Randall Harpole and Elijah Davis had been childhood friends, which was not unusual in the antebellum South.
The Harpole family owned no slaves, yet when talk of a Northern invasion grew cacophonous, Randall raised a company of Mississippi hill country cavalry and was elected their captain. They rode off to war and few came back. More died of dysentery than bullets or bayonets, but they were dead all the same.
The war spared Randall, but it had not been kind. He was wounded at Shiloh and again at Murfreesboro. While in the service of General John Bell Hood, Captain Randall Harpole was commended for valor. He was part of the surrender at Bennett Place in North Carolina, and began the long walk home to Mississippi with nothing but a Navy Colt cap-and-ball pistol, an old gelding hardly fit for plowing, and a bundle of railroad bonds won in a poker game. His fellow soldiers were using them to light campfires. He figured he’d found a treasure trove but soon concluded that, like everything else around him, they were worthless. He kept them just the same.
The recently freed Elijah “Billiards” Davis had been a valued part of the Davis family enterprise. Upon emancipation, he was told he could stay in exchange for services rendered and of course now he would receive wages.
Randall learned his wife and child had died of yellow fever in 1864, and his farm and outbuildings were occupied by either carpetbagger officials or scalawag neighbors. All the sacrifice, death, and destruction he’d witnessed for four years amounted to nothing.
This was not the Mississippi he left. The recently freed slaves—those who had opted to stay—displayed more kindness and goodwill toward the defeated Confederate veterans than did those who had enjoyed the privations of war on the home front. Returning Confederate veterans not only lost the war, they were completely disenfranchised and could not vote, hold elective office, borrow money, or buy property.
There was nothing to be done but start over. Court records showed that four hundred and thirty acres of prime bottomland were his, free and clear, if he could pay the back taxes of sixty-four U.S. dollars—a lot of money in postwar Mississippi when two-thirds of the 1865 state budget went for artificial limbs.
And then he remembered the railroad bonds.
The Davis house and compound were plantation baroque and would survive the war. Here, among its many dependencies, Elijah Davis had come of age.
When William Reynolds, a distant Virginia cousin of the Davis clan, had come here to die, the young, precocious Elijah was tasked to look after him. He had the run of the big house, its library, and gaming rooms. It was under these circumstances he earned his nickname, “Billiards.”
Elijah had learned to write and cipher and was a trusted manager of the Davis estates before the war. At the family’s request, he had arranged for a sizable piece of Davis property to be deeded to the citizens of Bayou Bend, an all-black, self-sustaining community in north Mississippi. The town was to have a bank, a school, a hospital, and retain its autonomy no matter the market price of cotton. Elijah was constantly looking for support for this utopian undertaking. It was his dream, his calling, his life‘s mission.
When introduced to Captain Randall Harpole, Elijah reminded him they grew up together, had hunted and fished with Randall’s father, who had worked for the Davises until he could buy his own place. Then he saw Randall’s railroad bonds and conjured a plan.
Elijah’s proposition seemed a fair one. For one-third of the fair market value, Elijah would shepherd the railroad bonds through the appropriate channels—the banks, government officials, and whoever else needed to be consulted, cajoled, or bribed—and do his level best to cash them in.
Captain Randall Harpole produced ten Tennessee-Tombigbee Tri-State Railroad certificates, whose face value was one hundred dollars each. The chance of getting that much for the elaborately printed certificates was small, but Elijah found a speculator from Massachusetts who, true to form, carried everything he owned in a carpetbag, and was willing to pay sixty-five dollars each for the bonds. After the transaction, Elijah left four hundred thirty dollars with Harpole, just as he had promised, and took his two hundred fifteen dollars and deposited it in the nascent Bayou Bend Bank. As a gesture of goodwill, Randall Harpole also deposited one-hundred dollars, an act that would come to haunt him in the politically charged environs of 1870 north Mississippi.
This would not be Elijah and Randall’s last interaction.
Captain Harpole, as people came to call him, paid off all his back taxes and restored his farm to its original six hundred and forty acres. He hired hands to work his fields and put the remaining acreage into tenant farms. This came to be called sharecropping, a system both praised and vilified, but it seemed to work if administered fairly. It rewarded men, black and white, for their labor, whether they owned land or not.
Politics raged all around, but Captain Harpole kept his head down, paid his bills, and went to church. He often visited with William F. Brantley, a former Confederate general who had returned home and opened a law practice in Old Greensboro, the meanest town in Choctaw County. They never talked about the war.
