A Damn Poor Hell
My family has a hidden history. I’ll begin with the less well-concealed part about my white ancestors.
As soon as the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek was ratified by Congress in 1831, and the Choctaw moved to Oklahoma territory, northeast Mississippi became open for settlement. In 1834, my ancestor Andrew Jackson (A.J.) Maxwell moved there from South Carolina, the most aristocratic of plantation states. He settled in a place called Boardtown in Oktibbeha County, Mississippi. There he owned a blacksmith shop and probably a grist mill. He was also a planter and owned slaves.
The year after A.J. moved to Mississippi, Boardtown was renamed Starkville and became the county seat. Its citizens constructed a “novel jail” with no doors or windows. According to an article from the 1950s, “The officers simply tied a rope to their prisoners and let them down through a hole in the roof.”
What is not made clear, at least in many modern histories (and this is no different from most anywhere else in the South), is that Oktibbeha County’s economy was almost entirely reliant on slave labor.
Mississippi had long ago enthusiastically made its deal with the devil. “Slavery can only be defended perhaps on the principle of expediency,” Sir William Dunbar of Natchez wrote in 1799, “yet where it exists, and where they so largely outnumber whites, you must concede almost absolute power to the master.” The alternatives, he claimed, were “insurrection with all its horrors, or emancipation with all its evils.”
Like the state of Mississippi, Oktibbeha County became majority Black. Its 1860 census showed a population of 5,171 whites, 7,631 slaves, 18 free blacks, and 157 Indians.
By 1860, A.J. Maxwell owned twelve slaves, ranging in age from 3 to 75. Their names were not seen fit to be included in the Slave Schedules.
William J. Anderson, a former slave and abolitionist, wrote about his experience being sold in Natchez:
In due time we arrived safely in the slave-pen at Natchez, and here we joined another large crowd of slaves which were already stationed at this place. Here scenes were witnessed which are too wicked to mention. The slaves are made to shave and wash in greasy pot liquor, to make them look sleek and nice; their heads must be combed, and their best clothes put on; and when called out to be examined they are to stand in a row — the women and men apart — then they are picked out and taken into a room, and examined. See a large, rough slaveholder, take a poor female slave into a room, make her strip, then feel of and examine her, as though she were a pig, or a hen, or merchandise. O, how can a poor slave husband or father stand and see his wife, daughters and sons thus treated.
“Just before the [slave pen] doors are opened, it is usual for the keeper to grease the mouths of the slaves, so as to make it appear that they are well and hearty, and have just done eating fat meat,” wrote Henry Watson, another former slave sold in Natchez, “though they seldom, if ever, while in the custody of the keeper, taste a morsel of meat of any kind.”
Our Maxwell family history, as written by a distant relative nicknamed (I kid you not) “Rhett,” gives no such accounts. Instead, it is typical of the usual whitewashing about the South’s monstrous past. It tells us:
Because of the high investment in slaves, it was important for the slaves’ masters to see that they were kept healthy, fed well and clothed properly. A kind and warm relationship was essential to the slaves’ performance, and the owners were well aware of this. Thus, the masters earned the slaves’ respect and loyalty through their care.
This paternalistic gloss was obvious to me when I first read the Maxwell family history as a college student, but it was the only source of family knowledge available to me at the time. I may have known I was being lied to, but didn’t yet understand the depths of the horrors of slavery, or my own family’s complete involvement in it. “You know they were klan,” my brothers and I said to each other, as my parents clucked about Rhett’s unreliability. A few years ago, I started my own research into this side of my family’s story.
When the Civil War broke out, both A.J. and his son Murray joined the Confederacy. A.J. became captain of the “Oktibbeha Rescuers,” Company C, 14th Regiment Mississippi Volunteers. That unit was part of the Confederate defeat on February 16, 1862 at the battle of Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River south of the Kentucky border. A.J. spent six months in the notorious Union prison at Camp Douglas in Chicago before being exchanged and ultimately invalided out of service.
In 1863, when he was around the age of 16, Murray joined Johnston’s Company I of the 6th Mississippi Cavalry. Rhett writes that young Murray’s “function was to retrieve tired horses and replace them with fresh ones.” I suspect Murray did a lot more than that. He stayed with that unit through various battles like Harrisburg, and was present at the Confederate surrender by General and future Klan founder Nathan Bedfort Forrest in Gainesville, Alabama. Maxwell father and son returned to Starkville where, according to my dad’s hazy memory, they scraped by. Born in 1932, my dad remembered visiting relatives who would pull down A.J.’s old officer’s sword, and told a vague story of A.J. hiding court documents in the swamp as the Yankees approached.
