VICKSBURG Chapter Thirty-Two

 

The 38 year old bespectacled Democratic publisher of the Hinds County Gazette, George William Harper (above), was worried.  Even during the bright arrogance of 1861, the one time mayor, two term state representative and a major of militia had watched with foreboding as “The Raymond Fencibles” marched off to war in Virginia. Despite his personal rejection of succession, George had volunteered as commissariat, securing supplies for the 2 regiments raised in Hinds county, Mississippi. And this gave him a perspective as, over the next two years, the war crept closer to 512 Palestine Street in Raymond, where George's wife Anna and their six children lived.

Raymond seemed safe from the anarchy of the war. The petite capital of Hinds county was off the main road between Vicksburg and Jackson, yet close to the Natchez Trace, on property donated by General Raymond Robinson. By 1862 the 1,500 white residents boasted a new Greek revival county court house (above) (built with slave labor)... 

...Two respectable rooming houses - “The City” and “The Oak Tree” (above) - as well as the not quite so respectable Florin House, several grand homes and two dozen or more tenement apartments. 

The town also boasted a new Episcopalian  church as well as the older Methodist church, ministered over by the Reverend Cooper - who was also owner of the diuretic medicinal waters of Coopers Wells resort (above)  just south of town. 

There were a couple of dry goods stores, a few saloons and blacksmiths, a hand full of doctors, a flurry of lawyers and Harper's  Hinds County Gazette - second oldest newspaper in the state. Raymond was as peaceful a town as could be found in the cotton empire. And then, four days ago on 2 May, 1863, the Yankees had captured Port Gibson, just 50 miles to the south.

The sudden appearance of blue uniforms in the very gut of Mississippi ripped apart the carefully cultured self image of gentility which had graced the south for a century. In a region already stripped of young white males, the nightmare of retribution was abruptly set free to stalk the land in daylight, and the thousands of ways the “peculiar institution” had twisted and bent the society, laws and psychology of the south were revealed in all their hypocrisy. So terrifying was this sudden reality it must be doubtful if either master or slave welcomed the revelation without reservations.

On Tuesday, 5 May, halfway between Raymond and Edward's Depot. 500 troopers of the 2^nd Illinois Cavalry had descended upon and captured 100 mounted infantry of the 20^th Mississippi. That put Yankees within 8 miles of Raymond.  

The next morning, George Harper used his new Number 3 Washington Press, manufactured by New York based Robert Hoe and Company, to deliver the depressing news to his readers. It was, he wrote, “...a very gloomy day. Enemy reported at Edwards Station, Auburn, Cayuga, (and) Rocky Springs.”

George assured his readers the Yankees would concentrate on Vicksburg, 40 miles to the east, and that the fighting would come no closer than the banks of the Big Black River – still 20 miles, a full day's travel, away.  But George knew a zone of uncertainty had opened up in the rolling hills of central Mississippi, bordered by Bayou Pierre on the south, the Big Black River on the west, Snake Creek to the east, and to the north, the little community of Edward's Depot.

The 20 year old Tennessean Richard O. “Rich” Edward was one of the 75,000 whites drawn and 100,000 slaves forced to Mississippi after the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. The sudden creation of 11 million acres of land turned conventional economics on its head. As attorney and author of “The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi”, Joseph Glover Baldwin put it, “The country was just settling up”. Fraud was rampant, and it seemed every idiot was making money. One of them explained, “...credit is plenty, and he who has no money can do as much business as he who has...”. “Rich” Edward easily acquired a few hundred acres in the Yazoo River delta and started growing cotton.

In 1834, Mississippi produced 85 million pounds of cotton. Three years later the cotton kingdom produced 200 million pounds of the white fiber. Over the same time the price paid for that cotton in New Orleans almost doubled. This drove inflation, but again, few seemed to notice. Baldwin explained that “Money, or what passed for money was the only cheap thing to be had.” It seemed as if the good times would go on forever. They did not.

During March and February of 1837 the price of cotton dropped 25%. The immediate cause was President Andrew Jackson's order that the only payment accepted for Federal lands would be in gold or silver. This caused private banks to raise interest rates on paper – or specie – loans. And that produced a seemingly endless string of bankruptcies. In August of 1838, Colonel William H. Shelton, President of one of the largest banks in Mississippi,  fled after his bank failed - “Gone to Texas” was the phrase. A year later he committed suicide. In 1840 the entire state of Mississippi defaulted on $2 million worth of loans to cotton farmers. It took seven long years for the recovery to even begin.

In 1847 Richard Edward paid a dollar an acre for a section of 640 acres of Harlan County, 16 miles from Vicksburg and just east of the Big Black tributary called Baker's Creek. The impetus for his investment was a new cotton boom.   In 1850 Richard's 30 slaves produced one hundred eighty 500 pound bales of cotton, shipped out of his own depot on the Mississippi Southern Railroad (above). By 1860 Richard's wealth included 124 slave laborers, making him one of the top 12% of slave owners.

