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Format: Prime Video (Online-Video wird gestreamt) Free State of Jones is a film of interest about a part of American history that became relevant to the nation,. Free State of Jones in HD auf Pantaflix anschauen. Genieße den ganzen Film online! Free State of Jones einfach ausleihen und legal streamen! Nach einer wahren Begebenheit – , der einfache Farmer Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey) kämpft im Amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg als. Free State of Jones in HD in der Weltbild Online-Videothek anschauen. Genießen Sie den ganzen Film online! Free State of Jones einfach ausleihen und. Free State of Jones jetzt legal streamen. Hier findest du einen Überblick aller Anbieter, bei denen du Free State of Jones online schauen kannst. Free State of Jones DVD im Onlineshop von Saturn kaufen. Jetzt bequem online bestellen. Filme in großer Auswahl: Jetzt Free State of Jones als DVD online bei notranjska.eu bestellen.
Serena Christopher Berry Even Confederate correspondence references the Union flag being raised over the courthouse in Ellisville. I never wanted to aid the rebels or their cause in anyway whatever. Our alienation was neither achieved in independence, nor stumbled upon by accident, but produced by American design. Nevertheless, Ross and McConaughey spent München Kino lot of time in Jones County, persuading many county residents to appear in Lin Magdeburg film. His former Beuty stayed behind. The McLeod brothers have been notorious for using abolition sentiments for a year or two. When secession fever swept across the South inJones County was largely immune to it. Waldorf, a leading rebel in my neighborhood, threatened to have me whipped and made to leave the county and I was often molested by the rebel cavalry as they searched my house often for my son at all times of the night and they threatened to camp at my house and eat me out. He threw down his gun and started home. Free State of Jones has the noblest of intentions, but they aren't enough to make up for its stilted treatment of a fascinating real-life story. Rate this movie.
Oof, that was Rotten. Meh, it passed the time. So Fresh: Absolute Must See! You're almost there! Just confirm how you got your ticket.
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Free State of Jones stars Matthew McConaughey, with his smooth Southern lilt and cool demeanour, as Newton Knight, a battle-weary Confederate soldier who deserts, deciding that he no longer wants to fight for the rights of slave owners.
Kate Muir. There is just too much information to pack in. Geoffrey Macnab. Charlotte O'Sullivan. The film too rarely confronts Knight with the vital difference between his predicament and theirs.
It's guilty of sanctifying his struggle, and sidelining the people whose future it was for. Tim Robey. There's a compelling story in here somewhere, but it's buried under a mountain of moral grandstanding and white guilt.
Adam Woodward. It's a movie that with enormous confidence operates outside the traditional story arc. Peter Bradshaw.
While it might not be the most engaging film for a lot of people, it's refreshingly atypical. Dan Scully.
McConaughey's charm is one of the positive aspects of the film and it is easy to see how he could command a group of disheartened people and get them to band together to fight back.
Allison Rose. The Free State of Jones does a disservice to the lives it hopes to dramatize as well as the time of anyone unfortunate enough to end up seeing it.
Dominic Griffin. Free State of Jones has its moments of clumsiness, but it also has scenes that are rousing and a story that, as they say, makes learning fun.
Abbie Bernstein. As it stands, the film isn't a complete mess, but with its slow pace and lack of cohesion, it does leave a lot to be desired.
Mae Abdulbaki. It's a powerful, moving story, but that doesn't mean it moves quickly. Lisa Johnson Mandell. Top Box Office.
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Please click the link below to receive your verification email. Cancel Resend Email. Add Article. Free State of Jones Critics Consensus Free State of Jones has the noblest of intentions, but they aren't enough to make up for its stilted treatment of a fascinating real-life story.
See score details. Rate And Review Submit review Want to see. Super Reviewer. Rate this movie Oof, that was Rotten.
The lady of the house barred herself in, with her little children, and refused to come out, although she knew what they were doing.
Taking the chickens was not enough. They went to the smoke house and cut down every piece of cured meat, and carried it out into the lane also.
There, they cut it into big chunks, and wallowed it into the dirt, and let the horse trample upon it where it would not be usable.
It happened that my father had just received a letter from my mother stating that the Confederate cavalry had come to her home and that one of the men had caught her horse out of the barn, placed the saddle upon it, and got on the horse, and cursed and abused her as she cried and begged that he leave her the much needed animal.
It was several miles to the nearest mill and there were several children to be fed. They found out that the confederate army had been all through Jones County, destroying everything they could.
Them men went to our corn crib and toted out corn to feed them horses … He got up to four or five barrels of corn where they had just wasted it, and the horses had just trompled over and left it.