When I was looking up my white ancestor’s military records, I thought I’d see if any Black Maxwells from the region fought for the Union army. There were several, but two immediately stood out: James and Henry Maxwell served with Captain Cherry’s Company F of the 55th Regiment, United States Colored Troops, a unit originally organized as the 1st Alabama Infantry (African Descent). James Maxwell enlisted as a private on May 20, 1863, in Corinth, Mississippi. Born in South Carolina, he was 5 feet, 6 1/2 inches tall and had gray eyes. Henry, born in Burke County, North Carolina, enlisted on the same day. He was 31, and an inch taller than James. Henry is also described as having gray eyes.
After President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and the Union Army took control of Corinth in 1862, the town became a haven for runaway slaves. Corinth is located in northeastern Mississippi, about 100 miles west of Memphis. Many of the self-emancipated were enlisted as cooks, teamsters, laborers, and armed guards. Soon, a “contraband camp” was set up, so-named because these former slaves were still on some level considered property, the contraband of war.
The Corinth Contraband Camp had homes, a church, and a hospital. The slaves formed a progressive farm cooperation program and sold cotton and vegetables. By August 1862, over 1,000 former slaves had learned to read and write. The 1st Alabama Infantry Regiment was organized from around 1,000 members of this camp.
By the end of the war, African Americans made up 10% of the Union Army. Their white officers were commissioned on competence, and not political ties, which conferred a leadership advantage. Unsurprisingly, Black Union troops were segregated from their white counterparts, paid less, and often assigned menial tasks and drudge work. Some cleaned out latrines. Some guarded forts, towns, and trains. Units made up of former slaves were given little consideration. Members of James and Henry Maxwell’s regiment actually mutinied during the summer of 1864, complaining “that their wives were not properly rationed.” The men held a doctor hostage at gunpoint for about half an hour before releasing him on condition that he open up the commissary on Sunday morning and issue the proper amount of food.
When the Black troops were allowed to fight, they did so with distinction. They attacked bastions in South Carolina and Louisiana; repulsed Confederates at Milliken’s Bend and Honey Springs. One Union officer said later that he never saw a Black regiment retreat in panic as many of their white counterparts did.
There’s little that I can say with confidence about James and Henry Maxwell. Because they lived in the Corinth Contraband Camp, they were almost certainly runaway slaves. It’s plausible, but impossible to prove, that they were owned by my white ancestors. Maxwell was not a common surname at that time in either Tennessee or Mississippi. Corinth lies only slightly north of Oktibbeha County.
I do know that James and Henry Maxwell participated in the battle of Brice’s Crossroads on Friday, June 10, 1864. My white ancestor Murray, who rode with Forrest, was also there. I don’t know if the two sets of Maxwells ever saw each other. It would have happened after 1:30 pm, when Union infantry attacked Forrest’s left flank at the cross roads. By 3:30, stymied by a massive counter attack and cut to pieces by galling artillery fire, the Union infantry retreated. The Confederates lost less than 500 men; the Union more than 2,500. I like to think that Henry or James saw Murray’s gray blur as he charged toward them, and raised a rifle to shoot him off his horse.
Brice’s Crossroads was a decisive Confederate victory, and made Forrest’s reputation as a tactical genius. The Reverend Samuel Andrew Agnews lived close to the engagement, and diarized his experience.
“Negroes and white men both plundered the house and nothing could move their hearts to pity,” Agnews wrote, “but with vandal hands they rifled trunks, bureaus and rooms.
They entered every room but the catch-all. Destruction seemed to be their aim. I have heard of many things they took away, but cannot recapitulate. Even the negroes were robbed of their clothing &c. The expedition was commanded by Gen. Sturgis, a resident of Chicago, Ill. Grierson commanded the cavalry.
The negroes were especially insolent. As they passed the road they shook their fists at the ladies and told them they were going to show Forrest that they were his rulers. As they returned their tune was changed. With tears in their eyes they came to my Mother and asked her what they must do. Would Mr. Forrest kill them. Poor fools, many a simpleton lies rotting along the road this day. I felt sorry when I saw the first one, but when I heard how they did I lost all my sympathy for the black villains.
Of course, the Confederacy lost the war spectacularly. Nathan Bedford Forrest didn’t surrender his troops until May 22, 1865, almost six weeks after Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. “That we are beaten is a self-evident fact,” Forrest said, “and any further resistance on our part would justly be regarded as the very height of folly and rashness.”
Henry Maxwell “died of disease” on May 13, 1865 in Port Hudson, Louisiana. James Maxwell was discharged on June 24, 1865 with a surgeon’s certificate of disability. There his trail goes cold.
