Granddaughter of the Instigator
A white descendant confronts the violent legacy of her ancestor, who led the Vicksburg Massacres during Reconstruction, and stands alone in public remembrance—bearing witness to the terror inflicted by her forebearer and the need for honest reckoning.
Juneteenth essay | Ellen Morris Prewitt | Reconstruction history Mississippi
The month of December is my cruelest month. Light and dark. Easy and hard. Death and life. The last month of the year opens with my first breath. It rolls through the anniversary—then ending—of my first marriage. Snow falls, snow melts. Mid-month, my Daddy Joe, so far from home, dies on the Colorado train tracks. My memories of him freeze at a three-year-old’s, then slowly melt. Christmas comes, Christmas goes. The baby is born, the man nailed to the cross. Light and dark. Beginning and end.
No wonder my first public confrontation with my ancestor’s violence in the Vicksburg Massacres took place in December.
Juneteenth essay | Ellen Morris Prewitt | Reconstruction history Mississippi
On December 7, 2024, my husband and I drove the narrow, switchback roads of Vicksburg National Military Park. The park is a Civil War battlefield where the Confederate loss in 1863 turned the tide toward the United States’ victory, but the violence whose 150th anniversary we were on our way to commemorate did not happen during the Civil War. The Vicksburg Massacres occurred in Reconstruction when the Civil War was supposedly over.
If I were to ask my little-girl self what Reconstruction was, she would say it was the time when the North kindly helped the South rebuild after the destructive Civil War, the same way we helped Japan after Hiroshima. I don’t blame her. We white people always think history is all about us. But even as an adult I believed this false narrative about Reconstruction: The era was an embarrassment when Northern carpetbaggers manipulated ignorant Black Southerners, resulting in corrupt elections and incompetent officeholders, all best to be forgotten. But that portrayal of Reconstruction, a period typically pegged from the end of the war in 1865 to shortly after the withdrawal of Federal troops from the South in 1877, is a primary thread woven through the Myth of the Lost Cause that glorifies the Old South.
In truth, Reconstruction was when Black Americans began to move the country toward true democracy. Black Mississippians were taking the 13th, 14th, and 15th Constitutional Amendments at their word and exercising their personal freedom, citizenship rights, and right to vote. Warren County, Mississippi, whose seat is Vicksburg, had free and open elections, and, according to the 1870 census (the first U.S. Census to count African American as people instead of property), a population of almost 28,000, over seventy percent of which was Black. Warren County was regularly electing African American officials who were working for the public good, particularly in establishing public schools for all.
I never would have known I’d been hoodwinked about Reconstruction if I hadn’t decided my “good enough” understanding of my family history was, in fact, not good enough.
I never would have known I’d been hoodwinked about Reconstruction if I hadn’t decided my “good enough” understanding of my family history was, in fact, not good enough. For fifteen years, I’ve been walking an on-again-off-again, round-and-round, confusing path of familial discovery that continues to reveal truths I never necessarily wanted to know. That journey took a hard turn when my ancestor’s name popped up in the definitive treatment of the violence that ended Reconstruction in Warren County.
Riveted, I read that in 1874, white citizens of Warren County led an armed overthrow of the county’s duly elected African American officials. The coup was followed by a rampaging throughout the county that was so cruel in its execution, we will never know the true number of Black Mississippians killed. These events, collectively known as the Vicksburg Massacres, were conceived, instigated, and led by my great-great-grandfather, Dr. John Hebron.
I call him the Scoundrel.
Folding chairs lined the lawn of the Shirley House, the site of the ceremony. The 1830s house was charming, small, and white, with a quaint balcony over a square front porch. The Shirley House is the only Civil War-era building still standing in Vicksburg National Military Park. Early in my work with the group planning this commemoration, I found it odd that Park officials kept talking about a woman named Shirley: The depth of ignorance I brought to this journey is impossible to overstate. Eventually, I learned “Shirley” was the last name of the enslavers who owned this house on a hill. If my husband and I had taken a moment before the ceremony began and strolled around the house, we would have seen mom and pop Shirley buried in the backyard, á la Elvis at Graceland. If we had been at the house during the Massacres, we would have seen bodies of the men who had fled to the house for shelter, lying where they fell.
