The State of Jones (36 page)

From Memphis, Trowbridge went to Vicksburg by riverboat, the
parlor of which was so wreathed in tobacco smoke that it dimmed the light of chandeliers. The majority of passengers were planters going downriver to their estates, and Trowbridge found them to be “hard swearers, hard drinkers, inveterate smokers and chewers, wearing sad-colored linen for the most part, and clad in coarse ‘domestic’: slouching in their dress and manners, loose of tongue, free hearted, good humored, and sociable.” They bought glasses of whiskey from decanters for twenty-five cents a shot, which they tossed down freely from noon until bedtime. Their talk was only of “mules, cotton, niggers, money, Yankees, politics, and the Freedmen’s Bureau—thickly studded with oaths.” There were a handful of Tennesseans onboard, who envied the Mississippians “their Rebel State government, organized militia, and power over the freedmen.”

At one landing, Trowbridge saw a burned plantation reduced to nothing but fifty standing chimneys. “Yankee vandalism,” a woman said. At another landing, he learned that four men in Confederate uniform carrying Spencer rifles had just robbed a store kept by a Union man and murdered a Negro.

But the strongest impression left by the riverboat trip came when a well-dressed, light-skinned black couple boarded the craft and asked for a stateroom. The captain exploded in rage: “God damn your soul! Get off this boat!” A chorus of furious passengers cried out, “Kick the nigger!” and “He ought to have his neck broke!” The couple disembarked, and their trunk was pitched to shore after them.

Along the way Trowbridge conversed with the planters, exchanging views on emancipation and free labor. By the end of the journey he had decided, “It was impossible to convince these gentlemen that the freedmen could be induced to work by any other means than by despotic compulsion.”

The Union troops who had been Newton’s allies were gradually mustered out of the state, leaving only a small federal presence in Mississippi, a few battalions of infantry, and agents from the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, the division of
the War Department that now governed the relationships between former slaves and white employers. The woefully understaffed and embattled head of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Mississippi, Colonel Samuel Thomas, was overwhelmed by the size of the problem he faced.

Most Mississippi whites, Thomas reported, “cannot conceive of the negro having any rights at all. Men who are honorable in their dealings with their white neighbors will cheat a negro without feeling a single twinge of their honor; to kill a negro they do not deem murder; to debauch a negro woman they do not think fornication; to take property away from a negro they do not deem robbery. They still have the ingrained feeling that the black people at large belong to the whites at large.”

To Newton, it must
have suddenly seemed like the Confederacy had seized control of the governments in Jackson and Washington, D.C. He retired to his hilltop acreage for much of 1865 and 1866 and kept to himself, laying low, tending his crops, and rebuilding his farm on the county border. For Newton to continue fighting, surrounded as he was by rebels, would have been useless, even suicidal. One of Newton’s great talents as a soldier was that he had a sense of when to go on the offensive and when to assume a defensive strategy.

Newton persuaded Rachel to leave Jackie Knight’s old plantation and follow him, to help on the farm and sharecrop. According to Rachel’s granddaughter, “After emancipation my grandmother and her family moved from the old slave plantation in Jones County to Jasper County … they went with one of the younger Knights who did not believe in slavery.”

Newton installed Rachel and her children in a barn until he could complete a cabin for her, built of split cypress boards. He raised the log-and-plank home not far from the one he shared with Serena, and he gave Rachel some acreage to work as her own.

Newton had another good reason to devote himself to his farm:
he had enmeshed himself in a tangled domestic situation. Somehow, during his career as a fugitive, he had found enough unguarded time to father children by the two women in his life at the same time.

Newton had continued his wartime affair with Rachel, and sometime between 1863 and 1865 she had his child, a daughter named Martha Ann, named, presumably, after his loyal younger sister. Among the freedmen Newton and Rachel’s relationship was an open secret.

“Rachel was considered his woman,” the former Knight slave Martha Wheeler said, “and he moved her to his place.”

But on Serena’s return to Jones County, Newton had reunited with her. In 1864 Serena too bore him a daughter, whom they also named after his sister Martha Ann. Serena shortly became pregnant again, and a son named Joseph Sullivan Knight was born in 1866. Newton seemed intent on following the Knight family tradition of leaving a double-digit number of heirs.

