When I was a little girl, my mother took me to see my great aunt in Winston County, Mississippi. Her name was Johnnie Mae Haggard Hindman. She was a farmer’s wife, who still lived on the same place where she was born. She was considered to be an old maid, when a farmer from over on the connecting Yellow Creek Road and Bond Road to both his family farm and hers, starting courting her. His name was Tom Hindman, son of Frank Hindman. I suppose their home was another place that I began to love family history.
She taught me about many of my Haggard ancestors, my Ashmore ancestors, introduced me to my Eaves ancestors. Once when I was in her home, she was visited by two sisters, Maisie and Daisy Flake. In later years I found out they were related through a connection with the Eaves family.
Her brother, William Jesse Haggard, lived across the fields from her. His wife was Bessie Lloyd and they had two daughters, Waldean and Elsie Merle. Elsie Merle created quite a scandal by marrying her second cousin, Alfred Mack Eaves.
Another sister, Nora, lived at the end of the road in the first two story house that I ever remember seeing. At the time she was married to a Mr. Thompson. By then she had also created a scandal by divorcing her first husband J. L. Schoolar, then marrying a Mr. Thompson. However this Mr. Thompson was the father of the Mr. Thompson that I knew. Another scandal for that small community.
The other two sisters, Stella and Lizzie also lived on the Haggard farm. Aunt Stella lived next to Aunt Johnnie and Uncle Bill in the house where her parents lived. There was a pump built into the sink in her kitchen. I was amazed. Uncle Willie took my little brother and me out to the barn and showed us the animals in his barn and took us out and let us pick cotton. I was only six years old and my little brother, Tommie, was only four years old. Aunt Stella fixed us a pillow case with a strap and we skipped all over that cotton patch and thought we were very much grown. Later on, we found out that Uncle Willie either killed himself or his gun slipped while climbing through a fence next to the gate to his barn lot.
Aunt Lizzie married J. L. Schoolar’s son Milton and their place was at the top of the hill about a mile from the rest of the family. I played on her porch which was latticed and screened in. So much for a little child to take in and remember, but I did and still do.
I loved these aunts and uncles, but the ones I loved the most was Aunt Johnnie and Uncle Tom. She showed me how to dry apricots and how she raised dahlia’s. He showed me billy goats and cotton fields. She showed me letters from other ancestors and they actually had a parlor where she kept the letters and all her pictures and treasures.
Later on in my life, we moved to a small town on the Mississippi, Helena, Arkansas. In the center of the main street, called Cherry Street, across from the courthouse was a mounment of the Doughboy. It had built in honor of and from the largesse of a man named Thomas Hindman, a Civil War General.
As I learned about the history of the town, I learned about the part the city played in the Civil War. Being on the Mississipp River, it was far up river from Vicksburg. The Union had captured the city and built a fort, called Fort Curtis, on what is now the home of the First Baptist Church. Across the river was a swamp called Yazoo Pass. On the river, sat the gunboat Tyler.
Meanwhile, the war raged around Vicksburg. It was decided that there would be a diversionary battle on the river at Helena, to pull the Union Troops away from Vicksburg. Seven Civil War Generals lived in Helena, Arkansas and they were going to march on Helena from Little Rock and pull the Union Troops away from the river and Fort Curtis. Two of these Generals were Thomas C. Hindman and Patrick R. Cleburne. Although the battle didn’t turn out as it was supposed to, it did pull some of the troops away from Vicksburg and a battle was fought in the swamps of Yazoo Pass. The Confederate Generals lost because a minion who was supposed to wake one of the Generals at 2:00 A.M. at the Lucius Polk home so that his troops could be at a strategic point, failed to wake them until 5:00 A.M., so the Battle of Helena was lost to the Union.
Later on when I was grown and began to research the family, my Aunt Johnnie and her grandaghter gave me the following because it was about my Uncle Tom Hindman’s ancestor, General Thomas C. Hindman. I was already aware of the descendants of General Cleberne because one of them went to school with my brothers. As I read this document by Wison Mckinstry, I asked for a copy to add to my own family history. It was written for the Southern Sentinel 76 year ago. So herein follows the story of the :
“Captains Courageous” by Wilson McKinstry
Traditions of the Old South hover over the “Hindman House” antebellum mansion one mile east of Ripley, Mississippi. At one time, several years before the Civil War, this big house, painted white, with it’s front to the south, sheltered two friends, who later became Generals in the Confederate Army.
