The State of Jones (21 page)

Newton would have learned how to hunt in the swamp for coon and opossum at night in the heat of the summer, when they were hidden and sleeping. Swamp possums were round, long-bodied little animals, of a whitish color, with noses like pigs, and they burrowed among the roots and in the hollows of the gum tree. They were clumsy but deceitful and cunning creatures that would feign their own deaths at the tap of a stick, only to scamper away. Newton also would have learned how to make a fish trap, a box made of notched boards and sticks, between two and three feet square, baited with a handful of wet meal and cotton wadded together. A fish swimming through the upraised door toward the bait would strike one of the small sticks and turn a handle, and the door would fall shut.

But Newton’s most reliable ally and source of sustenance was Rachel. It was during this time, when he was a fugitive and she remained in bondage to his family, that their partnership began. According to Knight family tradition, it was Rachel who helped hide Newton when it became too dangerous for him to go back to Serena and his children. They had an agreement: she would provide him with food, and he would work to secure her freedom.

The young woman knew both the ways of the swamp and the kitchens of Confederates. Rachel ferried food, clothing, and information to Newton. She regularly crossed the boundaries between Confederate households, the slave cabins, and the hidden civilization in the swamp, carrying news to Newton and keeping him apprised
of rebel movements, information she may well have overheard in the loyal kitchen of Jesse Davis Knight. For the rest of the war, Rachel would operate as Newton’s “intelligence,” according to a family member. She became Newton’s spy, his eyes and ears.

Rachel showed Newton and his men methods of poisoning or killing the dogs that pursued them. She ground up red pepper into a fine powder and scattered it to foul the noses of the hounds and taught Newton to dig up wild onions or garlic and rub them on the soles of his shoes and then cross a road backward, to baffle the dogs. She supposedly told Newton, “There’s lots a’ ways to choke a dog ’sides on butter.”

The deserters’ wives also conspired to wound or kill dogs. The hounds were kept ravenous, so that they would hunt, since a dog with a full stomach would only sleep. According to one account it was Rachel who taught the local women how to hide glass splinters, strychnine, and other poisons in the dog food.

But sometimes the men were cornered and alone in the swamps and had to hope their trigger fingers were faster than the jaws of the mastiffs. “Some of them died of lead poisoning,” Newton said, laconically.

Outwardly, Rachel and the other slaves of Jones County went about their business, doing their chores and obeying Confederate laws. But these were phantom gestures, veneers, as they awaited their liberation. The men and women in the slave quarters surely felt a personal stake in the survival of Newton and his band and guarded against their recapture. There was not a black in the Piney Woods unaware that Newton had run away from the army and was willing to fight to free slaves from bondage.

According to the Union government they were already free. Word of the Emancipation Proclamation had reached Jones County, and possibly so did word that in January of 1863 the Union forces occupying Corinth had held emancipation ceremonies, led by chaplains. Thousands of freedmen and women who had made their way to federal encampments were declared liberated—and then armed with pistols.

Mississippi slaves in the path of Yankee troops rejoiced at their arrival, demonstrating that they were acutely aware of their personal status. A twenty-four-year-old Yankee captain from Iowa who marched through the Jackson area in the late spring of 1863 was practically mobbed by overjoyed freedmen. “Passed by many a fine deserted place,” he wrote in his diary. “The colored people manifested great joy at our approach, and told us they prayed constantly for our success and had been praying for this time for many years. Many a god bless you was sent after us as we passed them.”

Men and women who had previously seemed subservient were no longer. In Vicksburg, no sooner had the Confederates under Pemberton surrendered than slaves in the town declared themselves no longer bound. One woman announced “her intention of going to search for her sons, as she was free now … she would not wait a day.” Another woman demanded wages from her mistress—and was turned out of the house for it.

Even small children were aware of what was at stake in the war. In Lauderdale County, Mississippi, a young girl named Susan Snow became infuriated when she heard white children singing a song in praise of Confederate president Jefferson Davis:

As soon as the children had finished singing, Snow hopped up and chanted in reply:

Unbeknownst to Snow her mistress had come out to the porch and heard her song. “Ol’ mistis was standin’ right behin’ me! She grabbed up de bresh broom an’ she laid it on me. Ol’ mistis made
me
submit. I caught de feathers, don’t you forgit it.”

