The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies

1 Guerrilla Wars: Plain Folk Resistance to the Confederacy

chapter one Guerrilla Wars Plain Folk Resistance to the Confederacy From their states of Mississippi, Texas, and North Carolina, Newt Knight, Warren Collins, and Bill Owens led guerrilla bands that waged war on the Confederacy. By early 1864, the most infamous of the bands, headed by “Captain” Newt Knight, had crippled the government of Jones County, Mississippi . Thanks to historians, novelists, moviemakers, and a long-standing­ family feud, his “Free State of Jones” is the best known of the uprisings. All three of these Unionist uprisings, however, generated regional inner civil wars. Each challenged the Confederacy on its own turf and struggled to restore the power of the U.S. government. As for the leaders themselves, they possessed forceful, even charismatic, personalities. Newt Knight, a tall, eagle-eyed, and remarkably self-possessed man with extensive family ties in the community, quickly rose to prominence among deserters after escaping his Confederate captors, who, early in 1863, tried to force him back into the Confederate Army. Later that same year, deserters from the Jones County area formally organized themselves, unanimously electing him as “captain” and naming their “company” after him. Newt Knight, captain of the Knight Company, the guerrilla band that held sway over Jones County, Mississippi, during the Civil War. Photograph courtesy of Earle Knight. Guerrilla Wars 21 Befitting the leader of a guerrilla band, Newt could be ruthless as well as charismatic. The cold-blooded murder of Major Amos McLemore, Jones County’s most powerful Confederate officer, is universally attributed to Newt, although he was never charged in court. That murder, committed on 5 October 1863, triggered formation of the Knight Company.1 In contrast to Newt Knight, Warren Collins, of Hardin County, Texas, appeared more adept at eluding capture than at murdering Confederate leaders. Not that Collins was necessarily less capable of murder—​ his reputation as a backwoods, bare-knuckled fighter suggests otherwise. But an entire body of folklore surrounds the life of this so-called Daniel Boone of East Texas, in which he appears more as trickster than as guerrilla leader. His home, the Big Thicket of East Texas, encompassed all or parts of five counties. Distant and isolated from major theaters of the Civil War, the Big Thicket offered an almost impenetrable fortress for the men it sheltered.2 By all accounts, Bill Owens, of North Carolina, appears to be the most ruthless and least charismatic of the leaders. Owens’s Civil War exploits inspired no romantic tales of heroism, and one searches the internet in vain for even one genealogy site that claims him. In fact, it seems Owens has been disowned. Perhaps because the North Carolina Piedmont boasted such an array of articulate Unionists among its political, intellectual, and religious leaders, Owens is known in popular memory (if remembered at all) only as one of the war’s many terrifying outlaws.3 More positively remembered leaders from the Randolph County area include militant Unionist Bryan Tyson, who was descended from Quakers , and Daniel Wilson and Daniel Worth, both of whom were Wesleyan Methodist abolitionists. Hinton Rowan Helper, author of the free soil/ abolitionist­tract The Impending Crisis of the South, was from nearby Davie County, and John Lewis Johnson, founder of the underground Unionist organization the Heroes of America, was from Forsyth County, another Quaker Belt county.4 Particularly in the Piedmont’s Randolph County area, where Bill Owens was born and raised, religious principles as well as class interests motivated loyalty to the Union. The same cannot be said of the uprisings in Jones County, Mississippi, and Hardin County, Texas, where religious irreverence rather than piety may have diluted the effects of pro-Confederate sermons. Neither Newt Knight nor Warren Collins appeared to be particularly devout . Nor is there evidence of organized abolitionist activity among families who rallied in support of either the Mississippi or the Texas uprisings.5 Despite a less ideological reputation than his Quaker and Wesleyan Meth- Family of Warren Jacob Collins, leader of the jayhawker guerrillas who hid out in the Big Thicket of East Texas during the Civil War. Seated on the left is his wife, Tolitha Eboline Valentine. On their laps are daughters Cora and Lillie. Photograph courtesy of Mary Allen Valentine Murphy. Guerrilla Wars 23 odist peers, Bill Owens was solidly rooted by kinship and neighborhood in North Carolina’s Unionist networks. Nearby kin included Murphy Owens, age forty-two, of Montgomery County, a self...