A quartet of singers bunched on the house’s front porch. Beside them, a professional drummer in an orange and gray shirt perched on the edge of the steps. An empty easel tilted in the grass, waiting.
Juneteenth essay | Ellen Morris Prewitt | Reconstruction history Mississippi
“People’s Club of Bovina” sounds innocuous, doesn’t it? When I first learned my Scoundrel ancestor was a founder of this club, I imagined him and his pals sprawled in red leather chairs while sipping brown liquor and playing whist.
No. The Congressional Record of the hearing on the Vicksburg Massacres that commenced before the month of December was over characterizes these People’s Clubs as military organizations. According to the Statement of Facts in the Report submitted by Representative Stephen. A. Hurlbut of the Select Committee, such a club was, “illegal in its views, and basing itself upon the embodiment of force and the readiness to use violence for the purpose of controlling and overthrowing the will of the majority, lawfully expressed in the form of elections.” So, when I say the Scoundrel was an officer in the People’s Club of Bovina, think military, not country club.
If you live in the South, your state likely had these white supremacy clubs. White Leaguers in Louisiana, Red Shirts in the Carolinas, “White-Liners” all over the place. Massacres dropped behind these clubs like scat from a bear: Colfax, Hamburg, Eufaula, Memphis, New Orleans. The Scoundrel’s Bovina Club was forthright in its mission: “This is a white man’s country, and must be ruled by white men.” Publicly, the club cloaked its intentions in complaints about unfair taxes. Maybe so. Two things can be true at once. But the taxes they called “burdensome” were funding public education for Black folks. That is, when taxes were paid. The Report of the Mississippi Joint Special Committee on the Insurrection in Vicksburg, 1874, quotes Warren County Tax Assessor J. W. Bourne as saying that those who made the most noise paid the least taxes.
The Scoundrel certainly strikes me as a noisy man.
My goal in this familial journey is to tell the bare truth about my ancestors without climbing on my high horse to judge them—I do not want to use their sins to make myself feel better. Success in this requires empathy, finding a way to connect with these men and women. But I have failed with the Scoundrel.
Right or wrong, to me the Scoundrel presents as an acorn: small, hard-shelled, and bitter if nicked. He was a physician who also ran his deceased father’s peach farm. The fruit farm, established by enslaved artisans, was the largest in the Southeast. The nursery business survived the war intact, and the Scoundrel wasn’t above using war myths of blood red peaches to sell his stock. He testified at the Congressional hearing where, in a tone of mockery and flippancy, he denied any involvement in the Massacres. Clubs like his were established in every ward in Vicksburg and throughout small Warren County towns. After their formation, arms flowed into the city.
The area clubs set their sights on removing every local African American from office, including chancery clerk, justice of the peace, and sheriff. Thing is, in Warren County, the Sheriff also served as tax collector. Thus, when Peter Crosby, an African American man born into slavery, was elected sheriff in November 1873, he became the biggest target for the clubs’ violent goals.
Juneteenth essay | Ellen Morris Prewitt | Reconstruction history Mississippi
In the decade since the Emancipation Proclamation, Peter Crosby had gone from being held as property to serving in the United States Army that defeated those who enslaved him. A family man, he bought property and established himself as a respected leader in the community. Working his way up from treasurer of Warren County, Crosby won a landslide victory to become the county’s first African American Sheriff and tax collector. This put a Black man in charge of collecting white men’s money to fund education for Black scholars. As my Bigmama would have said, that would not do. Thus, the white men began methodically fabricating the myth of officeholder malfeasance and incompetence that survived into my adulthood.
On December 2, 1874—the day before taxes were due—the Scoundrel and his gang known as the “Committee of Ten” confronted Sheriff Crosby and demanded he resign.
Historical descriptions of this confrontation always have the white men crowding into Sheriff Crosby’s office. I believe it. The area in the Old Courthouse Museum where Sheriff Crosby’s office was located is small. Two floor-to-ceiling windows dominate its front, or maybe its back—the orientation of the courthouse was flipped at some point. Whether Crosby watched this group of self-appointed vigilantes coming up the sidewalk, I don’t know.
