I drove a narrow, wooded road nearing Vicksburg where the green overhang opened to cotton and soybean fields. The road into town, Clay Street, drops you right off at the Vicksburg National Military Park. On July 4 in 1863, following a mythic 40-day siege, the Confederate city surrendered to Union forces, giving up crucial control over the Mississippi River. The Park dominates the city.
In another life, I attended a Civil War reenactment in Vicksburg. We walked a dusty road to a field outside of town where white folks in costumes lived in tents and ate awful food. Today, I was meeting with a fellow of the Andrew Mellon Foundation partnering with the National Park Service on the African American experience from the Civil War through Reconstruction. We met in a coffeeshop decorated with dead ducks. Afterward, we proceeded to the courthouse.
Vicksburg is confusing to me with its real-life, mixed-up history. The city has an actual working courthouse and an Old Courthouse, which I believe is a museum. We went into the former. The Fellow showed me how to pull the oversized real property ledgers off the shelves and run your finger down the page to index land ownership. She found an original 1800s Hebron deed, but it appeared to be land my family owned in town, not the LaGrange peach farm.
As she and I piddled, a helpful clerk with blond hair and blue eyes slowly turned the pages of a ledger containing old divorce records from the 1870s and 1880s. Yep, people divorced way back then.
The clerk couldn’t find a record of my ancestor Ellen Hebron’s divorce from the man I called the Scoundrel, my true reason for being in the courthouse. That left me still wondering who divorced whom. Did Ellen leave the Scoundrel because of his infidelity? Or did he throw up his hands at her independent writer’s life? Or maybe she divorced him thanks to the messiness of the Vicksburg Massacres. I just can’t say.
My travels toward Vicksburg began on a bright spring day in 2022 in the gathering hall at the Church of the Holy Trinity. The large open room was packed with Vicksburg movers and shakers. County commissioners and school board members and business leaders. Ordinary folks like me, too. We learned terminology and examined our biases and shared stories. The last session was a conversation about tourism in Vicksburg.
Tourism is a big deal in Vicksburg, with the Civil War history and the dominating Park. The topic was selected so that the group, which might have experienced awkward moments or actual discord, could come together over a common topic focused on the future. My table discussed the topic amongst ourselves. No one mentioned the upcoming 150th anniversary of the Vicksburg Massacres on Dec. 7, 2024.
The Massacres had become a big deal for me. In a herky-jerky, overlapping, one-step-forward-two-steps-back jumbled ball of confusion, I had been on a journey of familial discovery. My path was—and continues to be—full of bizarre, exploding revelations. I learn; I absorb, only to have new information pop up that I’m forced to face. More embarrassingly, I “discover” new information, only to realize I’ve had it at my fingertips all along. Or I could have, had I taken one more step. I don’t think these failures are solely a function of time or talent, though there is that.
The information is hard to absorb. It either directly contradicts what I grew up believing, or presents in a way that makes it difficult for me to see it clearly. But I keep tentatively tapping my toe forward, scouting the abyss.
Despite my passion, my actual courage at the table in Vicksburg was a warm thimble of spit: tiny, tepid and not very refreshing. But I found my voice and asked the table, “Are there any plans for a 150th commemoration of the Vicksburg Massacres?”
Blank looks all around.
When, upon prompting, I repeated the question, a woman said, “You’ve got your dates wrong. The Siege was in 1863.”
“Not the Siege,” I said. “The Vicksburg Massacres when Sheriff Crosby was overthrown and white militia marauded through the county, killing people?”
No one knew what the hell I was talking about.
Later, I learned this ignorance is common. American history is pockmarked with murderous rampages by mobs of white Americans killing innocent Black Americans. In Mississippi, it happened in Vicksburg and next door in Clinton. These massacres aren’t taught. They are “forgotten.” Our white agreed-upon amnesia eats holes in American history like acid through velvet.
As one of our group summarized our conversation to the larger group, the woman who had corrected my dates locked my gaze.
“Ask them your question,” she said.
I stared at her. This end-of-the-day talk was supposed to be unifying. A feel-good conversation about tourism. And she wanted me to bring up the Massacres?
