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The War Over "The Free State of Jones"

Look out folks there's a movie coming soon that will be one big whopper to believe.

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New York Times
August 16, 2009
Rebel Rebel
By DAVID S. REYNOLDS
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THE STATE OF JONES

The Small Southern County That Seceded From the Confederacy

By Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer

Illustrated. 400 pp. Doubleday. $27.50
The Civil War was not a simple collision of opposites. There was internal dissent on each side: Northerners who wanted to placate the South, Southerners loyal to the Union, and thousands of deserters from both armies.

In “The State of Jones,” Sally Jenkins, a Washington Post reporter, and John Stauffer, a Harvard historian, recreate the life and times of the bold Southern dissenter Newton Knight. An indigent farmer in Jones County, Miss., the flinty, blue-eyed Knight was conscripted into the Southern army in 1862 and soon deserted. He organized a small band of neighbors that used guerilla tactics and swamp hideouts to fend off pursuing Confederate troops. Knight’s vastly outnumbered group became a thorn in the side of the South, which was preoccupied with the invasions of Grant and Sherman.

Knight and other Jones County residents aided the North during Reconstruction. Although Knight was married to a white woman and had several children by her, he simultaneously had a long-term liaison with a former slave of his grandfather, named Rachel. At a time when most Mississippi blacks did not own land, he deeded farmland to Rachel, with whom he had a number of children who worked side by side in the fields with their white siblings.

Jenkins and Stauffer suggest that Knight was a religiously inspired anti­slavery warrior who “fought for racial equality during the war and after” and “forged bonds of alliance with blacks that were unmatched even by Northern abolitionists.” But Knight poses special challenges for biographers. He comes down to us mainly through second-hand accounts, such as his white son Tom’s sometimes-unreliable 1934 biography.

There’s the rub. Jenkins and Stauffer create a lively narrative, but is it factual — or fictionalized, like the movie script about Knight by the screenwriter Gary Ross, which, the authors report, inspired them to write the book?

These issues are the subject of an Internet debate that began when Victoria Bynum, a Texas State history professor and author of the well-researched 2001 book “The Free State of Jones,” wrote a review on her blog, Renegade South, in which she characterized Jenkins and Stauffer’s book as a good read but inaccurate and unjustifiably politicized. Jenkins and Stauffer responded with counter­evidence and claimed that Bynum had launched “turf warfare” to promote her own book. Others joined the exchange, pointing out small factual errors made by Jenkins and Stauffer, as well as the larger one that Jones County did not officially secede from the Confederacy, invalidating their book’s subtitle.

The dearth of dependable primary evidence about Knight forces Jenkins and Stauffer to rely often on conjecture. Their book fills lacunas with words like “perhaps,” “it is possible,” “likely,” “could have,” and so on. More than 50 pages is devoted to Knight’s war experiences, hard information about which is scant. One battle described, Vicksburg, may have little bearing on his biography, since, as an endnote says, “there is no absolute proof that Newton was at Vicksburg, and a case can be made that he was not.” (Bynum gives evidence that he was not.)

It’s impossible to gauge Knight’s alleged early antislavery views, as Jenkins seems to concede in a blog comment: “We don’t say categorically he was antislavery before the war.” Jenkins and Stauffer describe the ex-slave Rachel as a caring soulmate who symbolized Knight’s forward-­looking capacity to reach across the racial divide. But we can’t be sure, since, as the authors write, “there is precious little direct evidence of their relationship.”

Jenkins and Stauffer bring historical contexts to life and offer provocative interpretations, but they pile hunch upon hunch about Knight himself. Unless a new cache of sources about his life turns up, he’ll remain as elusive to biographers as he was to the Confederate troops that chased him through the wooded marshes of Jones County.

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David Upton

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