The State of Jones (8 page)

On Sundays, he attended church, sitting on a rough-hewn bench
with trestle legs. The Knights and the other families either walked, so as to rest the horses that had plowed all week, or hitched the steers to wagons and put chairs in the back.

Farming and faith united the poor whites of Jones County. House raisings and corn shuckings were, like baptisms, communal rituals. When a family moved into the area, or a newly married couple purchased their first small plot, neighbors gathered round to help them build the frame, floor, and roof of their new home. Corn shuckings were celebrations of the harvest, of man and God working together to create the kernels that sustained life. The shuckers sang as they worked, in a call-and-response melody:

Shuckings, land clearings, and house raisings were social occasions that drew families from miles around. Newton’s family thought nothing of traveling ten or fifteen miles to a log rolling. “They would go out in the woods, cut their logs, and haul them up,” Newton’s son Tom recalled. “Then they would split those logs, and ask in a few hands and put the logs up. Then my father would hew them down on the inside, and when it was finished call it a fine house.”

Women cooked the dinner and sat together and picked cotton off the seed or spun and quilted. A dozen women at their wheels made an ambient buzzing noise, and Mason and the other women could weave as much as five or six yards each of homespun in a day.

With the shucking done, and the moon rising over the piles of naked ears, they sat down to feast on fresh pork and sweet potato pie. In their minds, they were the chosen people of God, morally superior to slave owners, who did no work and depended on others for their livelihood. They were God’s special children.

The Knights were Baptists of a plain sort. Later in his life, Newton was a devoted Primitive Baptist, and he may have grown up one. It was an aptly named denomination, suggesting the nature of the
faith. While baptisms in Natchez took place in marble fonts surrounded by Italian stained glass, Primitive Baptists received the sacrament outdoors, under God’s canopy. After confessing their faith, the candidates for baptism waded into the muddy, snake-infested swamps, with the preacher leading the way, his Bible raised high over his head. It was full immersion. The congregation stood at water’s edge, singing, “High in the Father’s house above our mansion is prepared, there is the home, the rest I love, with Christ forever shared.”

These Baptists of the Piney Woods practiced foot washing, lay preaching, and egalitarian worship in unadorned buildings. The central tenet of their faith was that all humans were equal in God’s eyes and infused with God’s spirit. “God is no respecter of persons” was one of their favorite passages from the Bible. Another was: “Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body.”

Until about 1820, all Mississippi Baptists had acted on these egalitarian doctrines; blacks and whites worshipped together and prayed together. Lay preachers spoke informally, as the word of God came to them. But when cotton became king, and money talked louder than God, silver-tongued ministers yoked the word of God to the command of the slave owner. Increasingly, slaveholders and Southern evangelical ministers became one and the same: the voices of God’s authority.

Primitive Baptists resisted such sophistry. For them, “the tongue of the learned” was a forked tongue, as one preacher said. In the 1840s, they formed a separate church in order to worship autonomously and in traditional ways, renouncing privilege and the pastimes of the rich. Indeed, they viewed the planter class as lazy and effeminate: the gentry had soft “fair hands covered with gloves,” whereas their own hands were hard and rough, “exposed by reason of hard labor.” They embraced the purity of simple living.

Initially, Albert and Mason Knight attended the Leaf River Baptist Church, which sat at the junction of Jones and Smith counties,
and which Jackie and Keziah Knight had helped found. But in the 1830s, its influential gentrified pastor, Norvell Robertson, began to lead the congregation away from primitive practices such as foot washing and toward more mainstream worship. Robertson was a Virginia-born planter who owned seven slaves, and he was also the sort who paid as much attention to others’ behavior as his own. He attempted to impose his morality on a flock full of unruly and unrepentant backwoodsmen, censuring various members for offenses such as drinking, dancing, fiddling, and fornicating. This did not sit well with the Knight men, who were enthusiastic drinkers and brawlers. Neighbor Ben Graves recalled, “The early Knights were considered tuff people.” In 1838, Albert Knight was excluded from the church for “repeated intoxication.” A problem with whiskey may have run in the family; Jackie’s youngest son, Daniel, would steadily drink up his inheritance. Still, it may have seemed the height of hypocrisy to Albert to be called sinner by a slave owner like Robertson. As the pastor became increasingly intrusive and the worship less primitive, most of the Knights stopped attending Leaf River, including Jackie. Albert and Mason instead began attending a church called Old Union.