But in a back room at Edward's Produce and Grocery was the iron fist required to make that wealth possible – 300 muskets and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. Almost every large plantation in the south required such a larder, ever ready to respond to the expected great slave revolt, when it came. The 3,000 weapons destroyed by Grierson's raid were further evidence of these doomsday vaults dispersed though out Mississippi.  And these were not hysterical fantasies. 

According to the 1860 census, there were 791,000 humans living in the state of Mississippi, of whom 437,000 – 55% - were owned by the remaining 45%. Some 80,000 white Mississippi men then went to war, further unbalancing the social power structure. It would have been odd, if the whites had not felt vulnerable, because they were.

But in the pine forests of Winston county, in north/central Mississippi,  where there were only 122 black slaves, owned by just 14 white families - out of the total of 637 white families in the district. There was strong pro-union sentiment in Winston County. Yet even here, where masters vastly outnumbered those in bondage, owner Mr. C. D, Kelly was willing to believe his own cook's tale of a mass slave conspiracy. Her name was never provided, but Mr. Kelly said that on Friday, 20 September 1860, while he was “chastising”, the “girl”, she had revealed a massive plot to poison every white family in the county. 

She said she had been provided with poison to murder her master, his wife and child.  According to the New York Times, a week after learning of the plot, Mr. Kelly, “...called on some five or six responsible and sober-thinking gentlemen,” to form a Vigilance Committee. On 28 September the committee went from plantation to plantation, beating slaves without explanation or examination. The following day, the committee returned and some of the slaves spontaneously “confessed”, leading to the arrest of about 30 slaves. It was assumed white agitators had lead the conspiracy, specifically a traveling photographer, later detained in Philadelphia and identified only as G. Harrington – possibly Cole Harrington, originally from New York City.

Observed The Times, “ Knowing well that the law is too tardy in its course...” the committee “...unanimously committed” to pass punishment, “...on all persons, black or white, that may be impeached before it. of aiding or abetting in insurrectionist plans or movements, heretofore or hereafter.” The result, as reported in the Louisville and St. Louis newspapers, was that one negro and Mr. Harrington “had been hung.” 

And, of course the remaining 29 slaves were whipped, “...so severely, that it was thought they would die.’’

In February of 1862 such fear drove Joseph Davis, elder brother to Confederate President Jeff Davis,  to take his family and “house slaves” to Alabama for their safety.  But the moment the master's boat left the dock of his Hurricane Plantation,  his field hands took control of the entire peninsula, ransacking both Joseph's Hurricane Plantation house and Jefferson Davis' Brierfield Plantation house.   

All the cotton was burned, while the self-emancipated slaves took everything they could use back to their cabins (above) And there they stayed.  A Confederate lieutenant, dispatched with a patrol to put down the rebellion was shot at. The officer complained that, “...almost all the slaves on (the) Davis plantation had guns and newspapers.” 

Fifteen of the rebellious slaves were caught and several executed, but the remaining slaves remained defiant. They even refused to surrender the property to the Yankees, when they arrived. 

It was clear that for some time the so called benign slave masters had been sitting atop a powder keg of their own making. 

Robert Augustus Tombs (above), the 53 year old alcoholic Georgia genius, made the other obvious point regarding slavery in his farewell address in U.S. Senate. He said, “We want no negro equality, no negro citizenship...” But this deeply racist man also accepted as fact that slavery was doomed in America. A year later, as Confederate Secretary of State, he assured the Confederate Congress, "In 15 years more, without a great increase in Slave territory, either the slaves must be permitted to flee from the whites, or the whites must flee from the slaves."  It would seem that all talk of "benign slavery" was so much antebellum horse manure, not shared by the actual defenders of the institution. 

 Also,  viewed on a purely economic basis, slavery in the America was already dying. The first slave empires had been Virginia and Maryland. Fifteen to twenty years later "...due to the exhaustion of the soil..."  South Carolina had replaced them in cotton output.  As the cotton bushes consumed the available nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium in the soil, cotton yields in first South Carolina and fifteen years later, in Mississippi and Georgia began falling off. By 1860, Arkansas and Louisiana were the new queens of cotton production. By 1875, if not earlier, Texas would be used up. And then, without expansion into Mexico, which had made slavery illegal in 1845, slavery in North America would die a natural death.

Would the United States fight a new war, as they had in 1838 to seize Texas, to convert Mexico into the new slave empire? Was it likely Britain and France would allow such a conquest, if attempted,  to go unchallenged? 

The truth was, as George William Harper well knew, the day of the slave empire was ending. And the American Civil War was about one third of the nation refusing to accept that reality.

There were three men who would affirm that unequivocal reality to the citizens of the Confederacy - President Abraham Lincoln, in Washington, D.C., commander of the Army of the Tennessee, Lieutenant General Ulysses Grant, and General William Tecumseh Sherman, who on 6 May, 1863, stepped ashore at Grand Gulf, Mississippi, at the head of the 15,000 men of his XVth. Corp.

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