The State of Jones (29 page)

Next, Lowry moved on the Jones County band. On April 12, Lowry’s men trespassed on Newton Knight’s territory for the first time. They were instantly repaid with gunshots. That evening, twenty of Lowry’s men who had been patrolling stopped to dine at the home of a local physician. As the rebel troopers lounged on the piazza in the evening twilight, Daniel Reddoch, grandson of early Jones County settler William Reddoch and one of Newton’s staunchest men, moved stealthily through the dusk. He raised his overpacked shotgun and brought down the hammers, with a blast that blanched the twilight. Men toppled out of their chairs with blood blossoming on their shirts. Reddoch had fired directly into the rebels’ midst with a discharge so intense that it took out three men at once. A sergeant was killed outright, a lieutenant was mortally wounded, and a corporal badly injured.

It was the opening salvo in all-out war between Lowry and the Jones County Scouts, igniting a chain of violence that lasted almost a month. The deaths brought furious reprisals from Lowry. Three days later, on April 15, he thundered into the county at the head of his regiments, with packs of dogs baying like the noise of hell.

The slavering hounds flushed Daniel Reddoch and another member of the Knight band, Tucker Gregg, out of the woods and encircled them. As Reddoch stood ringed by the dogs, the rebels primed their Enfield rifles and executed him on the spot. Gregg tried to run but was cut down by bullets as he loped across a field and died of his wounds.

One night later, Newton’s young neighbor Ben Graves was awoken by the sound of gun cracks. The distant sputtering of fire was from Lowry’s men, who had descended on the home of Ben Knight, Newton’s twenty-seven-year-old cousin. Ben was an absentee from the 7th Mississippi Battalion, a survivor of Corinth and a parolee at
Vicksburg. The rebels may have mistaken him for Newton and believed they had the resistance leader trapped.

As rebel horsemen surrounded Ben’s porch, the young man, still wearing his nightshirt, vaulted off the gallery and sprinted down a dirt path. He escaped the volley of gunfire and pelted across a narrow footbridge to Albert and Mason’s old family property on the opposite bank of the Leaf River. He banged into the old cabin, perhaps hoping to find Newton. Instead he found his seventeen-year-old cousin Sil Coleman, asleep. Ben roused Sil, and together the two men hurtled across Mason Creek and into the swamps, pursued by dogs.

The first sets of teeth caught at their pants legs and sank into their calves, dropping them. Jaws clamped down on their flailing limbs like sprung game traps. Ben Knight managed to cut the throats of two or three dogs before he lost either his will or too much blood and succumbed to the mangling. When the rebels finally called the animals off, the prisoners had been badly ravened.

Rebels bound the bloody men, hoisted them into the back of a wagon, and drove back toward the old Knight place, to finish them off by lynching. As his executors wrapped the nooses, Ben pleaded for water. The soldiers stonily refused. Ben huddled in the wagon bed, gashed, pale, and slick with lost blood, and prayed for his grave to be filled with cool water.

A third prisoner was soon thrown into the wagon bed: Sil’s younger brother, Noble. The boy was so young he still lived with his seventy-six-year-old grandmother, Mary Coleman, who had suffered the slaying of her son Tom years earlier by the local tyrant Nat Kilgore.

The rebels unfurled the ropes and flung them into the branches. The prisoners were yanked to their feet and the loops settled about their throats. The boys may have begged for mercy. One of the soldiers may have replied with a derisive remark about “crackers’ necks.” The wagon lurched. Three bodies twisted and spun, shoulders turning like clockweights, their heads at odd angles.

According to a Knight family account, when the prisoners had
finished twisting on the ropes, the Confederates cut Ben Knight down and carried his corpse to the porch of the old Albert Knight home, where Serena was living, having returned to the county. They threw the body on the steps, and a rebel officer said, “Here’s your husband. You will be obliged to bury him.”

Serena replied, “My God man, that is not my husband. You have hung the wrong man.”

Newton’s youngest brother, Taylor, dug the grave, with the help of some of the local slaves. According to local slave legend, as the burying party shoveled earth out of the hole, water ran into it as Ben had prayed for. While the shovels plunged, Rachel carried the news of the hangings to Newton. He was said to be so grief stricken it made him sick to his stomach.

