The State of Jones (35 page)

The
Daily Picayune
newspaper noted the change sarcastically. “It is no very high compliment either to Mr. Davis or Gen. Lee. Jones is the poorest county in the State.”

If Newton had allies
among the Union officers, the Confederates had developed a more powerful ally in the North. Namely, President Andrew Johnson.

Johnson, sworn in as president on April 15, 1865, the day Lincoln died, initially seemed to identify with yeomen like Newton. A native of Tennessee and a tailor who had risen above meager beginnings, he had frequently lauded “honest yeomen” and had thundered against “the slaveocracy”—a “pampered, bloated, corrupted aristocracy.” When he first took office as president, he declared: “I hold this:
… treason
is a crime, and
crime
must be punished.” But Johnson’s threats were empty. Though he verbally thundered against the South, he denied that the states had “surrendered their right to govern their own affairs.” In fact, he enabled the states to resume their constitutional rights as quickly as possible and believed that the “old southern leaders … must rule the South.”

Behind this Orwellian logic was Johnson’s virulent racism and intractable personality. His mouth was grimly bowed and a pugnacious chin jutted from a weathered face, framed by coarse gray hair and eyebrows. He embraced emancipation only up to a point; he had owned a few slaves before the war, and he was wholly opposed to black suffrage, insisting that “white men alone” should manage government.

Johnson argued that blacks were the natural enemies of poor whites. “The colored man and his master combined kept the [poor
white man] in slavery by depriving him of a fair participation in the labor and productions of the rich land of the country,” he lectured a group of Northern blacks that included Frederick Douglass. Douglass countered by saying that blacks had far more in common with yeomen, and he envisioned a union of yeomen and former slaves in “a party among the poor.” But Johnson, incapable of seeing other points of view, clung to the notion that the black man was inherently slavish and would “vote with his late master, whom he does not hate, rather than with the non-slaveholding white, whom he does hate.” Given a choice between empowering blacks or forgiving the planter aristocracy, Johnson chose the latter.

Johnson had announced his plan for Reconstruction at the end of May 1865: he issued a general amnesty and restored all confiscated land to rebels who took an oath of allegiance to the Union and promised to support emancipation. About 15,000 Southerners were excluded from this general amnesty, mainly wealthy planters and senior Confederate officials. But these men could apply individually for pardons, and by the end of 1865, Johnson was granting them wholesale, “sometimes hundreds in a single day.” He also appointed provisional governors in the rebel states who were sympathetic to his policy of general amnesty, and William Sharkey was one of these.

Sharkey, a planter and prewar anti-secessionist, filled his administration almost entirely with pardoned Confederate leaders in the belief that they would help restore order. Next, he called for a provisional legislature. The body that convened in July was also made up largely of former Confederates, and it promptly sought legal ways to return blacks to servitude, while debating whether they were obliged to recognize the Union at all.

Incredibly, Sharkey also allowed former rebels to rearm themselves and form military units. By mid-August of 1865, white Mississippians were nervously complaining of lawlessness and insolence among the four hundred thousand freed blacks in the state, many of whom roamed the countryside looking for food and work. Also, tensions were rising between white citizens and black occupying
troops. “The negroes are bold in their threats, and the people are afraid,” Sharkey said.

What seemed to threaten Mississippians the most was their loss of authority over a black population that outnumbered them. In November of 1865, the
Jackson Daily News
instructed the postwar state government: “We must keep the ex-slave in a position of inferiority. We must pass such laws as make him feel his inferiority.”

Editorials in newspapers railed against the impudence of “idle darkies” who crowded the sidewalks and elbowed whites and who failed to tip their hats and show proper obeisance. “Take off your hat, you black scoundrel, or I’ll cut your throat,” a state legislator snarled at his former slave when he entered a room without doffing his cap. It was one more example of “the infernal sassy niggers.”

The Confederate militias immediately started committing “outrages” against Southern Unionists and blacks. The vengeful mood against free blacks became such that a helpless federal official lamented that the lives of mules were more valued in Mississippi, because the “breaking of the neck of the free Negro is nobody’s loss.”

