Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Mississippi

Tracing the Life of an Ancestor Isn’t Easy—or Always Accurate

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Oral history may not be particularly trustworthy.

My father was four years old when his paternal grandfather died, so any direct memories he would have had were likely dim. He told me the story, passed down by his father, that his grandfather Samuel Young had fought in the Civil War for the Confederacy, had found himself stranded somewhere in the east when the war ended in 1865, and made his way home primarily by walking. My father said “the Youngs were a family of shopkeepers,” and had lived and worked around Brookhaven in northern Pike Country, and they had owned no slaves. (Pike was a large county; during Reconstruction it was split into two counties, Pike and Lincoln.)

When his grandfather reached home near Brookhaven, Mississippi, my father said, he discovered the family was gone. Neighbors said the entire family had fled to East Texas to escape the devastation of war and Union control. He continued his trek across Louisiana and eventually found his family. At some point, the family returned to Mississippi. My father also told me, again passing down the family story from his father, that Samuel had been too young to enlist, and so became a messenger boy. 

The only possible reference I’ve been able to find in Confederate war records to a Samuel Franklin Young is a listing for S.F. Young – but it’s a man from a far northern country in Mississippi, whereas my ancestor would have been listed for Pike County, which was in southern Mississippi on the Louisiana line. 

That’s as much as I knew about my great-grandfather. It turns out that much of it is likely wrong.

The family listing in the 1850 census

The first question involves Samuel’s age. His tombstone in a cemetery near Alexandria, Louisiana, says he was born Jan. 22, 1845. The 1850 U.S. census lists his age as 7 years, 7 months, which would make his birth year 1843. The records in the family Bible, which I have, and which were written by Samuel himself, say his birth year was 1846. Another record says 1847.

All of those possible dates, except possibly the last one, are problematic for the “too young to enlist” in the war statement from my father. By 1863, the conscription age for the Confederate Army was 16.

Then I discovered this on one of the popular genealogy sites – another bit of family oral history from a grandson of Samuel through another descendant’s line. 

The grandson remembered his grandfather telling stories about his life. Samuel had been born on the Lake Plantation east of Johnston Station in Pike County. His father Franklin owned the plantation and 17 slaves (Franklin is listed as “farmer” on the 1850 census). His father was also involved in building the fill or rail bed for the Illinois Central Railroad from Johnston Station to Summit, Mississippi (the station and line were constructed in 1857).

Samuel, “as was the custom in the family,” was called James Samuel, Clarence Samuel, Samuel Franklin, and simply Samuel. 

Then there’s this: Samuel was drafted during the Civil War, but his father paid a substitute $500 and a horse and saddle to take his son’s place. Later, Samuel was drafted anyway, enlisted in the cavalry, and “fought the Indians west of the Mississippi River.” After the war, Franklin supposedly lost his plantation “to the carpetbaggers,” and the family settled elsewhere in Pike County and worked as sharecropper farmers. Samuel later went to work in a sawmill. 

Samuel’s tombstone

There are a lot of problems with those statements. It’s unlikely Samuel would have been called “James Samuel;” he had an older brother named James who died in 1860. His name is listed as “Samuel Franklin Young” in the Bible, and his signature (also in the Bible) is Samuel F. Young. I’m not sure where Clarence came from. And for the Civil War service “fighting the Indians,” Samuel’s other older brother Wylie served in the Confederate military and died in Texas in 1863.

I suspect either Samuel or his grandson combined some stories, or the grandson’s memory combined the stories. But most of this runs counter to my own father’s memory, or at least his recall of what he understood about his grandfather. And a reader recently pointed out that his great-grandfather had also been too young to enlist and served as a messenger boy for the Confederate post office.

And who knows what name Samuel served in the army under? His own? Clarence? James? And perhaps my father, and I by extension, misunderstood the meaning of “messenger boy” and assumed it was military. And here I thought I had all the facts.

What I know for certain about my great-grandfather: he was born in 1845 or 1846 in Johnston Station, Mississippi. He served somewhere in the Confederate Army. At his death in 1920, he was living with an unmarried daughter named Myrtle Young outside Alexandria, La., and he is buried in a cemetery there. He and his wife Octavia had nine children, seven of whom survived to adulthood. Octavia died in 1887, and Samuel never remarried.

