histories of unconventional southerners
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This is the second of Ed Payne’s three-part series on the Landrum family of Civil War Mississippi. To read Part 1: “The Gray,” click here. —vb
By Ed Payne
On 25 March 1864, twenty-eight men from south Mississippi entered Fort Pike and signed papers agreeing to serve for three years as Union soldiers in the 1st New Orleans Infantry. It would be the largest single day’s enrollment of Piney Woods men whose opposition to Confederate authority had grown over the course of the war.
Fort Pike was one of a series of coast fortifications constructed by the Federal government after the War of 1812. Completed in 1826, the fort guarded the strait that connects Lake Pontchartrain with the Gulf of Mexico. After Union forces captured New Orleans and portions of southern Louisiana in the spring of 1862, the fort became a garrison and training center.
Confederate military operations targeting the deserters and conscription evaders in Jones and surrounding counties began in early March of 1864. The commander of the first campaign, CSA Col. Henry Maury, noted with satisfaction the results:
“They have scattered in every direction . . . but most for Honey Island and the Coast.”
Honey Island is a section of the Pearl River basin, about thirty miles east of Fort Pike. The next step—a major one—would be to establish contact with the Federals and accept an offer to enlist.
Prior to March 25, only eighteen refugees from Mississippi had enrolled and they came in singularly or in twos or threes. But between 25 March and 31 July 1864, an additional 184 joined the ranks of the 1st New Orleans. Each man signed or affixed his mark to a document specifying that his service would be limited to the defense of New Orleans which essentially removed any concerns about having to face fellow Mississippians in combat.
The names of four Landrum men appear on the rolls for that day: Thomas S. Landrum, who gave his age as 43; William P. Landrum, age 28; Henry Landrum, age 18; and John Landrum, age 19. As related in Part 1, Thomas and William Pinkney Landrum were brothers and had enlisted together in the Confederate 2nd Battalion AL Light Artillery in February 1862. They deserted in October following the Battle of Iuka. Henry was the eldest son of Thomas while John was a first cousin (son of Jesse Marion Landrum). Only Thomas could sign his name; the other three made their marks on the enlistment form.
The arrival of over two dozen men on a single day suggests they came as an organized group. The military and pension records offer no hard evidence that Thomas Landrum served as their leader. But the fact remains that 24 of the 28 men who enlisted that day were assigned to the same company—Company D—and that Thomas was simultaneously appointed their Sergeant. A review of the timing of events in the Piney Woods is also suggestive. CSA Captain A.F. Ramsey wrote his letter complaining about the activities of deserters led by “one Landrum of Jones County” on 8 March 1864, unaware that Col. Maury and his troops had arrived in the area a few days earlier. Maury’s superior reported that his force consisted of 200 cavalrymen, a battalion of sharpshooters, and horse-drawn artillery.
Once in uniform, Thomas apparently sought permission to bring in more refugees from Honey Island. He and his son Henry received multiple leave authorizations from May through September of 1864. Military officials probably welcomed the south Mississippians as a new source of manpower and saw Thomas as someone who could convince others to enlist. But at the same time there existed a pressing need for noncommissioned officers to maintain records and train the influx of new recruits. Thomas reverted to the rank of private in May. His former position seems to have been filled by a young Irish emigrant who possessed clerical skills well beyond Thomas’s rudimentary literacy.
The impact of the two Confederate offensives against the deserters in the Piney Woods, combined with solicitation for troops at Fort Pike, resulted in May 1864 being the peak month for enrollment of Mississippians. Seventy-seven men joined the 1st New Orleans that month, with another 40 in June-July but only three thereafter. Other than the authorized leaves, military records are silent on what role Thomas played in mustering these Mississippians into the ranks of the 1st New Orleans. Thomas merely stated, years later in an affidavit for a disability pension, that he contracted both sunstroke and diarrhea while transporting refugees across Lake Pontchartrain to New Orleans in the summer of 1864.
Descriptions of conditions in the masonry fort range from Spartan to hellish: hot and humid in the summer, dank and chilly in the winter. Living quarters were crowded and sanitation poor. Many of the Piney Woods recruits proved highly susceptible to diseases. While only 4.5% of non-Mississippians in the regiment died of disease, illness took the lives of 27.3% of the Mississippians—slightly more than 1 in 4. The most common causes of death were small pox and chronic diarrhea.
