USA > Mississippi > Pike County > Pike county. Mississippi, 1789-1876: pioneer families and Confederate soldiers, reconstruction and redemption > Part 23
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Bishop Charles B. Galloway, in speaking of this period some years later, said:
"The final test of Southern character was not displayed in laying the broad foundations of a new civilization; not in the solemn but tumultuous councils out of which was evolved our great system of govermment; not in the historic halls of State, where Titans struggled for mastery over national principles and policies; not in the splendid valor of her sons in the storm and red rain of ter- rific battle; not in the military genius of her peerless captains, pronounced by critics to be the greatest marshals of modern times; but in their serene fortitude and unyielding heroism and unconquerable spirit, after the storm of battle had ceased and they were left only 'the scarred and charred remains of fire and tempest.' Surpassing the splendor of their courage in battle was the grandeur of their fortitude in defeat. The sublime hour in the Southern sol- dier's life was the time of his pathetic home-coming. I have seen the painting representing the returned Confederate soldier, which, in my judgment, is not true to the facts of history. He stands, in tattered garments, amid the ruins of his home, the gate fallen from its hinges, weeds covering the doorsteps, leaning upon his old musket, with a downcast look and broken heart. As a matter of fact, he only waited long enough to greet the faithful wife whom he had not seen for four stormy years, and kiss the dear children who had grown out of his recognition, and then with grim determination put his hand to the stern task of reconstructing his once beautiful home, and rebuilding his shattered fortunes on other and broader foundations. Men of principle never falter, though they fail. They felt the bitterness of defeat, but not the horrors of despair. How those brave men, the sons of affluence, addressed themselves to the grinding conditions of sudden and humiliating poverty can never be described by mortal tongue or pen. And those pitiless years of reconstruction! Worse than the calamities of war were the 'desolating furies of peace.' No proud people ever suffered such indignities, or endured such humiliation and degradation. More heartless than the robber bands that infested Germany after the Thirty Years' War were the hords of plunderers and vultures who fed and fattened upon the disarmed and defenseless South. Their ferocious greed knew no satiety, and their shameless rapacity sought to strip us to the skin. As Judge Jere Black, with characteristic vividness and vigor, has said: 'Their felonious fingers were made long enough to reach into the pockets of posterity. They coined the industry of future generations into cash and snatched the inheritance from children whose fathers are unborn. A conflagration, sweeping over the State from one end to the other, would have been a visitation of mercy in comparison to the curse of such a government."'
Such are the honors that go sounding down the ages the Yankee soldiers acquired in their so-called battle for liberty and the flag.
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The Bishop further says:
"But no brave people ever endured oppression and poverty with such calm dignity and splendid self-restraint. And by dint of their own unconquerable spirit and tireless toil, they saw their beautiful land rise from the ashes into affluence. The South no longer 'speaks with pathos or sings miserere.' She has risen from poverty and smiles at defeat. Out of the fire and tempest and baptism of blood, our State has come, undaunted in spirit and unfaltering in the future. It is said that the green grass peacefully waving over the field of Waterloo the summer after the famous battle, suggested to Lord Byron, in his Child Harold, to exclaim:
" 'How this red rain has made the harvest grow!' So every battle plain that was once furrowed with shot and shell and wet with the blood of brothers, now waves with abundant harvest of a new and larger life. The refluent wave has set in. After a long and bitter night the morning dawns. 'It is daybreak everywhere'."
Following in the same line of thought Chief Justice Albert Hall Whitfield said:
"Cold in death our hearts must indeed be when they do not warm to our Tartan-the Confederate grey. What a civilization rushes upon our memory as we gaze upon you! We are with our ancestors of the sunny South of old! We see again that 'glorious loyalty to rank and sex,' that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is there! And there, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it miti- · gated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.
