Chimneyville

The city of Jackson was captured and torched by Union forces on May fourteenth, eighteen sixty-three. Generals Grant and Sherman took the city in a morning as the Confederate army retreated. Grant ordered the destruction of everything of military value, and Sherman's corps carried out the order with thoroughness. Factories, warehouses, foundries, railroad depots, telegraph lines, and most of the buildings in between burned. When the smoke cleared, the brick chimneys were the only things standing above the ash.

That was the first time.

About eight weeks later, on July tenth, Union forces returned and laid siege to the city again. Union forces under General William Sherman spent a week reducing what little was left. The Confederate army slipped out on the night of July sixteenth, and Union troops entered the next morning. Soldiers found it barely worth burning again.

Soldiers began calling it Chimneyville, for the rows of blackened chimneys standing among the ruins like monuments to what had been there. The name stuck, not as a boast but as a statement of fact. The entire city, its records, its commerce, its built environment, had to be constructed from that ash. The New Capitol building that stands today was not completed until nineteen oh three, forty years after the burning. The state was rebuilding for a generation.

Jackson's destruction also meant the destruction of records. Business records, property records, the documentation of who owned what and who was owed what, gone. That kind of erasure affects everyone, but it affects enslaved people and their descendants disproportionately, because their claims on wages, on family, on identity were already the most fragile, the most dependent on the paper record.

What Chimneyville meant to the people who had been enslaved in and around Jackson, and who watched the Union army march in, was complicated. Freedom was coming. The city that had enforced their bondage was on fire. Both of those things were true at the same time.