Federal troops were being pulled out all over the South. Programs like the Freedmen’s Bureau were under attack in the courts and in the streets. Nightriders harassed former slaves and Confederate veterans who bonded with occupying Union troops and treated recently freed slaves as more or less equal. The place was full of violent men and suspicion. The middle ground on issues of race and suffrage shrank; the occasional moderate had no place to stand or be heard.
One Sunday night in the Greensboro Presbyterian Church, Captain Harpole sat a few rows behind William Brantley’s brother, Arnold, and watched his head explode from an assassin’s shotgun blast through a window. The church emptied. No one else was hurt, and General William Brantley began to investigate his brother’s murder. It was unclear if this was an act of the Loyalty League or part of a continuing feud with the Balzell family from Texas, but Arnold was dead all the same, and folks were forced to take sides. General Brantley would soon be killed in an ambush. The mood of the place would never be the same.
The newly freed slave and the landless white farmer had more in common than not. United, their potential alliance could prove a powerful political force. This, the old planter aristocracy would not abide, and a wedge of suspicion was driven deep between these two emerging entities. Pronounced loyalty to the Lost Cause and the purity of white womanhood were the irresistible narratives. Many a politician got elected “waving an empty sleeve” as evidence of his service or by characterizing the “black brute” as the greatest threat to peace and tranquility here at home. And so it went, season in and season out.
Randall Harpole had not seen Elijah Davis in quite some time. He knew of the recent spate of suspicious fires that had occurred in the small, all-black town of Bayou Bend. Randall was not surprised when he heard a knock and opened his door to see Elijah standing in the yard, lantern in hand. Captain Harpole invited him in, but Elijah declined. They sat together on the porch, itself a breach of protocol and custom in postwar Mississippi.
It seemed the utopian community of Bayou Bend was on the verge of financial collapse, a calamity that would have given infinite pleasure to the two warring white-power structures in the county. The bank needed an infusion of capital to fund its rebuilding and finance next year’s cotton crop. Captain Harpole was in no position to help, as he was down to his last fifty dollars from the railroad bond sale and was looking to withdraw his deposit in the Bayou Bend Bank. He learned from Elijah that these funds were no longer available.
Randall and Elijah sat up late into the night, drinking from the same jug, trying to think of ways to engage fate’s favor on their behalf. They came to the conclusion that the old saying, “No risk, no reward,” applied as never before. Elijah proposed they pool their resources, test their luck, and split the resulting profits. A trip downriver to the den of iniquity that was New Orleans was in order. They would go as man and servant into the gambling rooms of the Crescent City. Captain Harpole would provide access, protection, and cover for Elijah.
Randall had not played cards since his return from the war, but he had an uncanny knack for numbers. The subservient role was one Elijah was never asked to assume, even within the Davis family, but he knew the type and could play it convincingly. And so they rode west towards Greenville, the nearest stop on the Mississippi River for the flat-bottom paddlewheel steamers that plied the Father of Waters from St. Louis to New Orleans.
Elijah rode a mule and Captain Harpole a fine horse. After boarding their mounts at a livery stable, they bought tickets and climbed onto a boat headed to New Orleans. They counted one hundred ninety dollars between them. Captain Harpole donned his old Confederate officer’s tunic and found a card game almost immediately. When they disembarked on the Decatur Street wharf in New Orleans, they were up by three hundred and ninety dollars.
He asked around for some of his old wartime companions and was sent to the New Orleans Chance, Sport and Gaming Rooms, as their business was called. These successful speculators would bet on anything, from roosters who fought to whether or not the sun would come up the next morning. They were glad to see Harpole and welcomed them both to their private quarters. These men had more money than sense and were just the kind Captain Harpole needed to engage.
And engage them he did, from the first-floor rooms in the Pontalba Building into their inner sanctum. After eighteen hours at poker, Captain Harpole was ahead twelve hundred dollars, and they were invited deeper into the gaming rooms, where they saw three tables lit by chandeliers and covered in green felt. Captain Harpole was about to find out how Elijah earned his nickname, “Billiards.”
It was not unusual for Southern gentlemen of substance to have surrogates do their bidding, be it water their livestock, race their horses, or fight their fights. Elijah played his part to perfection as he ran the tables, time after time. Before the sun came up, he had made another twenty-five hundred dollars for their project.
