By the end of 1860 as secession fever swept the state, Jackie Knight was one of the wealthiest men in the vicinity. From his porch, he commanded an overview of 680 acres, profitably planted with cotton and rice, and more than twenty slaves working in them. The field hands wore hats of woven palmetto leaves to keep the sun off their brows as they moved among the planted rows. Closer in, eight slave cabins formed a semicircular yard, where women labored over washing tubs and vats, tended chickens, or roasted bushels of potatoes in an outdoor oven. At the foot of the porch, a dozen or so slave children did menial tasks. One fed kindling into the oven. Another waved flies away from the porch with a brush. When Jackie wanted to smoke his pipe, he called out, “Fire, fire!” A child grabbed a burning cob from the oven and ran over to light “ole master’s” tobacco.
The Knight family’s wealth and holdings did not end at his property line, either. Adjoining Jackie’s land was the farm belonging to his daughter, Altimirah, and her forty-six-year-old husband George Brumfield, who owned eight slaves. Two farms over, Jackie’s youngest and most prodigal son, Daniel, and his wife, Elizabeth, lived on a spread with ten slaves.
Jackie Knight grieved over the secession crisis for manifold reasons. He was ailing, with not long to live. He was a patriot who’d had his own experience with soldiering, in the Chickamauga Wars and again in the War of 1812, and he knew the toll of conflict. He could see it in his own family, which was deeply divided by the issues underlying the secession crisis.
Most of Jackie’s children were aspiring planters with a stake inthe slave economy. But there was a significant exception. Jackie’s eldest son, Albert, declined to own slaves. Albert was a modest shoemaker and tanner who made his own way and his own living. What’s more, none of Albert’s twelve children would own slaves either. His modest, independent-minded son Newton would display a special disdain for slaveholding. Albert was the one child who would not be bequeathed a slave in Jackie’s last will and testament.
If anyone might be expected to partner in and benefit from Jackie’s slave owning, it would have been his eldest son. On the other hand, eldest sons might also be expected to reproach their fathers for their sins.
Jackie Knight was self-made: born in North Carolina in 1773, he had pushed his way westward looking for virgin land, first to Georgia, where according to family tradition he served as a light horse soldier in the Chickamauga Wars and an infantryman in the War of 1812, and then on to Mississippi. He and his wife Keziah and their wagonload of children had arrived sometime in 1815 or 1816 at the vast expanse known as the Piney Woods, where the land seemed to heave with rising and falling hills, timbered by towering pines and split by creeks and hollows. “Here’s where we stop,” he said. He had built a home out of felled logs and survived for years despite the lonesomeness and lack of civil government. In 1822, he was one of eighty-nine settlers who petitioned to form Jones County, which they named after John Paul Jones. By 1850, it was still a place without a telegraph, newspaper, or railroad. Yet Jackie had made his fortune, thanks to two commodities also rare in Jones County: cotton and slaves.
Jackie’s acreage qualified as a plantation, barely. It sprawled on either side of the eddying Leaf River, which curled like a fat brown mud snake through the low thickets between Jones and Coving-ton counties. Twice yearly Jackie made trips to the busy seaport of Mobile, Alabama, to sell his goods, drawing wagons loaded with as much as 750 pounds of rice and twenty-five bales of cotton (bundlesweighing 400 to 500 pounds each). He used the profits to buy more slaves.
Knight was merely a rich man in a state full of tycoons. The South’s cotton trade was valued at $200 million annually by 1860, and Mississippi was the
The Knight family’s wealth and holdings did not end at his property line, either. Adjoining Jackie’s land was the farm belonging to his daughter, Altimirah, and her forty-six-year-old husband George Brumfield, who owned eight slaves. Two farms over, Jackie’s youngest and most prodigal son, Daniel, and his wife, Elizabeth, lived on a spread with ten slaves.
Jackie Knight grieved over the secession crisis for manifold reasons. He was ailing, with not long to live. He was a patriot who’d had his own experience with soldiering, in the Chickamauga Wars and again in the War of 1812, and he knew the toll of conflict. He could see it in his own family, which was deeply divided by the issues underlying the secession crisis.
Most of Jackie’s children were aspiring planters with a stake inthe slave economy. But there was a significant exception. Jackie’s eldest son, Albert, declined to own slaves. Albert was a modest shoemaker and tanner who made his own way and his own living. What’s more, none of Albert’s twelve children would own slaves either. His modest, independent-minded son Newton would display a special disdain for slaveholding. Albert was the one child who would not be bequeathed a slave in Jackie’s last will and testament.
If anyone might be expected to partner in and benefit from Jackie’s slave owning, it would have been his eldest son. On the other hand, eldest sons might also be expected to reproach their fathers for their sins.
Jackie Knight was self-made: born in North Carolina in 1773, he had pushed his way westward looking for virgin land, first to Georgia, where according to family tradition he served as a light horse soldier in the Chickamauga Wars and an infantryman in the War of 1812, and then on to Mississippi. He and his wife Keziah and their wagonload of children had arrived sometime in 1815 or 1816 at the vast expanse known as the Piney Woods, where the land seemed to heave with rising and falling hills, timbered by towering pines and split by creeks and hollows. “Here’s where we stop,” he said. He had built a home out of felled logs and survived for years despite the lonesomeness and lack of civil government. In 1822, he was one of eighty-nine settlers who petitioned to form Jones County, which they named after John Paul Jones. By 1850, it was still a place without a telegraph, newspaper, or railroad. Yet Jackie had made his fortune, thanks to two commodities also rare in Jones County: cotton and slaves.
Jackie’s acreage qualified as a plantation, barely. It sprawled on either side of the eddying Leaf River, which curled like a fat brown mud snake through the low thickets between Jones and Coving-ton counties. Twice yearly Jackie made trips to the busy seaport of Mobile, Alabama, to sell his goods, drawing wagons loaded with as much as 750 pounds of rice and twenty-five bales of cotton (bundlesweighing 400 to 500 pounds each). He used the profits to buy more slaves.
Knight was merely a rich man in a state full of tycoons. The South’s cotton trade was valued at $200 million annually by 1860, and Mississippi was the
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