As the Yankee occupation of Mississippi broadened, thousands upon thousands of freed slaves made an army in their own right as they moved toward Union lines. Once there they took an increasingly vital role in the Union war effort: according to one estimate there were twenty thousand black refugees in the Vicksburg area alone, doing hard labor for the North instead of the South. John Eaton, the chaplain of the 27th Ohio appointed superintendent of the freedmen by Grant, organized work programs for which they could earn wages, plowing on abandoned plantations leased to Northern speculators or wielding axes in woodyards.

Eaton described the waves of humanity that flowed toward the Union positions in Mississippi: they came “in rags or silks, feet shod or bleeding; individually or in families; and pressing towards the armies characterized as Vandal Hordes. Their comings were like the arrivals of cities. Often they met prejudices against their color, more bitter than they had left behind. There was no Moses to lead, nor plan in their exodus. The decision of their instinct or unlettered reason brought them to us. They felt that their interests were identical with objects of our armies. This identity of interest, slowly but surely, comes to be perceived by our officers and soldiers, and by the loyal public.”

Some of the freedmen were determined to do more than work—they wanted to fight. In the spring of 1863, freedmen began to volunteer in the first black regiments, mustered by General Lorenzo Thomas and led by volunteer white officers. By the end of the year about fifty thousand freedmen would be serving in the Union army, most of them in the Mississippi Valley. Southerners reacted to the
arming of freed slaves as if it were an act of barbarism. The poetical Lieutenant William Nugent of the 28th Mississippi Cavalry saw it as “flagrant, unwarranted and demoniac violations of the usage of a civilized warfare,” as he wrote to his wife.

As the Union soldiers became increasingly accustomed to working with liberated slaves, their views continued to evolve. “I don’t care a damn for the darkies,” wrote an Illinois lieutenant, “but I couldn’t help to send a runaway nigger back. I’m blamed if I could. I honestly believe that this army has taken 500 niggers away with them … I have 11 negroes in my company now. They do every particle of the dirty work. Two women among them do the washing for the company.”

Even William T. Sherman, who “was no professed friend of the Negro,” viewed the freedmen as valuable additions to the service, though menial ones. “Every Negro who came within our lines—and there were hundreds of them—was enrolled on the quartermasters books, clothed, fed, and paid wages, the price of his clothing being deducted,” recalled aide Wickham Hoffman. “They were proud of being paid like white men.” Hoffman was struck by the energy with which they trundled wheelbarrows filled with earth, at the double-quick.

Rachel and the unliberated slaves in the Piney Woods interior would also have received word through the grapevine of the battle in June of 1863 at Milliken’s Bend, where black troops proved that they were good for more than shoveling or laundering. The arming of freedmen had been a controversial exercise, primarily because white officers did not believe they could fight. Nevertheless, Grant saw that with black troops to guard garrisons, he could free up white units to campaign.

But at Milliken’s Bend, a Union position on the Mississippi just a few miles above Vicksburg, black troops proved their mettle, as they fought and died equal to the bravest men of either side. Initially part of Grant’s supply line during his drive on Vicksburg, the garrison at Milliken’s Bend had become largely irrelevant, and Grant left it in
the hands of five regiments of black troops, mostly raw recruits, as he went on about the business of besieging the city.

On June 5, a Confederate brigade under H. E. McCulloch attacked, aiming to take the bend in order to drive cattle across the river to the rescue of the starving troops there. The rebels charged at dawn, crying, “No quarter!” The fighting was hand-to-hand, from trench to trench, men savagely raking at one another with bayonets. The inexperienced black troops were pushed to the river, where they stood their ground and finally repulsed the Confederates with the help of fire from two federal gunboats. The casualties were staggering: of the 1,061 black soldiers who fought, 652 were killed, wounded, or missing, along with 160 white officers. Rear Admiral David Porter surveyed the battlefield and reported to Grant that it was “quite an ugly sight. The dead Negroes lined the ditch inside the parapet or levee, and were mostly shot on top of the head. In front of them, close to the levee, lay an equal number of rebels stinking in the sun.”

