The State of Jones (39 page)

The first sign of serious trouble for Ames had come the previous summer in Vicksburg, where whites were livid over the marriage of a Negro legislator to the daughter of a local planter and the presence of several blacks on the Republican ticket in upcoming local elections. On July 4, 1874, a mob of Vicksburg White Leaguers shot up an Independence Day rally of black Republicans, killing several, and took over the city by force. Ames wrote to President Grant begging for federal troops to quell the riot. But Grant, fearful of political backlash, advised Ames to settle the matter locally and refused to interfere. Incredibly, on the very anniversary of his siege victory at Vicksburg, Grant effectively returned the city to his old enemies.

Six months later, emboldened white supremacists inflicted worse slaughter on Vicksburg. A mob forcibly turned the black Republican sheriff Peter Crosby out of office. The overthrown sheriff, on orders from Ames, mustered a band of five hundred freedmen to help him take back his post, but as they marched on the town a heavily armed white militia headed by a Confederate cavalry colonel, Horace Miller, met them at a bridge on the outskirts. The leader of the black militia, a Union veteran named Andrew Owen, advised his outnumbered and outgunned men, “Boys, go back peaceable and
quiet.” As they turned their backs and began to disperse, a white fired into them. The shot touched off a massacre; for the next three days vigilantes hunted blacks down through the woods, where their bodies remained, their families too afraid to claim them.

Grant finally acted, dispatching a small unit of federal troops to restore order. But the damage was done: Ames’s enemies now knew that he had weak backing from the federal government. They smelled blood. The Vicksburg riots had shown “the absence of all the elements of real authority” in the Ames administration, L. Q. C. Lamar said.

By March of 1875, Ames was convinced the Democratic Party in Mississippi had metastasized into a paramilitary organization that meant to retake the state with bullets. Anticipating trouble, Ames was able to get a bill through the legislature authorizing him to organize two regiments of militia and purchase four Gatling guns.

But Ames had trouble raising a trustworthy regiment of white men. Some refused to serve because they feared reprisals from the Klan. Others Ames didn’t trust to side with blacks against their own race. Ames sought only the most deeply committed men. One of the few he trusted was the longtime Union man from the Piney Woods, Newton Knight. On March 18, Ames personally signed a commission appointing Newton a colonel in the 1st Infantry Regiment. As a white officer leading blacks Newton could expect bloody reprisals from his old foes; nevertheless, he took his place in the militia alongside black officers, who commanded about half the companies.

Newton may have tried to help raise other men to serve Ames’s need. An undated fragment of a note from Ames’s black lieutenant governor, A. K. Davis, to Newton suggests that he was responsible for some sort of mustering. “The governor wants you to appoint good men,” it read.

All that summer and fall, gangs of heavily armed whites broke up political meetings, made threats, and generally terrified black communities.

But the extent of Ames’s powerlessness was being demonstrated almost daily. The sheriff of Yazoo City was Ames’s good friend Albert Morgan, a carpetbagger and a valorous Union veteran from Wisconsin who had done the seeming impossible: he had helped three hundred or so black families buy their own land and opened schools for their children. Compounding these offenses, Morgan had married a beautiful mulatto schoolteacher from the North named
Carrie Highgate, making him a special target of White Line ire. On the first day of September, the town bells began to ring, and Yazoo City was soon full of armed men on horseback. They poured gunfire into a Republican rally, wounding several people, and put Morgan on the run for his life. Bands of men galloped about with ropes hitched to their saddles, firing in the air, “and when the niggers would see the ropes tied to their saddle, that was enough for them, they did not want anything more.” Morgan finally escaped after several days in hiding, thanks to a friend who met him in the woods with a horse waiting. Morgan rode away through the night and would not return to Mississippi.

“My friend, I fought for four years; was wounded several times; suffered in hospitals, and as a prisoner; was in twenty seven different engagements to free the slave and save our glorious Union—to save a country such as this!” Morgan wrote to Ames. “I have some love left for my country, but what is a country without it protects its defenders? … to be butchered here by this mob after all I have done here is too cruel.”

To Ames, it seemed like the war all over again. “In ’60 and ’61 there were not such unity and such preparation against the government of the U.S. as now exist against the colored men and the government their votes have established,” Ames remarked.

Just three days later another brutal assault took place in Clinton, a small town just fifteen miles from the governor’s mansion in Jackson. On September 4 a gang of white riflemen opened fire on a political rally of 1,200 Republicans led by a black state senator named Charles Caldwell. As Caldwell pleaded for calm, bullets tore through the crowd, and seven or eight people fell dead. This time, Republicans fought back, and two white men were killed in a blast of returned fire. Spectators screamed and fled into the woods, and for the next few days, periodic violence raged around Clinton. Large posses of armed white men arrived from surrounding counties by train, to join in chasing down blacks and shooting them. A black Republican named E. B. Welborn said, “They just hunted the whole
country clean out, just every man they could see they were shooting at him just the same as birds.”

A black Republican named Square Hodge was found dead in the swamp missing his entrails, one arm, and his head. Lewis Russell was marched a quarter mile into the woods and riddled with bullets by twenty guns. Nor were blacks the only ones to die. A band of fifty whites seized a carpetbagger who taught black schoolchildren, William Haffa, and executed him. Then they went next door and forced two black Republicans to stand on a tree stump and emptied their guns into them as if they were a firing squad.