When Crosby refused to resign, the white men returned with no less than 500 of their closest friends and jailed Crosby. He initially called on his supporters to help return him to office, and African American citizens marched to Vicksburg to support their sheriff. But Crosby realized the outsized violence likely to rain down on the largely unarmed men, women, and children walking toward the city, and he sent emissaries to tell them to go home. When the group turned around, a white leader on horseback cried, “Rally, boys, rally!” and his men began shooting.
Dr. Beth Kruse is a University of Mississippi historian and Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow working in Vicksburg to reinsert erased African American history. “Crosby’s supporters marched like Dr. King marched, like John Lewis marched,” she says, “and the white people fired on them.”
On December 2, 1874—the day before taxes were due—the Scoundrel and his gang known as the “Committee of Ten” confronted Sheriff Crosby and demanded he resign.
It was the beginning of the Vicksburg Massacres.
We took a seat on the folding chairs behind Vicksburger Ray Hume and his wife. Ray leaned over to tell me that a friend of his had asked if “the woman who wrote the article” would be there. She meant my essay about my ancestor’s role in the Massacres, published last year by Mississippi Free Press. Coming so late to my knowledge about the Massacres, I was the proverbial convert who could not shut up about what I had learned. I sent the MFP article to pretty much everyone I knew: I mean, what was the point of being the town crier of the Massacres if no one heard my cry?
As we waited for the ceremony to begin, a videographer from the National Park Service weaved around us, filming. Later, he would interview me about my role at the event. I told him my journey began with scholarly works by the historian Dr. Albert Dorsey Jr., an assistant professor at Jackson State University and the leading authority on the Vicksburg Massacres, and research by renowned genealogist Melvin Collier, whose ancestors were enslaved by my ancestors on their peach farm. I told him the history was there online if you looked for it. I said something about hoping souls or hearts could be stitched together. I remember nothing else. With my throat impaired by a virus, I sounded like some raspy old ghost talking into a tissue wrapped around a pocket comb, breathing out the past.
The front porch singers opened the event with the spiritual, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Brendan Wilson, who runs Visitor Experience and Outreach at the Park, welcomed us. Using prayers from Cole Arthur Riley’s book, Black Liturgies, Rev. Andy Andrews offered an invocation.
The Rev. Andrews is an Episcopal priest, who serves the Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi as the state director of the church’s Becoming Beloved Community initiative. Becoming Beloved Community is a ministry of the Episcopal Church in America that focuses on racial reconciliation. I am part of the Mississippi chapter. Our aim is to learn to see the image of God in all people. It was a Becoming Beloved Community gathering where I first asked about plans for the Massacres’ 150th anniversary, which led to my involvement in planning the remembrance. In that work, I learned from Dr. Dorsey to put an “s” on Massacres. There was not a single event: Terrorist cells, like the one led by the Scoundrel, which included his half-brother Alex, rampaged through Warren County for weeks. Testimony tells of groups thieving, raping, and killing innocent Vicksburgers.
Their victims included a Black man named Buck Worrell.
Juneteenth essay | Ellen Morris Prewitt | Reconstruction history Mississippi
The Worrell family lived on Edwards Plantation on Jackson Road out in the county. Buck Worrell was married to Peggy Worrell. Records show the couple had five, or perhaps six, children. The kids ranged in age from twelve years to a newborn. All were girls. The Worrells were known to the Hebrons, my ancestors. Otherwise, Peggy would not have testified she recognized Alex Hebron as the man who killed her husband.
Records called the Worrell family “Wonell.” Other times Wornell. According to Dr. Dorsey, they also used “Quinell.” Also World. Also Warrall. Those chronicling the heinous event didn’t even care enough to get Buck’s last name right.
Peggy Wonell (colored) sworn.
Question: What is your husband’s name?
Answer: His name is Buck Wonell.
Q: Where is he?
A: They killed him.
Q: Who killed him? Tell me about it.
A: He ran up to the house, to some white folks’ house, for them to defend him, and they had him took out of the yard and shot.
Q: What day was that?
A: On Tuesday.
Q: Did you see them when they shot him?
A: Yes, sir; he was standing right out there in the road.
Q: You saw them when they shot him?
A: Saw them when they shot him down.
Q: Who shot him?
