The State of Jones (31 page)

Thirty years after the surrender, Dabney H. Maury devoted a lengthy passage in his memoirs to the Jones County Scouts, whom he depicted as malcontent serfs. Maury believed that “the worst class of our population was to be found in the vast region of piney woods that sweep along our seaboard from Carolina to the Sabine” and that these rabble “manifested the most vicious and cruel natures of a North American. Jones County, Mississippi, is in this piney woods belt, between Meridian and the lower Pearl River.” Maury claimed that the Confederates had successfully invaded “this
imperium in imperio”
and reduced “these secessionists to order.”

In fact, the Confederacy had not been able to stamp out the Union allegiance in Jones. Not three weeks after Lowry left the county, Newton and his men were actively reconstituting the company. The core of the band remained at large: Newton, Jasper Collins, William Wesley Sumrall, and about twenty others began once more to wreak havoc.

Confederate commanders were surely embarrassed by their inability to capture Newton, especially when the events in Jones made the Southern newspapers. Newton’s elusiveness had become the subject of lore. On May 6, 1864, the
Mobile Daily Advertiser and Register
published an account from a rebel officer that suggested the extent of Newton’s spreading fame.

“I see by your evening issue of the 2nd instant, that, under ‘Mississippi Items’ you say that Captain Newton Knight, of Jones, had sent in a flag of truce, etc., to Col. Lewis. This is not so,” the correspondent reported, with obvious disappointment. A description of various actions followed, along with a comment on the “ignorance” of the impoverished people there. It concluded: “Newton Knight, it is thought, will report if he can be found.”

He couldn’t be found. Confederate officers never understood that
horse soldiers were useless in the Piney Woods; success hinged on men well trained in the art of swamp fighting, not horseback riders who broadcast their arrival, got lost every half mile, and made for easy target practice. Although outnumbered, Newton and his men “knew every creek and footlog” in the Piney Woods, as Newton’s son noted.

By June of 1864 Newton and his men were operating in force again, engaging in just the sorts of exploits Sherman might wish them to had he issued direct orders. They thwarted rebels’ efforts to rebuild the railroads, confiscated Confederate supplies, and threatened impressment agents.

On June 14, 1864, just two months after the Lowry raids, local Confederate conscript officer Benjamin C. Duckworth wrote to Governor Charles Clark in despair that the area was still in Newton’s control. The unionist guerrillas had wrecked or burned all of the local bridges and ferries, the local justices of the peace, constables, and commissioners refused to do public business, and “if a man is found dead the Civil authorities pays no attention to it any more than if it was a dog.” Duckworth himself was “afraid to speak my sentiments on the account of the Deserters” and begged that Clark destroy his letter: “when you read those few lines commit the same to the flames.”

On July 12, the Union-controlled
Natchez Courier
newspaper reported that “the county of Jones, State of Mississippi, has seceded from the State and formed a Government of their own, both military and civil.” Although the story contained erroneous and even fanciful details, the gist of it was essentially true. “Numbers of deserters having congregated in the swamps of Jones County, determined to form a government for themselves. Colonel Mowry
[sic]
, with a force was sent over to disband them, but they fought desperately, and in their strongholds defied the Colonel and his forces.”

At the end of July, Lieutenant H. C. Kelley, a provost marshal stationed at Shubuta, Mississippi, about fifteen miles from Jones, wrote to his superiors with a plea for troops. The Jones County scouts had
conducted yet another raid, liberating 150 cattle intended to feed the Confederate army. They turned them loose in the swamps where only they could find them and also destroyed corn standing in a field that was meant for the rebel troops.

“Colonel, I would call your attention to the situation of the county and Government property through this and Jones and Jasper Counties on account of the numerous quantity and boldness of the deserters,” Kelley reported.

Newton had defied the combined efforts of Polk, Maury, and Lowry. All the Confederate cavalry, artillery, and crack infantry regiments had done was give him temporary pause. Nor had they solved the larger problem of desertion in the ranks: only 20 percent of the five thousand active deserters in Mississippi had been caught and returned to duty.

As Newton resumed his operations, once again there were signs that he was in contact with federal forces. A Yankee officer was rumored to be among the transients being harbored in Jones County. Also, every day more blacks liberated from plantations came into the swamps to join the struggle.

The Confederate brigadier general of the state militia, W. L. Brandon, wrote to Major General Dabney Maury on August 14:

But by now, Southern authorities had little time or manpower to devote to Newton Knight. Virtually every able-bodied soldier in buff and gray was needed to try to shore up the Confederacy against Sherman, who was again on the march, this time to Atlanta. Sherman intended to make Meridian look like only a rehearsal.

“All that has gone before is mere skirmishing,” Sherman promised.

As Confederate troops streamed toward Atlanta to meet Sherman’s advance, Robert Lowry, Walter Rorer, and William Nugent were among them. So too, unwillingly, were the foot-dragging men from Jones County, impressed back into uniform in the 7th Mississippi Battalion.

The state was all but emptied of rebel forces. Leonidas Polk led his army into Georgia, first by rail and then the last seventy miles on foot, at the head of a divisional train that stretched for five miles. His headquarters alone required ten six-horse wagons to haul it. The departure left Mississippi largely undefended and in the hands of the deserters and Unionists who had so consistently eluded capture.

By the late summer of 1864, Jones County was again the center of a Union stronghold that extended throughout southeastern Mississippi. “The Free State of Jones” had become a battle cry, a statement of yeoman strength—and a warning to rebels.

