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Disloyalty to the Confederacy was found not only among the common folk. Col. J. F. H. Claiborne, one of the Natchez planter class, had settled in Hancock County for his health, at Laurel Wood Plantation on Mulatto Bayou near the mouth of the Pearl River in 1853, after President Franklin Pierce had given him a sinecure as custodian of the United States public lands of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
As his plantation prospered, he devoted his time to historical writing. Herbert H. Lang
wrote that Claiborne, an old-line Whig, opposed secession, although his son died in Confederate service. According to Lang, Claiborne became ?undoubtedly the most active advocate of the Union in southern Mississippi." He sent intelligence information to Union Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks, commanding at New Orleans, and shipped through the lines cotton he bought from Pearl River planters. Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin and Secretary of War James A. Seddon learned of
The J. F. H. Claiborne house. Laurel Wood Plantation, on .Mulatto Bayou near the mouth of the Pearl River.
Claiborne's intrigues, but lacking absolute proof, felt unable to take action against him.*1
In April 1864 Union Maj. Martin M. Pulver led four companies of the 20th Infantry, Corps dAfrique (black federal soldiers) from Fort Pike at the Rigolets up the West Pearl River aboard the steamboat Lizzie Davis on a raid. He brought back stores, sixty-four slaves, and recovered the steamboat J. D. Suaim, which the Confederates had sunk at the mouth of the McCall River two years earlier. On September 9, 1864, Union Lt. Col. Alfred G. Hall led a detachment of the 74th United States Colored Troops from Fort Pike aboard the refitted J. D. Sivaim up the West Pearl in a vain search for Confederate partisan rangers (possibly Capt.
J. M. Poitevent?s Co. B, of the 17th. or Steede?s. Cavalry Battalion) operating along the river. The Federals landed at Pearlington, Napoleon, and Gainesville and reported the country along the Pearl River nearly deserted. During one such raid. Union troops looted Moses Cook Lodge of its Masonic jewels, but a federal officer who was also a Mason ordered that they be returned. In 1864 a federal gunboat, the Wabash, hit a snag in the Pearl River and sank in what is still known as Wabash Bayou. In the late summer of 1973 Cecil Bennett and Harry Mitchell of Picayune found its wreck. Earlier in the war, the Confederates sent a gunboat, the Arrow, up the