Thomas Carmichael Hindman and Patrick R. Cleburne were two who were to leave the stately plantation home of Thomas C. Hindman, Sr. flanked by cotton fields, to return to it only in pleasant memory. The incident that brought these two friends together under the roof of Hindman’s Mississippi home recalls a story of gratitude and the friendship of two of Dixie’s distinquished sons.
Hindman moved to Helena, Arkansas, as a young lawyer, a city to which he was to bring honor and fame later as a soldier and a statesman. Soon after he opened his office for practice, another young lawyer looked out of his window one day and saw that the newcomer, his rival at the bar, was in trouble. The uneven struggle aroused the sense of fair play tp Pat Cleburne, and disregarding personal danger, he rushed to Hindman’s aid. Hindman came out with minor hurts, but his friend was wounded seriously. Remembering the peaceful seclusion of his father’s plantation home in northern Mississippi, Hindman carried his wounded friend there and nursed him for weeks.
Not far from the house enclosed by a brickand concrete wall, is the family burying ground. On the tomb of the father of the Confederate general is this epitaph; “A faithful soldier, a law abiding citizen, and honest man.” Born in Knoxville, in 1792, the first male child born in the now populous Tennessee city, the elder Hindman died at Ripley five years before his son joined the Confederate army. When the Mexican War broke out, Thomas Hindman, Sr., a veteran of the Battle of New Orleans, went to the front as colonel of a Mississippi regiment. With him to Mexico went his two sons, Robert Holt Hindman and Thomas C. Hindman. The latter, fresh from college, raised a company in Tippah County, Mississippi and entered the service as First Lieutenant in the Second Mississippi Regiment. For gallantry in action he was promoted on the field to a captaincy.
After the war Colonel Hindman and his two soldier sons returned to Ripley. On July 18, 1856, the colonel was killed accidentally while inspecting a cotton gin on his plantation. In the same Cemetery where the elder Hindman is buried lie the bodies of brothers and sisters of the Confederate leader. On one tomb in the little enclosure is engraved the words, “ Killed at Ripley, Mississippi, by W. C. Faulkner, May 8, 1849″. It is the tomb of Robert Holt Hindman, whose career was cut short at 27. That fatal quarrel between former friends filled a grave and divided two distinquished Southern families. William C. Faulkner, after a brilliant career as soldier, statesman, author, and financier, met death on the public square in Ripley at the hands of a business rival, Richard Thurmond. And a few years after the war, on the night of Septermber 27, 1868, General Hindman met a violent death. He was shot through a open window as he sat by his fireside reading a newpaper. It was believed he was slain by agents of the Carpetbag Government.
Born at Knoxville, Tennessee, January 28, 1828, Thomas Hindman obtained his early education at Jacksonville, Alabama. From Ripley he went to Lawrenceville Classical Institute, near Princeton, New Jersey, where he graduated with honors at 18. At the close of the War with Mexico, he returned to Ripley and studied law for three years under Orlando Davis, one of the south’s noted lawyers, a leader in public affairs. After being admitted to the bar, Hindman engaged in law practice, and in 1851 was elected to the Mississippi legislature, where he bcame a leader in the Democratic party. He was a friend of Jefferson Davis and as early as 1851 advocated the right of states to secede.
When he was only 23 years old he met the learned United States Senator Foote in joint debate; and three years later, in response to a challenge from Govenor James L. Alcorn of the Whigs, said, “I will meet you anywhere and debate with you from Monday morning until Saturday night.”
The late Dr. Charles E. Nash in his book of reminiscences of Generals Hindman and Cleburne, wrote that in 1856, the town of Helena, at that time with a population of 1500. was stricken by an outbreak of yellow fever. As the news spread, citizens made haste to leave the stricken city. One of the three physicians in town took the fever, and when the other two, Dr. Jacks and Dr. Grant called for volunteer nurses, only three responded: Thomas C. Hindman, Patrick R. Cleburne and a young Methodist minister, the Reverend Mr. Rice. These three spent their money, risked their lives and went about doing good, with no thought except relief of suffering and the care of their stricken neighbors. “There were no battles in the war”, Dr Nash wrote, “in which the two prominent generals of Arkansas showed courage and self exposure than in this.”
