The State of Jones (6 page)

The battle of Corinth was one of the most costly of the war for the South. A number of Confederate companies were “almost annihilated,”
and Van Dorn’s army was “shattered.” In two days of fighting, he had wrecked two of his three divisions and suffered a horrifying casualty rate of 35 percent. In some places “the dead bodies of Rebels were piled up … eight and ten deep,” and in one spot two hundred bodies were arrayed as if in one long, thin coffin.

Strategically, the loss was “crushing” for the Confederacy, as General Grant put it, for it closed off Southern transportation lines, gave Grant control of northern Mississippi, and opened the way for his campaign against Vicksburg. General Sherman, nearby in western Tennessee, heard Southerners “openly admit that their cause had sustained a death-blow.”

But to Newton and the other infantrymen who trudged into Camp Rogers at Holly Springs, the loss was more personal. They were past endurance, done in with fatigue, disheartened, and filled with disgust at their officers. Van Dorn was to be court-martialed: there was talk that he had been drunk. Other commanders had been incompetent. During the retreat soldiers were marched in the wrong direction and then countermarched, and many were half-starved for want of food. Even when they reached camp at Holly Springs, there were shortages of everything, including tents. Worst of all, some of the wounded had been abandoned or lay uncared for.

A train, at least five cars long, was left overnight full of men with undressed wounds, some without blankets, and all of them with nothing to eat. They were unattended and no one could find an officer. A lieutenant discovered them at about ten or eleven at night by happenstance.

Van Dorn was acquitted in the court-martial, but it was obvious from testimony that he had treated his troops as if they were toy soldiers and that his slipshod logistical work had caused needless suffering. One of those who testified against him was Colonel Robert Lowry of the 6th Mississippi, the veteran of Shiloh, who described his efforts to feed his famished men. The rations were “insufficient,” Lowry snapped. By the close of the first day’s fight, “our commissary stores were exhausted,” he said. As they fell back, they were
given nothing except a single mangy live cow, without any salt with which to cure it. After consultation with his men, Lowry drove the poor beast away. His men went two more days without rations of any kind, his pleas to superiors ignored, before Lowry finally sent men out with wagons to purchase forty bushels of potatoes, which he and his officers paid for with their own money.

Hunger only deepened the acrimony. The 7th Mississippi Battalion had done some of the heaviest fighting and suffered fifty-nine casualties. Company F lost a quarter of its men, among them some of Newton’s relatives, neighbors, and close friends. His favorite cousins Alpheus Knight, Ben Knight, and Dickie Knight were all hospitalized. His friend John H. Harper had almost lost both his feet, and Harper’s brother was dead. Jimmie Reddoch, whose family owned land adjoining the Knights’, had a hole in his jaw. It seemed like everyone he knew was in the hospital: Jim Ates, Tom Ates, Maddie Bush, Tapley Bynum, Jeff Collins, James Morgan Valentine, all of whom he had grown up with. When Company F mustered after the battle, Newton was the only noncommissioned officer who reported for duty.

Newton apparently behaved well at Corinth, because shortly afterward he was promoted to second sergeant and assigned as a provost guard, a kind of policing role. But his rank may have resulted from the fact that so few able-bodied men remained.

Once again, Newton nursed the sick; Major Joel E. Welborn recalled seeing him in the hospital at about this time. But in the days after Corinth, Newton and his friends in Company F became increasingly disaffected. It’s possible that he and his comrades associated their battle ordeal with the ancient siege of Corinth: classical stories often circulated among the troops, and the tale of the Athenian general Iphicrates, a deserter and a traitor to his country who achieved fame in liberating the city, was an unmistakable connection. Perhaps they recited from Lord Byron’s “Siege of Corinth”:

Newton felt a thousand wrongs. But perhaps the most galling wrong of all came a week after the battle. On October 11, 1862, the Confederate legislature passed its infamous Twenty Negro Law. The edict exempted the richest men from military service: “One white man on every plantation with twenty or more slaves” was permitted to stay at home.

Wealthy planters had pressured the Confederacy to pass the Twenty Negro Law in response to anxiety about maintaining discipline on the plantation. Slaves constituted half the population in the Deep South, and fears of revolt ran deep. The law would discourage slaves from running off to Union troops and prevent wives and daughters from being left alone with a lot of Negroes. Also, if planters and overseers remained at home, they argued, they could better see to the crops that fed the Confederacy.

When word of the decree reached Company F, anger boiled over. Jasper Collins was in camp with Knight when he heard about it. “This law,” he said, “makes it a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” The phrase would reverberate through the South for the rest of the war.

Collins threw down his rifle. “I’m through,” he said. He told one of his officers, “I don’t intend to shoot another gun here.” The officer said, “Don’t you know they will kill you?”

“They will have to catch me first, before they kill me,” Collins replied.

Soon after, Collins deserted. As of October 31, 1862, he was reported absent without leave.

Throughout the ranks, the Twenty Negro Law was greeted with outrage. A farmer from Smith County (adjacent to Jones) wrote to Mississippi governor John J. Pettus: “We who have but little or nothing at stake but honor are called on to do the fighting and to do the hard drudgery and bear the burthen and brunt of the battle, while the rich and would-be rich are shirking and dodging in every way
possible to shun the danger.” This Twenty Negro Law “did more to injure the Southern case” than Lincoln’s recently announced Emancipation Proclamation, he insisted.

