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5 Civil War Unionists as New South Radicals: Mississippi and Texas, 1865–1920
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chapter five Civil War Unionists as New South Radicals Mississippi and Texas, 1865–1920 By 1895, sixty-seven-year-old Jasper J. Collins, aging warrior of the Free State of Jones and the man who allegedly set Mississippi’s infamous Newt Knight on the road to opposing the Confederacy’s “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight,” had become a Populist. He never forgot (or repudiated) his years in the Knight Company, in which he served as 1st Sergeant to Captain Newt Knight and fought against Confederate forces from the swamps of Piney Woods Mississippi. A spirited dissenter all his life, he now moved on to fight new battles, this time for the rights of the common man against a new enemy— the corrupted Democratic Party. Populism emerged from the South’s agrarian reform movements of the 1880s. Mississippi’s preeminent agrarian reformers, Thomas P. Gore, the “blind orator” from Webster County, and Frank Burkitt, a former captain in the Confederacy from Chickasaw County, helped galvanize state support for the People’s Party in 1892. From Marion County, southwest of Jones County and bordering Covington County, Nevin C. “Scott” Hathorn Jr. was elected to the state legislature in 1895 on the People’s Party ticket. He also served that year as proxy delegate from Covington County to the state People’s Party convention.1 102 Legacies Although Hathorn was a decade younger than Jasper Collins and Newt Knight, he was probably acquainted with both. Hathorn’s father, raised in Covington County, was a staunch Unionist likely related to Robert C. Hathorn, the husband of Newt Knight’s sister Keziah. Two of Robert and Keziah Hathorn’s sons ran with the Knight band during the Civil War. Scott Hathorn had yet another connection with the Free State of Jones. In 1895, he and Prentice M. Bynum, former member of the Knight Company and nephew of Jasper Collins, served together as officers of the Marion County People’s Party.2 Whether or not connections to the Free State of Jones influenced Hathorn, by 1895 Populism flourished enough for Jasper Collins to entertain his greatest hopes for the small farmers of Mississippi since the brief era of Radical Reconstruction. In Texas, his brother, Warren Jacob Collins, enjoyed a similar political evolution. Like Jasper, Warren grew increasingly disaffected with the political establishment in the years following the Civil War. His East Texas county of Hardin boasted significant Populist and Socialist minorities, and by 1910 he himself was an enthusiastic member of the Socialist Party, extolling the virtues of Eugene V. Debs.3 The Collinses’ Civil War Unionism was a direct result of the decision by their father, Stacy Collins, not to own slaves. None of the sons owned slaves either, although all were prosperous farmers who could have purchased them had they so chosen. In contrast, Scott Hathorn and Newt Knight were both descended from large slaveholders. Their grandfathers, Samuel Hathorn and Jackie Knight, were veterans of the War of 1812 who traveled to southeastern Mississippi as soldiers and returned there to live around 1817–18. Both men settled in Covington County, bought slaves, and passed them on to the next generation. Samuel died before the Civil War, but his son, Nevin C. Hathorn Sr., also owned numerous slaves. Even so, Hathorn Sr. and Jackie Knight both opposed secession in 1861.4 The elder Hathorn’s and the elder Knight’s Unionist principles remind us that Piney Woods Mississippians’ opinions about secession were not drawn neatly along class lines, at least not in 1861. The ravages of war, however, stimulated class resentments. One story remembered by Hathorn descendants was that of Nevin Sr. chiding his prosecessionist brother-in-law, Alex Harper, for having kept his sons out of the Confederate Army while two of Nevin’s sons served despite his own opposition to secession. Harper replied that his boys refused to join the local Confederate company because it was filled with the “rag tag and bob tails of the county.” Nevin reared up for a fight, ready to avenge this brazen insult. Only the intervention of Alex’s [54.166.234.171] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:33 GMT) Mississippi and Texas, 1865–1920 103 wife, Patsy, prevented a “regular dog fight” between the men. Such conflicts , coupled with policies that favored well-placed families, accelerated disaffection with the Confederacy. The war not only threatened lives but also educated younger men like Scott Hathorn and Newt Knight about the prerogatives of...