Newton didn’t drink, but other Knights and their neighbors enjoyed drinking as a pastime, a solace, and relief from backbreaking work. There was a choice of saloons in the towns of Williamsburg or Mount Carmel over in Covington County, if they wanted to go that far, where the various shades of liquor were served with evocative names like John Silver, Old Morgan, or Ben Gun. But they didn’t need to travel to drink: just about every household in the area had a ten-gallon keg of whiskey in the house, bought during their annual trips to Mobile to sell goods.

Once or twice a year Newton and the other men of the family drove their surplus crops to Mobile by ox wagon for exchange or sale. The trip was 125 miles and took ten days, following a trail that meandered parallel to the Leaf River. Teams of oxen yoked in fours and sixes lumbered in front of springboard wagons hauling upward
of five thousand pounds of melons, bushels of corn, and bales of cotton, along a road so barely traceable that it “looked more like Indian path.” Often they halted, water-bound by rising streams. They made the journey with other families, sharing campsites and relying on one another for mutual protection.

The trip was a high adventure for a young man, a moving caravan and menagerie. Newton and the other boys herded the livestock, using cowhide whips to force seventy or one hundred hogs into a begrudging trot. Flocks of turkeys and chickens fluttered and skittered down the road before them and roosted in the trees at night.

Mobile, the South’s second largest seaport to New Orleans, was a stunning, multihued international business capital, a crescent of packed quays and warehouses set against the shimmering azure of the Gulf. It roared with commerce, roustabouts bustling along wharves, merchants dodging in and out of cotton presses and slave houses, and dusky outlanders dickering in what must have sounded to Newton’s ear like strange pidgin languages. Away from the water, on the quieter residential lanes, gracious silence reined over mansions entwined by honeysuckle and roses and cloistered by large oaks. British journalist William Howard Russell in 1861 described the market city, “crowded with Negroes, mulattoes, quadroons, and mestizos of all sorts, Spanish, Italians, and French, speaking their own tongues, or a quaint lingua franca, and dressed in very striking and pretty costumes.”

With cash in their pockets from the sale of their produce and livestock, the Knights and other Jones County farmers perused the goods for sale. The first things they bought were kegs of whiskey for themselves, at eighteen cents a gallon. Next was calico for the women; at fifty cents a yard, it took five dollars’ worth to make a dress. Flour was precious at ten dollars a barrel. They bought syrup, steeped in kegs like tar, and salt, which came in two-hundred-pound sacks that cost a dollar. Iron bars were another oft-purchased commodity, for hammering into tools and farm implements.

The trip to Mobile and back took nearly three weeks, but it was
highly instructive to the young Newton. It acquainted him with every narrow footpath and log bridge between Jones and the coast, the various shortcuts and dangers along the route. It taught him to travel vast distances easily and without fear, how to move across the backwoods landscape and use its resources to his advantage.

It taught him that the frontier could be remarkably fluid, for all of its privations. The Knights and other Piney Woods yeomen ranged far and wide; in addition to their journeys to Mobile, they regularly traipsed the dirt roads and traced local rivers to smaller market towns in their region. They used the spring-swollen Leaf River to float timber all the way to the Gulf. They built flat, shallow-keeled barges to transport goods to a shabby little market center in nearby Perry County named New Augusta, which one visitor described as no more than eight or ten “tenements” around a village square, with a grocery and a public trading house. Farther off was the Pearl River, which ran along the western edge of Covington County all the way to the Louisiana Gulf coast and offered irregular steam packet service up and down its banks. There was also the old military road forged by Andrew Jackson from Nashville to New Orleans, which passed directly through Jasper, Jones, and Covington counties.