When Union general Henry Slocum, the federal commander of the Department of Mississippi, saw what was happening, he issued a general order prohibiting these armed companies, characterizing the men who formed them as “outlaws” who have “scarcely laid down the arms with which they have been opposing our Government.” But Sharkey appealed to Andrew Johnson, who backed him and the Southerners. The military, Johnson declared, was in the state “to aid but not to interfere with the provisional government.”

Thus, even though Mississippi was still under military occupation, federal soldiers like those stationed in the Piney Woods who were Newton’s allies found their hands half tied in dealing with a surly, defiant citizenry, among whom the popular refrain was that they had not been beaten, only outnumbered. Midwestern boys enervated from the war and anxious to muster out were charged with preserving order in an atmosphere of strong drink and antagonism, even as they had been stripped of real authority by the president and
the governor. At least in the war they had been able to do something about the wrongs they perceived.

An Iowan named Lewis F. Phillips stationed on the Mississippi-Alabama border described his postwar duty as a trial in which the local populace tried to poison him with a toxic mixture of “pine top” bootleg and buttermilk, local girls treated him spitefully, telling him “they would no more touch a blue sleeve than a rattlesnake,” and the ex-planter class viciously persecuted former slaves.

One day when Phillips was on duty, a crew of black field hands came to the Union encampment from a distant plantation to show the soldiers the livid welts laid on their backs by a former master who still considered them his property. “Some of the old planters were now more savage with the Negroes than when they had a property interest in them and were cutting them up with the lash at a fearful rate,” Phillips observed.

Phillips and a squad of soldiers decided to pay the planter a visit, “to read him the law.” But the truth was that Phillips had no orders to make an arrest and could only hope to intimidate the planter. As the Yankees rode through the pleasant countryside, they stopped at various plantations along the way and found that virtually every man of the house had been slain, wounded, or captured. They spent half a day at the manor home of the lash-wielding planter, “telling him of the error of his ways and what would happen to him if he didn’t be good.” On the way back, Phillips and his men ran into a parade of bedraggled, emaciated Confederate soldiers making their way home. “They were not ‘whipped,’” they informed the Yankees, but only “overpowered.”

Phillips camped in the village of Uniontown, where the largest hotel still flew the Confederate Bonnie Blue flag, waving cheekily over Main Street. An irascible and inebriated Union colonel decided to teach the hotel proprietors a lesson and instructed his artillerists to wheel their guns directly in front of the hotel and fire a thundering salute. The explosions shattered every pane and teacup on the premises. “When we were done firing every glass that had been in that side of the house lay down on the ground,” Phillips wrote.

There was nothing to do but drink. One evening Phillips watched a man stagger down the street and pause in front of a cigar store, where he tried to pry the cigar out of the hand of a wooden Indian. Phillips heard him muttering: “All the niggers were free and now By God he’d free the Indian.” He tore the Indian down and kicked it into the street.

It was in this potent, uncertain environment that Newton and the Jones County Scouts were mustered out of service. On September 10, 1865, they followed orders and turned their arms over to Captain A. R. Smith of the 70th U.S. Colored Infantry in Ellisville, although they retained their personal shotguns.

The timing of the Jones County Scouts’ disbanding could not have been worse; the white militias empowered by Sharkey were rampaging. Major General Carl Schurz, a former Union officer who would become secretary of the interior, took a trip to Mississippi to aid in Reconstruction. He observed that the armed bands of whites “indulged in the gratification of private vengeance, persecuted helpless Union people and freedmen, and endeavored to keep the Negroes in a state of virtual slavery.”

In Mississippi’s October elections, impenitent rebels were swept back into the state’s highest offices. A former Confederate brigadier general, Benjamin G. Humphreys, who had fought in the peach orchard at Gettysburg, was elected governor. Humphreys still wore a torn and bullet-riddled Confederate army coat, which he ostentatiously bragged had been “thrice-perforated” by Yankee Minié balls. Humphreys won by a landslide. Three days after the election President Johnson approved his application for a pardon, allowing him to take office.