"It was a civilization which developed individualism; it magnified man, it enthroned woman. It imparted to the individual the sense of worth; the honor that preferred death to disgrace; fidelity to every trust; the sacred observance, as a matter of individual conscience, of every obligation, national, State and social, and it exacted of every official, from the highest to the lowest military and civil, that stainless standard of conduct, that lofty conception of public office as a public trust, which made every public servant tremble under the sense of responsibility, like the needle, into place. Cultivated, fired with the noblest patriotism, self-centered, used to power, the people of the South gave the United States, by this matchless statesmanship, a government strong in its justice at home, great in its dignity abroad, loved as the asylum of the oppressed of all lands, attracting at once the reverence and the affection of universal humanity. Such was the South in 1860. Illimitable wealth and boundless content were present everywhere. Her civilization was, in all that
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makes up the real blessings of civilization, the purest and loftiest time has ever yet known. Her people stood apart among the nations of the world. Their bosoms were the home of the most exalted honor. Whatever was mean, or low, or sordid, fled scorned from her borders. Majestic truth, imperial con- science, Olympian power, toned by the very courtesy of the gods, lifted its noble men and its glorious women far, far up, above the levels of all other civilizations. Content, happy, prosperous, moved always to splendid action by the highest ideal, if some god descending from superior worlds, in quest of the race most akin to his own, had swept with his vision the land of the South in 1860, he would have claimed us as his offspring, and here made his home. · Soldiers of that elder and grander day, time and occasion do not permit refer- ence to your achievements on the field of war. Rather let me hold in relief for the contemplation of your country a record nobler far than all the victories you have won.
"Other nations have greeted returning legions, victorious from the field, with triumphal arches, with marble monuments, with cheering thousands, with processions and bonfires; we, whose cause is said to have been lost, can bring alone the treasures of the heart.
"The Confederate soldier, when he left the final scene of surrender, passed before no reviewing stand, was greeted by the thunderous acclamation of no thousands and ten thousands of his fellow citizens, met no rejoicing multitudes on the way home, has since been sustained by no pension from the Federal treas- ury in his struggle with penury and want. I see the long, grey line melting back into private citizenship, when the sword of Lee was tendered.
" 'As some dark thunder cloud lowers upon the horizon, marshals its battal- ions and threatens all the landscape with ruin, yet is found, on the succeeding morning, in pearls of dew on flower and blade and grass, refreshing and beauti- fying God's earth,' so the Confederate soldier, after achieving immortal fame, and presenting the most matchless front that ever bore back invasion, became, when peace spread its banner o'er the land, the noblest, the safest, the surest citizenship that ever rescued civilization from night.
"Wearisome, I see him plod his way homeward. Finally, his eye rests upon the homestead, property all gone, in many instances blackened chimneys to testify how truly 'War is hell,' not a rose of the wilderness left on its stalk to tell where the garden had been. Does he murmur? Does he repine? Not so, my countrymen. He took up those burdens, he met those difficulties, the prospective statutes, the era of alien mastery and dominion. Repressing all tendency to lawlessness, restraining everything that passed the bounds of rea- son and prudence, curbing all passion in his onward march, he gradually but surely brought back, out of chaos, order
"From where Potomac's waters lave The tomb of Washington To Rio Grande's distant wave, Beneath the setting sun,
the reign of beneficent laws.
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"I know that McDonald led no grander charge at Wagram than did Pickett at Gettysburg; and I know that the bodies of dead Mississippians were found higher up that dread slope than those of any other State. I know that the aw- ful shock at Chickamauga's field is not surpassed, if it is equaled, in the annals of tremendous and deathlike stubbornness of fighting. But, I tell you, my coun- trymen, that the grandest monument that the historian shall record, as rising in perpetuation of the name and fame of the Confederate soldier, is the record that he left through the days of reconstruction, the blessing which he gives us to-day of equal sisterhood in the union of States, with the privileges and laws and rights our fathers left us, intact and undiminished.
"But I want to ask, just here, the question: How far would the Confeder- ate soldier have gotten in that magnificent effort if it had not been that he had beside him the inspiration of the Southern woman?
"Women of the South, you gave into his hands the banner of the free- you cheered and upheld him on 'the perilous edge of battle;' and when wounded or dying on the tented field, in the private home, in the hospital, you ministered to his wants, bound up his wounds, or closed the dying eyes, no more to see 'wife or friend or sacred home;' you were performing the very ministries of the angels themselves.