Newton lived not on a plantation, but in the upcountry; he wasn’t a planter, he was a herder and farmer who owned no slaves. Yeomen made up the vast ranks of Confederate soldiers doing the bitterest fighting—and from this point onward, they would also make up the ranks of deserters and resisters. The Twenty Negro Law was written exclusively for the planter class, not for the infantrymen. As one Alabama yeoman farmer said, “All tha want is to git you … to fight for their infurnal negroes and after you do their fightin’ you may kiss their hine parts for o tha care.”

What little loyalty Newton had to the army was utterly gone. “He felt that the law was not fair,” his neighbor Ben Graves said. “That it enabled the rich man to evade service and that it was not right to ask him to risk his life for people who rated themselves so far above him.”

All told, in the months after Corinth about seven thousand men in southeastern Mississippi went absent without leave. Whole companies vanished into the woods. Some of them were merely frustrated and would eventually return to the ranks out of guilt, or loyalty. Others were captured and forced back.

With Jasper Collins already departed, Newton grappled with his own conscience. Desertion was an act of shame, according to traditional understandings of loyalty and honor. But he surely wondered if the dishonor of desertion could be any worse than the dishonor he suffered as a Confederate. He wasn’t the only one who was thinking this way: between the battle of Corinth and the turning of the New Year, men from Company F deserted in droves. A muster roll for February 28, 1863, listed thirty-nine of them as AWOL.

There were also practical reasons for the massive desertions that fall and winter: 1862 was a horrible crop year, especially in the hill country, where a summer drought had destroyed much of the food in the fields. Rich planters could survive a bad year, but not poor farmers.
Worries over crops, winter food stores, and the welfare of their families hastened soldiers home.

At the same time, the Confederacy passed yet another egregious law: a tax in kind. This gave officials the authority to enter farmers’ storehouses and walk off with 10 percent of their provisions. Officers, or thieves masquerading as such, “roamed the state seizing slaves, horses, food, and even houses.”

One month after Jasper Collins deserted, Newton received a letter from his wife, Serena. A Confederate cavalryman had come to their farm and seized their best horse, and mistreated her while he was at it. Serena cried and begged to be left the much-needed animal: it was several miles to the nearest mill and there were children to be fed. The cavalryman cursed her, caught the horse, and got on him.

“This was too much for my father,” Tom Knight wrote.

Newton was done with the Confederacy. He did not intend to serve a new nation conceived in slavery and dedicated to the perpetuation of rich men’s interests. Jasper Collins led him to the Rubicon, and perhaps the stories of courageous martyrs and deserters at the ancient Corinth gave him the faith to cross it. “I felt like if they had a right to conscript me when I didn’t want to fight the Union, I had a right to quit when I got ready,” Newton said.

One day in early November, Newton deserted. The 7th Mississippi Battalion was on the retreat in early November of 1862, as it fell back under pressure from U. S. Grant, who was pressing down into Mississippi from Memphis. As the regiment evacuated a camp town called Abbeville, Newton was “lost on the retreat,” according to his military record. Somewhere, in all the marching, Sergeant Newton Knight slipped away into the woods.

“While they were there they did their duty the best they could,” Tom Knight wrote. “… They were poor men. They had no negroes to fight for, but the most of them had a dear wife and little children that needed their protection at home. They came home and did their duty here at home in Jones County.”

December 1860, Jones County

T
o old Jackie Knight, secession was
no cause for anthems. It meant the smoking destruction of all he had built, the country he had settled and the acreage he had cleared, planted, and colonized too, with eleven children and thirty-six grandchildren scattered across Jones County. There were Knights, too, among the slaves he owned.

“I am ruined,” he said.

Forty-five years earlier, Jackie had ridden into the primeval wilderness of the Mississippi Territory and subdued it with a whip and an ax. Newton’s grandfather was an archetypal pioneer, an imbiber of “Protestant scripture and boiled whiskey,” as William Faulkner described his kind, “Bible and jug in one hand, and like as not an Indian tomahawk in the other, brawling, turbulent, uxorious, and polygamous.”

The eighty-seven-year-old Knight family patriarch tilted backward in a chair on the long gallery of his pine-log home. He occupied
the same shaded spot each day, with his chair leaned at an angle against the wall, so habitually that there was a sleek place where his resting head had worn away the pine. As Jackie lamented the secession crisis that gripped Mississippi, he tossed his head from side to side in agitation. He moaned again, “I am ruined.” He said it so often that it sounded to a small slave child named Martha, who was playing in the yard, like a chant. “I am ruined, I am ruined.”

The old man had much to lose. By the end of 1860 as secession fever swept the state, Jackie Knight was one of the wealthiest men in the vicinity. From his porch, he commanded an overview of 680 acres, profitably planted with cotton and rice, and more than twenty slaves working in them. The field hands wore hats of woven palmetto leaves to keep the sun off their brows as they moved among the planted rows. Closer in, eight slave cabins formed a semicircular yard, where women labored over washing tubs and vats, tended chickens, or roasted bushels of potatoes in an outdoor oven. At the foot of the porch, a dozen or so slave children did menial tasks. One fed kindling into the oven. Another waved flies away from the porch with a brush. When Jackie wanted to smoke his pipe, he called out, “Fire, fire!” A child grabbed a burning cob from the oven and ran over to light “ole master’s” tobacco.

The Knight family’s wealth and holdings did not end at his property line, either. Adjoining Jackie’s land was the farm belonging to his daughter, Altimirah, and her forty-six-year-old husband George Brumfield, who owned eight slaves. Two farms over, Jackie’s youngest and most prodigal son, Daniel, and his wife, Elizabeth, lived on a spread with ten slaves.