The State of Jones

Also by Sally Jenkins

The Real All Americans

Also by John Stauffer

Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln

The Black Hearts of Men

For Gary Ross, Phyllis Grann, and Jim Kelly,

the three great minds who brought us

together, with enormous gratitude

and affection

I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them. I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done—in behalf of his despised poor, was not wrong, but right.

—John Brown, Last Address to the Virginia Court, 1859

CONTENTS

Prologue: The South’s Strangest Soldier

1: Corinth

2: Home

3: The Swamp and the Citadel

4: The Hounds

5: The Third Front

6: Banners Raised and Lowered

7: Reconstruction and Redemption

8: The Family Tree

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

PROLOGUE

The South’s

Strangest Soldier

1921, Border of Jones and Jasper Counties, Mississippi

The newspaperman drove his big city car along a rutted red-clay country road, sending up garlands of Mississippi backwoods dust. Newton Knight was hard enough to find when he was living. Dead, he would always be a fugitive, the newspaperman supposed. The old Civil War guerrilla was said to be nearing ninety years of age, and it wouldn’t be long before he escaped his worldly pursuers and went to the grave—and plunged straight to hell, his enemies hoped. But before he did, the newspaperman intended to take down his story with an honest pen.

The chance to interview Knight was an irresistible summons to Meigs O. Frost. An Andover- and Harvard-educated correspondent for the New Orleans Item, Frost, thirty-eight, was always on the lookout for a rich subject. He’d made a career out of exploring the queer angle, the surprising complication, and the buried secret. Newton Knight qualified on all of these counts; there wasn’t a more controversial—or reclusive —Civil War figure in the South. He’d still be debated long after the last headstone of the oldest combatant was covered with moss, Frost guessed.

Frost pressed the gas of his black Model T and endured the jouncing of his wheels, the rattling of the shutter hood, and laboring of the crankshaft. The rough road, littered with stones and pine boughs, wound through steep, wooded fields and across the crest of a lonesome timber-covered ridge. At last, a clearing opened up. Frost braked to a stop, with a sound of ahooga from the brass horn. He sat on the cape of a remote hill, with a sentinel-like view of the surrounding ridges. It was a place that suggested guardedness rather than peace.

Before him was a weather-beaten cabin, sheltered by lofty pines and crooked oaks, the sort the Confederate cavalry had hung traitors from. Frost got out of the car, and as the dust swirled around his cuffed pants and city shoes, he felt a stir of anticipation. He just might get the answers to some long-asked questions. Everyone had an opinion about the man whose loyalty to the Union had caused him to betray the South. But no one had ever heard the opinions of Newton Knight himself.

Knight’s role in Civil War Mississippi had been argued over ever since the surrender. The debate as to who he was and what he meant by his actions raged on, in old letters in school-taught hands, overlooked depositions, and wartime documents. Only one characteristic of the man did they all agree on.

Just a fightin’ fool when he got started, a friend described him.

From 1863 to 1865, Knight, an antislavery farmer in Jones County, Mississippi, led an insurrection against the Confederacy. For two long years he fought a war from within, successfully evading every bloodhound and tough-booted rebel that came after him. Working side by side with blacks and fellow fugitives, he raised the American flag in the marrow of the South, Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s home state, and became such an effective opponent that in the last year of the war exaggerated reports circulated that he and his compatriots seceded from the Confederacy and formed a separate government. The phrase The Free State of Jones earned a storied if apocryphal place in Mississippi, and in the American imagination.

For all of that, Captain Newton Knight remained one of the less known and most poorly understood warriors of the Civil War. An expert in the art of disappearance, he had faded into the weeds of time the way he once faded into the canebrake of the Mississippi Piney Woods region. Virtually every local account of him was bent by lore or bitter memory. Depending on who told the story, he was called a hero, outlaw, soldier, or murderer.

I believe in giving the devil his due, Newt was a mighty sorry man, declared his old Confederate neighbor, Ben Graves.

Yet, to one local boy named Monroe Johnson, Knight left the indelible impression of a patriot. He looked, Johnson said, like George Washington, with his long white hair.

Who was he, really?

