank lack of a tomorrow.

None of the old rules applied—except perhaps those they clung to from the Bible. The first book of Samuel, 16:7, told them: “For the Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” Acts 17:26 said: “And God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.”

Or perhaps it simply had to do with their fearless natures. “Do you know,” Newton liked to say, with a slow smile, “there’s lots of ways I’d ruther die than be scared to death.”

January 1864, Chickasawhay Swamp,
Mississippi-Alabama Border

T
he Jones County Scouts stole through
the murk toward the Confederate wagon train, moving like shadows among the shadows until they had it surrounded. With a silent gesture, one of Newton’s men lifted a horn to his lips, and a blast cleaved the night air. It jarred men and animals alike in the rebel camp. Panicked livestock jerked at their tethers, and alarmed men snatched up their weapons and pointed them in the direction of the noise. Just then, from the opposite side of the woods, came another ear-rending blast. As this noise faded, a third, jeering call came from in front—and then another from behind. The rebels whirled in confusion.

“Those drivers must have thought we had an army in the woods,” Newton said later.

To Newton and the gaunt-faced, squint-eyed men who peered through the Chickasawhay Swamp, the Confederate wagon train, fat with corn, looked like a sumptuous and lazily offered banquet.
An even more inviting target was the leader of the train, William Fairchild, the unloved Confederate tax-in-kind collector for Jones County.

The train was encamped along the old trace road to Mobile, four wagons heaped high with shelled corn, bales of cotton, and velvety wool and surrounded by burly oxen and cattle swaying under the prods of drovers. Fairchild’s guard was down; they were fifty miles south of Jones County, about halfway to the Alabama coast, and it had been a trouble-free trip in the fine late-autumn weather. Fair-child was placid and pleased with himself; he had already been paid in gold for half the load, contracted for shipment to Robert E. Lee’s army in Virginia. As twilight came on, the train had drawn to a halt still well inside the gloom of the swamp. Threats had seemed far away—until the horns sounded.

As the last note died, Knight’s men opened fire. Shotgun explosions bleached the night and a squall of shotgun pellets blew into the camp. Amid the iterating thunder, men screamed. Some of the teamsters fired back aimlessly at the vague enemies in the stygian dark. Musket fire and buckshot guttered, and cattle and oxen broke loose and bolted into the woods. After a brief firefight, Fairchild’s men scattered with them, fleeing through the trees and leaving the stores for the Jones County Scouts.

“We came a-shootin’ and they cut and run,” Newton recalled.

With the teamsters fled, the Jones Countians rode out of the timber and began to sack the train. They efficiently stripped it, packing away all of the corn and as much of the other stores as they could carry, including a fresh supply of powder and lead for their guns. They quit the clearing and disappeared back into the swamps with their haul, as quickly as they came.