Randall and Elijah found a boarding house on Saint Philip Street that provided a safe for their valuables, a suite of rooms for the “Captain,” and a bed and bath in the back for his man, Elijah. The three thousand or so dollars in both silver and paper were placed in new saddlebags. This infusion of cash would make all the difference to their prospects back in Mississippi. Now the task would be to get home with their winnings.
Word of their good fortune had spread, and three suspicious-looking men began to follow them at an observant distance. Captain Randall Harpole had not engaged in a single act of violence since being mustered out of the Confederate army in the spring of 1865. He sensed getting out of New Orleans might prove difficult. He was glad to be traveling with the Navy Colt cap-and-ball pistol, and kept it well-oiled and in fine working condition.
At first light, Elijah and Captain Harpole boarded a packet boat to Natchez, as did the three suspicious-looking men. They steamed upriver and as it grew dark, the lights of Natchez Under the Hill came into view. Captain Harpole made his way to the boat’s stern and commenced to relieve himself into the river. One of the strangers approached from behind. The Captain recognized the sound of a pistol’s hammer being cocked. He turned quickly, spraying the stranger with urine.
“Why, you son of a bitch!” said the man, taking an involuntary step backwards, at which point Captain Randall Harpole slapped the pistol from his hand, grabbed his arm, and heaved him overboard. The man could not swim but managed to seize one of the paddles just as it was coming up and rode it to the top, where he made eye contact with Captain Harpole, who said, “Piss on you and all your kind!”
Harpole’s face would be the last thing the man saw, his words the last heard, before he disappeared into the brown froth of the Mississippi River.
As the packet boat made landing on the east bank of the Mississippi, the two remaining men searched about for their companion and, not finding him, decided to follow the saddlebags. Captain Harpole expected as much and had transferred the contents into a flour sack and given it to Elijah, who would transport the money overland back to north Mississippi by way of the Natchez Trace. Captain Harpole would catch the next steamer north to Greenville, collect their mounts and go home to wait. The two suspicious-looking men got on board as well.
The Natchez Trace was an old game trail–turned Indian trail–turned settler trail that followed the ridges from Natchez on the Mississippi River to Nashville on the Cumberland. Many a poor farmer with an adventuresome spirit had lost his life after selling his barge of timber, produce, or livestock in New Orleans and starting the overland trip home, only to be robbed and murdered for his trouble.
A somber group of drovers hired Elijah to help with their stock. Six men—Mennonites, all armed—four wagons, and eight oxen promised to be slow but steady and safe. He had slept in the woods near Washington College, never letting the flour sack out of his sight. This was where Aaron Burr had been brought up on charges of treason in 1807. Elijah had read all about it in the Davis library. He’d also learned that a young Aaron Burr had favored freeing the slaves, but his proposals had gone nowhere.
Captain Harpole made a big show of boarding the King Cotton paddle wheeler with his saddlebags. The pair of potential thieves also boarded but only bought passage as far as Vicksburg, which was just as well, given that they were never seen again.
Six weeks had passed since Captain Harpole and Elijah parted ways under Natchez’s notorious Hill. Now here was Elijah standing in the front yard, offering up a slip of paper that turned out to be a bank draft for sixteen hundred dollars.
“Half of three thousand is fifteen hundred,” Captain Harpole said.
“Well,” answered Elijah, “we owe you one hundred from your previous deposit.”
“Tell you what,” Captain Harpole replied. “You take this here sixteen hundred dollars and deposit it in my account and then take these.” Captain Harpole pulled from under his seat cushion twelve Tennessee-Tombigbee Tri-State Railroad bonds, now trading above their face value for three hundred and fifty dollars.
“Get what you can for them and deposit it all in my account at the Bayou Bend Bank.”
“Yes, sir,” Elijah said. “I’ll do just that.”
This would not be Captain Harpole’s and Elijah’s last interaction.
There were far more women than men in North Mississippi circa 1865. Most were war widows such as Nancy McAdoo, whose husband Walt had ridden off with Captain Harpole, never to return. A new category, the emancipation widow, appeared with more frequency after the war.
Five years earlier, on the occasion of their wedding, an uncle gave the McAdoos a family of slaves: Constantina, her husband Marcus, and their two children. Nancy McAdoo had no clue what to do with them, having not grown up with servants. Her father was a circuit riding Lutheran minister who disapproved of chattel slavery and often preached against it and as they were a gift, selling them was out of the question. Walt saw them as four more mouths to feed. They lived in a single room in the back of the big, rambling, unpainted house that came along with the farm Walt purchased.