The high incidence of small pox among the Mississippians was due to lack of prior exposure in the rural settings of their previous homes. Those who survived exposure to the disease in cities and towns developed immunity. The use of cow pox as a vaccination was proven effective in the 1790s, but over half a century later there was still no means for large scale inoculation. Also, the lack of understanding about the mechanics of disease transmission resulted in soldiers contracting amoebic dysentery from polluted water sources. This produced the chronic diarrhea that killed many and, for others, remained a lifelong malady.
The children of Jesse Marion Landrum suffered an especially heavy toll. Jesse had three daughters married to men who joined the 1st New Orleans: Delphane Dorcus Landrum (James W. Lee), Cynthia Ann Landrum (John Tucker), and Elizabeth Landrum (Thomas Holliman). Not only did Jesse Marion Landrum’s son, John, die during Union service, so did the husbands of these three daughters.
But soldiers were not the only victims of disease. Some of the refugees brought their families with them to New Orleans and they, too, fell ill in the urban setting. According to a later deposition, Thomas settled his family in a house on Canal Street. He had married Sarah Ann Crosby around 1841 and she bore him nine children. Within months of her arrival, Sarah contracted small pox and died in October of 1864. Within a year, three of their children also died: Alexander, Linson, and Rebecca.
Linson B. Landrum, a brother of Thomas, was conscripted in October of 1863 (see Part 1). By this point Confederate recordkeeping had become erratic, and no further records are found for Linson until May of 1864, when he appears on the rolls of the 8th AL Infantry. A notation states that on 1 November 1864 he was transferred to the 48th MS Infantry (the unit into which he had been originally conscripted) which was stationed in the trenches outside Petersburg, Virginia.
On 24 December 1864 Linson crossed over to the Union lines and requested to take the oath of allegiance. Unlike those Southern soldiers who avowed loyalty after being taken prisoner, Linson was accepted as a legitimate defector. He declared his allegiance on 27 December. Linson then requested that he be allowed to serve with his brothers in Louisiana. Request granted, he arrived in New Orleans in February of 1865. Two months later, on 19 April 1865, Linson died of fever. He left a widow, Elizabeth Pitts Landrum, and eight children.
NOTES:1. While Newt Knight’s band may have eluded much of Maury’s operation, there is evidence of at least one contact. A list of engagements fought by the Knight Company, presumed to have been written by Newt himself, includes “Battel of Big Creek Church February the 1 Jones Co 1864 a ginst Cornel Marre of Momile Ala and his artiley.” The list may have been composed some time after the war, which would explain the error in the date (five weeks before Maury’s arrival in Jones County). Thanks to Vikki Bynum for providing me a copy of this document.
News Flash: As I was putting the final touches on the following report, I learned that the American Historical Association has awarded the movie The Free State of Jones the John E. O’Connor Award for “outstanding interpretation of history through the medium of film or video.” The award underscores historians’ appreciation of the movie’s refutation of the Lost Cause version of Civil War history! Congratulations to director/screenwriter Gary Ross and STX Entertainment for this important achievement.
I’m just back from Blacksburg, Virginia, where I attended a screening of the movie The Free State of Jones at the historic downtown Lyric Theatre. The movie, its showing sponsored by the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech, continues to stimulate interest in both the facts and the historical context of Jones County’s rebellion against the Confederacy.
Following the movie, I discussed Hollywood director and screenwriter Gary Ross’s cinematic refutation of the Lost Cause version of the Civil War and Reconstruction that has long dominated popular culture (and Hollywood in particular). Drawing on my years of research and publications on the Free State of Jones, I noted the cultural and kin-based origins of Jones County’s yeoman class uprising, and the uprising’s striking similarity to numerous other “inner civil wars” that raged throughout the Civil War South. Historically, I emphasized, the Free State of Jones is testimony to the importance of class dissent, interracial collaboration, and pockets of fierce support for the Union throughout the Civil War.
To demonstrate how embedded Lost Cause images became over time, I presented key movie stills from Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone With the Wind (1939), and Tap Roots (1948). All three movies bowed to the myth of a Confederacy formed to protect Constitutional principles and honor—not slavery—and provided visual testimony to its permeation of twentieth-century popular culture. Playing especially to the sentiments and emotions of Confederate descendants, these movies perpetuated stereotypes of benevolent plantation masters and gentle mistresses, dangerous black men, loyal mammies, and degraded poor whites (i.e., white Unionists ).