Senator Caldwell escaped before they arrived at his door. His wife, Margaret Ann, was told by the men who stood on her porch, “We are going to kill him if it is two years, or one year, or six, no difference; we are going to kill him anyhow. We have orders to kill him, and we are going to do it because he belongs to this republican party, and sticks up for these Negroes … We are going to have the south in our own charge … and any man that sticks by the republican party, and he is a leader, he has got to die.”

Margaret Caldwell testified that men were “shot to pieces” by the vigilantes. “They were around that morning killing people before breakfast,” she said. The death toll was thirty. About five hundred survivors, including Caldwell, fled to Jackson, where they congregated around the federal buildings and pleaded for protection.

White Democrats openly celebrated Clinton as a great victory. The
Jackson Daily Clarion
declared: “This lesson of Anglo-Saxon supremacy, written in blood, will ever remain the most important of many lessons taught in the modest college town of Clinton to the rising young manhood of a proud and untrammeled Commonwealth.”

Ames again beseeched the president for help. “A necessity of immediate action cannot be overstated,” he wrote. There was a small force of five hundred or so U.S. troops in Mississippi, divided between posts in Jackson, Holly Springs, and Vicksburg. Ames begged to use them—they could not intervene without direct orders from Grant.

Grant declined. The victor in an epic war had become a tired, calculating politician. Grant sensed that the mood of the country had shifted, as had his own, to apathy. “The whole public are tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South,” he complained. “… The great majority are ready now to condemn any interference on the part of the government. I heartily wish peace and good order might be restored without the issuing of a proclamation.” What’s more, a delegation of Ohioans had advised Grant that federal intervention in the South was so unpopular it could throw Ohio to the Democrats in the next election. Grant did the political math and decided that white Ohio, where Republican Rutherford Hayes was running for governor, was more important than black Mississippi.

Ames was alone with his troubles; there would be no federal troops to prop him up. Since the federal government lacked the will to protect Mississippi’s blacks, they would have to protect themselves. Ames had hesitated to arm a black militia for fear of igniting a race war that would be “felt over the entire south.” But now he ordered a thousand Springfield breech-loading muskets and authorized the mobilization of three Negro units. Among the columns were men who had been driven out of Clinton, including Charles Caldwell.

In early October, Caldwell led a small wagon train of men and armaments in a march across the countryside near Jackson. Word that black troops were armed with Springfields and bayonets so outraged whites that they threatened to hang Ames from a post in the governor’s mansion. As the election approached, Ames feared that the small regiments of black troops would only be butchered. He flinched. A group of Democrats, led by James Z. George and including William L. Nugent, proposed a “peace” settlement and met with Ames at the mansion. He agreed to disband the black militia.

The peace was one-sided. County by county, Ames lost control of the state. In Jasper County, a black activist named Sandy McGill was slain by the Klan when he refused to cease political organizing, despite threats. “He was a leader among the negros and they killed him because he defied them and made his boast,” Ben Graves
remembered. McGill and his brother-in-law, a man named Bill Henderson, were on McGill’s porch and waiting when the Klan rode into his yard. A white neighbor watched the riders stalk past the house, “one horse right after the other,” in a slow procession. McGill and Henderson refused to flee. Instead, they raised their weapons and triggered off a round. “They didn’t wait for the Ku Klux to fire; they fired on them,” Graves said. The two men were quickly overrun on their porch. Henderson managed to get away into the woods, but McGill was caught. “I think they beat him dead with a mall,” Graves remembered.

How Newton reacted to these atrocities is conjecture; there is no record of his feelings. But they must have cut him deeply—and implanted a cold fear for Rachel and her family.

The Democratic activist W. D. Gibbs campaigned through Jasper and Jones counties in 1875, pausing in Paulding to deliver what must have been a speech loaded with meaning before the Loyal League. Later, during an investigation of the election by the U.S. Senate, Gibbs denied terrorizing blacks and insisted the only guns Democrats had brandished were for squirrels.

Gibbs claimed that his appeal to black voters was perfectly free of intimidation. “I satisfied them, to the best of my knowledge and ability, the interests of the white man and the black man in Mississippi were identical.” Senate investigators asked:

In Paulding, Gibbs claimed, there were even “a good many colored people out to hear me.”

But Ames’s friend Albert Morgan drew a different portrait of W. D. Gibbs’s “canvassing.” Gibbs had menaced Morgan during a conversation about the election, in which Gibbs made clear the true nature of his Democratic activism.

“No one objects to the nigros votin’ now,” Gibbs told Morgan. “But the white man objects to nigro rule, and won’t submit to it any longer. It’s time for yo’ to quit yo’r ship. It is sinking mighty fast, and it’ll keep on till it reaches bottom. With yo’r support we could carry the county without any trouble at all. But, with or without it, we have made up our minds that we can, and by the Eternal, we will carry the county next time … We won’t harm you all unless yo’ get in ou’ way.”

“Who do you mean by you all?” Morgan asked.

“Why! Yo’ all Yankees and nigros—yo’ party.”

Gibbs continued: “I hope yo’ll all stand from under. It’ll save we all a heapo’ trouble. I tell yo’ we all white people have made up ou’ minds that we can, and we are going to carry this county next time. Peaceably, if we can, but fo’cibly if we must.”