Nancy grew fond of Constantina, and accustomed to the help with her children and household chores. The children, both black and white, ranged in size from lap, to porch to yard chaps, and were inseparable. Walt kept Marcus busy helping clear new ground and tending stock. And so it went, all through the leadup to secession. As the war wound down, talk of slavery’s end became overt, loud, and the only conversation anyone heard. When Nancy McAdoo received a letter of condolence from a Captain Harpole relating the details of Walt’s death, she became a statistic; yet another wartime widow.
Constantina woke one May morning in 1865 to the realization that Marcus was gone. The pull of freedom’s call was just too strong, and he would never be heard from again. She and Marcus had been fond of each other enough to “jump the broomstick,” which in slave quarters was the equivalent of marriage. Constantina was heartbroken when Marcus left, but such as this was happening all around her, she joined the ever-growing ranks of emancipation widows. The arrangement with Nancy, now the widow McAdoo, was that she would stay on, do the same work and be paid a wage. Mrs. McAdoo, ever the progressive daughter of a preacher, taught all four children reading and arithmetic three days a week. This was a more or less predictable way of life, and promised a form of security, if a paternalistic one.
Late one afternoon Captain Harpole rode up to the McAdoo residence with two head of cattle on a lead. He removed his hat, knocked on the porch and waited. When Mrs. McAdoo appeared, Captain Harpole explained as to how his surveyor had informed him that two acres he had recently cleared and was grazing stock on, were in fact her land. Harpole apologized for his mistake, offered the beeves in good faith and restitution, and assured her the fence had been returned to the accurate property line between their two farms.
She was gracious and invited him to join her on the porch, where they enjoyed conversation and hard cider. Never once did either speak of the war or the late Mr. McAdoo.
And so the courtship began.
Captain Harpole sat on the board of the newly reconstituted Bayou Bend Agricultural and Mechanical Bank along with Elijah Davis. After their monthly meeting, Harpole mentioned the McAdoo incident and allowed as to how Constantina’s children would be near school-age soon. He suggested Elijah call on the McAdoo household, offer his services, and promote the idea of Bayou Bend to Constantina. Elijah readily agreed.
Captain Harpole and the widow McAdoo were married that spring. She and her children moved into the spacious Harpole house. Constantina and her family occupied the McAdoo house, paid a modicum of rent and continued to plant a garden, feed the hogs, and generally keep the place up.
Every Sunday Elijah collected Constantina and her children and took them to church in Bayou Bend. Their lives seemed stable and secure, even though the fantasy that was Reconstruction, was falling apart all around them. To no one’s surprise, Elijah announced that he and Constantina were soon to be married.
By late summer all the crops were laid by, debts were paid and a sense of domestic tranquility seemed to hover over the two households. The new Mrs. Harpole was heavy with child and would deliver come winter.
Elijah Davis and Constantina were happy in the McAdoo house. Her children played in the swept yard and Elijah managed to make repairs and paint the house. He also painted the trunks of the big oak trees white up to the height of a man’s chest. No one knew why, it’s just what folks did.
The weather was pleasant, almost mild by Mississippi standards. The cotton and corn harvests promised to be abundant. However, all this goodwill and optimism could not long last, this being Mississippi in the 1870s.
Randall Harpole’s was the only white face to be seen at the gathering in Bayou Bend’s African Methodist Evangelical Church. Many of his neighbors had been invited to come hear the ordained minister and U. S. Senator Hiram Rhodes Revels speak, but none had seen fit to attend save for Captain Harpole.
Revels was a Republican and the first black Senator to be seated in the upper legislative body of United States government. Senator Revels was something of a moderate. His stand and vote were crucial to the eventual reinstatement of white rule in Mississippi and the lifting of former Confederates’ disenfranchisement. This was something Revels would be castigated for in some quarters, but he preached the love of God and the doctrine of forgiveness. It was a welcome message in this time and place.
Randall Harpole quietly invested in Bayou Bend. He opened a blacksmithery and livery stable, entirely staffed by former slaves. Both enterprises were much needed and crucial to the farm economy. His good relations with Elijah in particular and the black community in general were the worst kept secret in all of North Mississippi. Tongues began to wag. Folks began to talk.