A: Alex Hebron shot him. I was looking right at him.
Q: Did you hear them say anything to him?
A: They had been up there to the house asking for him, and they had him taken out of the yard and shot.
Q: What did they say when they shot him, or before they shot him?
A: I never heard what they said to him before they shot him.
Q: Where had he gone from when he went up to Edwards’s?
A: He went from his house.
Q: From your house?
A: Yes, sir; from the house there on the place.
Q: How far was it?
A: The house is not so far from Mr. Edwards’s house.
Q: About how far?
A: About fifteen yards apart, I reckon.
Q: What did he go to Edwards’s house for?
A: For them to friend him; and they drove him out toward the road, and told them white fellows to take him out there, not to shoot him in the yard; but to take him outside the gate, and they didn’t care what they did with him; and they just carried him outside the gate and shot him down; and he laid out there for two nights and two days, and the dogs ate his face and head all off before we women could bury him; there was nobody to bury him but the women, and we women buried him the best way we could.
—US Congress, House, Select Committee on Affairs in Mississippi, “Investigation of Violence and Illegal Organization Used to Intimidate Colored People before Election in Vicksburg, Mississippi, with Testimony,” 43rd Cong., 2nd sess., 1875. (statement of Peggy Wonell).
Vicksburg National Military Park Superintendent Carrie Mardorf took the podium to recognize the partners who helped create the remembrance, asking those present to rise as she called the names.
She said, “Descendants of the victims.”
A group sitting on the front row stood, descendants of the Marshall family. The Marshall descendants ranged from older folks around my age to a girl who seemed eight or ten. Their ancestors, Robert Banks Sr. and Robert Banks Jr., were among the men the white mob killed on the grounds around the Shirley House. The family turned to face us, then retook their seats.
Superintendent Mardorf said, “Descendants of the instigators.”
That was me.
I stood up, never looking away from Carrie Mardorf. Time lengthened. How long did I stand? Long enough for people to turn to see who was standing. Me, it was me, granddaughter of the instigator. I was standing. I did not know Carrie was going to say that, to call me out. I did not bow my head. I did not mouth, “Sorry.” I stood up to be the physical embodiment of whatever anyone needed me to be. To take the wondering and assessing and “how can you live with that?” vibe of the crowd. I was not there for me. I was there for everyone else who did not show up to stand up.
As a drummer played the steady beat of the traditional drum call accompanying libation, the judge read the twenty-three names of those known to have been killed in the Massacres.
I sat, and Carrie’s gaze returned to her list.
Later, my husband said, “Half the white people in Vicksburg are descendants of perpetrators of the Massacres, and the only person there to stand up was my wife.”
Later still, at a family gathering, my older cousin—firstborn grandchild of our generation—would apologize for not being there with me at the ceremony. I reassured him—I was so pleased he had driven over the night before for Friday’s event. “That was really kind.”
“I wish,” he said, “I had been there so you wouldn’t have had to stand up alone.”
Juneteenth essay | Ellen Morris Prewitt | Reconstruction history Mississippi
Judge June Hardwick of the Jackson Municipal Court took the podium for the central event of the weekend, the libation ceremony. Judge Hardwick is the great-granddaughter of U.S. Colored Troops veteran William “Bill” Sims and a longtime leader in remembrance work, including the ancient rite of libation.
In readying for the ceremony, I learned the libation ritual began on the African continent, perhaps Nigeria, as an offering to the ancestors or gods. That day, in Vicksburg National Military Park, Judge Hardwick recited remembrances. Of ancestors. Of atrocities. Of courage. Of victories. After each remembrance, the judge paused, then slowly tilted a clear pitcher to pour water onto the dirt, preparing the soil.
As a drummer played the steady beat of the traditional drum call accompanying libation, the judge read the twenty-three names of those known to have been killed in the Massacres. In response, upon each name, the group replied, using the Yoruba language affirmation and blessing, “Asé.” Pronounced “ah-SHAY,” the solemnly uttered word honored the victims, the ancestors.
“Buck Worrell.”
“Asé.”