He was a slave owner’s grandson who never owned slaves; a dead-eyed shot who could reload a shotgun before the smoke cleared; a father and husband who after the war had two families, one white, the other black; a white man who in his later years was called a Negro. He fought for racial equality during the war and after, and he envisioned a world that would only begin to be implemented a century later.

Those were the facts. The full story was even more complicated.

That Newton Knight deserted and fought against the Confederate army was well known. Less well known, and seldom publicly acknowledged was Newton’s long alliance with a woman named Rachel, a slave owned by his family, a woman of manifest strength and arresting appearance whom he was rumored to have loved, and even married. Rachel aided and protected Newton during the Civil War and after it bore his children. Newton shared his homestead with her until her death in 1889, and perhaps breaking the biggest taboo of all, he had acknowledged their children and grandchildren as his own. What he did after the war was worse than deserting, old Ben Graves said.

The recovery of the life of this poor Mississippi farmer who fought for the Union was an important story, Frost believed. For one thing, Knight contradicted the romantic vision of the Southern past as a glorious Lost Cause. In this view, the Confederacy was a noble but failed attempt to declare independence from Northern aggressors—and slavery was ignored. One would never know, based on this Lost Cause mythology, that countless gallant Confederate heroes had committed treason, in defense of a still deeper crime. Or that the majority of white Southerners had opposed secession, that many Southern whites fought for the Union, and that a few of them, like Knight, burst free of racial barriers and forged bonds of alliance with blacks that were unmatched even by Northern abolitionists, and remained loyal against all odds.

Newton Knight was a spectacular reminder to Meigs Frost that the South was plagued by bloody internal estrangements. In fact, a major reason for the South’s defeat stemmed from its enemies within, blacks and whites. In Jones County, fifty-three men had not only fought as anti-Confederate guerrillas, but formally enlisted in the Union army in New Orleans.

Definitive statements about Knight’s career were perilous, given the scantiness of the record and the competing agendas of the witnesses. But this much Frost was sure of: for two long years Knight and his band remained unconquered though surrounded by Confederate Armies from start to finish. Their resistance had hampered the Confederate army’s ability to do battle against the North, forced it to conduct a third-front war at home, and eroded its fierce will to fight.

Not that anyone had ever thanked him for it. Newton Knight remained such a sore subject that many Mississippians refused to say his name, except to cuss him, and some of his own relatives even denied kinship with him. To them, he was a criminal.

No romance about it at all, sir, an old Confederate said to Frost. Just a bunch of deserters hidin’ out and bushwhackin’.

To an extent, Knight’s personal reticence had allowed others their opinions of him over the years. Knight never talked about the war. He gave only a few firsthand accounts of himself, even to his white son, Thomas Jefferson Knight. One of the strange things about my father’s activities was that he would never tell anyone how many men they killed or wounded, Tom Knight observed.

Newton believed it did no good to talk about the war and stir up the old bitterness. He made exceptions on five occasions between 1870 and 1900, when he filed claims through Congress seeking compensation for his service to the Union army. The claims were denied—Northern politicians were skeptical that any Southerners could have been loyal to the federal side. The rejection reinforced Newton’s predisposition toward silence on the subject.

But he was reaching the end of his life, and he was tired of being misunderstood. In 1920, the white-haired old man had sent out a missive from his hilltop property. He wished to tell his story to an independent historian. He had heard too many lies of the times, he said. He wanted to correct them.

An Ellisville attorney named J. M. Arnold wrote a note to Dunbar Rowland, Mississippi’s preeminent military historian and archivist:

One Newton Knight of war fame and leader of the Jones County deserters is still living. He is very old and has sent out word that he desire to have some person come with a stenographer and let him make a statement of the true conditions &c. of those times … This old man is liable to die any time and the chance to get the truth, men, facts and events will be lost if this statement is not obtained … I suggest you get some person he know to go with the stenographer as the old man will talk freer … I give you this information because I know you are interested in getting first hand knowledge and this is the first chance that has been had to get the true facts about Jones County during the war.

That was how Newton had come, on that spring day in 1921, to grant an audience to the journalist Frost. Yet even with an invitation, Frost was warned, it might be difficult to get Knight to talk much about the old days. The war still rankled in him, as it did in his enemies in Jones and the surrounding counties. Watch out you don’t come back with a charge of birdshot in your legs, if Uncle Newt ain’t feelin right, a local told Frost.