Humphreys and the legislature that convened on October 16 set about restoring the old antebellum order. The people of Mississippi had abolished slavery “under the pressure of federal bayonets,” Humphreys said, and the Negro was free whether they liked it or not and entitled to certain protections. But that by no means meant the Negro deserved citizenship or equality. The “purity and progress” of Mississippi society depended on keeping blacks where they belonged
according to the “law of God,” Humphreys said: on the plantation where white bosses could guard against “the evils that may arise from their sudden emancipation.”

One Delta planter put it less delicately. “I think God intended the niggers to be slaves. Now since man has deranged God’s plan, I think the best we can do is keep ’em as near to a state of bondage as possible … My theory is, feed ’em well, clothe ’em well, and then, if they don’t work … whip ’em well.”

Mississippi’s legislature began writing the notorious set of laws known as the “Black Codes.” Though euphemistically labeled a “civil rights act,” the laws collectively denied blacks their hard-won freedom and enslaved them again: freedmen were prevented from voting, assembling, renting or owning land, or quitting their jobs. Perhaps worst of all, under an “apprenticeship law” all blacks under age eighteen who were without means of support were required to be “apprenticed”—i.e., enslaved—to whites without pay.

A purposely overbroad vagrancy law defined any blacks whom whites might find troublesome or inconvenient as criminals: “All rogues and vagabonds, idle and dissipated persons, beggars, jugglers, or persons practicing unlawful games or plays, runaways, common drunkards, common night-walkers, pilferers, lewd, wanton, or lascivious persons, in speech or behavior, common railers and brawlers, persons who neglect their calling or employment, misspend what they earn, or do not provide for the support of themselves or their families, or dependents, and all other idle and disorderly persons, including all who neglect all lawful business, habitually misspend their time by frequenting houses of ill-fame, gaming-houses, or tippling shops, shall be deemed and considered vagrants.” Insulting gestures and preaching without a license were also crimes. The penalty was imprisonment and a fine of fifty dollars, and those unable to pay could be hired out to whites.

The state legislature also refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which abolished slavery, claiming it would empower “radicals and demagogues.” The gesture sent a message to the rest of the country: Mississippi Confederates would govern
their state without interference from federal law. (Not until 1995 would Mississippi ratify the Thirteenth Amendment.) Unionists like Newton must have wondered what the three hundred sixty thousand Union lives lost in the war had been sacrificed for.

By the end of 1865, in fact, Confederates had even distorted the meaning of “Unionism.” Former Confederate officers, even generals like Humphreys, were claiming the mantle of Unionism as their own and twisting the term to describe themselves as moderates: “Union man” had come to mean simply someone who had opposed secession back in 1861, “regardless of subsequent service for the Confederacy.” As one Union officer put it: “There is no such thing as loyalty here, as that word is understood in the North.” The sophistry of those Confederates belittled men like Newton, who had suffered such wrath for pledging allegiance to the United States of America.

To a prominent Northern writer named John Townsend Trowbridge, who toured the state in the summer and winter of 1865-66 as part of a larger journey across the battlefields of the South, Mississippi’s Confederates were remorseless. Trowbridge blamed the fact largely on Andrew Johnson’s leniency. “The beautiful effect of executive mercy upon rampant Rebels was well illustrated in Mississippi,” Trowbridge wrote.

Trowbridge arrived just as the Black Codes went into effect. One plantation owner told him, “I’d have been willing to let my plantation go to the devil for one year, just to see the free niggers starve.”

During a midnight journey from Corinth to Memphis Trowbridge stumbled into an encampment of freedmen, a dozen or so people in “miserable conditions, wretchedly clad” who invited him to share a campfire that blew smoke in a circle and offered him what they had—an apple—which was more generous hospitality than any he had received from whites. The freedmen had worked all summer for a planter in Tishomingo who had refused to pay them.

As he rode a train to Memphis he gazed out of the window at more ragged freedmen and overheard fellow passengers remark, “They’ll all be dead by spring” and “Niggers can’t take care of themselves.”