Sheriff Peter Crosby actually won the battle of the Massacres. He regained his office and, even after his white deputy sheriff shot him in the face, served out his term. Federal troops arrived and restored “peace.” However, the “War of Redemption”—the name white people sacrilegiously applied to their violent campaign to end Reconstruction—continued. White Redeemer tactics spread through the South like flesh-eating bacteria through a weakened immune system. By the 1880s, white Vicksburgers were back in charge. The violence that put them there was “systematically erased from the public memory and records,” according to Drs. Kruse and Dorsey’s Story Map, “Vicksburg’s Troubles: Causes and Consequences of Black Participation in the Body Politic During the Age of Redeemer Violence.”
Without that memory, we stumble in our understanding of how quickly the futures that could have been for the Black resistors, the state of Mississippi, and our country were destroyed.
Fortunately, we will soon be helped in our remembering. On Thursday—Juneteenth 2025—a Mississippi Department of Archives and History marker identifying and interpreting the Massacres will be placed on the grounds of the Warren County Courthouse. The marker will be located directly across the street from the old courthouse, where the Scoundrel confronted Sheriff Crosby and demanded he resign. Linda Fondren, the executive director of Vicksburg’s Catfish Row Museum, led the effort to have the marker put in place. She says an interpretive sign alongside the marker will bear the title, “Peter Crosby and the Reckoning of Power.”
Without that memory, we stumble in our understanding of how quickly the futures that could have been for the Black resistors, the state of Mississippi, and our country were destroyed.
As the marker is unveiled, I will be there to see Sheriff Crosby win, again.
Juneteenth essay | Ellen Morris Prewitt | Reconstruction history Mississippi
The Marshall descendants set a white wreath on the easel.
Up in the bare trees, the spectral Hebrons, my ancestors, gathered. They were dispassionate, as the dead always are, embroilments of this life no longer their concern but simply present, as if for a family portrait. In front stood my Daddy Joe, who died so young, and his mother, my beloved Bigmama, who lived to 102, always intent on enforcing racist mores. Behind her stood Big Poppa, her father, who in a 1928 political speech waxed nostalgic for Reconstruction’s return of government to white Mississippi—he was the Scoundrel’s son, after all. I wish I could say the Scoundrel himself was full of remorse, but I cannot. At the very back stood the first Mississippi Hebron, the enslaving peach farmer who sired this clan. Finally, very much alive and seated in a folding chair, was me, the granddaughter of the instigator, waiting to receive from my descendants my own snarky benediction.
Maybe the month of December isn’t cruel at all. Maybe it’s simply the turn into a dark alley that occurs in all our lives, our family’s lives, our country’s lives. In those narrow confines, footsteps echo on brick. Steeling myself against the growing dread—I will not be bullied—I walk. At the alley’s end, light puddles. Only by moving toward it do I realize the footsteps I’ve been hearing and fearing are those of me and mine and ours.
Afterwards, my husband and I sat in a coffee shop by the Mississippi River. I reminded him of my death wish: I want my ashes placed in the Mississippi at Memphis so I can float past my home state and on to New Orleans and spill into the Gulf of Mexico. I know it’s illegal, but I’ll figure it out. The perspective outside the window gave the impression of bluffs across the water, although Louisiana is actually flat and flood soggy. I could swear I was looking at a crevasse between two high banks. A cupped palm holding a flowing stream.
We name the dead, as if one must be killed to matter. But everyone in that tight society knew everyone else. They knew the victims, they knew the perpetrators. My ancestors lived beside the orphans and widows; they lived with what they had done. On a cold December day, violence turned their world inside out. On another cold December day, we remembered their violence.
“Remember who you are, where you come from,” they say before a Southern child walks out the door. December will always remind me of who I am. I am the granddaughter of the instigator. I am the one who stood up. I know where I come from. Where I go is anyone’s guess.
Ellen Morris Prewitt is an award-winning author who has lived all over, but not outside of, the American South. She was the Peter Taylor Fellow at The Kenyon Review’s Summer Writing Program and currently serves as Writer-in Residence at 100 Men Hall, an iconic Mississippi Blues site. “Granddaughter of the Instigator” is an excerpt from her memoir-in-progress, Loving My Hateful Ancestors. Her first traditionally published novel, When We Were Murderous Time-Traveling Women, will be released by Literary Wanderlust in 2026.