The State of Jones (7 page)

Jackie Knight grieved over the secession crisis for manifold reasons. He was ailing, with not long to live. He was a patriot who’d had his own experience with soldiering, in the Chickamauga Wars and again in the War of 1812, and he knew the toll of conflict. He could see it in his own family, which was deeply divided by the issues underlying the secession crisis.

Most of Jackie’s children were aspiring planters with a stake in
the slave economy. But there was a significant exception. Jackie’s eldest son, Albert, declined to own slaves. Albert was a modest shoemaker and tanner who made his own way and his own living. What’s more, none of Albert’s twelve children would own slaves either. His modest, independent-minded son Newton would display a special disdain for slaveholding. Albert was the one child who would not be bequeathed a slave in Jackie’s last will and testament.

If anyone might be expected to partner in and benefit from Jackie’s slave owning, it would have been his eldest son. On the other hand, eldest sons might also be expected to reproach their fathers for their sins.

Jackie Knight was self-made:
born in North Carolina in 1773, he had pushed his way westward looking for virgin land, first to Georgia, where according to family tradition he served as a light horse soldier in the Chickamauga Wars and an infantryman in the War of 1812, and then on to Mississippi. He and his wife Keziah and their wagonload of children had arrived sometime in 1815 or 1816 at the vast expanse known as the Piney Woods, where the land seemed to heave with rising and falling hills, timbered by towering pines and split by creeks and hollows. “Here’s where we stop,” he said. He had built a home out of felled logs and survived for years despite the lonesomeness and lack of civil government. In 1822, he was one of eighty-nine settlers who petitioned to form Jones County, which they named after John Paul Jones. By 1850, it was still a place without a telegraph, newspaper, or railroad. Yet Jackie had made his fortune, thanks to two commodities also rare in Jones County: cotton and slaves.

Jackie’s acreage qualified as a plantation, barely. It sprawled on either side of the eddying Leaf River, which curled like a fat brown mud snake through the low thickets between Jones and Coving-ton counties. Twice yearly Jackie made trips to the busy seaport of Mobile, Alabama, to sell his goods, drawing wagons loaded with as much as 750 pounds of rice and twenty-five bales of cotton (bundles
weighing 400 to 500 pounds each). He used the profits to buy more slaves.

Knight was merely a rich man in a state full of tycoons. The South’s cotton trade was valued at $200 million annually by 1860, and Mississippi was the largest cotton producer of all, shipping 535.1 million pounds of it to market. It seemed as though entire portions of the state, especially the soil-rich delta, were covered by harrowed rows worked by hoe gangs, hunching over the green, foot-high plants that blossomed with bolls, the dauby, gauzy stuff that was the fiber of the South. A visitor to the state saw “nothing but fields of mimic snow.”

Thanks to King Cotton, the slave population had exploded. Of the 4 million slaves in America on the eve of the war, 1 million had been sold south into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas between 1820 and 1860, to the tune of half a billion dollars. The slave trade constituted a larger piece of the American economy than even the railroads or manufacturing. In Natchez the mansions were the size of villas, their walls lined with art by French masters. There were 436,631 human chattels toiling in Mississippi, and their prices rose with cotton. A single field hand in the 1850s was worth anywhere from $1,100 to $1,800—roughly $75,000 to $135,000 in today’s value. “My grandfather had one he gave $10 a pound for,” recalled Ben Graves. “Bought him by weight.”

In the 1850s, Frederick Law Olmsted journeyed through Mississippi as part of an extended tour of the South and filed a series of roving reports for the
New York Times.
In one exchange, he asked a Woodville, Mississippi, innkeeper what sort of country it was.

“Big plantations, sir. Nothing else. Aristocrats.”

Olmsted asked how rich were the people he spoke of.

“Why, sir, from a hundred thousand to ten million.”

“Do you mean that between here and Natchez there are none worth less than a hundred thousand dollars?”

“No sir, not beyond the ferry. Why, any sort of plantation is worth a hundred thousand dollars. The niggers would sell for that.”

