The State of Jones (23 page)

The escaped Fairchild reemerged from the brush to find several of his men wounded or killed, the rest dispersed up and down the swamp. The tax collector spent the next several days gathering survivors and recovering what oxen and cattle he could find. With this vestige of his train he finally made it to Mobile, where he reported
the raid to Confederate authorities. He then headed home, no doubt livid at the brazenness of the attackers.

Once back in Jones, Fairchild’s losses only made him more heavy-handed. He immediately went on a hunt for fresh livestock among the yeomanry, and this time he brought with him the strong arm of Sheriff Nat Kilgore. Together, Fairchild and Kilgore stalked a swamp known as the Bogahoma Creek, popular among farmers for hiding livestock from the prying eyes of tax agents. They found it filled with fleshy, free-grazing hogs.

Fairchild and Kilgore went to the nearest homestead and angrily threatened the wary wife who came to the door. Her husband would have to gather the hogs for tax seizure by the time they returned, or he’d be shot. They did not want to have to round up the hogs themselves.

“But if we do have to gather them up, and happen to find him while hunting the hogs we will shoot him quick as we would an old buck,” they warned.

The bullying, however, had the opposite effect from that intended. As soon as Fairchild and Kilgore departed for the ride back to Ellisville, the wife sent out a distress call. Word of the threat spread among the yeomanry, and men gathered. After some discussion, they were roused to do murder. Two young members of the Jones County Scouts were chosen for the job of intercepting the government men and killing them. They cradled their guns and moved off toward the Ellisville road.

But Newton may have followed to be sure they did the job right. As Tom Knight tells the story, the two young men found an ambush spot behind an old rotting half-unearthed tree stump. They cut holes in the wood for their gun barrels, and once situated, settled down to wait. “But there was one man in the crowd that did not have any faith in these boys for the job,” Tom Knight recounted, “so he took a stand by the road in another place.” When Fairchild and Kilgore came riding down the road, both boys shot, but both missed. The second man, however, “gave them both barrels and killed them both.”

Tom’s implication is that his father was the third shooter. Once again, Newton Knight was never positively identified as the shooter, but it was commonly accepted by Fairchild’s descendants that he pulled the trigger. The Fairchilds, like most of Newton’s enemies, accused him of cowardice. According to a Fairchild family memoir, William was “on a buying trip through the county when Newt pluged him, in the back.”

Whether Newton was the guilty party or not, it had plainly become dangerous to conduct official Confederate business in Jones County. The rebels were no longer in charge. The Jones County Scouts were.

Military authorities responded by once again unleashing the hounds and scouring the woods. But Newton and his men only responded by gunning down yet another prominent Confederate.

The pack of dogs hunting the guerrillas now numbered nearly one hundred, and most of them were owned by a local merchant and landowner named William McGilvery, a forty-two-year-old slaveholder, who joined the search parties as a vigilante and rode out behind his animals.

McGilvery chased the renegades so aggressively that he followed his dogs straight into one of the company’s hideout camps, near a fork known as Horse Creek. Newton was cooking some provisions at a nearby farmstead belonging to a woman named Sallie Dulancy when he heard the baying, followed by horsemen. He dashed into an open field and cut across it toward the woods to warn his fellow guerrillas. Rebel bullets strafed him as he ran, cutting his shot-bag strap in two and putting two holes in his hat, and three more through the flying tails of his coat, before he reached the cover of the woods, where he threw himself over an embankment and rolled down into the swamp.

The pursuing rebels, fearful of penetrating too deep into the thickets, pulled up at the edge of the woods—all but one, McGilvery, who charged into the brush behind his prowling, pattering dogs. The hounds loped into the hidden encampment, where the guerrillas awaited them with hammers cocked. A roar of shotguns met the dogs,
which fell with giant bloody holes in them. As the fire died down, McGilvery, who had finally reined in his horse, hollered out, “You quit killing my dogs!” In response, one of the Knight men stepped behind an oak tree, laid his rifle across a branch, sighted, and shot McGilvery out of his saddle. He fell heavily to the marshy ground, bleeding from a head wound, and as Knight’s men surrounded him, he begged them not to shoot anymore and asked for water. One of Newton’s army raised him up and gave him a draft. They then carried him to Sallie Dulancy’s house, where he died that night.

The slayings of Fairchild, Kilgore, and McGilvery in early 1864 marked another escalation in the war in the Piney Woods. Over the next several weeks the emboldened guerrillas conducted a campaign to cleanse the countryside of Confederate loyalists. Two more men caught bullets; a well-known potter and landowner named B. J. Rushton and an affluent fifty-six-year-old Baptist preacher in Jasper County named John Carlyle. Other prominent rebels were assaulted and intimidated and run out of the county with nothing left. Their houses began to burn.

“These deserters brought terror into the hearts of people who sympathized with the Confederacy,” recalled J. C. Andrews, a teen-aged conscript who worked a gin mill in Jasper County. “They robbed George Harbor and beat him and left a notice for him to leave the country at once, which he did. Neal McGill, a Mr. Patterson, and S. A. Allen were also robbed and beaten and their lives threatened. They left the country to save their lives.” Another teenaged Jones County rebel conscript, Maddie Bush, recalled that virtually every local Confederate bureaucrat fled, until there was no civil authority left. “There was nothing to support the officers, and there was nothing to assess,” he said. “There was no sheriff, assessor, or tax collector.”

