The free state of Jones
Subtitle: Mississippi's longest civil war
By: Victoria E. Bynum.
Series: The Fred W. Morrison series in Southern studies
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2001
Place of publication: Chapel Hill
Language: eng
Number of pages: 316
Subjects: Knight family; Military deserters -- Mississippi -- Jones County -- History -- 19th century; Unionists (United States Civil War) -- Mississippi -- Jones County; Racially mixed people -- Mississippi -- Jones County -- History -- 19th century; Jones County (Miss.) -- History -- 19th century; Jones County (Miss.) -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Mississippi -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Social aspects; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Social aspects; Jones County (Miss.) -- Biography
Genres: Biography.
Description: Newt Knight was a man who defied social rules by deserting from the Confederacy, hiding in the swamp with runaway slaves and other deserters to fight the Rebels and declare Jones County, Mississippi as the Free State of Jones. Some of his men were captured and executed and, as in the movie, the women in their family cut them down. Women also aided the Knight Company. Newt also took a black wife who had several mixed race children. Free State of Jones is an excellent comprehensive study that begins with people in the back country of North Carolina during the Revolutionary War who settled Jones County bringing with them their sense of justice and attitudes toward tyranny. Bynum mines every available source to recreate the society of Jones County through the decades from settlement into the 20th century. Bynum describes the mixed race community created by the tangled and complicated extended families who intermarried and created their own schools living in defiance of the hardening Jim Crow attitudes. Bynum expertly places Davis Knight’s 1948 charge of miscegenation in the larger historical context of the period and expertly connects it to Newt Knight’s flaunting sexual racial norms of his day. Newton Knight has been portrayed as a principled American patriot fighting for civil rights for African Americans and his mixed race progeny and as an unprincipled, villainous traitor who betrayed his race, the Confederacy and transgressed racial boundaries. Whichever narrative a person believes reveals a great deal about that person’s attitude about race and the Confederacy.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [281]-304) and index.