The Coleman boys were left hanging, shoulders slumped and feet still, until their sixteen-year-old sister Cornelia came to find them. The girl sawed at the hemp and cut her brothers down.

To Newton the hangings were an atrocity, and some of Lowry’s men agreed: one of them admitted Sil Coleman was a mere “lad,” and another acknowledged that their cavalry had hanged a man “perhaps by mistake.”

But Lowry was remorseless; it was his exact intention and chief strategy to punish the guilty by pursuing the innocent. If Lowry couldn’t catch Newton and his men, he could persecute their friends and relatives until the desperadoes showed themselves. A day later, Lowry rounded up still four more men for hanging. Tom Whitehead, twenty-one, and his younger brother Daniel, barely eighteen, were nephews of Newton’s who had been raised in an antislavery home. Their mother was Mary Ann Knight, a sister of Albert’s who like her brother had chosen to make her way in life without owning slaves. The other two men arrested were Jim Ates and his elder brother, Tom Ates, small farmers who had been conscripted into the 7th Mississippi Battalion and deserted after Corinth.

The four captured men were taken in irons to the village of Gitano, Mississippi, where their confessions were extracted. A
so-called military court found them “guilty of desertion and of armed resistance to the civil and military law” and sentenced them to death by hanging. It was summary trial judgment—the young men were strung up just one day after their capture, in a crescent of the Leaf River swamp. Ever after it was called “Crackers’ Neck.”

The next to die was Newton’s younger brother, twenty-year-old Franklin, apparently executed after a running gun battle. A week later, yet another Whitehead brother, twenty-six-year-old Noel, was seized and hanged. With that, the Whitehead family was virtually wiped out of sons, having lost four out of five. Their eldest, Emerson, had died after the battle of Iuka. Their only survivor was an eleven-year-old named George.

The toll of those two April days on Newton’s company was severe: ten men killed by shooting or hanging, and five more wounded. More than fifty years later, the mention of Lowry’s name made Newton’s expression freeze. Meigs Frost observed the transformation in Newton’s features when he introduced Lowry’s name into their conversation.

“I’m told that General Lowry caught some of your men,” he said.

Newton’s smile vanished as if a light had gone out, replaced by a spasm of hatred, “a look of bitterness that showed the fires of a half century ago were not all dead, cold ashes,” Frost wrote.

“He was rough beyond reason,” Newton said. “He hanged some of my company he had no right to hang.”

One of Lowry’s men later bragged in an editorial to the
Mobile Evening News
that “terror was struck” by the Confederate campaign of vengeance. If so, the terrified were mostly women, boys, and old men. Lowry continued to seize blameless family members, young and old, to try to force guerrillas to turn themselves in. The
Jackson Mississippian
newspaper detailed his method: “He held the father as hostage until the son was brought forward, which rarely failed.”

The Confederates rounded up local boys who were too young for conscription and put them in a stockade, called the bullpen, where
they interrogated them and threatened them with hanging if they didn’t tell all they knew about the Knight band. A twelve-year-old boy named W. B. Temples was nearly hanged three times in one day. The rebels put a noose around his neck, threw the end of the rope over a limb, and drew him up in the air until he choked, then let him down. When the terrified boy regained his voice, he was questioned again. When he again refused to answer, the procedure was repeated: the rope drew tight around his neck and he was jerked into the air. Finally, an officer intervened and freed the boy and told him to run on. As he tore across the countryside, some of the men fired after him.

Another boy named Richard Blackledge, whose brother rode with Newton, was picked up by the rebels for interrogation during a trip to the gristmill to grind some corn and held overnight in the bullpen. When the boy’s father came looking for him, a rebel officer sarcastically informed him the child was in custody to “safeguard” him from the Knight band. The elder Blackledge replied hotly that he knew Newton Knight and other men in his company, but he never knew any of them “catching up boys and old men, and keeping them away from home.” For his insolence the father was locked up with the son for the rest of the night.

Lowry arrested Newton’s uncle, the elderly William H. Knight. The old man was threatened with hanging unless he revealed the whereabouts of his son William “Dickie” Knight, one of the most ardent Unionists in the Jones County Scouts. The slave Joe Hatton was sent into the swamps to tell Dickie that if he did not surrender, his father would be executed in his stead.

