The State of Jones (33 page)

Newton continued to plague the local Confederates. On September 1, 1864, Amos Deason and four other prominent loyals wrote to Governor Clark requesting a company of home guards for protection from his reprisals. Deserters continued to stream into the swamps by the hundreds, until Judge Robert S. Hudson lamented that Mississippi was “groaning under the flood of deserters” and estimated that the state was home to anywhere from five thousand to eight thousand of them. Newton’s ranks swelled with disenchanted soldiers, freedmen, smuggled Yankees, and renegades.

Newton and his men had become so powerful that they actually hoped to overthrow the Confederates democratically, at the ballot boxes, in the county elections that October. On Election Day, men armed with guns, pistols, and bowie knives marched out of the woods to the precinct to cast ballots. But the effort to take back Jones County at the polls failed. Rebel cavalry guarded the ballot boxes and arrested four Unionists who tried to vote.

Newton and his men went back underground and kept fighting, but the worst of the war was over for the Jones County Scouts. Between
the late fall of 1864 and January 10, 1865, Newton recorded just four more battles: in November, they fought an action against “a lot of Rebels sed to have belong to Forest’s Caverle,” near Reddoch’s Ferry, where Newton captured and paroled twenty-one men. In December, Newton and his men were cornered by a company of cavalry under a Captain Gillis at a farm owned by the Gunter family on the Leaf River. Joe Gunter was caught and executed, according to one source shot in front of his wife, Selena, and their children, after which the cavalry forced her to build a fire and cook all of her chickens.

Also wounded in the firefight was Newton’s corporal, S. G. “Sam” Owens, grandson of a legendary backwoods bare-knuckle brawler named Tom Sullivan. Owens was shot in the knee and the hip and only escaped capture by going limp and feigning his own death. The cavalry left him in the field, where Knight’s men found him when they crept back from the thickets. They made a litter and carried him two miles to his mother’s home and hid him in her loft. For weeks Owens lay in the attic convalescing, hidden behind a large trunk and peering through a small window to see what was going on outside. Owens’s presence was a secret to everyone but his close family. When he was healed and able to move about, the sound of rustling and humming in the attic frightened a local slave, who took the sounds to be that of a ghost.

At the end of 1864, the Jones County Scouts finally had a happy event to celebrate: the marriage of Alpheus Knight. The twenty-year-old Alpheus had survived Corinth and Vicksburg and two perilous years of riding at Newton’s side. He and his bride to be, Mary Powell, planned a small, clandestine ceremony during the Christmas week on his family’s property on the Leaf River. In the wedding party were ten or so of the Knights’ close relatives and comrades, including Newton, his sister Martha, and the wife of Dickie Knight, off serving the Union in New Orleans.

Somehow, a local Confederate wife learned of the wedding plans. She wrote out a message to the local rebel officers, informing them of the opportunity to capture the Knight band and handed it to her
cook. “You take this message and don’t you stop to eat or sleep until you’ve delivered it to the Confederate soldiers by Ellisville,” she ordered. The kitchen slave dutifully delivered the message—but she also delivered a message to Newton via the grapevine that the Confederates had been tipped off. “Some folks that were friendly to me, they sent word about it,” he recalled.

Newton urged Alpheus and Mary to go ahead with their celebration and offered to keep watch, though the temperature had plunged. Other members of the wedding party told him, “You’ll freeze to death.”

“The Lord lights a fire in a man to keep him warm when he’s working for a good cause,” he replied.

Newton stood sentinel on the banks of the Leaf River, peering into the dark for Confederates who might try to approach by ferry. Throughout the night he walked a half-mile beat, up and down the riverbank. The river was still until daybreak, when he heard a faint rattle of chains—the sound of a flatboat coming across the river. A moment later, he heard the noises of horse hooves stamping on the bottom of the flatboat. Newton turned and ran for the house, bursting through the door as the wedding breakfast was being laid out.

“You’re just in time,” a woman told him. “Sit down and eat.”

“I’ve got no appetite,” he said. “There’s a fight coming. We’ve got to get out of here. There’s about a hundred Confederates marching on this house.”

As the others gathered their things, Newton bolted a cup of coffee and chewed on a piece of pie. The party rushed outside and scattered in four directions. Newton, Alpheus and Mary, his sister Martha, and two other women struck out over an open field. As they cut across it toward the woods, one of the women, who carried a small baby, struggled to keep up. “I can’t carry this baby so fast,” she gasped. Newton seized the child in one arm.

“I’ll carry your gun,” she said.

“No madam, you won’t,” he said. “Nobody carries my gun but me.”

They had gone about two hundred yards when they heard the
beat of hooves. “Here they come!” Newton said. From out of the brush came a herd of colts, riderless. For a moment Newton was relieved—until the dashing of horses was followed closely by the rippling cracks of gunfire. About twenty Confederates had ridden behind the stampeding horses, using them as cover.

As Newton, Alpheus, and the women reached the tree line, Newton handed the baby to its mother and plunged into the brush. While the women pushed deeper into the woods, Newton and Alpheus swung around and kneeled to face the Confederates from the cover of the trees. The two men raised their weapons, and Newton cautioned Alpheus to fire only one barrel at a time. Then he drew aim on a captain riding straight for them.

“Lord God, direct this load,” Newton said.

The blast kicked the gunstock into Newton’s shoulder, and a fraction of a second later the rebel officer tumbled from his saddle. A moment later, Alpheus let go with one barrel, and another rebel flew from his mount. Alternating barrels, Newton and Alpheus dropped four men and a large gray horse before the Confederates reined to a halt.

Newton began to yell military orders from out of the timber. “Attention! Battalion! Rally on the right! Forward!”