"It is a little thing to give a cup of water, but its draught of cool refresh- ment when drained by the fevered lips may give a shock of pleasure to the frame more exquisite than when nectarian juice renews the life of joy in hap- piest hours. It is a little thing to speak a word of common comfort, which, by daily use, has almost lost its sense, yet, on the ear of him who thought to die unmourned, 'twill fall like choicest music.
"There are those listening to me to-day who have ministered the comfort that should bring back to them the sweetest of memories. And when the war was over and the Confederate soldier returned, he was met not with reproaches, but with love, sustained by confidence, guided, upheld. God has so ordained that man may meet the brunt of some sudden storm, may live through and master some great crisis, but it is woman alone who can wear through the su- preme crisis of individual or national life, by the endurance, the fortitude and the patience which she alone possesses.
"And so in the midst of the gloom, the women of the South rose resplendent to the occasion. She remembered that grief sanctified makes great. What, though she stood amid the wreck of desolated and dismantled homes, with the bright relics of princely fortunes strewn ruthlessly about her, the qualities of the eternal granite were integrated into her endurance. What, though her household Penates lay dashed to fragments on the hearthstone, her idols in the eternal silence, and the power of the despot attempted to bury in the grave of the slain the hopes of her country, set its seal upon the grave, rolled the rock upon the sepulchre and placed its watch. Her sublime faith has lived to see the resurrection angel of the South roll back the stone from the sepulchre, destroy the seal, break the fetters of political disability, shatter the bonds of industrial, agricultural and commercial subordination, and raise, radiant from
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the grave of the old, the figure of the new South, to stand in transfigured beauty, fronting the deepening glories of the Twentieth Century, 'like the winged god breathing from his flight.'
"She remembered that whatever was sublimest in the annals of Christianity looms o'er the ocean of time, like the Northern lights, more resplendent for the surrounding shadow of relentless persecution. She recalled that whatever is most glorious in the achievements of military heroes have been the triumphs of men who were cradled in storms and schooled by adversity. She remem- bered that whatever in literature is truly immortal, unvarying history proves the ripened products of intellects that have towered to the regions of perpetual sunlight, through atmospheres dark with clouds and tempests! And, remem- bering these things, she called her patience to her aid-she summoned her en- durance to the tremendous task; she nerved the returning husband, father, or son, to the herculean task of the years that have just receded from us, and to-day, women of the South, if there be hope in this land it is due to your courage; if there be promise in the future it is the result of your faith; and if, my countrymen and countrywomen, if, I say, in the years that are to come, when we who stand under this evening sky shall sleep the dreamless slumber of the grave, when we shall no more be known amongst men, these Southern States shall fill with fifty millions of happy men and women-if the Isthmian Canal shall be gay with the merchantmen of every nation upon earth-if the Galveston of the future shall remember the Galveston of the tempest but as a nightmare dream; if New Orleans and Mobile and Savannah and Charleston and Wilmington and our own Gulfport and a hundred other marts shall become imperial 'cities, proud with spires and turrets crowned, in whose broad-armed ports shall ride rich navies laughing at the storm;' if, above all that, literature, and religion, and art, shall fill this land with temples and lyceums, and galleries glorious with immortal paintings and statuary, and with a knowledge univer- sally diffused-if, I repeat, that glorious day shall come to this land we love, the land of the magnolia and the orange, the land of the mountain and the sea and of the tropic stars; the land of Lee and Jackson and of Davis; if the coming ' years shall bring these splendors to this clime, it will be due, women of the South, to the deathless fidelity with which you have held fast to the principles of jus- tice and right and truth; immutable and eternal, because of the possession of which God has made the heart of woman, in every age, the last repository of the faith of every creed, and the patriotism of every land.
"Meet indeed it is, soldiers of the Confederacy, that your sons have deter- mined to erect, in honor of the transcendent women of the South, whose inspir- ing patriotism made you in war the finest soldiery of time, whose love and sym- pathy and fortitude enabled you, through wreck and ruin, to preserve and perpetuate the liberties of your country, and who for forty years have annually covered the graves of your dead with flowers and tears of fadeless affection, a monument, the noblest in its proportions, the most exquisite in its carvings, the loftiest in its inscriptions, affection has ever reared to make virtue immortal! Let it rise in the purity of spotless white, against the dark background of our
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national sorrows, high up into the serene heavens! and through the ages to come, when garish day has gone, and with it the harsh clangor of commer- cialism, let the vast silence of the starry midnight steep it in holy, healing quiet!
