Legend of the Free State of Jones by Rudy H. Leverett

Author:Rudy H. Leverett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 1984-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

There was a man that lived in Ellisville named Mr. McLemore. He seemed a leader for Lowery (sic) and his company. He would ride around the county looking up the people’s fat cattle and hogs and would let one man by the name of Fairchild and another man by the name of Kilgore know about them. Those two men were left here to get up supplies for the Confederate soldiers. But they would keep Lowery and his men posted as to where they would find Knight and his company. They got to be so busy giving information about Knight and his company that Knight and his company got tired of him making himself a news-toter from them to Lowery’s company and they ordered him to stop. But he kept on carrying news. One night my father said he and two of his men went to McLemore’s house. They climbed the fence instead of opening the gate for fear the gate would make a noise and McLemore would suspect something and run. All three of them eased up to his window, and one of the three shot him and he died. They intended to stop him from spying out what little liberty they had, and they did. They sent him word to leave their business alone. He told them that he knew his business and expected to attend to it. It was not long until his business was wound up.19

Knight’s version of this incident departs radically from the oral tradition and from those facts that can be independently established. A letter written by T. C. Carter, a comrade-in-arms of Major McLemore, which was published in the Hattiesburg, Mississippi, American newspaper around 1914, agrees with the oral tradition that McLemore was killed in the home of state Representative Amos Deason in Ellisville while sitting by the fireside with a group of other officers and friends. The “Lowery” Knight mentions is presumably Colonel Robert Lowry, whose regiment was dispatched to Jones and neighboring counties to put an end to the deserter depredations in the area. As we have already mentioned, however, the latter took place in mid-April 1864, six months after the murder of Major McLemore. The expedition of Colonel Maury into the county had taken place two months before that of Lowry; but even allowing for a confusion of the names Lowry and Maury, it would still be a great anachronism to give as the motive for McLemore’s murder that he was a “news-toter . . . to Lowery.” What Knight’s narrative may preserve for us are the preliminary efforts by Major McLemore to talk the deserters back into the army before resorting to armed force to achieve his end.

The oral tradition concerning this well-known incident is faithfully recorded by Kathryn Tucker Windham in her short story titled “Out of Devil’s Den.” Windham wrote that “Repeated reports of McLemore’s forays into his domain convinced Newt that the officer must be killed.”20 In other words, it was McLemore’s success in accomplishing the mission

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