It’s back to the records to see what other facts I can find or corroborate. 

Top photograph: Samuel and Octavia Young about 1880.

A Year of Reading the Civil War

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For a few years before 2022, I’d been occasionally reading about the American Civil War. It’s something I grew up with; my grandparents were all born after it was over, but their parents lived through it. Tw sets of great grandparents lived through the Union occupation of New Orleans; one set lived in an unoccupied part of Louisiana; and one set survived the war as parts of Mississippi were ravaged by war (and often repeatedly). 

This last group was the Youngs. Three sons and a son-in-law all enlisted in the Confederate army. One, the youngest, was too young to enlist when the war began but somehow signed up as a messenger boy. He was the only one to survive, and he was my great-grandfather Samuel. Not long after the war, his father died, and Samuel became the family patriarch at the ripe old age of 23 or 24. Samuel lived until 1920; my father was four years old when his grandfather died. 

This year, I began reading about the war in earnest. Except for the Battle of Vicksburg, I had not known what Mississippi experienced during the war. The Young family, with my aging great-great grandfather with several daughters and daughters-in-law, lasted out the war in Brookhaven, Mississippi. I had to search hard to find out what, if anything, had happened in Brookhaven. The town was visited twice by Union troops, both times in 1863. First was Grierson’s Raid in April, which became the basis for the 1959 movie The Horse Soldiers with John Wayne. The second time was in July, during the siege of Jackson by Generals Grant and Sherman. A small contingent of Union troops made its way some 70 miles south of Jackson to Brookhaven, burning some mills, tearing up railroad track, and talking 200 prisoners at the conscript camp for the Confederate army there. 

Few family stories have survived over the succeeding 160 years, and only a few about my great-grandfather the messenger boy. I’ve turned to books, articles, and research papers to find out at least some small idea of what my ancestors experienced. I’ve been left amazed.

Here are some of the best books I’ve read this year. 

The Real Horse Soldiers; Benjamin Grierson’s Epic 1863 Civil War Raid Through Mississippi by Timothy Smith. Smith corrects the misinformation contained in Grierson’s Raid by Dee Brown, published in 1953 and which provided the basis for the John Wayne movie. 

The Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army After Appomattox by Caroline Janney is an excellent history, making the case for the unfinished business becoming the mythology of the post-war South.

Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil War’s Final Campaign in North Carolina by Ernest Dollar Jr. I blogged twice on this book; once for the review and once explaining how it was a book that wouldn’t let go. What we now call post-traumatic stress disorder was alive and well in the Civil War and particularly at its end. 

The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5-6, 1864 by Gordon Rhea. Published in 1994, this is the classic history of one of the most horrific battles of the Civil War (1994).

Diary of a Confederate Tarheel Soldier by Louis Leon. Published in 1913, this war memoir was written not only by a Confederate veteran but also one who was Jewish – and his parents in New York City sent him care packages when he was taken as a prisoner of war.

The Confederate Surrender at Greensboro by Robert Dunkerly. This is one of many concise Civil War histories published by Emerging Civil War. Dunkerly explains the surrender of General William Johnston to Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, and how Sherman’s terms were considered far too lenient by official Washington.

The Civil War in Mississippi: Major Campaigns and Battles by Michael Ballard. I never realized how much of the state was was fought over by the opposing armies. It was far more than only Vicksburg.

Mississippi in the Civil War: The Home Front by Timothy Smith. Smith (who wrote the account of Grierson’s Raid noted above) also produced a book on what life was like for civilians in Mississippi – and it was anything but easy.

The Limits of Loyalty: Ordinary People in Civil War Mississippi by Jarret Ruminski. Ruminski covers some of the same ground as Timothy Smith above, but with a different focus. He looks at what happened to civilian loyalities over the course  of the war.

The Battle of Jackson, Mississippi by Chris Mackowski and The Civil War Siege of Jackson, Mississippi by Jim Woodrick. Mackowski gives considerable details on the battle, while Woodrick takes a broader look (and includes what happened in outlying areas like Brookhaven). 

Presidential Reconstruction in Mississippi by William Harris (1967) and Reconstruction Mississippi by James Wilford Garner (1901). Harris looks at the program for Reconstruction approved by President Andrew Johnson (and eventually set aside by Congress; the Radical Republicans wanted vengeance and punishment, and they got it. The Garner book started life as a Ph.D. thesis at Columbia University; it is filled with data, charts, and graphs and a highly readable interpretation of them.

Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Mississippi in the Civil War by Bobby Roberts and Carl Moneyhon (1993). In the 1990s and early 200s, a series of these photography books were published, covering most of the states in the former Confederacy. Pictures can tell just as good a story as text.

The Army of the Potomac Trilogy by Bruce Catton (originally published 1951-1954; Library of America edition 2022). This is a classic, one that remains a remarkably up-to-date history of the army eventually commanded by Ulysses S. Grant. Two other classic histories I hope to read in 2023 are Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative and Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson.

North Against South: The American Iliad 1848-1877 by Ludwell Johnson (1978). This is decidedly not a classic history. It is, however, a well-research and documented history of the Civil War from the Confederacy’s perspective. 

Top photograph: Camp scene, Union soldiers guarding Confederate prisoners; National Archives. 

“Reconstruction in Mississippi” by James Wilford Garner

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James Wilford Garner (1871-1938) was born and raised in Pike County, Mississippi, the same county where my paternal great-grandparents were born and raised (during the Reconstruction period, the state legislature split the county into two, with the southern half retaining the name and the north half being renamed Lincoln County). Garner graduated from the Mississippi Agricultural & Mechanical College in 1892 and went on to study at the University of Chicago and Columbia University. 

Garner would become a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Illinois, and he also did extensive teaching work in India. He co-authored a history of the United States with Henry Cabot Lodge, and he published a number of other works on government and political science.

The work he is best known for is his Ph.D. thesis, published in 1901 under the title of Reconstruction in Mississippi. It firmly established him as what was then called the Dunning School, named for Columbia professor William Archibald Dunning. The school of thought generally favored a conservative, more pro-Southern understanding of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. 

The thinking of the Dunning School was influential in universities through World War II, although it was not without its critics, notably historian and civil rights activist W.E. B. DuBois. However, DuBois did consider that, of all the writings associated with the Dunning School, Garner’s Reconstruction in Mississippi was the fairest.

Reading it today, 120 years after it was published, is to see it as a product of its time. Yet Garner did marshal a huge amount of data to support his thesis that Reconstruction, managed by Radical Republicans and backed by the U.S. Army, was largely a disaster for the state of Mississippi. 

The work begins with a summary of secession and the Civil War and the transition from war to reconstruction. It covers presidential reconstruction under Andrew Johnson, followed by congressional reconstruction. The period of congressional reconstruction was particularly marked by rampant theft and corruption in the state government, involving Northerners called carpetbaggers and Southerners know as scalawags who seemed determined to raid the state of as many resources as possible. Garner notes that many of the Union soldiers who had fought in Mississippi returned after the war to live there. (He also notes than roughly one fifth of private property in the state changed ownership during the period.) 

James Wilford Garner

It was a difficult time for many in the state. Not only was Mississippi economically devastated by the war, rail lines had to be rebuilt, the postal service reestablished, social order restored, and a civil government created that could function. Garner also devotes entire chapters to the creation and functioning of the Freedman’s Bureau, the disturbances associated with the Ku Klux Klan, and the creation (or re-creation) of the public school system, which was also plagued by corruption. 

Reconstruction in Mississippi has a definite pro-Southern tilt to its depiction of Reconstruction, but I understand why DuBois considered it relatively fair. Garner is evenhanded in his criticisms, and he does discuss the period broadly and rather inclusively. He doesn’t paint the period of slavery as some happy, pleasant time for all concerned. But it’s his extensive use of data, tables, and charts that is most impressive. 

Top illustration: A Drawing of a Freedman’s School in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1866.

“Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Mississippi in the Civil War”

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Beginning in 1990 and continuing for the next two decades, the University of Arkansas Press published a series of photographic histories of the Civil War. The volumes were developed by state, using states where a considerable portion of the war was fought. The university press included volumes on Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri, South Carolina, Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia. 

Each volume is structured the same: an overall introduction to what happened to the state and its people during the war, followed by chapters on specific battles, armies, or state events. The emphasis is on the photographs, with each making extensive use of individual portraits of generals and other officers as well as enlisted men. 

