The State of Jones (13 page)

For the first time, Newton understood what it was to be a runaway slave. He was sleepless, parched, skulking, blistered, cut, and footsore. As he listened to the sound of the dogs threshing through the woods after him, an old abolitionist song may have occurred to him: “The hounds are baying on my track, Christian will you send me back?” As Aughey wrote, “A fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind.”

Understanding turned to gratitude when slaves came to his aid. The men and women toiling on plantations were reliable sources of succor for fugitives; numerous accounts of runaways and Unionists in Mississippi make clear the extent of the mercies they received from slave quarters as they sought to evade Confederate authorities. Slaves would have fed Newton, led him to safe havens and shortcuts, and taught him ruses for eluding the dogs.

The account of other fugitives in Mississippi in the fall of 1862 shed light on the extent to which slaves aided Unionists behind the lines, and sought their own liberation as well. At roughly the same time Newton fought his way toward Jones County, the preacher John Hill Aughey was desperately stealing across the same section of countryside after escaping from prison in Tupelo, not far from Corinth.

Aughey was arrested in July 1862, for resisting conscription and for spying. He was part of a ring of ninety-odd other Unionists, who signaled meetings by lighting fires on local hilltops, conducted operations against the local rebels in Tishomingo County, and passed information to federal officers. Their motto was “Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”

Aughey was on a reconnaissance ride when Confederate cavalry surrounded him, took him into custody, and escorted him to Tupelo,
where he was interrogated by Sterling Price and clapped in irons in a vermin-infested blockhouse to await execution as a traitor. The prison was a converted old grocery store with a tar of molasses on the floor, over which swarmed “grayback” lice. Aughey was shackled to prisoners of an astonishing variety: runaway slaves, American Indians, resisters, deserters, and captured Yankees who had been rounded up from the local countryside. The population of the crowded blockhouse rose and fell from day to day, as prisoners were called out and marched away for execution.

“We were a motley assemblage,” Aughey wrote. “All the southern states and every prominent religious denomination had representatives among us. The youth in his non-age, and the gray haired man and very aged man were there. The learned and the illiterate, the superior and the subordinate were with us. The descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japheth, were here on the same common level, for in our prison were Africa’s dark browed sons, the descendants of Pocahontas, the pure Caucasion. Death is said to be the great leveler; the dungeon at Tupelo was a great leveler. A fellow feeling made us [a] wondrous kind; none ate his morsel alone, and a deep and abiding sympathy for each other’s woes pervaded every bosom…. when our fellow prisoners were called to die, and were led through our midst with pallid brows and agony depicted upon their countenances, our heartfelt expressions of sorrow and commiserations were loud … and deep.”

There was nothing to do but plot improbable jailbreaks. The men traded tales of escape and advice on how to survive in the swamp. It was well known among them that slaves would help a renegade of any race. One man related that he had been hidden and nursed for a week by a slave named Isam and his wife Tabitha. Another told of being led by a small slave boy to a hiding place in a swamp, where he found a large group of other Unionists who were clandestinely fed and cared for.

As the date of his execution approached, Aughey’s fellow prisoners helped him pick the locks on his shackles with a tool fashioned
from a spoon. Iron fetters still on his ankles, he staggered into the thickets and hid. His experiences probably reflect Newton’s: he subsisted on sassafras leaves and pond water and at times was so thirsty he contemplated opening a vein and drinking his own blood. As he moved surreptitiously through the swamps, he fell into accidental company with other fugitives. In one busy day, he spotted another Unionist shimmying down a tree trunk and crossed trails with a runaway slave.

The runaway showed him a novel method of eluding the dogs: he walked on planks. He would place a plank on the ground, stride a few paces on it, then place another down, picking up the one he had just trod on. It was a laborious method and made for slow progress, but it left no scent or tracks. He sang as he traveled:

With the aid of the runaway, who knocked a Confederate patroller unconscious as both men were on the brink of rearrest, as well as help from some underground Northern sympathizers, Aughey finally reached the safety of Union lines. Aughey was conducted safely east, where he became an army chaplain and wrote a memoir called
The Iron Furnace
, in which he detailed his experiences and wrote of his indebtedness to the Mississippi slave community. “These kind friends,” Aughey wrote, “bore the image of God carved in ebony.”

