Many spent the war in hiding. In thick woods and swamplands and on small river islands, they bided their time, refusing to fight and die for slavery. They bore many names: deserters, layouts, jawhawkers, tories. Some called them, because of the vegetation that slowly grew on their clothes while they hid from Confederate troops, “mossbacks.”
I recently visited one of the main hideouts for these anti-Confederate mossbacks, somewhere I had written about but never before seen. This in itself wasn’t unusual; my research covers the entire Deep South, so most of the places I have studied I have not experienced firsthand. But there was something deeply haunting about this place.
When the great Mississippi River flood of 1927 drove my grandfather’s family out of Avoyelles Parish (the northern tip of Cajun country), they settled in New Orleans, so I grew up visiting the city with some frequency. I still try to go there at least twice a year (Jazzfest, Christmas) because it’s one of my favorite cities in the world; though, thanks to Hurricane Katrina, I no longer have any family there. On my last trip, a few days before the New Year, I decided to rent a car and make the 45-minute drive up Highway 10 to the Pearl River swamp, where several companies offer guided tours.
You know the shape of this stretch of river: you know how the Mississippi-Louisiana border largely follows the Mississippi River but then juts 100 miles east in a straight line only to start squiggling its way south again, as if a child did not realize their paper had slipped while they were drawing. Those last 60-odd miles of the border follow the Pearl.
When we imagine a “Civil War site” we usually picture a sunlit battlefield with paved roads, well-kept monuments every few dozen yards; not a dark tangle of roots and wild boars, where Union soldiers never set foot. But over the past few decades, historians have come to understand that the Confederacy was actually fighting a two-front war: against the United States, obviously, but also against enslaved and free blacks, poor whites, and other non-slaveholders within the Confederacy’s bounds.1
Among non-slaveholding whites in the Deep South, attitudes towards the Confederacy ran the gamut from apathy to hatred, but it was clear that few poor white men had a burning desire to fight for the South, and even fewer were willing to fight for more than a year or two. While many poor whites simply joined or were drafted into the military and then deserted and returned back home, there were likely tens of thousands of men who evaded the draft purposely, or who lived away from mainstream society and were thus never drafted in the first place. These poor white layabouts, even more so than the minority of outright white southern abolitionists, were a source of worry for the slaveholding class, not least due to their sheer numbers.
The composition of the Confederate Army changed a year into the Civil War when the Confederacy began conscripting its soldiers. Poor whites immediately became the primary targets of the draft. This fact, coupled with the so-called “Twenty Negro Act,” which exempted from military service anyone who owned more than nineteen slaves, brought mounting class tensions closer to a head. Non-slaveholders accused the Confederacy of waging “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”2
The law’s blatant protection and privileging of the region’s wealthiest slave owners surely spurred more rounds of mass desertion. Elsie Posey, who spent her childhood enslaved in Mississippi, reported that the Twenty Negro Act “account[ed] for Jones County’s record as the ‘Free State of Jones’ and for Covington County’s famous ‘Deserter’s End Lake.’”3
As early as 1862, deserters in Georgia scattered through the heavily forested area west of the Ocmulgee River. A few years later, the entire area was in open revolt. Gum Swamp, another densely wooded area, provided another refuge. Since Confederate troops could not easily traverse the swamps or make it out to the small islands the deserters inhabited, they instead stole the men’s guns and horses and occasionally harassed their families.4
Deserters took over several small islands along the Mississippi River, such a white “bandit named Coe” who settled on Island No. 76 near Bolivar, Mississippi. (It’s no longer on the river thanks to a cutoff constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers; it now abuts Lake Whittington.) Coe apparently “gathered around him a large number of negroes. He became a terror to all the neighboring country. He and the negroes descended on the plantations and carried off everything.” And Coe was not only accompanied by enslaved people, for as one Mississippian later remembered, “there were also other renegade white men with him whose names I will not mention.”5
Indeed, many non-slaveholders joined anti-war organizations, while others formed semi-violent “tory” or “layout gangs.” These bands of men could be highly destructive to the South’s infrastructure, burning bridges, jails, and government buildings, attacking supply trains, and generally stealing from plantations whenever they got the chance. Emboldened anti-Confederates even began harassing conscript officers and other government officials. According to David Williams, by 1864 these men had “all but eliminated Confederate control” in the Deep South’s hills, mountains, piney woods, and swamps.6
They hunted, fished, and foraged for roots and berries. Their wives and sisters and other women kinfolk smuggled them food whenever they got a chance. As Confederate forces approached, the mossbacks and layouts simply retreated farther back into the woods, using rockets and horns to warn each other.7
In Mississippi and Louisiana, these mossbacks, draft-dodgers, and layouts “were especially numerous” around the Pearl River, where “scarcely five hundred men were drafted from these piney woods.”8
In 1891, a journalist named David Dodge wrote an expose on “The Cave-Dwellers of the Confederacy,” proposing that most of these men had a deep disaffection for the secessionist slaveholders, and this “manifested itself in a dogged determination not to serve in the Confederate ranks.”
