The State of Jones (17 page)

As the Vicksburg survivors made their way through the region, they came across odd drifting scraps of paper. These were the bits and pieces of Jefferson Davis’s collection of books and papers, shredded by the Yankee victors. A slave named Alfred led hundreds of Northern soldiers to the plantation where “Old Jeff’s” furniture, books, and wine were cached. For two consecutive days they took special pleasure in ransacking and wrecking the property of the
Confederate president, until the flotsam floated through the woods for miles. Troopers stabbed at the volumes with the points of their bayonets “as often as they could find a piece of paper large enough to receive the point of a knife,” a caretaker wrote to Davis. When the frenzy was finally over, the Yankees rode away with hacked-up pieces of Davis’s carpets as saddle blankets and pieces of his curtains for tents.

To Major Walter Rorer of the 20th Mississippi Regiment, surreptitiously patrolling the area on horseback, it was as if all of society had been flipped upside down. Rorer was a fine example of an antebellum Mississippian, literate and valorous, a successful sawmill owner from Aberdeen who entered the army as a captain and rose in rank to lieutenant colonel, second officer of the regiment. He’d fought like a lion at the battle of Raymond, trying to halt Grant’s progress toward Vicksburg, for which he was cited for gallantry. “He was continually going up and down the line encouraging and directing the men as though no death messengers were nigh, exhibiting that noble daring and eminent tact which has rendered him so dear to every man in the regiment,” according to a report.

Rorer thought he was beyond shock, but what he saw when he rode out to survey the countryside under Yankee dominion gave him pause. He described his observations in a series of letters to a Virginia cousin. “I think any man would prefer death to such a life as many of those live who are left within enemy lines,” he wrote. “Every thing is taken from them before their eyes and given to their Negroes or taken by the soldiers, ladies dresses are given to Negro women, Negro men are dressed in Yankee uniform and formally mustered into the Service of the United States in the presence of their masters, and those families who are stripped of everything are limited to one suit of clothes and a daily ration that is issued to them by the federal commissary. It is a very wealthy country between the two rivers (Big Black and Yazoo) and some who were once worth a million are now worth nothing.”

Rorer’s sense of disorientation grew when he visited his home
in Aberdeen on furlough in August, in the wake of the Vicksburg defeat. The passenger trains were so crowded with fleeing civilians that Rorer couldn’t get a seat, so he hopped a freight train instead. He arrived eight miles from Aberdeen at dark, borrowed a mule from an acquaintance, and made his sad, plodding way toward town.

But Newton had little sympathy for planters who bemoaned their lost world or were plundered by Yankees. Rebel forces were perpetrating equally savage violence on the countryside, if not worse. Union troops patrolling the Louisiana side of the Mississippi River were aghast to find that rebel raiders had slain or set fire to everything in their path that might be put to use—including the slaves, who were shot or burned alive to prevent them from defecting. A Yankee cavalry commander reported,

With both sides determined to starve and burn the other out, swaths of the state were destitute, and yeoman families like Newton’s were caught squarely in the middle. Corn was up to four dollars a bushel and far beyond the means of soldiers’ families.

Newton’s wife, Serena, was on the brink of starvation and struggling to feed her children. She moved through an endless ring of chores on the Knight farm, a circuit of heavy manual labor from field to storehouse to smokehouse to corncrib. When a fence rail broke, there was no one to mend it for her. When the livestock strayed, there was no one to help her search it out. She wielded the heavy ax herself, yoked the animals, and drove the heavy plow. Night brought no relief from work, for once the children were asleep she sat up late at the spinning wheel, or shelled corn, or darned and laundered their fraying clothes.

Her continual physical exhaustion was compounded by anxieties—over what weather might do to her meager crops, whether she would be able to feed and clothe the children for another month, whether Newton would come home safely. Things began to wear out, with no way to replace them. Without Newton to tan, there were no new shoes. Pieces of farm equipment broke, with no way for her to fix them.

Serena wasn’t just tired; she was beset by loneliness. Her spirituality gave her some solace, but it became impractical to go to church. The farm animals needed a rest from farm work, so travel was just too difficult. Church attendance had dropped all over the state, as families lost their mules and horses to the Confederacy. “The ways of Zion languish and mourn,” wrote the Mississippi Synod. “Pastors are parted from their flocks, God’s worship interrupted or forbidden,
while from many churches God’s people are exiled sheep scattered without their shepherd.”

All in all, Serena probably endured as many hardships as Newton himself. At least as a Confederate conscript he’d had fellowship, something to eat, clothes to wear. His wife did not even have that much. Serena’s only company was a household full of needy children, none of whom were old enough to help her.

Nor could she expect any sympathy or support from the Confederate government. The bureaucracy was oblivious if not outright hostile to her deprivations; it expected her to sew flags and garments for the army and turn over her foodstuff and cloth without complaint, at risk of being labeled treasonous herself. Another yeoman wife, this one in North Carolina, summed up the state of women like Serena in a letter to her governor beseeching him for relief.