She wouldn’t look away. I stood up.
“My ancestor was an instigator of the 1874 Vicksburg Massacres,” I said, because if I was going to ask, I had to say why, even if my voice was shaking. “John Hebron. He’s in the Congressional Record as part of the hearing on the rampaging that took place after Sheriff Crosby was deposed. I was wondering if there are any plans for the Massacres’ 150th anniversary?”
The facilitator at the podium glanced around the silent room. “I’m not familiar with what you’re talking about,” he finally said. “But I promise you, I intend to find out.”
The morning after the Day of Dialogue, I insisted my husband drive down to the county courthouse. I wanted to see the marker on the Massacres. He said, “There’s not going to be a marker.” I said, “There has to be a marker.” He said, “There’s not going to be a marker.” I got out of the car. I walked all the way around the huge block.
There was no marker.
In 1874, African American businessman and landowner Peter Crosby was the duly-elected sheriff of Warren County. Sheriffs also served as tax collectors—this is crucial information. By that summer, with the Civil War a decade in the rearview mirror, armed night riders were “patrolling” throughout the county to “dissuade” Black voters from participating in the August election. A goal, as assistant professor of history at Jackson State University and author of an upcoming book on Vicksburg and Redeemer violence Dr. Albert Dorsey, Jr. describes, was to keep Black Mississippians from gaining economic independence.
Economic independence meant Black laborers wouldn’t be “available” to work on the land, which was unprofitable to farm without unpaid labor (brilliant businessmen, these so-called planters.) To counter the voter suppression, Black troops were drilling in the Vicksburg streets to ensure Black men could vote.
Up to this point, the Scoundrel had been leading his post-Civil War life. Contrary to the general belief that wealthy Southerners were left destitute by the war, the Scoundrel spent his time running race horses, taking vacations and tending to the fruit farm his father had established using the talent and labor of enslaved men, women, and children. But, like those who crawled into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2020, political hate broke open the Scoundrel’s life.
On Sept. 5, 1874, a group of men formed the People’s Club of Bovina and elected leaders, one of whom was the Scoundrel. The constitution of the Club vowed to end Republican rule, Republicans being the party of Emancipation. The myth of the Lost Cause paints Reconstruction as a time of incompetent, corrupt rule. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Reconstruction was working. Black Mississippians who acquired the right to vote by constitutional amendment were voting. Officials were acting for the common good, among other things, founding public schools for all children.
In their groundbreaking textbook, “Mississippi: Conflict and Change,” authors Charles Sallis and James Loewen noted elected Black officials were “reasonable in their use of political power and in their actions toward white Mississippians. All they asked was equal rights before the law. On the whole, Mississippi was especially fortunate in having capable Black leaders during these years.”
So why did my ancestor choose to found the People’s Club of Bovina and proclaim a race war inevitable? I think the answer lies in my first sentence: Reconstruction was working.
The fig leaf of an excuse adopted by the Bovina Club was Crosby’s unfair taxation, a foreshadowing of whiteness’ worship of tax cuts when public services benefit Black folks. The Club issued a statement that more than 30 years later the Scoundrel’s son, the powerful President pro tem of the Mississippi Senate, would echo: “This is a white man’s country, and must be ruled by white men.”
On Wednesday, Dec. 2, 1874—the day taxes were due—white men confronted Sheriff Crosby and demanded he resign. Mississippi records show that the Scoundrel was in that group. When Crosby refused, a white mob marched on the courthouse.
Ultimately, men supporting Crosby disbanded to retreat but were met by firing white forces. The mob chased Black folks on horseback, gunning them down. Then, for nearly a week, white folks took to vigilante killing throughout the county. A 2015 article in the Vicksburg Post by Josh Edwards, called the month-long killings a “slaughter” before violence abated Jan. 5, 1875, when Union troops arrived.
The Scoundrel was accused of leading one of these marauding groups. When I saw the Congressional investigation of the violence, I had a “this is real” moment. There was his name, right there—the Scoundrel testified at the hearing. So did the widow of a man who testified that the Scoundrel’s half-brother killed her husband. Another witness met a body of armed men on the road. When asked what organization it was, she testified, “I believe that Mr. S. R. Reed and Doctor Hebron were in command of it.” In a separate state investigation, the Scoundrel was identified as leading a group of more than 100 men.
