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Story Archives: Civil War in Vidalia: Views of 1863 battle from Rosalie mansion, Tacony quarters
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Civil War in Vidalia: Views of 1863 battle from Rosalie mansion, Tacony quarters
 (Fifth in a Series)
Vidalia-born John Roy Lynch would one day become an important man on the national scene in the 1800s, serving as the first African-American Speaker of the House in Mississippi and in Congress. Later, he would write about his life and about Reconstruction.
Historian Eric Foner of Columbia University in New York City, who won the Pulitzer Prize for History last week for his book, "The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery," told The Sentinel in 2006 that John Roy Lynch's account of Reconstruction in Mississippi "remains one of the best there is."
In September of 1863, according to his autobiography, John Roy was aroused during the night "by the booming of cannon, the firing of guns, and the noise of horses passing in double-quick time. We soon found out that a battle was being fought."
Once a slave, John Roy was 15-years-old and visiting two elderly friends at Tacony Plantation in Vidalia when the Confederate calvary moved into town. Weeks earlier, the Yankees had arrived in Natchez in force following the victory at Vicksburg in July 1863 and were now pushing into Louisiana. In fact, only days earlier, a huge federal force -- made up of primarily of volunteers from Indiana, Illinois, Kansas and Wisconsin -- had marched from Natchez to Harrisonburg where these troops destroyed Fort Beauregard, a Confederate stronghold on the Ouachita River.
In the meantime, slaves were being freed on plantations throughout the region. Many converged on Natchez, while others remained on the plantations as did John Roy's elderly friends, Uncle Dump and Aunt Julia Ann, who were still at the slave quarters on Tacony.
John Roy had crossed the Mississippi River from Natchez three days earlier to visit Tacony, located three miles from the riverfront town of Vidalia. A former house servant at Dunleith for Alfred Vidal Davis, who also owned Tacony, John Roy had spent more than a year as field hand at the Concordia plantation where he developed a strong bond with Uncle Dump and Aunt Julia Ann.
Now free, he planned to return to Natchez after his Tacony visit, and live with his mother and brother in two rooms in a small frame house on Market Street. While a small federal force occupied Vidalia, the bulk of the Union army -- about 12,000 men at one point -- was encamped across the river in Natchez.
As John Roy slept in Uncle Dump and Aunt Julia Ann's cabin on his visit to Tacony, a Confederate calvary of about 200 men moved into Vidalia. At Cross Bayou in Concordia, located between the Black River at present day Jonesville and the Mississippi at Vidalia, Confederate Col. James G. Major had organized "a flying squadron" of 200 volunteers -- mostly Texans -- "given the mission of attacking the Union camp at Vidalia," according to historian Edwin C. Bearss' account of the Fort Beauregard campaign in the Winter 1964 issue of "Louisiana Studies." Marching through the night, the Rebels reached Vidalia at daybreak.
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