"The Southland mourns her dead to-day And hangs a funeral pall From Old Virginia's crimson plains To Pickens' gulf-girt wall. Along her coasts, across her fields, And o'er her meadows fair, She mourns to-day her chieftain dead, In earnest, sadd'ning prayer. The humble and the low, The solemn sounds of heartfelt grief,
In fervent prayers now flow."
-Emmet L. Ross.
PEABODY PUBLIC SCHOOL, SUMMIT.
In 1868 one of the first public schools established in the State of Mississippi was located in the town of Summit. It was inaugurated under the provisions of the system devised in the will of the great educational philanthropist, George Peabody.
Rev. Barnas Sears, General Agent of the Peabody educational fund, visited Summit, and under an agreement for an equal amount of money to be raised by the people as an endowment for the support of an institute of learning, the Peabody School was established and. its doors opened at the Episcopal rectory in November, 1868, which was leased for two years until a suitable building could be erected.
The Board of School Directors consisted of Wm. H. Garland, James B. Quin, James N. Atkinson, Thomas R. Stockdale and Chas. E. Teunison. Rev. Charles H. Otken, of Amite County, was chosen as Superintendent, with Mrs. Josephine Newton, Mrs. Mary B. Blin- coe, Miss Emma Fourniquet and Miss Hattie Wicker, afterwards wife of Sheriff-Captain William McNulty, as teachers.
There were several causes that contributed to the difficulties in the beginning of this institution which were serious obstacles in the way of its Superintendent and teachers, as well as the authorities and citizen supporters of the town of Summit.
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The country had been desolated by the war and there was a cha- otic condition in the system of labor incident to the abolition of slavery. The farms had to be rehabilitated and agricultural indus- tries made to prosper before other business or educational enter- prises could succeed, except under the most trying circumstances. We were in the beginning of the ordeals of reconstruction. The Federal military were stationed in every county. Pike County had a negro military company stationed at its courthouse under an officer whose duties came under the plan of Thaddeus Stephens for the Africanization of the Southern States, which throttled the efforts of the people of Summit to establish the Peabody Public School in the beginning. But the men and women who were interesting them- selves had passed through the crucible that tested their strength and their virtues, having lived through the flames of fire and the swelling streams of blood that characterized the Civil War.
After the first two sessions were over a handsome building, costing $5,000, was erected and the attendance rose from 142 in 1868 to 347 in 1871.
Among those already mentioned in connection with the insti- tute will be found the names of C. L. Patton, Mrs. Annie Jackson, Miss A. T. Boyd, Miss Annie Flowers, Miss Octavia Johnson, Miss Annie Cunningham, Miss Ellen Hamerton, Miss J. B. Grant, Miss Caroline Augusta Lamkin, Miss G. Leonard, Rev. J. C. Graham, J. B. Winn, J. M. Sharpe.
Dr. Otken filled the place of Superintendent for nine years and successfully steered through the most difficult period of its exist- ence. During the nine years of his services as principal the school directors were Wm. H. Garland, Thomas R. Stockdale, Jas. N. Atkin- son, C. E. Tunison, J. L. B. Quin, I. Moise, W. A. Cotton, Wm. Cunningham, Dr. W. W. Moore, Gen. W. F. Cain, Chas. W. Bean, Ben. Hilborne, Rev. Wm. Hoover, Judge Hyram Cassidy, Sr., and after 1872 Col. Wm. Campbell and Mr. W. T. White served as mem- bers of the Board of Directors.
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JUDGE HUGH MURRAY QUIN.
Judge Hugh Murray Quin was a son of Peter Quin, Jr., and Martha Catho- rine Moore. The Quins were from York District, South Carolina. Peter, Jr., married his wife in North Carolina. Her mother was a Miss Murray, whose brother was the author of Murray's Grammar.