It’s not clear how much Serena knew, or how she felt about Rachel’s appearance on the farm as a sharecropper. But Newton’s divided loyalties seem to have tilted in favor of his white family for a time—Rachel would not bear another child by Newton for four years, until 1869. She and Newton may have temporarily given up their affair as hopeless or simply too dangerous. Under the draconian Black Codes, interracial marriage was not only banned but penalized with a life sentence in the state penitentiary. Nevertheless, Rachel seems to have committed herself to Newton, and to working on his farm.

Newton’s 170 acres became an informal if perhaps fraught collective. The Knights, black and white alike, went about the laborious job of reclaiming the land that had gone to weeds. Newton’s farm had never been worth much, just $300 before the war, but now it wasn’t even worth a third of that—it would only be valued at $120 in 1870. It would take him a decade of relentless clearing and cultivating to build it to 320 acres.

Foot by foot, the Knights cleared fields, felled trees and unearthed stumps, and turned the thorny undergrowth into neat furrows.
They planted corn, and apple trees, because Newton loved the fruit. He raised a new plain log home with a large rock fireplace and a high-galleried porch, not far from the ashes of his first home.

But persistent droughts made recovery from the war hard. Newton’s wartime neighbor Ben Graves recalled weather that seemed almost biblically punishing. “It seemed there came a drought every year … After the war the elements seemed to set in against us, for about 3 years the crops were a failure. We had 12 weeks of drought one year.”

Newton’s white children toiled side by side in the fields with Rachel’s. His eldest sons did the same heavy work as Rachel’s son Jeff. Clearing even a single new acre required the labor of the entire family: blacks and whites, adults and children alike, would bend over crosscut saws until a tree was felled, and then cut it into logs, after which the logs were rolled on top of sticks for carrying. It took a team of six or eight adults to lift the logs and carry them away, for hewing into boards or split rails for fences.

But not all of Newton’s children were happy to be sharing the homestead with Rachel and her children as their equals. Tom grew increasingly resentful as he got old enough to understand the true nature of the arrangement, perhaps influenced by Serena’s feelings on the matter. “The attitude of his mother caused Tom to have little, or no use for Rachel and her white daughters,” a descendant observed. But Tom obeyed Newton’s wishes and understood that they were there by virtue of “his will.”

When the corn came in they would shuck it in the crib and then shell it at night by the fireside and put it in sacks, and the following day carry it on horseback to the mill, to be ground into meal. The nearest rail town was thirty-eight miles away, by ox wagon, so they did most of their marketing at an old post office-country store six miles away, where there was a water-powered gristmill. Sometimes, if there were a spare dozen eggs, Rachel would walk the six miles to the store to trade them for sugar or coffee.

There was never enough food to fill all of the bellies, just the lean
game that Newton hunted, or the chickens they raised, with corn pone made with salt water in a skillet and garden vegetables. The Knight children were so perpetually famished that they searched the meadows for nut grasses, which they would chew to supplement their thin meals, along with muscadines, persimmons, and hickory nuts.

The new homestead sat on a spit of land above a verdant, heavily wooded hollow, and Newton wore a footpath down the hill to a cold spring that rushed at the foot of it. He would loft his shotgun into the crook of his elbow and wander off down the path to hunt alone for a day at a time. Or sometimes he simply strolled down to the spring, where he liked to go for the quiet. He tried “to forget the past” and forgive his grievances against his old enemies, he told his son Tom.

He wanted to “live peaceful with men as far as possible.”

Mississippi’s lawmakers had gone
too far with the Black Codes. To Northerners they seemed to be trying to alter the outcome of the war, behaving as victors rather than the defeated. “The men of the North will convert [their] state into a frog pond before they will allow such laws to disgrace one foot of soil in which the bones of our soldiers sleep and over which the flag of freedom waves,” wrote the
Chicago Tribune.
Congress agreed: it denied Mississippi readmission to the Union and placed the state under rigid federal military rule again.