Frost approached the weathered old cabin, in the shade of the long-straw pines. As he opened the gate of a hand-hewn split rail fence, a hound bayed, and a young couple wandered out to the front porch. Knight’s daughter, Cora, wore an old-fashioned calico dress; her husband was in overalls.

Uncle Newt home?

No, suh. He’s oveh at the otheh place, bout three miles off.

She gestured into the woods, a direction that presumably led to the home of Knight’s black family. Frost surveyed the rough, uneven ground with dismay; the thickets and tangled underbrush made it impossible to go any farther by car. He would have to hike. The man in overalls pointed to a narrow dirt footpath that wound into the woods. Over yonder, past that naked pine.

Frost had just started up the undulating path into the dense woods when a figure loomed ahead, trudging through the brush. The tall, gaunt form that mounted the hill was a trifle stooped, but even with an old man’s hunch in his back, Newton Knight was still formidably built. Frost surveyed a frame that was perhaps six-foot-four or taller, in an age when the average male height was about five feet seven. He was clad in a suit of dark homespun, heavily booted, and topped by a great-brimmed slouch hat of light-colored felt, which only made him seem larger.

The face that peered from beneath the hat was eagle-like. A mighty beak of a nose jutted out like a promontory, Frost noted. The jaw was seen through a sparse white beard. The white hair, uncut for years, hung about his shoulders. But it was the eyes that made the impression on Frost: they were the pale blue color of the winter sea, and they suggested all of the isolation and self-sufficiency of a survivalist who was willing to do whatever it took to endure. To Frost, they were the eyes of a gunfighter. They were that cold, clear, blue-grey eyes of the killer now vanishing from the west, he wrote. They looked clear through you. And by some peculiarity of control, hawk-like, the lower lids never moved.

The gaze was unnerving enough in peacetime, Frost thought. In fighting times—well.

Glad to see you sir, Knight said, offering a handshake. The outstretched hand was a great slab of a thing, palm toughened and heavily muscled from a lifetime of hefting axes, wrestling livestock, and wielding firearms.

His accent was pure backwoods Mississippi, soft on the A’s and hard on the E’s. For emphasis, he used phrases like right smart or right peart. The words came out raht smahrt or raht peert. Knight suggested they move into the house to get out of the raw spring weather and warm themselves next to the hearth. I’m feeling right peart this morning but I reckon a fire would feel good, don’t you? he said.

As Frost followed Knight along the path, the old man covered the uphill ground like an athlete. He had once been a king of backwoods fighters, a bare-knuckled, crotch-kicking, ear-biting hellion. He used to have the biggest, longest teeth you ever saw, one friend remarked.

They crossed the porch of the cabin, stamping dirt from their boots on the threshold. Knight’s living room was a plain, barnlike space of rough plank floors and matchboard walls. A giant whitewashed stone hearth took up most of one side of the room. Above, mounted on a rack and gleaming, was a twin-hammered shotgun.

Frost wasn’t intimidated by the weapon, or by the old soldier. The reporter had an air of the patrician about him—he was a Connecticut Yankee and a remote cousin of the poet Robert Frost—but he was also an ex-soldier himself and a former foreign war correspondent. As a young man he had once tried to chew buckshot, to build up his determination. Following Harvard and a brief stint as a reporter for the New York Times, Frost had enlisted in the Marines. He had chased Pancho Villa across Mexico and fought in the Great War. He still had a silver plate in his leg, which had been shredded by shrapnel. As a war correspondent he had covered a half a dozen Latin American revolutions and lost the sight in one eye from an infection contracted crawling through a jungle. He had finally settled down in New Orleans, where he wrote about everything from ghosts to corruption. But he remained a notoriously tough reporter, who would help bring down Louisiana governor Huey Long by exposing his scandal-ridden administration.

As they stood by the fire, Frost forthrightly introduced the subject he had come to talk about: did Knight remember much about the war?

Well I remember a right smart of it, Knight said.

Memory still as good as your eyes? Frost asked.

Better, Knight shot back. My memory’s all right. ’Bout my eyes, I’ve worn out three-four pair of spectacles. Don’t think much of ’em. Quit ’em. I can see enough to shoot a bird on the wing or a rabbit on the run yet. That’s good enough for me.