In researching my family’s history, I came across a hateful little chapbook titled Reconstruction in Oktibbeha County, written by F.Z. Browne (a Princeton-educated Presbyterian pastor, no less) and published by the Mississippi Historical Society in 1913. Because Reconstruction had been abandoned years before, Browne was brazen in his condemnation of it. “As a species of retributive justice for real or fancied wrongs committed upon the colored race,” he wrote, “white men were arrested and fined upon the slightest pretext.” He also told us without a trace of irony that, in 1865, a Black man who was accused of raping a white woman in Starkville was allowed to be “run to death by hounds.”
Browne was confident enough in his race’s reestablished superiority to be quite open about Oktibbeha’s convulsive Reconstruction period. Its African-American population organized, and marched. Several times things got violent. One passage is worth quoting at length.
When the negroes were becoming very insolent and unruly Dr. Ellis, of the Trim Cane neighborhood…issued a warrant for the arrest of a negro, Gabe Dotson, who had been guilty of some misdemeanor. Robert Ellis made the arrest and immediately the whole league or the organized body of negroes in that community armed themselves and marched into Starkville. They had been organized by Bob McDuffie, a negro who it was said had picked up some crude ideas of military science from service as body servant of his master in the Confederate army. As they marched up the main street of Starkville their guns were carried in a wagon in the midst of the column and were covered with corn shucks and thus concealed. When they reached the vicinity of the present courthouse in Starkville one of their number, named Samson Wynn, espying Ellis on the street, approached him and began to curse him. Ellis immediately shot him down. Bob McDuffie, the negro with the drum, seeing this, struck it and immediately the negroes rushed for their guns and began to fall in line returning the fire and shooting down Ellis.
The negroes, armed and organized, had possession of Main street for a time.
A white mob later came after the ringleaders of the insurrection. They cornered Gabe Dotson in his house, and he wounded one of them. “After the shooting the negro ran for his life,” Browne wrote, “but must have been overtaken, as he was never heard of again.”
One passage from Reconstruction in Oktibbeha County piqued my curiosity. In it, Browne complained about organized and marching Blacks. “Generally,” he wrote, “they were in a state of unrest, like sheep without a shepherd — all looking eagerly for that supposedly promised gift of forty acres and a mule to each head of a family.”
In their excited and unsettled condition they reverted to the savage customs of their African ancestors, who had been trained to rally to some central point when the sound of their rude war drums was heard over hill and jungle. Late at night the children of the Southern planters shivered with a nameless dread as the throbbing drums announced to them that the negroes were assembling and marching, they knew not where.
When I read this passage, I immediately thought of the fife and drum tradition in parts of the South — especially northeast Mississippi — exemplified by musicians like Othar Turner.
Fife and drum blues, as it came to be known, was assembled from pre-Civil War military instruments and African polyrhythms, just like jazz later on. The fifes were cut from cane. There’s a neighborhood in Starkville called Cane Trim. Drumming by slaves was forbidden, lest they secretly communicate. Alan Lomax was the first to record fife and drum music. “In vaudou ceremonies,” he wrote, “dancers make pelvic gestures toward the drum to honor the holy music that is inspiring them. I never expected to see this African behavior in the hills of Mississippi, just a few miles south of Memphis.”
Othar Turner didn’t know the origin of the music he played. “How old it is?” he once said when asked about it. “I don’t know. They said it’s African, back in African times, that’s what they say, I don’t know, I wasn’t thought of. And they say drums was a-calling.”
It honestly thrills me to think of the white ownership class cowering in their beds in “nameless dread,” while some probably very holy drumming was resounding through woods in the black Mississippi night. “If possible the drums were destroyed,” Browne wrote about the organized breakup of Black meetings in Starkville, “and threats made of more drastic treatment if any further meeting, marching or drumming was attempted. These measures of expediency were not always carried through without bloodshed.”
With the aid of sympathetic whites, Starkville’s Black population opened schools, founded their own churches, and established a cooperative stock company in the middle of town. Corn or other produce was accepted in lieu of money. Oktibbeha County Blacks organized and marched to the ballot box. “Soon ballot stuffing, open intimidation, and bribery of negro voters at the polls were resorted to,” Browne tells us. “Here if at any period in the world’s history, the end justified the means. What was this end? I answer ‘The preservation of white supremacy and the keeping intact of the heritage of the fathers.’”
Browne wastes little time getting to the heart of the matter. “The Ku Klux Klan was organized in Starkville in about 1868,” he wrote plainly. “The best men of the county were in it.” Browne lists two “prominent members” as Rhett [the namesake of our family historian] and Murray Maxwell.