Dickie Knight sat on a rail fence, listening to Hatton. When Hat-ton had finished, Dickie spent a few agonized minutes thinking about what to do and then said, “You go back and tell the officer to just go ahead and hang Pap. He’s getting to be an old man now, and they won’t knock him out of many years. But they may knock me out of a good many.”

Dickie Knight slipped back to his swamp hideaway, where he informed
the Jones County Scouts that he had decided to go to New Orleans to “join the Yankees.” He and some of the men hatched a plan to build a boat to carry them down the Pearl River to the Crescent City.

Joe Hatton went home, not bothering to return to Lowry’s men. Their bluff called, the rebels spared William Knight, and a few weeks later Dickie made it to New Orleans in his flat-bottomed boat and enlisted with the Union forces, with whom he proudly served out the war. As an old man, he would joke that he wanted to be “the only Yankee buried in Big Creek cemetery.”

When Lowry’s men weren’t hanging boys or holding old men hostage, they perpetrated small meannesses on the yeoman wives, hoping to bait the Knight-company men into showing themselves. “It seems like they would take great delight in destroying what Knight’s men had at home,” Tom Knight recalled.

A woman named Mrs. Alzade Courtney, the mother of three small children, struggled to run her farm single-handedly, plowing all day and scrubbing all night. After darning and washing the homespun she would hang the clothes out to dry, only for the Confederates to snatch the garments. Each time she loaded her corn on a mule to take it to the mill she was waylaid by Confederate soldiers who seized it from her.

One afternoon she was working in a field when a rebel horseman pulled up and demanded to know where her husband was. “Where is the man who has been plowing here?”

“There has been no man plowing here,” she said.

“You are a liar; tell me where he is.”

The officer dismounted and began stalking the field, looking for footprints. “Does them tracks look like men’s tracks?” she asked bitterly.

Nancy Walters cringed in her cabin with her two youngest children as Confederates ransacked her farm and destroyed all of her stores. A host of mounted rebels rode into the yard and carefully hitched their horses to the shade trees and then tore open her corn-crib and flung the contents on the ground for the horses to feed on.
“It was a sight to see how they wasted our corn,” the youngest son, Calvin Walters, remembered. Next, the soldiers caught all of the family’s chickens, killed them, and plucked them in the yard. As the feathers drifted in the air they attacked the smokehouse too, dragging all of the meat out, slicing it into chunks, and throwing it into the dirt. As the men worked, Nancy bitterly wished aloud that Newton Knight and his men “could have known that they was here destroying our stuff that we had worked so hard for, but there was no way to get word to them.”

At last the Confederates got ready to leave. As they were remounting, a rebel soldier stalked into the Walters pasture and put a bridle on her one good mare. This was too much for Nancy, who charged out of the house, seized a fence rail, and knocked the soldier flat with it. She led the horse back to the barn, wheeled around with the fence rail, and told another soldier “she would kill him if he didn’t get out of the lot.”

As Lowry’s raids continued over the next three weeks, Newton and his men were powerless. They took shelter in the swamps, dodging their pursuers. “They fought men and dogs day by day about twenty days,” according to one ally, B. A. Mathews, brother of one of the company members.

Lowry and his men dared not penetrate too deeply in the swamps after them, for fear of ambush. When some local Confederates wanted Lowry to mount a full-scale assault, Lowry replied that it would take several hundred more men than he had to clear out such treacherous combatants. Lowry wasn’t afraid of the swamp, but he didn’t mind admitting he was “afraid of them old shot guns that they had in their camps, and the way they used them.”

The Jones County Scouts had the strategic advantage in the swamps, and they used it. Lowry’s men lived in constant fear of ambush and surprise attack. One afternoon a yeoman wife was working on her farmstead when a squad of Confederates rode up to her porch and demanded to know the whereabouts of her son, a member of the company.

“I don’t know where he is,” she told them.

“Yes you know. Now, tell us where he is.”

“Well,” said she, “I told you the truth. I don’t know where he is. But I can find out.”

She unhooked a large drive horn from the wall, stood up on the gallery, and blew a long note. After a moment, a distant blast answered. It was followed by another from a hillside and yet another from the brush. Soon the hills rang with a dozen answers.