Dodge was one of only a handful of white writers to ever accurately attribute the successes of these anti-Confederate men to the intelligence and resourcefulness of the enslaved:
“Often the negro’s instinctive knowledge of woodcraft enabled him to make suggestions which greatly increased the safety of the hiding-place; and when questioned by the guards, his apparently innocent responses would throw pursuit in one direction while his master was speeding off in another. No one else could mingle the alarm signal with the hog-calling so successfully or be heard so far as he could; and no matter how thick the guards or how strict the watch, the cave was sure to be kept provisioned. While ostensibly very busy at the store or the station, his alert ears were catching every scrap of news, every rumor which could indicate the movements of the ‘deserter-hunters.’”
Anti-Confederate whites hid out in ways they “had learned from runaway slaves,” rubbing onions “or odorous herbs” on the bottoms of their feet to throw off tracking dogs and bounty hunters. “More than one deserter,” wrote David Dodge, “owed not only his comfort, but his liberty, if not his life, to the fidelity and cunning of some trusty slave.”9
The enslaved also helped the mossbacks and cave dwellers by bringing them provisions. Jeff Rayford, who spent the war enslaved in Mississippi, recalled helping feed the deserters: “men would hide out to keep from going to war. I cooked and carried many a pan of food to these men in the Pearl River swamp. This I did for one man regularly. All I had to do was to carry the food down after dark, and . . . pretty soon he would step out from behind a tree and say, ‘Here Jeff’ and then I would hand it to him and run back to the house.”10
Only 160,000 of the 359,000 men on the Confederacy’s muster rolls were present by the end of the Civil War. Indeed, historians have uncovered evidence that by then, slaves and white anti-Confederates were cooperating in an organized opposition to the southern government. At the same time the Confederacy was losing the front against Grant and Sherman, it was losing a second front against many of its own citizens.11
Slaveholders had created a war to protect their own wealth and privilege. Then they expected non-slaveholders to carry the burden of the war; to give life, limb, and sanity to preserve an institution that only negatively impacted them. Hundreds of thousands of southern men said, plainly, no. Many of them did so by hiding here, in this swamp, where decades later, on the fourth or fifth day of Christmas (overcast, cold for this far south), I took photographs.
When the tour was done, something stopped me from immediately getting back in my car. It wasn’t dreading the drive, though the city did feel many miles farther away than my drive that morning would have suggested. It was knowing that this place mattered to so many and indeed mattered to all those, whether or not they knew it, who were touched by that war. It was knowing, as I took a deep, humid breath, that what I had written mattered, and still matters; and that this place was still refuge to secrets.
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- Victoria E. Bynum, The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and its Legacies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2010), chaps. 1–2; William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
- David Downing, A South Divided: Portraits of Dissent in the Confederacy (Nashville: Cumberland House, 2007), 113, 115.
- Elsie Posey in George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972-79), supplement, series 1, vol. 7 (Miss., part 4), 1738.
- Mark V. Wetherington, Plain Folk’s Fight: The Civil War and Reconstruction in Piney Woods Georgia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 222–23.
- New York Sun and J. C. Burrus quoted in Greenville (Miss.) Democrat, March 28, 1911, transcribed in Rawick, ed., American Slave, supp. series. 1, vol. 5 (Miss., part 2), 470, 472; Marion Bragg, Historic Names and Places on the Lower Mississippi River (Vicksburg, Miss.: Mississippi River Commission, 1977), 120.
- David Williams, Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War (New York: New Press, 2008), 5.
- Wetherington, Plain Folk’s Fight, 230.
- Roger W. Shugg, Origins of Class Struggle in Louisiana: A Social History of White Farmers and Laborers during Slavery and After, 1840–1875 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1939), 178–79.
- David Dodge, “The Cave-Dwellers of the Confederacy,” Atlantic Monthly (Oct. 1891): 514–22 (link).
- Jeff Rayford in Rawick, ed., American Slave, supplement, series 1, vol. 7 (Miss., part 4), 1801–2.
- Bynum, Long Shadow of the Civil War, 5; Downing, South Divided, 115; Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 88.