Congress was also fed up with President Johnson, whose sore-headedness over black citizenship caused a total breach with the legislature. In April of 1867 lawmakers wrested Southern policy making away from him, passing a comprehensive new Reconstruction Act: Southern states were required to adopt black suffrage and to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment before applying for readmission to the Union. Also, Confederates were barred from holding office. The measure passed over the veto of an irate Johnson, who railed that it operated “in favor of the colored and against the white
race” and that the South was being trodden underfoot “to protect niggers.”

To Newton, the new radical Reconstruction policies at last seemed to promise “the end to rebel rule,” as one Raleigh newspaper put it. But more than that, it was a breathtaking expansion of country, and Union. “We have cut loose from the whole dead past,” wrote Wisconsin senator Timothy Howe, “and have cast our anchor out a hundred years.”

As the climate became more favorable, Newton rode down from his hilltop to support his man in the 1868 presidential election, General U. S. Grant, who was running at the head of the Republican ticket against the unremarkable Democratic governor of New York, Horatio Seymour. Another fierce Grant supporter was Jasper Collins, who was such an ardent admirer of the Union general that he named one of his sons Ulysses.

But Newton and his fellow Republicans encountered furious resistance in a political season that was continually intemperate and even deadly. Mississippians had always been notorious for settling matters with violence, eye gouging, crotch kicking, stabbing, and shooting; one British tourist observed that even casual conversations had the “smack of manslaughter about them.” The political stakes drove opponents to new levels of shrill contention: newspapers railed against “ranting niggers” and “stinking scoundrels,” and the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups made their first appearance in the Piney Woods, dedicated to foiling the “incredible scheme of granting suffrage to the half brutish blacks,” which would be the “high water mark of political insanity.”

The champions of Anglo-Saxon superiority, who posed as destroying angels, were men of all classes: planters, farmers, and merchants. They were men anchored in a tradition of slavery and soured by crop failures and the state’s inability to recover from the war, and they scapegoated blacks for Mississippi’s ills. Their ethic of vigilantism coupled with racial hatred led them to join rifle clubs named things like “Sons of the South.” Their aim was to restore social order
as they pictured it should be, and that meant punishing blacks for insolence and driving out the Northerners and radical Republicans who were the agents of change.

The Piney Woods had less Klan activity than many other areas, because of the relatively small population. Nevertheless, it was present. “It did not seem that the ku klux klan roamed around this country unless some Negro misbehaved,” recalled Ben Graves. “They were organized to make Negros and carpetbaggers stay in their places. The carpet baggers were men that came here from the north, that come to put devilment in the negro’s head. He would tell the Negro that he was as good as the white man … They thought the Negro and them would take the country … That was what organized the ku klux klan, to see that the carpet bagger and the Negro did not take the county. They were all that saved it.”

In Covington County, a “White Cap Klan” meted out formal judgments against “objectionable negros” and polled the membership on whether an offender should be punished with violence or merely intimidated into “good behavior.” They used ritualistic ceremonies to frighten superstitious local blacks: they would approach in a dead silence and ride in a circle around the victim, wordless but making mysterious motions. Some of their methods were no more than Halloween charades: a sheet-clad goblin would call for a drink of water and down a whole bucket, a sleight of hand performed with a rubber bag under the sheet.

In Paulding in Jasper County, a former slave named Jane Morgan who lived in a community of freedmen on an old ruined plantation watched as Klansmen kidnapped two of her friends. “Once de Ku Kluxes cum to our place and take two of our niggers off,” she remembered. “We never knowed dey had done nuthin’ but we sho never seen dem niggers no more—no sire we ain’t.”

The Klan activity was a response to the fact that in nearly every county, black Republicans and their white allies were forming grassroots Union Leagues or Loyal Leagues for the purpose of enlisting new members and organizing their vote. The clubs offered
education in citizenship and protection in numbers. Their members were bound by political and sometimes religious affinity, often led by black preachers or educators, and fostered by white carpetbaggers or Southern abolitionists like Newton. Newton was almost certainly active in a Union League club. A Democratic state senator, W. D. Gibbs, recalled that both Jones and Jasper counties had Loyal Leagues and that one political meeting of black voters in Jasper numbered three hundred men.