Here’s hoping that The Free State of Jones encourages future movie makers to continue drawing on the expertise of professional historians when attempting to recreate the Civil War past.
Post Script: Just before the movie began, I was delighted to meet in person a longtime friend, Sherree Tannen. Sherree has participated in many discussions on this blog—has written two guest posts for it—but I had never met her in person, nor did she warn me she was coming to Blacksburg, so this was a real treat!
This past week in Virginia, I discussed legendary, historical, and cinematic versions of the story of The Free State of Jones for Lynchburg College’s Civil War and Reconstruction Lecture Series. Adding immeasurably to the evening’s excitement and fun were Eunice Smith, a Free State of Jones descendant, and her mother, Deborah Smith (who is descended from North Carolina’s Winton Triangle)!
No sooner did I return from Lynchburg then my copy of the University of Southern Mississippi’s Winter issue of The Southern Quarterly arrived!
The new Quarterly features an interview with me conducted by Dr. Susannah Ural, professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi. Q & A about the causes and the meaning of the Jones County uprising, and specifically about the lives of Newt, Serena, and Rachel Knight, abound.
On the heels of all that, I received my author’s copies of the Chinese version of The Free State of Jones. Nor a bad week for keeping track of a story now known internationally!
Accomplishing what others could not with so little, this woman of courage and determination, too white to be black and too black to be white, stood up against the moonshiners who threatened her. (Quoted from back side of From Cotton Fields and Mission Fields)
At the young age of sixteen, Anna Knight escaped Jim Crow Mississippi by joining the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. Anna, the daughter of former slave George Ann Knight, and reputedly of Civil War guerrilla leader Newt Knight (who was recently portrayed by Matthew McConaughey in the movie, The Free State of Jones) , eventually became part of the legion of educated middle-class women of color who worked tirelessly between 1890 and 1930 to “uplift African Americans by opening the doors to education and health care” (Quoted from Bynum, “Negotiating Boundaries of Race and Gender in Jim Crow Mississippi,” Long Shadow of the Civil War, ch. 6, p. 118).
Yet, Anna Knight had first to “uplift” herself before she could join the ranks of elite African American women. In this newly-released narrative of her life, Anna’s great-niece, Dorothy Knight Marsh, seeks to reveal how this mixed-race child, who grew up amid racial strife and economic hard times in the piney woods of Mississippi, transformed her life into that of a highly-educated Adventist teacher, nurse and missionary who would in turn transform the community in which she was raised.
In June, 1988, Dorothy and a cousin retrieved the voluminous collection of papers and documents left by Anna Knight when she died in 1972 at age 98. In the book’s introduction, Dorothy describes how she waded through the fascinating materials, discovering in the process Anna’s original handwritten version of her 1952 autobiography, Mississippi Girl (now out of print). Very soon, Dorothy explains, she decided to rewrite Mississippi Girl by paraphrasing Anna’s original autobiography and incorporating new information found in her personal papers. She also added an additional chapter that describes Anna’s final years of life (Marsh, Intro, p. v-vii).
I can’t wait to read the entire book, and I encourage you to do so, too! From Cotton Fields to Mission Fields may be purchased on Amazon by clicking here.
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The University of Southern Mississippi will host seven influential scholars, artists, activists, and scientists in 2016 and 2017 as part of its featured lecture series, University Forum and the Armstrong-Branch Lecture. From an actress whose beloved characters have become part of our cultural legacy to a scientist who wants to change how we think about humans’ origins, this year’s speakers are guaranteed to spark conversations.
The University Forum opens an exciting year of world-class speakers Tuesday, Sept. 13 when Dr. Victoria Bynum, author of The Free State of Jones, speaks at 6:30 p.m. in Bennett Auditorium. In 2003, Vikki Bynum, who traces her roots to southern Mississippi, published a definitive account of the Jones County, Miss. revolt against the Confederacy. Last summer, her book was made into a movie starring Matthew McConaughey as the rebellion’s leader, Newt Knight. In her talk, Dr. Bynum will examine the legacy of Knight’s rebellion and the racial politics that have shaped our memory of the past, from the Civil War to our own times.
Forum’s fall schedule continues Tuesday, Oct. 18 with Bryan Stevenson, one of the nation’s leading advocates for criminal justice reform. Stevenson is a founder of the Equal Justice Initiative based in Montgomery, Ala. In 2012, he argued before the Supreme Court to end mandatory life sentences for crimes committed by children, and he continues to seek changes in the criminal justice system that will replace retribution with mercy. He is the author of the bestseller Just Mercy, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Nonfiction, and was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1995 and the Olaf Palme Prize in 2000. He will speak at Bennett Auditorium at 6:30 p.m.