Jackie’s fortune had come in part through some light slave trading. In 1840, he was still just a pioneer homesteader with land valued at a few hundred dollars, but he rapidly amassed wealth over the next twenty years, until by 1860 his personal estate was worth more than $25,000 ($1.9 million in today’s currency). According to Knight family slave Martha Wheeler, Jackie “never was a big slave owner but he made much money trafficking in slaves.” His holdings were so considerable that when his children married, his traditional wedding gift to each of them was a
pair
of slaves. Chattels were the ultimate measure of a man’s status in Mississippi. A common way of inquiring as to someone’s worth and social standing was to ask, “Have they any Negroes?”

Jackie was status conscious: his home was sophisticated for the area, made of good timbers with plastered indoor walls, and had two large front parlors, the sign of someone interested in showing his gracious accommodations to the public. He kept his cash and valuable papers in an iron trunk that was apparently a family heirloom from England, and he also had linens, tablecloths of velvet and silk, tableware, china, and silverware, as well as a fine buggy. Most rare, he had two cases of books. He was a man of some education, and his children could read and write.

But Newton Knight grew up in a home much plainer than that of his grandfather, with his cutlery, books, and house slaves. His father Albert expressly chose to belong to the yeoman rather than planter class, supporting his family as a tanner and a single-handed farmer. Born in 1799 in Georgia, Albert was a grown man when his family arrived in the Piney Woods, and by 1822, he had established enough of a stake to sign his own name to the petition that led to the formation of Jones County. But he remained a modest dirt farmer whose acreage was worth just $900 by 1860. In contrast, his socially aspiring younger brother Jesse Davis Knight by the age of just thirty-nine had amassed acreage worth $3,000 and a personal estate worth $8,900.

While his siblings received gifts and deeds of chattel from Jackie,
Albert did not. What explained the exception? Albert’s wife, Mason Rainey, may have influenced her husband in his views on slavery. She was a woman of obscure background, said to be an orphan whose family had been neighbors of the Knights in North Carolina, taken in by them after her own people died of “flux.” Mason supposedly went with the Knights when they migrated west and married Albert, ten years her elder, when she came of age in 1820. While there is no direct evidence of Mason’s beliefs, it’s worth noting that not one of her dozen offspring ever owned slaves, a striking departure from the rest of the Knight clan.

Martha Wheeler, the Knight family slave who as a child did chores in Jackie Knight’s yard and lit his pipe, recalled that Mason was compassionate, “quite a doctor,” who tended to the sick in “all the surrounding country.” Mason was also literate; she taught her children to read and write, and she and Albert donated land to establish the first school in the area. All of her children received some education.

The Knight family schism was reflective of larger rifts taking place all across Jones County, and Mississippi as a whole, during the secession crisis. The most common division was between rich and poor: it was a state of stark economic differences. On the eve of the Civil War, Jones County was an island of poverty in a sea of cotton- and slave-based wealth. Economically, the Piney Woods was as stagnant as its swamp water: it had the poorest soil and poorest people in the state.

Residents and outsiders alike referred to it as “de po’ folks’ lan.” A vast, dark, meandering cypress marsh ran through the region, known as the Dismal Swamp. The ground was sandy and the pine barrens were almost impossible to clear, which made it better suited for grazing than cultivating cotton. Planters sneeringly referred to it as “cow country” and joked that the land was “too poor to raise a fuss on.”

But one of the many ballads sung by the local poor whites reflected, if not their ear for poetry, then their sense of regional pride and independence:

Locals also called the area “no man’s land,” because so many settlers picked up stakes and moved when the better-soiled Choctaw lands were opened for settlement in the 1830s. Jones County was just too hard to clear, with its swamps, thickets, and mighty pines, to lure many large planters or slaveholders.

In 1860, the entire output of cotton in Jones County was just 633 bales. There were only 407 slaves, and those were concentrated in the hands of a wealthy few, like Jackie Knight: just seventeen families owned half of them. The rare Jones County farmer who
did
have slaves tended to have just four or fewer. Most families owned none at all.

