The State of Jones (40 page)

To reinforce the point, Democratic leaders paraded not with squirrel guns, but with cannon. In Meridian on the day registration began, voters were informed that if they didn’t vote the right way, the siege guns would be turned on them. In Noxubee, Oktibbeha, and Colfax counties the cannon were detonated “very often, as a means to annoy, frighten, and intimidate those opposed to them,” until in Colfax County there was almost “a reign of terror.” In Monroe County, Democrats boasted that “there will be no U.S. soldiers to protect the voters, and they will have it all their own way.”

As matters grew worse, the Republican majority splintered and voter support faltered. A Republican ally named J. B. Allgood wrote to Ames advising him that the Republican league there was dissolving. “If we can have no protection, it is to the interest of us to disband our organization,” he wrote. “The negro is unable to protect himself; ignorant, illiterate, poor, and dependant as he is, he is at the mercy of the white man. I would like to know if we can get any protection; if not, we should know it, and shape our course accordingly.”

By now Ames didn’t need to read letters to know what the Democrats were doing. They threatened to do violence to Ames himself. One night in Jackson a group of belligerent Democrats marched through the streets with a cannon drawn by mules and paused at the governor’s mansion. They jeered and roared at the windows—and then fired pistol shots at them. They disappeared for a time, but returned in the early hours of the morning, thoroughly drunken, and began firing again, and also detonated the cannon, rattling the windows. They debated whether to storm the manse and kill Ames on the spot, but decided not to. Instead they went to the offices of the Republican newspaper, the
Jackson Pilot
, and shattered the windows.

On November 1, 1875, the day before the election, Ames wrote to his wife, “The reports which come to me almost hourly are truly sickening. Violence, threats of murder, and consequent intimidation are co-extensive with the limits of the state. Republican leaders in many localities are hiding in the swamps or have sought refuge beyond the borders of their own counties.”

The Democrats won in a landslide. In Columbus, Mississippi, vigilantes set fourteen fires and killed four black voters, and mobs greeted others and made them vote Democratic at the end of gun barrels. In Claiborne County, a cluster of black voters had to pass through a gauntlet of eighty White Liners carrying Remington breechloaders; they opened fire on them at a blast from a bugle, wounding six. When a report of the incident was wired to General James Z. George, he responded approvingly, “Your dispatch satisfactory. Push on the column, but keep quiet.” The Republican vote count in Claiborne was expected to be more than 1,800. It was just 496.

In Aberdeen, a hundred mounted and uniformed men under former Confederate general Reuben Davis guarded the polls and threatened to “cover the yard with dead niggers in fifteen minutes” if any blacks tried to vote. Those who did were pistol-whipped, and the crowd dispersed. There were 1,400 Republicans in Aberdeen; just 90 cast votes. In Yazoo County, the Negro population was 12,000. There, Republicans got just 7 votes.

In Jones County, they got just 4.

As the returns came in on election night, Democrats carried sixty-two of seventy-four counties. A brass band led a parade to the house of James Z. George, who declared “the redemption of our common mother, Mississippi.” By the time all the votes were counted, the Democrats controlled the state legislature with a four-to-one majority.

The killing didn’t stop with the election. All over Mississippi jubilant White Liners continued to drive Republicans out of office by force and did violence to blacks who had defied them. They had a particular score to settle with State Senator Charles Caldwell, who had displayed such militancy during the Clinton affair.

They assassinated him at Christmastime. A group of vigilantes invited him to have a drink, and the clinking of glasses was the prearranged signal: he was shot through the back from a window. He was then dragged to the sidewalk, where he lay bleeding as a Clinton street mob fired thirty to forty more bullets into him. When the town bells pealed to announce his death, his wife Margaret took to her bed in grief. When Caldwell’s brother Sam rode into town to find his brother’s body, he too was shot dead.

Blanche Ames wrote her mother: “Those who have seen Caldwell’s corpse report that the body had to be tied together, while on his head and neck there was not a space where one could lay a hand.”

Ames too feared assassination. He hardly knew a man in Jackson who hadn’t either taken part in the terrors or sat idly by as they occurred. Vigilantes liked to demonstrate how defenseless he was by firing their guns near the mansion. “At night in the town here, the crack of the pistol or gun is as frequent as the barking of dogs,” Blanche wrote. “Night before last they gave us a few shots as they passed the mansion yard, by way of reminder.”

Ames barely lasted past the New Year. In February of 1876 the state legislature drew up thirteen articles of impeachment against him. One of them accused him of fomenting a race war by naming Charles Caldwell to the militia. James Z. George formed a committee
of prominent men to press Ames for his resignation, and among them was William L. Nugent. The delegation confronted Ames and threatened him with removal. Rather than prolong the state’s agony, he resigned.

Newton left no record of his mood after the election of 1875, but it can be guessed at: Mississippi Republicans had lost all faith in politics. Grant’s refusal to send in troops had left them “to the tender mercies of the Ku Klux Klan,” as one Mississippian put it. The Reconstruction project had collapsed, and the state was in the hands of the same antebellum leaders who had driven the South into desolation. As the presidential race of 1876 approached, Newton had no hope that the law would protect him, or his friends and loved ones.

“The Negroes are now almost ready to take to the swamps, and unless the government send troops here at least a month before the election, the Negroes will not go to the polls,” one Republican activist wrote to Washington. “We look for the Government to stand by us and if it does not it can take these Southern States and do what it pleases with them.”

