The State of Jones Read Online Free PDF

mind reader,” Carlisle replied.
    Many of the occupiers of Corinth were seeing the Deep South for the first time, and they examined it with curiosity. Corinth was a hub for seized cotton, and huge poofed bales sat on the train platforms in front of the Tishomingo, ready to send north. The town was also a destination for “contrabands,” scores of slaves who fled or stole away from their plantations with the Yankee invasion of Mississippi and came to the Union lines seeking freedom. They staggered into Corinth in rags and on bare feet, or rode in bunches on mules and buckboards. “It is all humbug about Slaves liking to stay with their masters,” an Ohio colonel discovered. “Men and women and children run off whenever they get a chance.”
    Some Northern soldiers were repulsed by contrabands, and many had, at best, mixed feelings about them. But they were unanimous in appreciation of the fact that they relieved white men of the hardest labor. Contrabands did the most punishing work on the fortifications; they worked as diggers, drivers, haulers and did the cookingscrubbing, and laundering. An Illinois infantryman wrote from Corinth, “Every regt has nigger teamsters and cooks which puts that many more men back in the ranks … It will make a difference in the regt of not less than 75 men that will carry guns that did not before we got niggers.”
    Contrabands exposed northern soldiers to slavery firsthand and frequently caused men to revise their views of it. Some slaves came to Corinth bearing livid marks and scars inflicted by owners. But external wounds only signified one kind of physical punishment. Joseph Nelson of the 81st Ohio Infantry wrote about a revelation he received on a visit to an area plantation: “We learned of one of the beauties of slavery of which we had not previously thought. A resident here owned a large strong muscular Negro whom he stood as men do a stallion, $100 to insure a live youngster to kick, yell, and suck. Slave women were brought to him and bred, that they might reproduce their kind.”
    Abolitionists and non-abolitionists alike among the soldiers were appalled by the condition many of the contrabands subsisted in. Yet their treatment by Union troops was often hardly better than that they received from Confederates, and sometimes worse. One Union soldier wrote in his diary wondering whether they were any better off. “They are quartered together in barracks, are filthy and diseased, the small pox are raging among them. If these Negroes cannot be treated better than they are, we ought to leave them with their masters, who can certainly take better care of them.”
    A close-up view of slavery, combined with the heat, stale camp food, incessant work, and tension of combat, cured Northern soldiers of any romance they may have had with antebellum Mississippi and its beguilingly beautiful plantation homes. One Iowa infantryman who went into the countryside outside of Corinth came to a large manor house, where a mistress supervised two Negroes as they killed hogs. The mistress complained that the flight of slaves had forced her own daughter into the kitchen. The girl “had never washed the dishes until the Yankees had come into the country,” she bitterly informed the Northern soldiers.
    By the end of September, the occupying Yankee troops had developed a sincere hostility toward their Mississippi hosts. When a Yankee transport on the Mississippi River came under sniper fire from the banks, infuriated troops leaped onto shore and burnt every single thing in sight. “All, all committed to the flames,” a Union captain reported. He added, “They have met a just retribution.”
    As Van Dorn advanced on Corinth, he was convinced that the Yankees would not match the fierceness of the Southerners fighting for their home soil. But the Northern invaders were clearly in an ill temper, too.
    October 3, 1862, 10:00 a.m., Corinth
    Sharp musketry and the
humps
of cannon erupted as the 7th