Each chapter begins with a narrative, and the photographs follow. An explanatory text accompanies each portrait, explaining who the person was, where they served, what battle or battles they fought, and whether they lived, survived with injuries, or died. 

The volume on Mississippi is entitled Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Mississippi in the Civil War. It was the third volume in the series, published in 1993. It’s a hefty volume, not quite as lavish as a coffee table book but leaning in that direction. It was written by two men. Bobby Roberts was then the director of the Central Arkansas Library System and director of the Archives at the University of Arkansas. Carl Moneyhon was a professor of history at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Moneyhon’s books include Republicanism in Reconstruction Texas, A Documentary History of Arkansas (co-author), and The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on Arkansas. 

The book is now almost 30 years old. The text is relatively up to date, which is not a surprise given how it focuses on major events and battles and well-known historical military figures. A considerable amount of information exists from which to choose; the state experienced some 17 battles, nine of which were connected to the Vicksburg campaign. The chapters in the book focus on Civil War photography in the state, Mississippi goes to war, Mississippians in the Amery of Northern Virginia and the western armies, the struggle for northeast Mississippi, Vicksburg, the home front (which often turned out to be closed to the front than home), Meridian and the battles in northern Mississippi, and after the war. Photographs of both Union and Confederate soldiers are included.

Private James Madison Moore, Company A, 14th Regiment, Mississippi Consolidated Infantry

The pictures were provided by a number of individuals and national and state agencies and organizations, including the Military History Institute, Mississippi’s State Archives, the Special Collections at Louisiana State University Library, and other sources.

It’s the portraits of the soldiers, Union and confederate, that make the volume. So many of the were young, in the late teens and early 20s. Some look more like boys in uniforms than soldiers. Some have almost haunted looks about them. But these were the soldiers who fought on both sides; the texts include whether they died or experienced amputation of an arm or leg. One notes that the man, recently promoted and on furlough to visit his family in northern Mississippi, was ambushed and murdered by bushwhackers and/or deserters. Civil order had largely collapsed across the state.

It’s a big book with a large topic, but the photographs help bring home the reality of what the war was like for the men who participated in it. 

Top photograph: Members of the 9th Mississippi Infantry at Pensacola, Florida, early in the war. Photograph by J.D. Edwards of New Orleans. 

“The Limits of Loyalty” by Jarret Ruminski

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We often get images, based on stereotypes, stuck in our heads about history. The antebellum and Civil War periods are no exceptions. We think the South was nothing but large plantations with thousands of slaves. We also might think that every Southerner tightly embraced secession and the war and retained that embrace until surrender in 1865.

These images are two-dimensional cartoons, with more or less an element of truth. The reality was considerably different. Most Southerners were small farmers, not big plantation owners, who did have an outsized presence in issues of the days. Likely most white Southerners did support secession, but that support began to wane as early as 1862. Fewer than half of white Southerners were slaveowners. And the state of Mississippi is a good example.

In The Limits of Loyalty: Ordinary People in Civil War in Mississippi, Jarret Ruminski takes a deep look at what happened in the state over the period 1861-1865. The time in which people’s nationalist sentiments and actions were most closely tied to the Confederacy was, unsurprisingly, early on. By 1862, as parts of the state began to experience invasion and destruction (and Mississippi experienced considerable amounts of both over the course of the war), sentiment shifted. Other loyalties, like to community and family, began to take precedence over feelings about the Confederacy and even the war. For many, and especially for women left at home with children and small farms and businesses, family survival became the overriding issue.

Ruminski draws upon letters, published reports and editorials in newspapers, journals, and official records. He considers early nationalist sentiment; how Union, Confederate, and private citizens defined oaths of allegiance; the contraband trade that occurred across all socio-economic levels; the role that deserters and gangs of thieves and robbers played; the breakdown in loyalty between slaves and masters; and how all of this upheaval not only tore at the fabric of law and society but reverberated for decades after the war.

In short, in the state of Mississippi at least, and likely many other Southern states, the idea of the Confederacy, support for the war, and afterward the “Lost Cause” might have more basis in fiction and myth than in actual fact. It was one thing to support the Jefferson Davis national government. But families had to eat and survive, and if it was a choice between loyalty to the cause and the war and seeing your children starve, it wasn’t much of a contest.