Union General William T. Sherman had written as to how the greatest threat to peace and tranquility in the postwar South was the landless returning rebel veteran. Young and eager, skilled at killing, and good shots and horsemen all, they were easily provoked “brave rascals,” Sherman had said, and must be dealt with accordingly.
These men were plentiful in North Mississippi. Most were not from there, but passing through on their way west to become bona fide outlaws, find an early grave, or both. In the interim they caused as much mischief as possible, amongst blacks and whites alike.
It was late of an evening when a frantic Elijah Davis, lantern in hand, mounted the steps to the porch and banged on the Harpole front door.
“Captain!” Elijah said. “You got to come! They set the church on fire and God only knows what’s next.”
A sleepy Captain Harpole pulled on his copperas britches and slipped into his old Confederate officer’s tunic, which he hoped would give him a certain amount of credibility amongst the presumed perpetrators. He took hold of the Navy Colt cap-and-ball pistol and put it in his waistband. Elijah had saddled his horse, and off they rode toward the orange glow on the horizon.
People, most of them black, were pouring down the road running away from Bayou Bend. Elijah and Captain Harpole forged ahead and stopped only when confronted by a makeshift roadblock. From the darkness they heard a voice.
“Hold up there. Where you going?”
“We’re going into town. People there owe me money and I aim to collect,” Harpole lied.
“No you ain’t,” the voice said. “You one of them slavers what’s seen the light. Hell, you got your boy with you now! Get down off them horses!”
Four armed men emerged from the dark with lit lanterns and approached Randall and Elijah ever so carefully.
“Well, I’ll just be damned!” said one. “This here fellow is an officer. You reckon we ought to salute?”
“He ain’t nobody’s boy! Who set that church on fire?” Randall demanded to know, still sitting his horse, as was Elijah.
“I reckon it must’ve been the Holy Ghost—he’s been seen hereabouts, some say.”
“Holy Ghost, my ass!” Randall shouted, as he spurred his horse forward and fired two rounds from his pistol in the general direction of the men and their lanterns. Confusion ensued. He and Elijah were off at full gallop, trailed by a hail of bullets and buckshot.
The Bayou Bend A.M.E. church was still smoldering when they arrived. Men, both black and white, were milling about, drawn to the fire as if by hypnosis. Some were armed, some not. A few were of Captain Harpole’s old command. While they had no love for the former slaves, they were not about to sit idly by and watch their much-loved mutual place descend into anarchy.
Captain Harpole’s military instincts took over. He organized the crowd and formed a perimeter around the tiny town of Bayou Bend. He declared the equivalent of martial law and ordered that no one be allowed in or out.
Two men were caught trying to torch the livery stable. Harpole did not hesitate. He ordered them hanged. Their lifeless bodies joined the dozen or so who were the casualties of the night’s violence, including Capulet Bishop, Bayou Bend’s constable, who had been one of the first to die.
As the sun came up, Captain Harpole and Elijah looked around and took stock. Volunteer security patrolled the streets and surrounding area, bringing in stragglers and questioning survivors. Someone brought up their horses.
Elijah broke the silence and said, “Captain, you done good tonight. The peoples here ’bouts are asking me about you, and I tell them we go way back. That you are quality white folk. But what about that old Confederate coat he’s wearing, they say.”
The Captain chuckled. “Well, it didn’t exactly win me any friends back on the road, did it?”
“No sir,” Elijah said. “It did not. The past don’t mean a damn thing in this man’s Mississippi.”
“You’re mighty right about that,” Harpole said, and slowly took off the worn Confederate officer’s tunic, folding it ever so gently before tying it to the back of his saddle.
“You know,” he said, “I lost that damn Colt pistol I carried with me all through the war. It must’ve fallen out when we rode away from them boys on the road. That was some hot work! And I won’t soon forget it.”
“Captain,” Elijah counseled. “We’ll get you another pistol.”
It did fall out. The CSA issued Navy Colt cap-and-ball pistol landed in a ditch where it would stay, covered by mud, until found after a hard spring rain in 1951 by two boys, one of whom would write this story.
William Dunlap
This was the first William R Dunlap story I ever read, and I loved it. Still do. I remember thinking, possibly writing in response, what a labor of love it was to weave such a three dimensional history into a found object. It takes a close observer to be this kind of artist.
Great story!!!.....I would like to see that pistol sometime.