They emigrated and settled in Holmesville in 1815, where Hugh Murray Quin was born on the 22nd of February, 1819, and where he grew up and was educated. In his young manhood he married Delilah Bearden. He settled on a farm purchased from Anthony Perryman, lying in the Bogue Chitto Valley, one mile and a half above Holmesville, where he lived, acquiring considerable property in land, slaves and stock. He was for many years clerk of the court at Holmesville and was admitted to the practice of law. During the Civil War he filled the position of Probate Judge, and after the close of the war, when county courts were established, he occupied the bench as Judge of that court, but was put out by order of the military and superseded by the appointment of Judge T. E. Tate. He afterwards, through the solicitation of the people, moved to the town of Summit, and was elected to the office of Mayor. At the expiration of his term he returned to his plantation near Holmesville, where he remained until his death in 1900.
With Delilah Bearden he raised the following children : Dr. Lucius M Quin, who married Courtney Magee; Wallace W. Quin, who married Neelie Williams; Emma Eoline, who married Luke W. Conerly; Lula, who married Charles H. Rowan; George, who married Alla Irvin.
Judge Quin was left a widower by the death of his wife in 1867, and subse- quently married Nannie Sumrall, of Copiah County. With her he raised two children-Henry and Ina.
After returning to his plantation from Summit in the early seventies, he filled the position of justice of the peace for his district up to the time of his death, about twenty-seven years.
He was as well posted in the laws of Mississippi as any man who ever lived in Pike County. He was an excellent probate judge and practitioner in chan- cery. He was the soul of honor, broad minded, liberal to a fault, true in friend- ship, sympathetic, loving and kind, and his home was noted for being the place of unbounded hospitality, where the humblest wayfarer could always find a night's lodging and the hungry were never turned away from his gate unfed. He was a warm-hearted, devoted husband. He loved his own children ten- derly and those who became members of his family by marriage. He was re- ligious and a devoted member of the Methodist Church, and a Mason of high standing. He was sought far and near for advice, which was freely given, and few men have lived in Pike County whose death was more regretted and whose loss was more keenly felt. He died in the Christian faith, without a blemish upon his name or his character.
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THE BURRIS MAGEE TRIAL.
One of the most noted criminal trials that occurred in Pike County after the close of the Civil War was that of J. Burris Magee, of Wil- kinson County, charged with the killing of Connover in Summit. Magee had been a conscript officer in the service of the Confederate Government. A difficulty arose between the two men at the depot, Connover using violent language in the abuse of Magee. The latter withdrew from the depot, followed by Connover, who was armed with a heavy stick. Magee drew his revolver and leveled it at Con- nover, telling him to keep back, at the same time retreating across the street. As Connover advanced Magee fired one shot at his right arm with a view of stopping him, but he continued to advance with his uplifted club. Moving backward Magee stumbled in a ditch and fell, and as Connover with his stick raised over him, in his prostrate condition, Magee fired on him again, and killed him. The grand jury of Pike County indicted Magee for murder, though the prelimi- nary examination disclosed the fact that it was not necessarily so, and he was given bail.
Magee secured the services of three of the most noted lawyers in South Mississippi, Judge Simrall of Wilkinson, Judge Hyram Cassidy of Franklin, and John T. Lamkin of Pike. It was as fine a legal team as could have been selected in the State.
At the trial the State was represented by H. F. Johnson, Dis- . trict Attorney, latterly President of the Whitworth College at Brook- haven, and Rev. W. H. Hartley, a Methodist minister, belonging to the Mississippi Conference, who felt it his duty and volunteered to assist in the prosecution of the case. The trial excited widespread interest. Judge Simrall's part of the programme was to dwell upon character, the reputation of the defendant and his people in the
past. John T. Lamkin was to proceed on evidence and the testimony of witnesses in the case, and Hyram Cassidy was to close the defense with his inimical witticism, anecdotes and ridicule. The destruction of the court records by fire in Magnolia rendered it impossible to give the names of those concerned in the trial and the writer gives it entirely from memory, being present from first to last.
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