The final speaker of the fall series is familiar to anyone who watches CNN. Juliette Kayyem is a former Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, and a leading security analyst. In 2010, she worked closely with state and local governments to coordinate the response to BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill and this year she published Security Mom, a plea for common-sense responses to the security challenges facing every American in an era of global terrorism. She will speak a week after the presidential election on Tuesday, Nov. 15 in the Thad Cochran Center Ballrooms.
Dr. Andrew Haley, associate professor of history and director of University Forum, is understandably excited about the coming year. “Our theme is ‘Civil Words’ and, as we have done in the past, we want to spark discussions about our changing world and bring everyone in southern Mississippi into the conversation.”
That conversation will continue into the spring semester. On Tuesday, Feb. 21 the Armstrong-Branch Lecture Series, named after two Southern Miss heroes who broke the color barrier when they enrolled at the University in 1965, will feature actress and activist Jasmine Guy. Guy won six consecutive NAACP Image Awards for her role as Whitley Gilbert on the television sitcom A Different World. Today, Guy directs as well as acts on stage, on film, and on television. She is author of a 2004 biography of Afeni Shakur, Black Panther activist and mother of rapper Tupac Shakur.
by Victoria Bynum
In today’s New York Times, opinion editor Charles Blow delivers a harsh critique of the movie, Free State of Jones, arguing that its treatment of slavery in general and the rape of slave women in particular amounts to a “genteel treatment” of the institution. Blow then turns to my book “The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War, and accuses me of using “grossly inappropriate descriptors” to characterize what in reality was rape. To demonstrate, he quotes the following passage from my book:
Through encounters with women such as Rachel, Newt knew that white men regularly crossed the color line despite laws and social taboos that forbade interracial liaisons and marriages. Rachel, light-skinned and physically attractive, was the sort of slave after whom many white men lusted. The fact that she had a white-skinned daughter announced to interested men that she had already been “initiated” into the world of interracial relations. (page 86)
With great indignation, Blow then exclaims, “Encounters? Liaisons? Initiated? Sexual relations? As long as she was a slave this was rape! Always. Period.”
I responded in the comments section of his op ed with the following:
Mr. Blow quotes my phrase “interracial liaisons and marriages” as though I use them to mask what in reality was rape. He is wrong. In fact, there were many such “relationships”—yes, relationships—that were consensual in the antebellum South, and those relationships were forbidden by law (most, but not all, were between whites and “free people of color”). Rape of a slave woman, on the other hand, was not against the law unless the slavemaster brought charges against someone who “damaged” his “property.” By mischaracterizing my remark in that paragraph, Mr. Blow charges me with ignoring the sexual exploitation of enslaved women. Anyone who knows my work knows that nothing could be further from the truth. In The Free State of Jones, however, I analyze the relationship of Newton Knight and Rachel Knight on its own terms, and not within the trope of slave rape. The relationship between the two began in the midst of the Civil War. Newt Knight was not Rachel’s slavemaster; they were fighting together against the Confederacy. They lived together until her death in 1889. Not every sexual relationship between a Southern white man and a woman of color was an act of rape, albeit many if not most were exploitative. To level such a blanket charge trivializes rape and ignores the complex stories of interracial relations during the eras of slavery and segregation that historians like myself have struggled for years to bring to light.”
Let me add that Charles Blow did not dare to quote the passage that appears on the very next page of Free State of Jones.—the passage where, in critiquing Ethel Knight’s 1951 treatment of Rachel, I wrote the following:
Missing from Ethel’s Old South were white men familiar in Newt Knight’s world—slaveholders (not just slave traders) who treated black women as property to be bred like cattle, and white men who regarded sexual access to African American women as a simple right of manhood. (page 87)
No, Mr. Blow did not quote those words. They would not have advanced his goal of condemning any work on the Free State of Jones that might reflect well on the film he strove to condemn.
Shame on Charles Blow for choosing to employ dishonest rhetoric rather than careful analysis in his critique of a movie that strives to tell a true story of anti-Confederate class resistance and interracial alliance during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
To read the entire op ed, click here.
Jennifer Schuessler examines unusual aspects of The Free State of Jones in New York Times:
Renegade South 