Hindman rapidly became the leader of the Democratic Party in Eastern Arkansas. He was to the Democrats, says one writer,”A beacon upon the mountain top, a light set on a hill.” In the year 1858 Hindman was nominated for Congress and elected by an overwhelming majority. He was twice elected to Congress, but refused to take his seat in the thirty-seventh Congress and entered the Confederate army.
Commissioned a colonel at the outset of the war by his friend, President Jefferson Davis, with whom he and his father and brother served in the War with Mexico, Hindman raised and commanded the Second Arkansas Regiment, which after the addition of cavalry and artillery, became known as “Hindman’s Legion”, an organization that was to bring fame to its officers and men on many a bloody battlefield. On the eve of the Battle of Shiloh, General Johnston rode up to Hindman, who had already been promoted to Brigadier General, and said, “Nobly won on the field of Shiloh, Braxton Bragg.”
Hindman’s brilliant friend from Helena pursued a career closely paralleled that of Hindman. It was Pat Cleburne who boldly planned the capture of the United States Arsenal. His daring and rugged fighting qualities won for him the title, “Stonewall of the West”, and his defense of Ringgold Gap brought him the thanks of the Confederate Congress. Evidence of the romance and mysticism of the emerald Isle is found in the fact that he originated the “Order of the Southern Cross.”
Whenever there was action Cleburne was at home, whether in defense of the under dog in a street fight, or at the head of a division of yelling, scraping rebels. In the thick of things to the last, he fell at the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, November 30, 1864.
In a letter to his mother after the fall of the Confederacy, General Hindman said that he had fought too long and too hard for the Confederacy “to remain under the flag of her conquerers.” Like many other Southern leaders, he moved to Mexico City, taking his wife and their three children. Hindman married Miss Mary Watkins Biscoe, daughter of Colonel Henry Lawson Biscoe of Arkansas and a niece of Dr. Robert A. Watkins, the first Secretary of State for Arkansas, and Judge George A. Watkins, who became a Chief Justice of the state in 1852. Biscoe Hindman, retired insurance executive of Chicago is their son.
General Hindman’s military fame had preceded him to Mexico City and he was offered a high command in the army. He refused the offer, but consented to write two military volumes. The money derived from this work enabled him to live until he could build up a law practice.
He became attorney for the “American Colony of Yucatan”, and had completed the legal work necessary to the organization of the colony when the sudden fall of the emperor Maximilian caused the Southerners to abandon thier organization and return to the States. Hindman came back to Helena, a city that had given seven Generals to the Confederate Army; Hindman, Cleburne, Dan C. Govan, Lucius E. Polk, James C. Tappan. Charles W. Adams, and Arch C. Dobbins. It is this fact that gives the Helena Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy the name “The Seven Generals Chapter”.
The Hindman home has changed little, except for the addition of weather boarding and paint, since Thomas C. Hindman and Patrick R. Cleburne looked out on hundreds of acres of Cotton. It is built of logs, two enormous rooms on the ground floor, separated by a spacious hall, each large room flanked by a smaller room and each with a huge fireplace. From the hall a stairway, its steps worn by footsteps for almost a century, leads to the second floor, where the plan of the ground floor is duplicated. Recently an “L” has been added on the north of the house.
The yard is enclosed by an iron fence and just outside is a sugar maple, planted 82 years ago by Mildred Hindman Doxey, the general’s sister. Mrs. Doxie, who died in Arkansas a few years ago, had lived more years than the old house has stood. She was the grandmother of Congressman Wall Doxey of Mississippi and Hindman Doxey, former Prosecuting Attorney of Marshall County, Mississippi.
Letters from Mrs. Doxey to Mrs. J. A. Booker, herself a native of Arkansas, now living in the home, recall many interesting incidents connected with this historic house, and are indicative of her fine sensibilities and her regard for the traditions of her family and of the South.
When the place came into possession of Judge Sam W. Pegram of Ripley many years ago, the house was weatherboarded and painted white, and became one of the most attractive homes of the countryside. A little less than 25 years ago the plantation was bought by J. A. Booker. Mr. Booker has added to his holdings until his plantation of more than 1500 acres includes the home of his father, the late Joe Booker, and the Doxey Farm, whence a young Doxey came courting to the home of Thomas Hindman many years ago.
From his front door, Mr. Booker looks out over more than 800 acres, an outlook not unlike that of the day of Thomas Hindman, the elder.
Southern Sentinel, Ripley, Mississippi
June 2, 1932