In fact, Knight’s mind was as clear and keen as a man fifty years younger. He remembered all of it: the shell blasts that furrowed green fields, the nooses in the trees, the ravening hounds bursting through the brush. He remembered after the war, too, when it was just as dangerous, the years when he seemed to be forever defying the forces of a superior army from his hilltop retreat.

We’ll all die guerrillas, I reckon, Knight said. Never could break through the rebels to jine the Union Army. The Johnny Rebs busted up the party they sent to swear us in. Always was unofficial. Well I reckon it don’t make much difference now, anyhow.

Knight piled oak logs in the large mouth of the fireplace and then sat down heavily in an old splint rocker by the fire. He gestured to Frost to do the same. Draw up a chair and make yourself comfortable, Knight said. He pronounced it cheer. Frost sat down and took out his notebook and his pen.

Now, sir, Newton said, as Frost settled in. What is it you want me to tell you?

ONE

Corinth

May 1862, Corinth, Mississippi

As far as the foot soldiers were concerned, the other side could have the damned town. The generals might have gladly given it up too, if not for the railroad junction. Corinth was pestilential. Even the Union’s pitiless William Tecumseh Sherman said the place made him feel quite unwell. Sherman’s superior, Henry Halleck, had such a low opinion of it that when he fell ill with a bowel ailment, he sourly named it the evacuation of Corinth.

It was wretched ground for a fight, with boggy fields, swarms of bugs clouding the fetid air, and a chronic shortage of decent drinking water. A Confederate colonel called it a sickly, malarial spot, fit only for alligators and snakes. It left no better impression on a Yankee lieutenant from Minnesota, who found the locals ignorant and the women she vipers with the figures of shad bellied bean poles, he wrote. As far as he could tell, the chief local produce consisted of wood ticks, chiggers, fleas, and niggers.

But men on both sides understood, if reluctantly, that Corinth was one of the most vital strategic points in the South. It was the vertebrae of the Confederacy, as one rebel official put it. In the middle of town, two sets of railway tracks crossed each other in a broad X: the Memphis and Charleston ran east-west, while the Mobile and Ohio ran north-south. The intersection was a working hive: locomotives screeched and huffed, while men on platforms loaded and offloaded downy bales of cotton, stacks of lumber, crates, barrels, sacks of provisions like salt beef, and other vital war materiel. Trains were the reason for Corinth’s existence: the village was just seven years old and the streets were still raw dirt. The largest hotel in town, the Tishomingo Hotel, was a broad two-story affair with six chimneys that fronted directly on the tracks of the Memphis and Charleston, which ran just outside the front porch.

There were 80,000 Confederate troops under General Pierre G. T. Beauregard jammed into the brick and clapboard town, which normally housed just 2,800 inhabitants. Corinth was filled with rebel wounded from Beauregard’s catastrophic encounter in April with U. S. Grant’s Yankee troops at Shiloh, just a few miles away. The battle, so named for the log church where Grant’s men had camped, was the worst bloodbath in the Western Hemisphere to date, with a toll of 20,000 in two days. God grant that I may never be the partaker in such scenes again, one Confederate survivor wrote. When released from this I shall ever be an advocate of peace.

Corinth was hardly an ideal place to recover. Contagion was inevitable with such a large army closely confined in pestiferous surroundings, the comings, goings, spewings, and brawlings of thousands of men, horses, mules, and oxen trod everything into mud, and their litter and foul runoff attracted hordes of fleas and mosquitoes. There were not enough rooms to accommodate the wounded, much less the sick. On the first floor of the Tishomingo, men lay on blood-and water-soaked carpets or blankets in the vestibule and hallways. On the second floor, the charnel-house vapors caused some of the doctors and nurses to pass out.

One of the wounded was a rugged thirty-year-old colonel in the 6th Mississippi Infantry, and a future governor of the state, named Robert Lowry. This peacetime lawyer had been raised in Smith County, one county over from Jones. He had taken wounds in the chest and another in the arm, as his company lost 310 men out of 425. The performance had earned his unit the nickname The Bloody Sixth.