———

The two armies grappled
with each other across northern Georgia, columns of men scuttling along rugged red clay foothills that turned grease slick under their heels. The days were a punishing repetition of maneuver, dig, and march, while hundred-degree temperatures made bugs sing, and the air lay heavy as a quilt.

Sherman’s men moved light and fast, carrying just five days of bacon. If the quartermaster’s stores failed along the way, Sherman threatened, “We’ll eat your mules up, sir; eat your mules up!” In just twelve days, the Yankees moved eighty miles, halfway toward Atlanta. But the pacing Sherman, unshaven, in muddy pants, a spur on one boot, slouch hat jammed over his quill-like hair, was unsatisfied. He remained frustrated by his inability to land a decisive blow or to break the will of his opponents.

“No amount of poverty or adversity seems to shake their faith,” Sherman observed, “niggers gone, wealth and luxury gone, money worthless, starvation in view … yet I see no sign of let up—some few deserters, plenty tired of war, but the masses determined to fight it out.”

The Southern strategy was to “resist manfully” to the last, as Robert E. Lee put it, with the hope that in the November 1864 election Lincoln would be replaced. If the South could just hold out until the election, Northern fatigue with the war would set in and a Peace Democrat, perhaps George B. McClellan, would negotiate a truce resulting in Southern independence. But U. S. Grant, now general in chief of the Union army, understood that the South was war weary too. He knew this from the constant stream of deserters who “come into our lines daily who tell us that the men are nearly universally tired of the war, and that desertions would be much more frequent, but they believe peace will be negotiated after the fall elections,” Grant wrote.

Grant intended to settle the war not with peace negotiations, but with a series of aggressive blows that would break Southern will. He ordered Sherman, now in command of the west, to “get into the interior of the enemy’s country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources.”

As Sherman pushed south across Georgia in a series of looping marches, the rebels under Generals Joe Johnston and Leonidas Polk continually parried and withdrew in a series of defensive actions. For weeks the two armies skirmished across rocky ridges of Georgia in asphyxiating heat and humidity, raking each other with artillery but never fully engaging, like two wary boxers dancing for position.

Confederate morale became uneven, men grew sick of walking backward, and hunger was a continual problem, rations so slim that William Nugent and his fellow cavalrymen received only a third of a pound of bacon a day. The army was plagued more than ever by desertions—not even another round of executions had stemmed the tide. Columbus Sykes, a colonel and a well-heeled planter in the 43rd Mississippi, whose wife continued to ride in her carriage though it had to be drawn by mules, wrote home at the end of April just before embarking for Georgia. His brigade had been forced to witness the deaths of two deserters, as a warning.

“Two men of the 31st Miss. Regt. and one of the 33rd Miss. are condemned to be ‘Shot to death with Musketry’ at 3 o’clock p.m. for desertion,” he wrote. “The entire Brigade is ordered to witness the execution. What a solemn warning to those who are tired enough to desert their colors. The Government is determined to stop it by visiting upon the offender the extremest penalty known to military law.”

A week later, Sykes was so affected by the episode that he wrote home again, this time describing the firing squad itself.

As for those impressed back to their units, loyal Confederates kept a wary eye on them and understood they couldn’t be counted on. The apathy and evasions of reluctant soldiers such as Sim Collins in the 7th Mississippi Battalion were plain for all to see. While they wore the Confederate uniform, they had no intention of dying for the cause and were borderline insubordinate when shooting started. “The men who are caught and forced into the ranks cannot be relied on at all,” Nugent observed. “Behind breastworks they may be induced to exchange shots with the enemy; in the open field they can never be brought to close quarters.”

Nugent, encamped near Marietta, brooded over suspected disloyalty in one of his own soldiers, a lieutenant who seemed to duck battle and was likely preparing to defect to the “swamp, where he can have Yankee coffee and sundry parties to attend.” Nugent’s own devotion to duty was worn as thin as his clothes; he was matted and filthy as a ferret.

“‘Odds fish’ how I would like to be five thousand miles from here now,” he wrote to his wife. “Mud, filth, rain; every imaginable species of vermin crawling all around you; little sleep, hard work & fed like a race horse, constantly annoyed with stray bullets, whizzing shells & pattering grape; dirty clothes and not a change along; little or no time to wash your face and hands and very little soap … no comb for your hair.”

The reluctant soldiers of 7th Mississippi Battalion were under almost continuous fire in June, as Sherman continued his artillery barrages and flanking movements along the ridgeline. On June 14, 1864, Leonidas Polk trudged up a steep hill known as Pine Mountain, near Marietta, for a view of the field. As he stood on the crest and studied the smoking and scored terrain below, a cannon shot whistled. It struck him square in the chest and tore a huge hole in him, “opening a wide door,” according to his son, “through which his spirit escaped.”

Though he was winning the war of attrition, Sherman himself was growing sick of the continual shelling with no definitive victory. On June 27, believing the Confederates close to the breaking point, and in a fit of impatience, he assaulted Kennesaw Mountain. In the center of the rebel defenses was a brigade commanded by Robert Lowry. The daylong charges up steep slopes in broiling temperatures left Lowry and his men soaked in their own sweat, blood, and retching saliva. The Yankees were finally repelled with three thousand casualties, Lowry’s line turning back two charges. Sherman accepted the defeat with a verbal shrug.