Another traveler through northern Mississippi in November of 1862 was a chronic runaway slave from the Alabama-Mississippi border area named Wallace Turnage, who bolted from his plantation after suffering repeated beatings for not harvesting his allotted load. “Tired of being whipped” by overseers, including one who
used a walking stick on him, Turnage made for the Union lines at Corinth. It was an especially perilous undertaking for a slave. According to a general order issued by Confederate brigadier general Dan Ruggles the previous July, any Negroes caught attempting to pass to Union lines were to be shot on the spot.

Turnage’s flight was similar to that of Newton’s and Aughey’s. He ducked buckshot fired by a patroller in Lowndes County. He leaped a broad ditch to shake the hounds from his heels. He hid in church steeples, rode a log across the Tombigbee River, and stole a rowboat. Five male slaves hid him and fed him near Aberdeen and told him “they gloried in my spunk.”

But Turnage was recaptured when he was betrayed by a frightened slave woman who reported him after he begged for food at her cabin, just half a day’s walk from Corinth. He was set on by dogs and mauled for four or five minutes while a white man with a bullwhip around his neck pointed a pistol at him. A gang of slave catchers hauled him to a cabin where they beat his head against the fireplace bricks and thrust his hands into the flames. He was then chained to the floor until his owner could retrieve him. On the way home, a squad of rebel pickets offered to tie him to a tree and use him for target practice.

These were the sorts of scenes and stories the fugitive Newton encountered as he moved across the violent panoramic landscape of Mississippi. Everywhere, it seemed, cotton was burning and men were running, fighting, or hiding.

He would have been
a limping, scarecrow-like figure when he finally got home, more rags than man, mud caked and direly in need of a bath, with lice even in his beard.

Jones County looked as though it had been through a war, too. Barns listed from lack of repairs and weeds overgrew fields. The Confederate cavalry had impressed all of the good horses, and the few left to plow were emaciated hacks with their ribs visible. Conscription
had stripped the county of men, and without enough hands to help with the harvest, crops rotted. Rebel officials seized much of what was reaped, as taxes in kind, leaving family storehouses nearly empty. A major crop failure in the first year of the war exacerbated the problems.

Nor could anyone afford to buy supplies; inflation was raging, and the purchasing power of Confederate money had dropped by a factor of three. A barrel of flour sold for fifty to seventy-five dollars in December of 1862 and would rise to ninety to one hundred dollars by the following year. There were shortages of everything: salt, essential for preserving meat, coffee, tea, candles, soda, dyes, and medicines. Everyone was hungry and threadbare. And there was no quick end in sight to the war.

Newton seethed at what he saw. According to his son, “He made it [home] all right and found the people had been treated awful bad here in Jones County.” Serena and other farmwives described to him how Confederate officials invaded their homesteads at will, emptying corncribs in order to feed the horses they had impressed and rounding up cattle, hogs, and chickens for slaughter. They even stalked up the steps of cabins and into parlors, where they seized cloth that women had woven to clothe their families.

Serena stood by, near tears, as officials appropriated all she harvested by day and labored over by night. “It was awful cruel to have to stand out and see the cavalry come into their homes,” Tom Knight wrote, “and take their knives and cut the cloth out of the hand looms, where they had spun the thread out of cotton that they had carded with cards at night after a hard day’s work in the field, and dyed and sized it and warped it and threaded the old hand loom and then wove the cloth to make clothes for their children to wear; then to see them come and cut it out and carry it off with them for their own use.”

The local cavalry plagued Jasper Collins’s sister Sally. The tough, witty divorcee who had accused her estranged husband of sleeping with a mare worked her own farmstead on Tallahala Creek, but she
was unable to fend off the Confederates who habitually plundered her hogs, chickens, and corn. They pushed her beyond endurance when, one afternoon, they caught her best horse and took it, leaving behind an overworked old deadhead.