One white officer leading a regiment of black troops, Captain M. M. Miller, formerly of Yale University and Galena, Illinois, wrote an account of the engagement for his local paper in which he passionately praised his soldiers. “We had about 80 men killed in the regiment and 80 wounded so you can judge what part of the fight my company sustained! I never felt more grieved and sick at heart than when I saw my brave soldiers slaughtered—one with six wounds, all the rest with two or three, none less than two wounds. Two of my colored sergeants were killed, both brave, noble men; always prompt, vigilant and ready for the fray. I never more wish to hear the expression ‘the nigger won’t fight.’ Come with me a 100 yards from where I sit and I can show you the wounds that cover the bodies of 16 as brave, loyal and patriotic soldiers as ever drew bead on a rebel. The enemy charged us so close that we fought with our bayonets hand to hand. I have six broken bayonets to show how bravely my men fought.”

Milliken’s Bend was a negligible fight strategically; soon after it was over, the garrison was abandoned. But the troops who fought
there won the first significant victory over bigotry in the Union service—and they did so a full six weeks before the 54th Massachusetts would make their legendary assault at Fort Wagner. Charles A. Dana, the assistant secretary of war, later remarked, “The bravery of the blacks at Milliken’s Bend completely revolutionized the sentiment of the Army with regard to the employment of Negro troops.”

It was under these conditions, then, of emancipation, mass slave defections, inductions into Union uniform, heroism, terror, vengefulness, and atrocity, that the slaves of the Piney Woods aided Newton Knight and his band. They undoubtedly saw it as their contribution to the war effort, their way to get into the fight. According to numerous accounts, Joe Hatton, who lived in the household of Newton’s uncle William Knight, believed that as “a useful messenger” for the Jones County Scouts, he was working “in the service of his peoples” and may have even considered himself a fellow soldier of Newton’s.

It was a fearful risk, as accounts from other slaves in nearby counties who aided deserters reflect. “I remember how the men would hide out to keep from going to war,” remembered a slave named Jeff Rayford. “I cooked and carried many a pan of food to these men in Pearl River swamp. This I did for one man regularly. All I had to do was carry the food down after dark, and I was so scared I was trembling, and while walking along the path in the swamp, pretty soon he would step out from behind a tree and say: ‘Here, Jeff.’ And then I would hand it to him and run back to the house.”

Julia Stubbs, a slave in Simpson County, recalled how she collaborated with the local farmwives to aid deserters hiding from the Confederate cavalry hunting them. “During de war deir wuz a heap o’ deserters hid out. De Calvarymen would ride through a hunting ’em. We could might nigh alwas’ hear ’em a coming long fo’ dey got in sight, de womens would blow a horn sos dey could hide from ’em. I’se carried food to de woods to de deserters. Sometimes we would have to take it a long ways an’ agin dey would be near by.”

No one risked more than Rachel. As a fugitive, Newton was both vulnerable and reliant on Rachel, and according to their descendants
he would not have survived the war without her. It was a constant temptation for the fugitive to return to the known and comfortable, and Rachel’s cabin in the half-abandoned slave quarters must have offered a rare refuge. In turn, Rachel may have seen the angular, black-haired, buccaneering Newton as a champion who emboldened her to act.

Frederick Douglass described an escapee’s poignant glimpses of “civilization” and the mixed feelings they provoked. “Peeping through the rents of the quarters, I saw my fellow-slaves seated by a warm fire, merrily passing away the time, as though their hearts knew no sorrow. Although I envied their seeming contentment, all wretched as I was [in the swamp], I despised the cowardly acquiescence in their own degradation which it implied, and felt a kind of pride and glory in my own desperate lot. I dared not enter the quarters—for where there is seeming contentment with slavery, there is certain treachery to freedom.”