But if Jones County was poor, it had a primordial magnificence that the inhabitants cherished. The rolling and wavelike forests were full of ancient, colossal pines that shot sixty feet in the air, their trunks so broad it took six men to encircle one. Streams glinted under canopies of oaks, so clear that riders who crossed them could see perch playing around their stirrups. Luxuriant grasses grew three feet high, and pastures were studded with wildflowers, amid which ranged herds of red deer and flocks of turkey and partridge. It was a place of fearful solitude at night, when the tall armless pines looked “gaunt and spectral and fall sadly on the soul,” according to one traveler. Nothing moved other “than the flapping of an owl, and fantastic shadows, like trooping apparitions, chase each other into settled gloom.”

The country Newton grew up in was still frontier, so wild that wolves scratched on the doors of homesteads at night. The woods were dense and full of panthers and bears, and the farms were few, separated by as much as fifteen miles. No one traveled without a gun, in case they met with a predator or wild game for the table.

The social milieu was raw as the landscape, one of hardship,
faith, whiskey, bare-knuckle fighting, hunting, and farming. Albert and Mason Knight were typical of the homesteaders who predominated in Jones County, scratching at the earth on hardscrabble farms of fifty acres or so. They bent their faces to the earth, built a home and raised crops with their own hands, and took pride in that self-sufficiency. They ate what they grew and used the rest for sale or barter. While rich planters owned purebred horses and four or five eight-oxen teams, yeomen were lucky if they owned a couple of mules and oxen and a single horse.

Albert raised hogs and planted corn, sweet potatoes, greens, and whatever else took root in order to feed his large family. He harvested fewer bushels of corn in one year than the livestock on a large plantation consumed in a month. The produce from their few acres of cotton, which they hoed themselves, was used to make homespun, or was sold for supplies.

Albert and Mason Knight’s home sat atop a grassy rise near the Leaf River, a one-room cabin of square-hewn logs with a drop-roof gallery across the front and a kitchen connected by a breezeway. Large oaks shaded it, and in the back, a creek flowed almost at the doorstep; Albert named it Mason Creek for his wife, who deserved something in her honor. Their dozen children were born virtually every other year from 1821 to 1850; Newton was their eighth. The children slept in a heap of bodies in the loft of the cabin, the interior of which was of peeled logs, mud chinked and patched with pine board and clouded with wood smoke from the enormous clay-and-stick chimney, the hearth of which was so large that all of the children could crowd around it.

The Knights’ nearest neighbors were three of Albert’s younger brothers, William, James, and Benjamin, who by 1840 had established adjoining farms. Also nearby was William Reddoch, who operated a small ferry across the Leaf River, essentially a flat boat with oars and a pull-rope.

Despite the sparse population, there was no lack of company on his family’s spread, which teemed with children and animals. The
pigs outnumbered the humans by six to one in Jones County. In 1850, there were just 1,890 white citizens, but there were 2,539 milk cows, 4,324 other cattle, and more than anything, there were hogs, 12,686 of them. The razorbacks free-ranged in the swamps, where they fattened themselves on acorns, beech mast, tender pine roots, chinquapins, lily roots, and crawfish. There was always pork on the table, along with an unvarying diet of sweet potatoes, of which Newton must have gotten heartily sick; Jones Countians raised 32,615 bushels of them that year.

Newton received his education from his mother, or from the itinerant schoolmasters who passed through annually and taught for two or three months at a time, charging by the head. Passels of youngsters crowded into a log hut, studying a
Blue Back Speller
or McGuffey’s reader, or
Dilworth’s Spelling-Book
, which taught them how to construct a short sentence like: “No man may put off the law of God.” The teacher kept order with a hickory rod about as long as a boy.

In the evenings, the family regularly read their Bible and occasionally recited a few lines from Shakespeare or Lord Byron, who were among the most popular authors of the era and read by all classes. Newton may have even tried reading
The Columbian Orator
, the popular elocution manual designed for young boys, which taught Frederick Douglass how to turn words into weapons. But if he did, he either didn’t get very far or failed to learn the art of elocution. He was never a wordsmith; for him the gun would always be mightier than the mouth.

On Saturdays, Newton hunted with his brothers and cousins. He stalked deer and hung the carcasses in the chimney to dry. He kept an eye on the thick reed brakes that lined the creeks and branches; if they trembled, it meant bear. He played thread the needle, which meant shooting a rifle ball through a small hole in a board at a hundred paces. And he learned to repack a muzzle-loaded, twin-hammered shotgun faster than any boy around.