Ames departed for Washington, where he announced to anyone who would listen that Mississippi had been violently overthrown. A Senate select committee was convened to inquire into voting conditions in the state, headed by George Boutwell of Massachusetts. Ames, stiff with dignity yet seething, testified that James Z. George’s so-called Redeemers had won the state “due wholly to fraud, violence, and murder to such an extent and degree that the northern mind seems incapable of comprehending it.”

In the spring and summer of 1876 members of the Boutwell committee went to Mississippi to collect testimony firsthand, but they found many Republicans so traumatized they refused to cooperate. A party man from Macon named E. Stafford wrote a letter declining to appear, using searing language that surely reflected some of Newton’s own feelings.

“Very few from this county will go voluntarily before your committee, for two important reasons,” Stafford wrote.

Still, after devoting months to the task, the committee collected two volumes of documentary evidence, including testimony from witnesses such as Albert Morgan and Margaret Caldwell, the wife of the assassinated legislator. Stacks of pages described in gruesome detail the tactics that had been employed in the election of 1875. The report ended with a succinct conclusion that stated in unmistakable language that militants had retaken by force what Grant and Sherman had fought so bloodily for.

“The state of Mississippi is at present under the control of political organizations composed largely of armed men whose common purpose is to deprive the negroes of the free exercise of the right of suffrage and to establish and maintain the supremacy of the white-line democracy, in violation alike of the constitution of their own state and of the Constitution of the United States,” it read.

Not that it did any good. Even while the report was being written, Mississippi’s Democrats were once again employing gun blasts and suppression to sway the 1876 presidential race between Rutherford Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden. Mississippi’s White Line legislature issued a new decree aimed at black voters: they were required to disclose where they lived and were employed. Once again, thousands of fearful black voters stayed away from the polls. In Yazoo County exactly two Republicans cast votes. In Tallahatchie, the total was one.

When the national votes were tallied, it was the closest election in U.S. history. The deadlock created a constitutional crisis that lasted for months and was only settled, after protracted negotiation, by the Compromise of 1877. Democrats agreed to give Hayes the presidency, in exchange for his concession that federal troops would no longer intervene in the South. There would be no more meddling in Dixie’s domestic matters; Southern whites would settle “the Negro question” for themselves without any further federal help.

It had been a decade since the Civil War, and yet to Rachel, Newton, their children, and other freedmen it seemed that “the whole South—every state in the South—had got into the hands of the very men that held us as slaves,” as one black leader bewailed.
The Nation
magazine announced, “The Negro will disappear from the field of national politics. Henceforth the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him.”

For men like Newton and Ames, the dirt farmer and the patrician governor alike, it was a disaster, the wreck of all they had hoped for from Reconstruction. In fact, it was more than that: it was the true end of the war. “A revolution has taken place—by force of arms,” Ames had declared, as he watched events helplessly, “and a race are to be disenfranchised—they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom—an era of second slavery.” The Mississippi election of 1875 had been merely a continuation of the conflict they had fought a decade earlier and thought they had won. They were wrong. They had lost.

Autumn 1876, Jasper County, Mississippi

N
ewton retreated to his farm, but
he didn’t surrender. Instead, to the frustration and disgust of his enemies, he propagated. What few ideals Newton had left, he lived out privately, devoting himself to his acreage and his ever-burgeoning families. He said there was “no time to try to attend to other men’s business, that he had plenty to do to attend to his own business,” his son Tom recalled.

His “own business” was indeed plentiful: By 1876, the Knight homestead teemed with sixteen children and infants, most of them Newton’s. It almost seemed as if he was determined to colonize a separate mixed-race society.

One bit of business Newton had was pressing: a month after the presidential election, he deeded Rachel 160 acres of land. The deed, handwritten and dated December 3, 1876, was an almost unheard-of gesture for a white man in Mississippi, and it bespoke Newton’s partnership with Rachel, whom he had come to regard as his “second
wife.” It also suggested how much he wanted to secure her independence. Most whites sought to virtually re-enslave blacks, to drive them from land, or use them as tenants and cheap laborers, not to promote their independence. The title to her own land would protect Rachel in the event something happened to him.

According to the deed, Newton gave Rachel the land for less than a dollar an acre, a fraction of what it was worth. The “fea simple” came to $150, and we can’t know whether Rachel actually paid Newton, but if she did have that kind of money, it means she was hugely industrious and that Newton had treated her with generosity in their sharecropping arrangement. In any case, the possession of her own land was a great day for Rachel. Land was the irreplaceable American prerequisite for social standing and autonomy. Land was what so many blacks believed was promised to them as compensation for slavery after the Civil War—forty acres and a mule—and had been lost by the broken promises of Reconstruction. Land was freedom itself. “What’s de use of being free,” one black asked, “if you don’t own land enough to be buried in? Might as well stay slave all yo days.” Land was everything—and the vast majority of blacks were landless. A survey of seventeen Mississippi counties in 1870 found that not one in a hundred blacks owned the land on which they worked. Fifteen years after the Civil War, only 7.3 percent of blacks in the entire rural Cotton South owned farms. Rachel now owned four times forty acres, and the land would shelter her from the neo-Confederate ascendancy that had swept the state and release her from the “iron grip” of the sharecropping system.