The ears of the cavalrymen still rang from a half-dozen shotgun blasts. As they gazed at the thickets and heard Newton shouting orders it must have seemed that they had encountered an entire company. With four men bleeding on the ground, they were not inclined to press the attack against an unknown number in the woods. They turned their horses and galloped away.

The battle over, Newton and Alpheus exhaled with relief and moved out of the woods to skin the horse. They hauled the hide into the swamp and tanned it in a hole they dug in a log. They used the leather for shoes, a pair of which Newton gave to Martha. She wore them until they fell apart.

Two weeks later, the cavalry returned in search of Alpheus. When he heard the troopers approaching, he crawled up the chimney and
ordered Mary to light a fire. His new bride was so nervous as the Confederates interrogated her that she continually fed more wood to the flames. As the troopers searched the rooms, under beds, and in the barn, Alpheus sweated and turned black in the smokestack. At last the soldiers left, and Alpheus climbed out of the chimney, his rear end roasted.

The Jones County Scouts fought their last engagement on January 10, 1865, near the place where they had first joined forces, Salsbattery. As a dual force of cavalry and infantry closed in on them from two sides, the Scouts delivered a mist of buckshot. After just a few of such volleys from the fringes of the woods, the rebels gave up the attack “as a bad job,” Newton said. Years later, when a work crew cut a road through the area, they found buckshot dappled in the bark of the trees.

Twelve weeks later, the Confederacy toppled. On April 9, 1865, a surrounded and outnumbered Lee, his men starved into wraiths, wrote out a note of surrender at Appomattox and, though he would “rather die a thousand deaths,” sent it across the line to the war-sick Grant, who awaited it racked by a migraine.

Two days later, Lincoln delivered a celebratory speech from the White House balcony in which he suggested that literate blacks, and those who had served the Union, should have citizenship. The speech outraged the ears of John Wilkes Booth. “That means nigger citizenship,” Booth said. “Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he’ll ever make.”

A day later, Mobile surrendered to Union forces. A week later, Lincoln was dead from Booth’s bullet and Grant stood in disconsolate tears over his coffin as it lay in state at the White House.

Still, it was another month before the ceasefire reached Mississippi. On May 4, Confederate general Richard Taylor finally surrendered his remaining forces near Biloxi. On May 6, Governor Charles Clark yielded the capital at Jackson. When Jefferson Davis was captured while trying to flee in Georgia, the new U.S. president Andrew Johnson proclaimed the conflict was “virtually at an end.”

For a brief and exultant time, Newton and the Jones County Scouts believed that they had helped win the war for the Union. The solidarity and resistant swamp tactics of Southern Unionists had dragged down the giant Confederacy, sapping its energy, manpower, and morale.

Newton and his men had fought for their homes and the principles for which they stood, Tom Knight recalled his father saying. “It made him feel good to know his men would fight and die by him for the cause they were fighting for and the interest they had in Jones County. He said he was never afraid to go into a fight when all the company was with him. He knew they would win; it made no difference with him how many cavalry were in the fight on the other side.”

One month after the surrender, in early July of 1865, Newton and some of his men went to Meridian to meet the Union commander there, Major General William L. McMillen. The trusted subordinate of Sherman thanked them for their service and “recognized us as officers and soldiers,” Newton recalled. Newton must have swelled with pride at the words from McMillen, impressive in his stiff, high-collared blue frock coat and gilt shoulder straps. McMillen was a veteran of bitter fighting with Mississippi cavalry during the long twilight months of the war. He remarked that the Jones County Scouts probably deserved pay as Union soldiers for their hazardous duty behind the lines, “as we were a great help to the Government in their defense.” He authorized Newton to draw some rations for his men.

But Newton discovered that victory was a fleeting, ephemeral thing. Just because the Union had prevailed, it didn’t mean Newton’s foes had laid down their enmity for him. Ragged Southerners began to return home to find their fields destroyed, their traitorous enemy Newton Knight in a position of prominence, the local blacks impudent, and a new phrase, “The Free State of Jones,” ringing in their ears, which made their sacrifices seem like a mockery. Conquered and no longer able to fight physically, they began to wage a more
subtle political war to regain control of their state and redeem their Southern honor. They would dignify their treasonous actions under the rubric of a noble but Lost Cause.

William Nugent was among the troops who surrendered under General Richard Taylor in Mobile. Nugent was granted parole and amnesty at Vicksburg on May 22, after signing a “damned nasty oath” of loyalty to the U.S. government. Nugent began the long horseback ride home to Greenville, “disconsolate and weary.” He arrived to find Greenville almost completely razed. As he turned down a lane toward Oakwood, his wife’s family plantation, a neighbor greeted him and pointed him to a nearby field. There, he found his wife, Nellie, and his young sister, Evie, chopping weeds. The sight so undid him that he sat down on the ground and wept.

For months, Nugent had tried to forestall the Confederacy’s imminent surrender and failed. But that did not mean Nugent accepted defeat. The South, he believed, would find other ways to continue the war. “I feel that we can never be subjugated, because even if our armies in the field are defeated there must be such a force kept among us ‘to preserve the peace’ that the Yankees’ government will fall to pieces in the effort to keep it up,” he predicted. Nugent added a second prediction, one in which he would be proven entirely correct.

“The greatest difficulty,” he declared, “will arise after our armies are whipped.”

July 1865, Ellisville

N
ewton Knight had become the man
to see in the Piney Woods. His new status in the first uneasy weeks of the so-called peace was plain in the sheen of the good horse he rode in open daylight down the broad streets of Ellisville and the authority with which he came and went from the Union headquarters, where officers jotted out orders for him and called him “Captain.”