Instead of aid from the government, Serena received only harassment, or worse. The rebel officers who came hunting Newton may have physically abused her—it was not uncommon—when they didn’t ransack her storehouse or ruin her crops. Women who refused to tell the whereabouts of their men sometimes found themselves knocked to the ground with rifle butts. Her Confederate neighbors also deliberately set out to ruin her, as revenge for being married into a Unionist family. Even when Serena did have corn, she often could not find anyone to mill it for her, because Confederates ran the gins.

The brutally punishing attitude of rebels toward a Unionist spouse was reflected by the experience of one Alabama yeoman’s wife, who was left to cope with persecution in her local community after her husband escaped to the federal lines. She was set upon by Confederate soldiers, who tossed her spinning wheel, dresser, and dishes in the yard “as far as they could throw them.” They yelled at her “that her god dam’d Yankee husband had escaped from their prison and had gone to the Yanks.”

With the river ports and market towns in the hands of the Yankees, lines of wagons moved toward them, full of hungry yeoman wives, so desperate they were willing to defy Confederate law to trade goods. William L. Nugent’s cavalry unit caught a half dozen weathered farm women attempting to reach Union lines in hopes of bartering for needed supplies. They had traveled one hundred miles with a single bale of cotton in each wagon. The Confederates confiscated their meager goods and imprisoned two of them. To Nugent, who wrote about the incident to his own refined young wife, they seemed unwashed slatterns.

But nothing unhinged Mississippi
like desertion. Against this mural of ruin, Newton and his fellow Johnnies, bedraggled in clothing stained the color of dirt, staggered home from Vicksburg. Deserters swarmed over the state, until in some counties, blacks found that the woods were “so full of runaway white men that there was no room for them.”

Grant had made a shrewd decision to accept surrender with parole. As he predicted, the released and disillusioned soldiers became a crisis for the rebel army: a month after Vicksburg fewer than fifteen hundred of thirty thousand had reported for duty. All across the South, in Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana, men were missing from their units. In Mississippi, there were at least five thousand deserters, stragglers, and absentees, according to an inspecting officer for the Conscription Bureau. Men were leaving the rebel army faster than they were being rounded up, the officer noted with alarm.

The Confederate high command did its part to transform these parolees into disloyals. Amazingly and perhaps intentionally, the Confederate staff lost the official parole rolls. The high command used this as an excuse to violate the parole agreement and began attempts to force men back into the ranks whether or not they had been exchanged. For many soldiers, despair turned into open rebellion. Thousands of poor whites followed Newton Knight and became self-described Unionists.

Many of them went home to rural counties to find disaffection had already set in there. Reports of armed bands of deserters resisting Confederate authority had been pouring into the Mississippi governor’s office since the spring of 1863: Scott, Lawrence, Leake, and Marion counties all requested military aid to deal with the festering issue. In Simpson County, a band of twenty-five deserters busted out of the local jail and attacked citizens who had aided in capturing them. A similar account came from Gainesville, a town on the banks of the Pearl River in Hancock County, where deserters were so resistant that local authorities couldn’t confront them “without endangering their lives.” One man who lent his horse for an action against the deserters was “severely beaten and brused,” a Confederate official complained, adding, “It is not safe for any officer to ride through the country alone not knowing what minute that he may be waylaid and shot down from the wayside.”

Newton was not the only man in Jones who swore he would rather die than rejoin the Confederate army again. A large band of
seventy-five to one hundred or so deserters already prowled through the thickets of the county, with hundreds more lurking deeper in the swamps, led by Jasper Collins and his brothers. The men loosely cooperated in evading Confederate authorities and filched supplies from the homes of loyal rebels. Their presence provoked a typical letter to the governor, this one sent on June 1, 1863, from Company K of the 8th Mississippi Infantry. The men of Company K, known as the “Ellisville Invincibles,” were the most zealous Confederates in Jones, battle-tested veterans who had fought at Perryville. They were incensed at the reports of shirking and thieving they received from home and requested special duty to go back and round up the absentees. Second Lieutenant Harmon Mathis informed the governor that he and his men “all are desirous of being detached to Jones County, Miss. for the purpose of apprehending [and] arresting a body of deserters now lurking in said county … there is between seventy-five and one hundred deserters who are lying out in the swamps and prowling from house to house stealing everything they can get their hands on.”

The desertion problem had begun even before Vicksburg, but it bloomed into a perpetual crisis after. Why did deserters risk dishonor, imprisonment, and even execution rather than go back? The plain fact is that without conviction to carry a man, service in the Southern army was insufferable. Living in a swamp was in some ways preferable. It wasn’t just the ordeal of combat, it was the Southern soldier’s everyday existence, of comfortless exhaustion, chronic exposure, pauper’s pay, and rancid diet, and all of it enforced by tyranny from above.

There was no soap, and clothing rotted on their bodies from living outdoors; men didn’t change shirts for weeks at a time. Uniforms were worn so threadbare it became a source of joking. “In this army, one hole in the seat of the breeches indicates a captain, two holes is a lieutenant, and the seat of the pants all out indicates that the individual is a private,” a Confederate wrote. Overcoats and blankets were so hard to find after the first year of the war that men cut holes
in pieces of scavenged carpet and slipped them over their heads for warmth. It was an army that went everywhere on foot, and yet by the winter of 1863 reports of shoeless men leaving smears of blood on the ground came from all over the service.