THE PINEY WOODS 165 as a private and by the time the war ended was a brigadier general. He would later serve two terms as governor of Mississippi from 1882 to 1890. For the raid, Lowry was put in charge of two units, the 6th Mississippi Infantry and the 20th Mississippi Infantry. Moving through Smith, Jones, and Perry Counties, Lowry tracked deserters, shooting those who resisted. Some of the men captured in the raid reenlisted in the Confederate service. While the Maury and Lowry raids thinned the ranks of the pro-Union natives, it did not eradicate them. Newt Knight and the core of his band evaded capture until the end of the war in 1865. While the Knight band was the most noted example of anti-Confederate activity in the Pine Belt, others took individual or kinship group actions of civil disobedience. Some refused to pay taxes to support the Confederate government. At least 200 inhabitants of the Piney Woods independently chose to journey to South Louisiana to join the 1st and 2nd New Orleans Infantry of the Union army in late 1863 and 1864. Two brothers, Alvin and Daniel Sumrall of Perry County, enlisted on June 11, 1864, roughly two weeks after their brother-in-law, Elias Allen. Elias Allen and Alvin Sumrall were former Confederate soldiers of Company F, 17th Mississippi Battalion Cavalry and most likely went to Louisiana to avoid being forced back into Confederate service. Daniel Sumrall, the namesake of the future Lamar County Piney Woods town, most likely joined to avoid conscription into the Confederate service. Alvin Sumrall died of typhoid in September 1864 while in the Union service. On his deathbed he told his brother-in-law Elias that “he saw a white horse saddled and he was going home on him.” Like Alvin Sumrall, two out of every three Civil War soldiers died from disease instead of combat. In April 1865, the American Civil War came to an end, prompted by Robert E. Lee’s surrender to General Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. In all, 80,000 white men from Mississippi fought for the Confederacy, another 500 for the Union. Some 17,000 Mississippi slaves and freedmen either fought in the Union army or assisted in military operations. Although no firm death toll exists, by the close of the war an estimated 27,000 Mississippians laid down their lives during the armed conflict. The surrender and dissolution of the Confederacy signaled the beginning of Reconstruction in Mississippi. Over the next eleven years, Mississippi struggled to deal with the aftermath of war. Three major issues dominated reconstruction: the path Mississippi would take to readmission to the Union, who would control the new government, and the status and standing of former slaves. In Jones County, the bitter divisions between Unionists and former loyal Confederates continued after the military truce. Newt Knight received an appointment from the federal military as a relief commissioner in Jones County in 1865, which angered former Confederates. While the South had lost the war, many white Mississippians chafed at the close federal scrutiny of their postwar government, and looked with disdain upon men such as Knight, whom they considered a deserter and renegade. In October 1865, nearly 100 petitioners forwarded a request to the state legislature to change the name of Jones County to Davis County and to rename the county seat town of Ellisville to Leesburg. This bold move came at a time when a newly elected Mississippi legislature tested the boundaries of the accommodating terms of presidential Reconstruction. Under Reconstruction, most individuals received amnesty by simply declaring an oath of loyalty to the United States. Those who held high Confederate office or owned $20,000 worth of property in 1860 had to apply for a presidential pardon. When 10 percent of the voters in the state took the oath of loyalty, the state could form a new government and rejoin the Union. The new Mississippi government seated in the fall of 1865 was predominantly conservative Whigs but contained a sizable group of secession Democrats. The legislature enacted the Jones County petition, changing for several years the name of the county and its primary town to memorialize former Confederate leaders. The legislature, in addition to refusing to adopt the Thirteenth Amendment, passed a group of laws to address the status of African Americans known as the Black Codes. While recognizing the freedom of the former slaves, the Black Codes limited African American civil rights and sought to enforce white control of economics and politics. Harsh measures such as the Apprentice Code, under which former white masters could retain legal control of African American youths until they turned eighteen, smacked of a return to slavery. Statewide, African American Union soldiers constituted a majority of the federal forces who remained in the state to keep order. These soldiers often drew the ire of Mississippi’s white residents. In Pike County, members of the federal 66th Colored Infantry Regiment encountered racism and disrespect from local whites during 1865. In one encounter, two white residents ordered an African American soldier out of town at gunpoint after they defaced his From March 1867 to March 1870, the federal military controlled Mississippi under the Military Reconstruction Acts.