Though Crosby was eventually re-instated, someone shot him in the head in 1875. He never recovered but served out his term. By the November elections, white people like the Scoundrel had regained control of Vicksburg and Warren County offices.
You can hear it in my voice, can’t you? The disdain for my ancestors. That’s the way I spent most of this journey, chastising and repudiating them. They were not the heroes of this story. They were most decidedly the villains. Then one Sunday at Free Church of the Annunciation in New Orleans, I had an epiphany.
In my Episcopal church, we pray for the dead, because we believe these “saints” continue to grow in their relationship with God. These saints included the folks I’d been so busy judging. I realized, seated on the hard pew, I was not separate from my ancestors. I was a continuation of them, and one day, I would be an ancestor—the one who needed forgiveness for my own sins.
Something merged in my brain, and I felt the generations of prayers for my ancestors. What if those prayers had been “working”? What if those who did such harm looked down from an enveloping love and realized that too often, they had not honored that love? What if my ancestors were the ones who had been sending me insistent nudges to repair the harm? What if they had inspired every good thing I’d been led to do by generating that very desire?
The possibility convicted me in my pride and self-righteousness. Nose in the air, I had decreed myself so much better than them. In fact. I had worked extra hard to make them “them” and me “me.” Bad vs. good. Ignorant vs. enlightened. Racist vs. aware. My relatives were broken people. So am I. They and I belong to the human race, the communion of saints, the beloved of God. As do we all.
Two and half years after the Vicksburg Day of Dialogue, from Dec. 6 through Dec. 8, 2024, we are to have a 150th remembrance of the Vicksburg Massacres. Instrumental in this effort have been members of Becoming Beloved Community Episcopal Church MS, including Ray Hume, the man who stood at the podium and made the promise to find out about a remembrance. In addition, the personnel at the Park and Dr. Dorsey, who taught me to use the plural in referring to the events because the killings went on for months, will attend.
Others have been involved in hosting a historical talk, planning a wreath-laying and developing a eucharistic Remembrance. The planning group was fortunate to have Linda Fondren offer her prestige as Executive Director of Catfish Row Museum and her immense influence as a Vicksburg leader. She expanded the remembering into the 2025 Vicksburg Bicentennial Celebration, which will offer a multitude of events including—in the full-circle way of life—the erecting of a maker on county property in honor of Sheriff Peter Crosby.
After our courthouse visit, the Mellon fellow and I were standing on the downtown Vicksburg streets. I pointed west to the river.
“I heard that isn’t the Mississippi River. The channel changed.”
“Right,” the Fellow said.
The most basic fact about Vicksburg—it sits on the bluffs of the Mississippi River—isn’t true. In 1876, the river changed course, leaving Vicksburg high and dry. Two years later, the Army Corp of Engineers began working to cut a diversion channel to the Yazoo River, which merges with the Mississippi. Vicksburg sits on the Yazoo River.
We have choices, you and me. I have found those choices to be as wavery as light bouncing off water. As I travel through life, I have to constantly renew my decision to examine what I think is true. I can accept family stories and Lost Cause Myths, or I can listen. I can hear when historians tell me that is not what happened. Or I can continue to broadcast that which makes me feel comfortable.
Several times in my conversation with the Mellon fellow, I felt she knew something about my family’s past she wasn’t ready to share. Once, she asked, “Have you made a thorough newspaper search?” I have tried. But I’ve seen references to articles that I can’t recover. I’m sure I have surprises yet to come—my DNA results recently upended what I thought I knew about my family. As I keep nearing Vicksburg, life will force me, again, to rethink.
Maybe I will never get my family history right. The revelations of my past might always be like the loose bluffs along the river. This fine, silky soil takes a long time to form. It’s stable when dry. But, if water intrudes or the vertical is stressed into a slope, the bonding strength will fail. In one moment, an entire bluff can crumble into a landslide. When that happens, any house built on it cannot stand.
This MFP Voices essay does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.