The negroes were not always as badly deceived as they appeared. An old negro named Johnson Gillespie, who had belonged to Dr. W.E. Gillespie of Starkville, said to his young master, ‘Marse George, what are these things that go around at night called Ku Klux?’ George Gilllespie answered ‘I do not know, but they say they are the spirits of the dead.’ The old negro answered ‘If they are the spirits of the just who went to heaven I don’t think they would want to come back to this country, and if they are the spirits of the wicked it is a damn poor hell that will not hold them.’*
Browne also lists George Gillespie as a Klan member. Klan meetings were held in a grove near Gillespie’s house about a quarter mile out of town.
Decades later, when authoring the family history, Rhett Maxwell was less forthcoming about the Klan. “As the Carpetbaggers and the negroes started filling the county and state offices,” he wrote, “many true southern men in Oktibbeha county organized a local Klu Klux Klan chapter. They were standing to preserve Southern ideals and beliefs.” He neglected to mention the active participation of our ancestors, one of whom was his grandfather.
A.J. Maxwell died on January 24, 1879. He lived long enough to see his life’s work erased.
Starkville burned to the ground on April 25, 1875. All fifty-two town buildings were destroyed, including the courthouse and all its records. What’s interesting to me is that the cause of this is never mentioned: not in Rhett’s history, not in modern tellings. Just that the town burned, and people got on with their lives. To me, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the conflagration was intentionally set by a group of people continuing to suffer under subjugation. Even a damn poor hell, it turns out, can still produce fire.
It’s interesting to note that the Starkville fire occurred the same year that “negro Republican organizations” planned to march in numbers between twelve and fifteen hundred to attend an event featuring the successful candidate for Congress who also happened to be the grand cyclops of the Klan. They were turned away by the sight of two cannon and a stockpile of about a hundred and fifty rifles, avoiding a massacre.
I found one last extraordinary document during my research. Between 1936 and 1938, the federal government’s Works Project Administration collected more 2,300 first-person slave narratives. I found one such interview of a 76-year-old woman named Mattie Stenston, conducted in 1937. She used to be owned by my family.
Mattie was born in Starkville and was told she was six years old when the Confederates surrendered. Much of her story is the kind of sunny reconstruction expected by the local white interviewer — in this case, a certain Mrs. Ed Joiner. Mattie talks about bountiful food and wearing gingham dresses “Dolly fodden style” during the summer. But once or twice, she gives us an honest look into what a Maxwell slaves’ life was like.
Old Master was always good to us niggers and none was ever beat unless he did a bad crime, then he was laid across a barrel and given fifty lashes across his back. No, there was no jail house, just the barrel and the strap. There was no school house, only at old Miss’s knee, where we were told not to steal and lie. I never knew about trouble between the white and black folks till after the surrender, except when the nigger did wrong.*
I finally had a Maxwell family slave name, and I learned others too: Mattie’s mother Frances Maxwell; her father Steve; her aunts Nancy, Mary, and Minnie; and her uncle Robert. My mother’s name was Nancy, and my brother’s name is Steve. Having access to even these people’s names is deeply affecting. Part of telling their story is relating how people like my white ancestors devoted their lives to denying their very humanity. If I had to guess, I would say that Mattie was the three-year-old recorded in the 1860 Slave Schedule. This would have made her around the age of 8 at the time of surrender.
I hear a lot of talk these days by unserious people about how their history is being erased, because statues commemorating the Confederacy and its legacy of slavery are being torn down. These statues were erected during the Cult of the Lost Cause, when Reconstruction in Oktibbeha County was published by a triumphant, newly-restored supremacist power structure. Interestingly, the real story — about people like James and Henry and Mattie Maxwell — has yet to be told, and scarcely exists in the historical record. What little of it does serves as an indictment to a part of American history that has yet to be fully reckoned with.
In my mind, this is a story of empowerment, not subjugation. It’s a newly-expanded family history. I am related to A.J. and Murray and Rhett Maxwell by blood. In that limited sense, I am a part of their lineage, but I rebuke their heinous acts. I am bound to James and Henry and Mattie Maxwell by heart. To be sure, they owe nothing to my family, and our shared surname simply serves as a point of connection. I identify with their perseverance, and feel obliged to them. In this sense, I consider them my ancestors, and write this corrective to venerate their memory.
*I decline to use the racist Uncle Remus dialogue assigned by white authors in these source documents. Some quotes attributed to African Americans have been edited for the sake of basic decency.