Those Confederates who survived Shiloh unharmed were as likely to get sick in Corinth. The rebels were preparing for a state of siege as a federal army of 120,000 under Union general Halleck encroached on the outskirts of town. Men labored constantly with shovels in the sweltering heat, as Beauregard ordered the defenses fortified with immense earthworks. The men dug until they were thirsty, then drank foul, swampy water. Diarrhea and dysentery became endemic. Soon, a quarter of the Southern troops were ill. The water was bad enough to kill a dog much less a man, wrote a Mississippi cavalryman named William L. Nugent home to his wife.

Beauregard responded to the epidemic by trying to rally men with rhetoric: We are about to meet in the shock of battle the invaders of our soil, the despoilers of our homes, the disturbers of our family ties, he wrote in a widely distributed letter. Face to face, hand to hand, we are to decide whether we are to be freemen or the vile slaves of those who are free only in name … Let the impending battle decide our fate, and add one more illustrious page to the history of our Revolution, one to which our children will point with noble pride, saying, ‘Our fathers were at the battle of Corinth.’

But even as his letter circulated among the soldiers, Beauregard decided to evacuate the city. At the end of May, Beauregard hastily decamped his army and its provisions, mostly hunks of heavily salted meat, for the healthier environs of Tupelo to the west. Beau-regard, too, had gotten sick. Suddenly, he did not feel his presence was required in such a swampland. He took an unauthorized leave to recuperate in comfort in Mobile.

With the Confederate withdrawal from Corinth, the Union forces moved in. They found the place a stinking pit. Abandoned foodstuffs and other detritus rotted on the roadsides. A soldier with the 81st Ohio, Joseph K. Nelson, noticed an odd glint in the earth that crunched under the soles of his boots. When he bent down to examine the dirt, he found it was literally moving with insects.

The Johnnies left behind something for us to remember them by, he wrote in his diary. The ground in places was alive with ‘body guards’—lice—and was much littered in places with large chunks of very salt beef. The salt sparkled and glistened in it.

October 1862, Northern Mississippi, on the March

General Earl Van Dorn was a ringlet-tossing little Mississippian in search of a big reputation. Profligate with the lives of men and impossibly conceited, as suggested by his extravagant twists of auburn hair, Van Dorn openly aspired to a burning name, as he put it. He was continually conceiving of schemes that could win him the flaming renown he sought, and his latest was typical.

As an Indian summer fell over Mississippi, Van Dorn about-faced the Confederate Army of the West and marched it back toward Corinth with the intention of retaking the town. His plan was a hurriedly drawn, surprise full frontal assault, and heedless of risk, but that only made it more infectious to some of his colleagues. He was after great objects, and that justified the unusual hazard of the attack, according to his chief of staff, another overeager Mississippi cavalier general named Dabney H. Maury.

But Newton Knight, a young sergeant striding in Company F of the 7th Mississippi Battalion, felt none of the enthusiasm that the glory-seeking Van Dorn and Maury tried to summon with such verbal flourishes. He was neither free nor proud to be a Confederate soldier.

Company F, made up of sixty-nine men and four officers from Jones County, had been forcibly mustered into the ailing Confederate army after Beauregard’s evacuation of Corinth in May. Now, just four months later, almost half the new men were ill. Fully two-thirds were absent or on leave, and six had died. At the last roll call, only twenty men and two officers had answered present, Knight among them. Men were sick with yellow fever, dysentery, malaria, and influenza. Or they were just plain sick and tired of marching around northern Mississippi as their vainglorious commanders ordered them to and fro across the sweltering countryside. It was a testament to Knight’s sheer vigor that he was on his feet.

Newton was a long-limbed, shaggily handsome twenty-four-year-old accustomed to privation. His wavy black hair curled to his shoulders and was greased with sweat over a tall forehead. A rampant, untended mustache and beard fell below his chin into his shirt buttons. His large, pooling, blue-gray eyes seemed preternaturally sighted and were spaced far apart, which led some to accuse him of eccentricity. He had perpetually sunburned cheekbones and a large jaw clamped hard and slightly off center.

He was rawboned and muscular from habitual work and a lifelong diet of sweet potatoes, cornbread, and whatever wild game he brought down with his shotgun. Big heavyset man, quick as a cat, a friend described him. Men from easier backgrounds found camp life a misery; the beds on wet ground, the foraging and scrabbling for decent victuals, the tramping in all weather with never a change of clothes. Not Newton: hard didn’t bother him.