Newton listened to the exhausted, distraught women and the half-clothed children crying with hunger pangs. Tom Knight summed up his father’s reaction: “Ask yourself if any red blooded man could stand for such conduct and not resent it.”

Confederate officials seemed insensible to the central unfairness of the tax-in-kind system: planters could afford the high taxes and appropriations, but they pushed small farm families, who provided the rank-and-file foot soldiers, to the brink of destitution. A vicious circle plagued the Confederacy: tax seizures that were supposed to feed troops left their wives and children famished.

Jefferson Davis and Governor Pettus urged planters to do their part to feed the army, by planting one acre of corn for every laborer. But Newton noticed that those who had so violently urged secession weren’t nearly so devoted to the cause when it came to shifting from cotton production to less profitable food crops.

A Piney Woods farmer named R. C. Saffold, from neighboring Smith County, summed up the fury of Newton and other yeomen in a letter to Governor Pettus on November 3, 1862. “If something is not done by the legislature to open the corn cribs that are now closed against the widow and the orphan, and soldiers families, who are destitute, I know that we are undone. Men cannot be expected to fight for the Government that permits their wives and children to starve.”

Yet that’s exactly what the Confederacy expected of Newton Knight and men like him. While conscription and taxes drove whole counties into economic distress, rebel authorities adopted an increasingly hard line against deserters.

It soon became apparent to the local Confederates that Newton was living at home, and so were other absentees. In late 1862, Major Joel Welborn came back to Jones County on leave and discovered
that many of the men missing from his outfit after Corinth were hiding out there. Moreover, their families were abetting them. But when Welborn confronted the men, he was met with grim insubordination.

On November 1, 1862, Welborn wrote to Confederate headquarters at Jackson, reporting the presence of large numbers of deserters in Jones County. The men “say they will never return to camp,” he warned, adding that their numbers were significant. “One man has no business in trying to collect these men,” he wrote. He added, “I am well acquainted with that section of the country & am satisfied that there is some of the citizens that is encouraging these things.”

Newton shuddered to think of what might happen to him if he were captured. Desertion was a capital crime. Early in the war the death penalty was rarely if ever enforced, because it defeated its purpose and diminished the number of troops. But as the war wore on, the Confederacy’s culture of leniency where desertion was concerned was hardening. Harsher measures were called for, and execution became a real possibility. According to Newton’s descendants, he asked a fellow Confederate soldier, “Do you think they’d really shoot me?”

There were several dreaded punishments short of shooting or hanging to keep men in the ranks. There were public floggings; shaving of one side of the head; marching men through the countryside like slaves in a coffle; imprisonment with hard labor; and of course branding. It wasn’t lost on Newton that these forms of punishment all had their origins in masters’ efforts to discipline insubordinate slaves. The typical prescription for flogging was thirty-nine lashes—the same number recommended to punish chattel.

As Newton knew, the most feared punishment other than execution was the brand. Offenders who were branded with a “D” on their cheek had “the mark of desertion forever scar [their] face.” The procedure typically took place at the field hospital, so Newton knew the details: an orderly heated coals in a metal bin, and when the branding iron—made specifically for deserters—was sufficiently hot, the
orderly gave it to the doctor on duty, who pressed it into the man’s cheek. There was a sizzling sound, followed by the acrid-sweet smell of burning flesh and blood, and then a long wail.

Another corrective was to be clapped in shackles and fetters while they were red-hot, which also caused scarring. A blacksmith was ordered to “iron him securely, sir,” and the glowing metal was placed around wrists and ankles, burning through cloth and boots. The chain threaded through the prisoner’s shackles was about ten inches long, forcing him to walk in an enfeebled shuffle.

Some measures were calculated merely to haze and humiliate. Stragglers were marched through the camps under guard with boards tied to their backs, on which were written slogans such as “I am a coward” or “I am a shirker from battle.” Others were tied hand and foot astride the neck of cannon, where they were exposed and on view for as long as sixteen hours. As absences became more frequent, such measures became an accepted, routine part of camp life.