Simeon Collins: An Important Family Link Between Mississippi and Texas

By Vikki Bynum

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, and after exchanging emails with Greg Rowe, (see blogroll, American Civil War Essays & Research), I decided to write a bit about Greg’s direct ancestor, Simeon “Sim” Collins. Sim, a crucial figure in the Free State of Jones’s Knight Company, is often overlooked because of his untimely death shortly after the Civil War. Older brother to the better-known Jasper (who lived to the ripe old age of 86), Sim was Newt Knight’s 2nd Lieutenant. Three of his sons also joined the Knight guerrilla band: James Madison (Matt), Benjamin Franklin (Frank), and Morgan Columbus (Morg).

The fate of Sim Collins and his sons reminds us that taking a Unionist stance during the Civil War was rarely a matter of merely lying in the woods and waiting out the war. The Knight band fought numerous battles against Confederate forces (all dutifully recorded by Newt Knight), but none more ferocious then that against Col. Robert Lowry and his men, sent to the area to break up the band. This battle would eventually lead to Sim’s death.

In the space of a few weeks in April, 1864, Col. Lowry’s men killed ten men from the Knight Company. None of the Collins men were among them. Jasper was up in Tennessee, on a mission to hook the band up with Union forces. Riley Collins fled to New Orleans, as did many members of the band, where he joined the Union Army and soon died of disease.

Sim and his sons were among those deserters captured by Col. Lowry and threatened with execution if they did not rejoin the Confederate Army. Story has it that Sim’s wife, Lydia, begged Lowry not to execute her husband and three sons, and that he responded by offering this alternative. So back into the Confederate Army these Collinses went, and off to Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia, where the Confederate Army scored a tactical victory over the Union, while suffering a setback in the over all war. The men were captured by Yankees and imprisoned at Camp Morton—a cruel irony for the fiercely Unionist Collins family!

Sim, Matt, Frank, and Morg Collins were released from Camp Morton at war’s end, but it was too late for 46-year-old Sim, who died within months of his release. A wounded man at the time of his forced reentry into the Confederate Army, that, and the battle at Kennesaw Mountain, followed by a year in prison, no doubt sealed his fate.

Like so many of the South’s plain people, Sim’s widow and children sank into poverty after the war. In 1872, Lydia and several of their grown children and families moved on to Texas in hopes of making fresh start. Sim’s brother, Warren Jacob Collins, was there to welcome them. As a result, the Texas branch of the Collins family became as extensive as the one left behind in Jones County, Mississippi.

Update, September 6, 2015: Tina Howard Jones, the daughter of Thomas Ray Howard and a descendant of Simeon Collins through his son, Morgan Columbus, recently provided me with a wonderful cache of photographs of descendants of Morgan and his wife, Lucinda Jane Sumrall, which I’ve added here. I know that Collins, Sumrall, and Howard kinfolk will enjoy seeing these faces from the past!

Lucinda Jane Sumrall Collins, wife of Morgan Columbus Collins, the son of Simeon and Lydia Bynum Collins. Lucinda was the daughter of Harmon Levi Sumrall and the niece of William Wesley Sumrall, both of who, like Simeon Collins and his sons, were Civil War Unionists from Jones County, Mississippi. Harmon Levi supported the Knight Band, of which Simeon and Wm. Wesley were members.

1st row, l to r: Lucinda Jane (Sis) Sumrall Collins (widow of Morgan Columbus Collins); Frances Amanda Collins (daughter of Morgan and Lucinda). 2nd row, l to r: Addie Capps Howard (daughter of Frances Amanda Collins) holding her grandson, Thomas Ray Howard; Archie Thomas Howard, Addie’s son and the father of Thomas Ray Howard. Thomas Ray Howard was the father of Tina Howard Jones, the donor of these photos.

L to R: Eler Capps, with her parents, John Henry Capps and Frances Amanda Collins Capps. Eler was the older sister of Addie Capps. She contracted scarlet fever at 8 months, which left her deaf.

Five generations, L to R: Lucinda Jane (Sis) Sumrall Collins, Addie Capps Howard, Frances Amanda Collins Capps, Archie T. Howard holding Thomas Ray Howard.