Newton suffered from a different complaint: he was an unwilling soldier. In April of 1862, the Confederacy, badly in need of reinforcements, had passed the first Conscription Act, drafting all men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. They just come around with a squad of soldiers ’n took you, Newton remembered. On May 13, 1862, Newton and twenty-two of his closest relatives and friends, young men who hunted together, worshipped together, drank together, helped build one another’s homes, and even married one another’s sisters, had reluctantly enrolled in Company F together, rather than be conscripted and be put into companies where we didn’t want to go, another Jones Countian recalled.

As an inducement, those who volunteered rather than waited to be impressed received a fifty-dollar bounty. But those who hesitated were coerced or faced arrest. Under the threat of law, they all came in, recalled the major commander of the 7th Battalion, Joel E. Welborn, who raised the troop. I did organize the men as conscripts. Welborn and the unit captain, his relative J. G. Welborn, took down enrollments until the battalion numbered 760 or so.

At least by joining up together, Newton and his friends could be messmates. Eating together was the strongest tie in the dreary life of the army other than fighting together. Messmates were more than supper companions; they foraged, cooked, groused, sang, gambled, argued, smoked, and killed time together. Over meals, they confided their daily thoughts and fears to like-minded men who shared their wretched experiences.

Mess was a small relief for Newton and his comrades as they moved toward Corinth on October 2, 1862. At the end of the day, the men unshouldered their gear and dropped it heavily. They stacked their muskets in triangles, barrels crossed and rifle butts in the dirt, and sagged to the ground or low campstools, a seedy lot in mismatched clothes and heavy beards. They thrust pipes in their mouths or pulled out newspapers, while around fires, rank-smelling meat stew began to simmer in a heavy black iron pot and coarse cornbread roasted in a black skillet, which an assigned man had carried, stuck handle first in his rifle barrel.

The men griped incessantly about their fare, the dry cornbread cooked in bacon grease (wheat flour was usually too precious to be wasted on infantrymen) and the rancid beef they were issued. The blue-black meat had a gluey texture, and they wondered if they threw it against a wall whether it would stick. Buzzards would not eat it at any season of the year, one Mississippian claimed. They joked that the cattle supplying the army were so emaciated it took two soldiers to hold up one cow so it could be shot.

Depending on what the countryside offered, they would enhance their meal with foraged field peas or onions, or fruit plundered from orchards. A favorite recipe was cush, a stew made of beef, bacon grease, water, crumbled cornbread, and mashed green apples. But sometimes they had nothing but dry bread and musky beef, which they roasted in strips on the ramrods from their guns. As one Mississippi captain in another regiment reported, The discipline of the troop would be promoted by a more regular issue of rations.

None of their issue was regular. They wore sallow gray-brown tunics and cartridge belts, in which the best-armed men might have a pistol stuck one way and a knife the other. They were unevenly equipped with rifles; some had Springfields with barrels long as rails, others the shotguns they brought from home. In addition to their eighteen-pound firearms, they packed forty rounds in ammunition pouches, three days of rations in haversacks, clanking metal canteens, and mess kits, if they hadn’t thrown them away to lighten the load. Sometimes when a man didn’t have a plate to eat from, he exploded a cartridge in a canteen. The canteen would split open and flatten.

As they ate, the men of Company F commiserated and discussed their apprehensions about the coming battle. They once again debated, as men on both sides often did, the cause they had been drafted into. A few even openly expressed an unwillingness to fight: the outfit was unusually full of independent-minded men who resented conscription and felt no loyalty to the Confederacy, though they had to be careful saying so in front of officers.

A leading example was Jasper Collins, a thirty-four-year-old corporal with a face flat and leathered as a saddle who was one of Newton’s closest lifelong friends. When there was a fight on, he was right there with my father, wrote Newton’s son. Collins was considered one of the most knowledgeable and politically informed men in the company, He kept well posted on business … and read lots, on various matters that would come up. He was from a family of staunch Unionists, who were tough enough to be able to state their beliefs aloud and defend them. His father Stacy had spoken out vehemently against secession, and his six brothers were pro-Union as well; Jasper’s older brother Riley had flatly refused to be conscripted.

