Austin and San Marcos

I drifted into Austin late, after 100 miles or so on state highway that rolled through dreamy, live oak-studded Texas Hill Country. Wallowed in two Tex-Mex tacos -- barbacoa and carne guisada -- at a hip little taco stand patronized by UT students with stretched earlobes.

Met Professor Victoria Bynum and her husband, Professor Gregg Andrews, in San Marcos the following morning, where they took me for breakfast at an elegant, rustic local restaurant. Camaraderie was instant and the talk flowed. Vikki and my father both wrote books laying to rest the popular myth that Jones County, Mississippi seceded from the Confederacy: Legend of the Free State of Jones by Rudy H. Leverett, University Press of Mississippi, 1984, currently being re-printed (http://www.amazon.com/Legend-Free-State-Jones-Leverett/dp/0878052275/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252629707&sr=1-5); and The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War by Victoria E. Bynum, University of North Carolina Press, 2002 (http://www.amazon.com/Free-State-Jones-Mississippis-Longest/dp/0807854670/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252629768&sr=1-2). As Drs. Leverett and Bynum established and re-established in 1984 and 2002, it didn't.

What did happen was that a group of deserters from the Confederate army hid out in Jones County's swamps and battled Confederate forces sent to Jones County to round them up and press them back into service. Professor Bynum and my father differed as to whether/to what extent the deserters was acting on anti-Unionist principle versus cowardice and criminality, but they enjoyed a civil and mutually respectful correspondence on the subject, and both wholeheartedly agreed that the evidence kills the secession-within-secession myth.

A Hollywood producer recently resurrected that myth from the dead. In the service of a script which he hopes to develop into a movie at some point, he got a couple of folks -- a professional best-seller author and the Harvard professor he hired to consult for the movie -- to write a book (State of Jones, released in 2009). The producer's book contends that the leader of the band of Confederate deserters was an anti-slavery guerilla hero acting on his purported anti-slavery convictions. It's been criticized for misuse of source materials and errors in scholarship. (See reviews in the Wall Street Journal (see http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204621904574248902001381462.html) and The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/books/review/Reynolds-t.html?scp=1&sq=rebel%20rebel&st=cse); as well as the blog Renegade South (http://renegadesouth.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/the-state-of-jones-by-sally-jenkins-and-john-stauffer-a-review-part-one/; http://renegadesouth.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/part-two-review-of-sally-jenkins-and-john-stauffer-state-of-jones/; http://renegadesouth.wordpress.com/2009/07/11/part-three-review-of-sally-jenkins-and-john-stauffer-state-of-jones/).

Some of us feel that what actually happened was plenty exciting without the taking of liberties with the historical record and overlaying modern values and socio-political sensibilities on it. Most of the residents of Jones County, Mississippi, including my great-great-grandfather, Major Amos McLemore, originally opposed Southern secession from the Union. Jones Countians were not planters, and relatively few owned slaves. Most of them felt that the Civil War was a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight." They overwhelmingly supported the Confederacy, however, once war was imminent -- what they supported was not slavery or secession but rather resistance to coercion at the point of a Union bayonet. Despite his pro-Union sensibilities Major McLemore was murdered on his own turf by the anti-Confederate deserters' leader, Newt Knight, and local legend holds that his blood seeps up from the floorboards where he fell. Knight went on to lead his band in a number of skirmishes with Confederate forces and to father and live openly with a mixed-race family with a former slave of his father's. A pretty good story without added fabrication, if you ask me, but I'd probably have to admit that the producer's version would make the better popcorn drama.

I'm content with drama imbued with grey hues, which is what I see in my family's story. Major McLemore's death seemingly precipitated a familial decline. HIs wife, who was also his cousin, was left to raise five children ages 12 and younger on her own during Reconstruction. Rosie Vinnie's eldest son died unmarried at age 34. His grave marker in the McLemore family cemetery on the Old Place reads: "How many hopes lie buried here." Another son was my great-grandfather Walter Scott McLemore, who with his wife Mary Etta Lee raised seven (eight?) somewhat wayward children on the Old Place. Some of them made whiskey; "the women" found work of sorts in New Orleans. Walter Scott's youngest was my grandmother, Elma Rose. She came and went over the years, leaving her five children to fend for themselves out on the Old Place or in town or wherever they could be quickly stowed.