The theme of the attacks was clear: Newton and the Jones County Scouts were making war on anyone aiding the rebel cause, hounding them just as Unionists like Newton and John Hill Aughey had been hounded after secession.

Pleas for help flooded the offices of Confederate authorities. On
February 8, 1864, a Captain William H. Hardy in Raleigh, the seat of Smith County, warned Governor Charles Clark that between two hundred and three hundred deserters in Jones were “confederated” in driving respectable citizens out and that they had murdered a Baptist minister in the southwestern part of Jasper. Hardy asserted that local troops were incapable of dealing with the guerrillas and that citizens refused to act against them “for fear of some private injury.” On the very same day, Clark received another equally dismaying account from the sheriff of nearby Perry County, G. W. Bradley, who declared that he was so threatened by guerrillas that he could not collect taxes except “at the risk of my life.”

It had become obvious to the Confederate high command that something disquieting was happening in the Piney Woods. There was a sharp difference between deserter bushwhacking and this new more concerted militancy, which seemed to be spreading. The reports suggested that the guerrillas in Jones were highly organized, and growing in size and control, and they seemed to be forming fluid partnerships with other bands of disaffected insurrectionists in surrounding counties. In fact, Newton would later claim to have collaborated with men across five counties.

But what alarmed military authorities the most was evidence that Newton had established contact with the Yankees. On January 28, 1864, citizens of Jasper and Smith counties wrote to Governor Clark pleading for protection from at least three hundred Union-friendly deserters in Jones who, in addition to driving rebel loyalists out of the area, were rumored to be getting ammunition from Yankee sources on the Gulf coast. The loyalists implored the governor to send a “strong force” to their aid.

Newton and the Scouts had illustrated their range with the attack on Fairchild’s Confederate wagon train in the Chickasawhay Swamp. The place where they had struck was fifty miles southeast of Jones, virtually on the Alabama border. Clearly, Newton’s influence was broad and he was well traveled, and Confederate authorities therefore had plenty of reason to believe he was in contact with Union officers from Grant’s occupying army.

The Confederate commander of the Department of Alabama, Mississippi, and East Louisiana, Lieutenant General Leonidas Polk, was especially disconcerted by word that the Jones County Scouts were threatening to destroy the rail bridges in their vicinity. These were no mere bushwhackers simply out to heist some corn. They were political militants. “Southern Yankees” Polk labeled them.

On February 7, 1864, Polk ordered General Dabney Maury, the commander in Mobile, to dispatch a cavalry unit of no less than five hundred troops, who were to descend on Jones County and clear out the guerrillas. Polk warned that the terrain would be difficult and they would need local guides. The cavalrymen were to be led by Maury’s cousin, Colonel Henry Maury.

“I find the officer in charge of the guards at Red Bluff bridge, on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, has been made uneasy by the messages he has received from those deserters, & c., in Jones County, that they propose to burn the bridges on that road,” Polk wrote to Maury.

But it would be nearly a month before Maury and his cavalrymen finally responded and made it into Jones County. The Confederates were too busy dealing with a real Yankee: one named Sherman.

At the same time urgent reports of disaffection in Jones and the surrounding counties were reaching the desk of the governor, the rebel military commander Polk was becoming aware of a large movement of Union troops. On February 3, Sherman had launched an arrowing campaign from Vicksburg into the heart of the Mississippi interior. His goal, 150 miles across the state, was a large depot town, Meridian.

His red hair bristled
like a currycomb, and he issued a glare from a face as creased as the folds in an old dog. When he talked he was so manic and stunningly fluent that the conversation left listeners exhausted. But in fact, William Tecumseh Sherman, “Cump” to his friends and “Uncle Billy” to his troops, was a clearheaded man, especially about the nature of war, a subject on which he was incorruptible. He couldn’t stand high-flown rhetoric about it. “Its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentation of distant families,” he said.

Sherman’s insight into the anguish and lamentation of families was based on experience: his nine-year-old son Willie had died of typhoid on a visit with his father to Mississippi in 1863, an event that bored a hole in the soldier’s heart. The loss both heightened his sensitivities and hardened his judgment that the only relief to such a brutal conflict was a quick end. Later, when the mayor of Atlanta asked Sherman to spare civilian homes, he replied grimly, “You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm as against these terrible hardships of war.”

For Sherman the fight against the South was personal as well as professional; it did not just involve hostile armies “but a hostile people,” whose excessive pride was to blame. He believed he possessed
an understanding of Southern manhood and therefore the stubbornness of the conflict. He had spent 1859 to 1861 as the superintendent of a military academy in Baton Rouge and knew well “the young bloods of the South,” as he called them,

Nothing short of total devastation would cure them of fighting, Sherman believed. The Union should “make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.” Together with Grant, Sherman settled on a “strategy of exhaustion” calculated to demolish the home front that supported the Confederate war effort. The sooner he broke the Confederate will, the sooner the war would be over. “I would make this war as severe as possible, and show no symptoms of tiring until the South begs for mercy,” he said. “Indeed I know … the end would be reached quicker by such a course.”