Newton’s own convictions about the war stemmed from a combination of politics and faith. He was a Unionist in principle, and he had opposed the state’s Ordinance of Secession. He also questioned the fundamental religiosity of slavery and the underlying basis of the war. In his worship he was a Baptist, and some evidence suggests he was a Primitive, one who tended to believe in the equality of souls, including those in bondage. As he read in his Bible, Acts 17:26: And God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.

Newton had resisted serving the Confederacy, to the point that he courted arrest. He declared to the conscription officers that he didn’t want to fight and instead volunteered as a battalion hospital orderly. In that way, he hoped to avoid killing men and care for them instead, and to reconcile his conscience with his actions. I told ’em I’d help nurse sick soldiers if they wanted, he remembered.

His defiance didn’t sit well with the Welborns. At one point, according to a fellow soldier, the captain threatened to have him shot.

Knight simply didn’t feel any common interest with the merchants and planters who made up the officer class and who had pressed him into service. The man who had forced Newton into uniform, fifty-one-year-old Major Joel Welborn, was a moneyed, well-connected land speculator with a reputation for crooked dealing back home. Welborn was among the richest men in Jones, the owner of an ever-expanding empire of real estate with a personal worth of $36,000. A year earlier, he had been accused by his neighbors of fraud for abusing his position as swamp commissioner to seize as many as 25,000 acres of land and resell it.

Newton was a yeoman farmer who had left behind a homestead and acreage worth just $800, on which he struggled to feed his wife, Serena, and three infant sons. Yeoman farmers depended upon their own sweat and toil and took pride in their independence. But the planter-merchants were contemptuous of small farmers like Knight in civilian life. A prominent Mississippi attorney turned cavalryman, William L. Nugent of the 28th Mississippi, patronizingly described the humble tiller of the bleak hillsides of the interior who eked out a miserable existence. General Dabney Maury more bluntly called them the worst class in our population. Colonel Robert Lowry of the 6th Mississippi referred to them as ignorant persons despite the fact that he had grown up among them, as his neighbors.

These elites were just as infuriatingly arrogant in the military. Many of them seemed to view their officer status as a prerogative, and the men in the ranks as vassals. They could afford luxuries such as tents with flaps that closed, changes of underclothes, and lavish fare like wheat biscuits. We are treated here worst than dogs, wrote J. B. Shows of Company C of the 7th Battalion angrily to his wife in Jones County. One enlisted man described Confederate officers ordering infantrymen around as if they were a lot of negroes. I am in favor of discipline but not of tyranny. Still another wrote in his diary, I only hope that a false patriotism will never again induce me to put myself at the mercy of such damnable despotism as governs the army.

The chronic hardship of camp life for the Confederate private exacerbated his resentment at conscription. The pay was only eleven dollars a month—when the men received it, which was seldom—not enough to purchase a clean shirt. As their clothing tattered, so did their morale. One angry Confederate soldier chafed from morning till night at the starvation, rags, dirt and vermin and the insuperable obstacles to decency by which I was surrounded and blushed with mortification at his own appearance.

Newton therefore felt little loyalty to his superiors. The sinewy physical giant who wished to remain in the rear frustrated his officers. But if they wanted to shoot him, at the same time they needed him. Newton was popular and held sway over the men, enough so that upon conscription Welborn had designated him fourth sergeant of the company. In fact, Newton showed the makings of a good soldier: he had an unbreakable constitution, an unerring eye through a gun sight, and a capacity for hard marching. He performed his duties well enough that he was shortly promoted to third sergeant, though that may have had as much to do with the sickness in the company. As a sergeant, Knight was required to study Hardee’s Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics and learned how to issue basic drill commands: Attention, company! Shoulder—arms!

Knight’s dual roles as sergeant and hospital orderly kept him busy given the poor health of the unit as it moved toward Corinth. Among his responsibilities was dosing his comrades with the standard, crude army remedies for their ills. I went around giving the sick soldiers blue mass and calomel and castor oil and quinine, he said. That was about all the medicine we had then.

At night, the field hospital staff pitched a small tent, about fourteen feet square with about eight cots. There wasn’t much temptation for men to malinger with medical excuses, as there were no sheets or pillows, just rough-fibered army blankets, and no one had heard yet of sanitizing. Too long a stay on one of those cots was likely to give a man an infection if he didn’t already have one.