Jarret Ruminski

Ruminski received his B.A. degree in English and his M.A. degree in American history at Youngstown State University, and his Ph.D. degree in 19th century American history from the University of Calgary. His Ph.D. dissertation, which likely furnished a considerable portion of the research for The Limits of Loyalty, was entitled “Southern Pride and Yankee Presence: The Limits of Confederate Loyalty in Civil War Mississippi, 1860-1865.” A freelance writer and researcher, he’s published articles in Civil War History, The Journal of the Civil War Era, Journal of Southern History, American Nineteenth Century History, Ohio Valley History, Ohio History, and a variety of other historical and popular publications.

The Limits of Loyalty focuses on the lives and experiences of ordinary people during the Civil War, the people who tilled the farms, harvested the crops, operated the small stores and sawmills, and had to feed their families. It was a society coming apart at the seams in a variety of ways, and as Ruminski demonstrates in his highly readable and extensively researched account, the loyalty people felt was multifaceted, with loyalty to family and community taking increasing priority as society collapsed.

Top Photograph: Women of the Civil War, drawing by Winslow Homer.

“Presidential Reconstruction in Mississippi” by William C. Harris

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It’s barely mentioned in the standard school history textbooks, but the Southern states experienced two Reconstructions after the Civil War. The second is the best known, lasting from 1867 to 1876, and generally known as Radical Reconstruction (for the Radical Republicans in Congress who controlled it). The first is Presidential Reconstruction, between 1865 and 1867, directed by President Andrew Johnson, who believed he was carrying out the desires and plans of the assassinated Abraham Lincoln, who wanted a speedy reunion.

The Radical Republicans wanted punishment, and they wanted civil rights for the former slaves.

Mississippi was the second state to secede after South Carolina and the first to seek reunion. But reunion was anything but simple. The state was devastated economically; much of its large agricultural and small industrial infrastructure has been destroyed, and its social infrastructure was in upheaval. Law and order had broken down, railroads destroyed, and planters and farmers were desperate for a labor force to plant and harvest cotton.

Historian William C. Harris explains what happened during these roughly two years in Presidential Reconstruction in Mississippi, originally published by LSU Press in 1967. The state faced what looked to be insurmountable difficulties – a huge debt, a collapsed currency and economy, the disappearance of the slave system that underpinned cotton and agriculture, cities and towns that had been destroyed, the deaths of so many men in the war, and the breakdown of law and order across the state. 

Both the provisional government and the restoration government struggled with what to do about the former slaves. Planters wanted to keep them tied to the land; the slaves themselves flocked to the cities and towns, looking for work. There were the questions of civil rights, including land and property ownership, education, and voting. And the state faced the enormous problem of trying to revive agriculture and especially cotton production, which seemed to offer the best way for the state economy to recover.

Harris explains that the state leaders trying to manage the restoration were largely men who had been pro-Union or anti-secessionist and associated with the old Whig Party. They were aware of congressional sentiment, but they were also considering what would have been at one time unthinkable – former slaves having the right to vote. A few understood that Congress was unlikely to accept anything short of the full rights of citizenship. 

William C. Harris

He pays special attention to efforts aimed at reviving the state’s economy – agriculture, levee reconstruction, the railroads, towns, commerce, and industry. And he explains the Black Codes, tentative steps toward rights for the former slaves but also an attempt to regulate them in Mississippi society. It was these activities which put a national spotlight on presidential reconstruction across the South, outraging newspapers and many in the North who saw the codes as a kind of slavery in disguise. 

Harris is a prominent Civil War historian, educator, and author. His published books include The Day of the Carpetbagger: Republican Reconstruction in Mississippi, William Woods Holden: Firebrand of North Carolina Politics, With Charity for All: Lincoln and the Restoration of the Union, Lincoln’s Last Months, Lincoln’s Rise to the Presidency, Lincoln and the Border States: Preserving the Union, and Lincoln and the Union Governors. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Alabama, and he taught at Millsaps College and North Carolina State University, from which he retired as professor emeritus in 2004.

Presidential Reconstruction in Mississippi, 55 years after its publication, remains a valuable resource for understanding how the state tried to manage its emergence from the chaos of the Civil War, where it succeeded, and where it fell woefully short. 

Top photograph: Oxford, Mississippi, in August, 1864, after its destruction by Union troops.