Most frequently, they traveled to the small burg of Ellisville, the county seat of Jones established in 1842, which was constituted of “the remnant of a log courthouse, and two … grog shops.” Nevertheless, it had its pretensions, evidence of which were some handsome homes built by rising merchants, with fine heart-pine lumber, bricks, hardware, and paint brought from Mobile. The village sat eighty miles southeast of Jackson and twenty miles north of Hattiesburg and was named for Judge Powhatan Ellis, who had worked as a circuit judge in the vicinity before going to the Senate and the Mississippi Supreme Court. Ellis was a frontier traditionalist, judging by his ruling that it was perfectly legal for a husband to chastise an obstreperous wife.

The distance to market meant that between trips, the Knights made do with what they had or did without. Shoes were precious
commodities and had to be handmade by Albert. He taught Newton to tan hides for them: they cut down a pine and dug a ten-foot trough in it, which they filled with lime, water, and ashes to remove hair from the skins. They cut the cured hides into shapes and tacked the soles together with tiny wooden pegs. Ladies’ shoes were made of deerskin, men’s of cowhide, and one pair was all any member of the family could expect per year. Some Jones Countians walked barefoot to church, carrying their shoes in hand to protect the soles, and only put them on once they were inside. Then they’d pull them off again after the service was over.

They grew indigo and boiled bark for dye. They made their own soap from redwood ashes, collected grease and cracklings in a large dripper, and molded their own tallow candles. Newton and his father carved their own plow stocks; for harrows, they used the crotch of a forked hickory tree and made teeth by whittling pegs. They used home remedies of herbs and roots for medicines, because the nearest doctor was a day’s ride away. And they wore their hair long, with whiskers, because there was no barber and shaving was too difficult. When Newton needed a haircut, he did it with a pair of farming shears.

The yeomen who practiced such hard-won self-reliance naturally resented any encroachment on their autonomy. During Newton’s youth in the 1840s and 1850s, the county was without much in the way of formal authority, and in fact it became famous abroad for its citizens’ tendency to do as they pleased and reject outside interference, which may have given rise to the appellation “The Free State of Jones.” The place was said to be so free of social convention, and any form of civil rule, that the people were “wholly indifferent to the judgments of the courts, for they had no jail except a log-pen, without a lock to its door or a roof upon it, and as for pecuniary penalties, they defied them.”

But as Newton entered adulthood, burgeoning gentry appeared in Jones County and so did officialdom. A circle of local merchants, emboldened by their success in commerce, began to impose them
selves as moral, civil, and political arbiters much as Norvell Robertson at the Leaf River Baptist Church imposed himself as a religious authority.

A conspicuous member of the self-designated local aristocracy was Amos McLemore, a thirty-four-year-old Methodist-Episcopal minister, schoolteacher, and slave owner. McLemore preached on Sundays in the largest church in the county, a five-hundred-seat congregation. But on Mondays, he set aside piety and did business across three counties from Perry to Jones. By 1860, he was the leader of the local Masonic lodge, carrying the title of worshipful master. He was also a land speculator and owner of a half interest in a dry goods business with Dr. John M. Baylis, the physician who would soon be performing amputations on the Confederate wounded. McLemore had a lordly sense of lineage: his grandfather had served in the Revolutionary War, an uncle had served under Andrew Jackson in 1812. His kin had founded Meridian, the second-largest city in the state, where they owned a vast plantation. He had a high opinion of his own refinements and a low one of the local yeomanry, judging by a descendant’s description of him. His great-grandson, Mississippi historian Rudy Leverett, claimed, “He was among the very first to bring some of the gentler influences of civilization to one of the most notoriously primitive areas of the state.”

Another member of this select circle was fifty-four-year-old businessman Amos Deason, a merchant known for scoundrelly business dealings and owner of arguably the most handsome home in Ellisville. The elegant white manor gave the illusion of being built of expensive imported white marble, but the façade was actually of wood panels painted to look like stone. Tall paned windows framed a broad octagonal porch, and oaks draped the elegant peaked roof. Deason would eventually become the district representative to the Mississippi Confederate legislature.