The next morning, after reveille, the doctors determined who was fit to march. Newton distributed bitter-tasting drafts, made of various powders stirred into tepid water. Often, medicines were unavailable, owing to the Union blockade, and ether and chloroform were too expensive to use on common soldiers. An array of small bottles was lined on temporary shelving, holding herbs and home remedies. There was Dover’s powder, quinine, rhubarb, Rochelle salts, castor oil, sugar of lead, tannin, sulphate of copper, sulphate of zinc, camphor, tincture of iron, camphorata, syrup of squills, simple syrup, and an assortment of alcohols—whiskey, brandy, port wine, and sherry. For those suffering with nervous disorders, there was the herb valerian, or perhaps some opium, to induce calm and sleep.

Newton changed bandages, read the Bible to men who requested it, and found water for the ailing. His disposition mattered more than medical knowledge. With death so common, doctors became calloused, and the soldiers resented them, believing they were butchers who kills mores than they cour, as an Alabaman put it. Captain Walter A. Rorer of the 20th Mississippi, who had fought at Shiloh, flatly despised them. There is nothing held by them so cheap as human life, and all seem to think if they do not murder men directly, they are not responsible, he wrote. A compassionate orderly was a wounded soldier’s best friend.

But Newton knew he was going to have to fight eventually, whether he wanted to or not. The 7th Battalion was marching in a force of 22,000 men led by Van Dorn on a circuitous route to his great object, Corinth. As part of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Division, Newton was under the immediate command of General Sterling Price, another pugnacious staff officer who craved conflict. He had already led Newton into battle once, at Iuka two weeks earlier.

Price was a thickset Missourian who stood six foot two and weighed nearly three hundred pounds, with a face shaped like a lamb chop and swirls of white-gray hair at his temples that plunged downward into cottony sideburns. He struck one Mississippi lieutenant colonel as a hale, hearty, handsome old farmer, and his Missouri soldiers called him Old Pap, for his grandfatherly appearance. But he had a vehement temperament and was prone to grandiosity. A few months earlier, he had demanded preferment from Jefferson Davis by slamming his fist down on the presidential desk, shouting, I will surprise you, sir! His sense of entitlement was based on a widely varied career as a lawyer, hotelier, tobacco planter, congressman, veteran of the Mexican War, and governor of Missouri. He was portentous. When shown the fortifications of Corinth built by Beauregard, he said, I only saw anything like them but once and I took them. Although he initially opposed secession, he turned fanatic, and at the end of the war he would choose exile in Mexico over surrender.

In mid-September, Price had stormed his men into Iuka, swaggeringly advising his troops that if the Yankees had the impudence to come near, to shoot at their knees. But the battle had been a near disaster: they had almost been trapped by federal pincers led by Grant and General William Rosecrans.

Newton and the 7th Mississippi Battalion had been among the last to arrive on the field, shortly before nightfall. The firing had subsided, but he witnessed the toll of it in the dim twilight, and heard it too, from the thousands of wailing wounded. The moon had been full that night, shining on pale corpses and dark humps of dead horses. Confederate losses were as high as 520 killed and 1,300 wounded, while the Union reported 141 killed and 613 wounded. Before dawn, the men had been shaken awake with orders to withdraw. Price, badly outnumbered, had been fortunate that an entire arm of the Union force under General Edward O. C. Ord had remained idle due to an acoustic topographical fluke, unable to hear the sounds of battle from behind a hill. Price seized the opportunity to escape down an open road, and the sleepy, unnerved men went tramping back the way they came.

Ever since then, they had been on a wearisome circular journey. Price had given his men just two days’ rest before putting them on the rapid march again, this time to Ripley, twenty miles north, for a rendezvous with Van Dorn and the attack on Corinth. Without waiting to fix things up and get together our old men we again started on a more foolhardy expedition than the last, said one staff officer.

Capricious weather and the pace of the march told on the men. At first, it rained as Newton and comrades trudged over the steep hills of northern Mississippi. They arrived at Ripley footsore and mud soaked, and with ill will toward their commanders after marching for seven hours at a stretch, at night thru rain and darkness so black you could scarcely see your hand. They slept on wet ground, with no idea of why they were