They destroyed their property and would kill their cows and hogs and chickens and eat them. They went to their smoke house and got lots of their meat and sliced it up and left big chunks of it in the lane, wollered up in the dirt.
Our corn and meat was all we had to live on and they wasted practically half of it that night. Sometimes the cavalry would come along where [clothes] was hung out to dry and carry them off with them, and leave them without clothes to wear.
Colonel: Through you I would respectfully represent to the lieutenant-general commanding that I am officially informed, through Capt.
You will perceive that under these circumstances we cannot discharge our duty, and that the public interests, no less than the public honor, demand that a check be put to these lawless and pernicious acts.
I respectfully appeal to the lieutenant-general to take such measures as in his judgment the exigency demands. I would also state that great injustice is done to producers by the loose and careless manner in which the tithe is often collected by officers attached to the army.
Unauthorized parties, both officers and privates, often exercise this power. I would respectfully ask your attention to the fifth article of General Orders, No.
I would respectfully ask that the lieutenant-general commanding issue and promulgate his order to the effect that no officer attached to the army is authorized to exercise this privilege but those meeting the terms of the order above named, and that parties so collecting the tithe shall leave with the producer duplicate receipts for the same, and shall afterwards furnish to the post quarter-master of the district engaged in the business receipts for the same, with a list of the names of the producers from whom the tax had been collected.
This is necessary that the parties may be properly debited and credited, as our instructions requires. You cannot realize what disservice has been done to the cause by such irregularities, alienating the affections of the people and destroying the means of subsisting the army.
I confidently leave the remedy in the hands of the lieutenant-general. I was arrested and put in jail and in the guard house for the purpose as they said of making me fight for the rebel cause but they failed to make me do anything against the union cause.
I made my escape from them and they never after that time had me in their possession. Newt, Tom, and Ethel Knight all pointed out that Jones County farmwives blew horns either to warn deserters away or to summon them to their side.
At least two women maintained homesteads that fronted strategically located deserter camps within the area.
Both women cooked meals and provided places of rest for wounded or weary deserters. She would get her blowing horn and give it one long blow and you could hear other horns blowing in almost every direction answering her.
My father said they did not like to hear those horns blowing. On that memorable day at Salsbattery, all the men were asked by Knight to carry their hunting horns.
It was the custom in the early settlement to use the horn for distress signals, to drive stock, to summons faraway workers to dinner, and every family owned a horn.
It was agreed that certain signals would be blown and by the number of blasts the different or distant groups of men would know what was meant. Three short blasts meant to come together for further instructions.
If one man was the only one within range of the signal, he was to sound off his horn, and that group, or pair, were to sound off their horns, and on down the line in order to reach those stationed at the furthest point.
It was agreed that certain signals meant to converge upon the confused Cavalrymen, if they were in pairs, or small groups.
And often a half dozen mounted soldiers were slain before they knew, or had time to realize that they were ambushed by an unseen enemy.
She took up a big drive-horn and went out on the gallery and blew it. Pretty soon somebody answered with another blast up on the hillside in the brush.
Then another blast came from another point. That Confederate leader looked at his men. And they sure got.
Women were left, heavy with child, or with tiny bundles in arms, and many with several little ones clinging to their skirts. Most women of that day could fire a gun, and many could shoot as well as men, so his wife was not left without protection.
Women who shared the anti-secession views of their fathers, sons, and husbands often encouraged them to desert at the first opportunity.
But women who suffered from hunger, illness, or abuse at the hands of Confederate soldiers also provided men with ample personal reasons to desert and return home.
The [Confederate] Cavalry was made up of men trained by military regulations, and they knew only to proceed orderly, along the main roads.
That is where the Knight Company had the advantage, because they knew to keep to the swamps, and hideouts. And the Cavalry, inexperienced as they were in such warfare, were afraid to venture into the thick reed brakes, without knowledge of the number of men, or the pitfalls that awaited them.
Continuing my course due south, as nearly as I can judge, I came at length to water just over shoe. The hounds at that moment could not have been five rods behind me.
I could hear them crashing and plunging through the palmettoes, their loud, eager yells making the whole swamp clamorous with the sound.
Hope revived a little as I reached the water. If it were only deeper, they might lose the scent, and thus disconcerted, afford me the opportunity of evading them.
Luckily, it grew deeper the farther I proceeded—now over my ankles—now half-way to my knees—now sinking a moment to my waist, and then emerging presently into more shallow places.
The dogs had not gained upon me since I struck the water. Evidently they were confused. Now their savage intonations grew more and more distant, assuring me that I was leaving them.
Finally I stopped to listen, but the long howl came booming on the air again, telling me I was not yet safe. From bog to bog, where I had stepped, they could still keep upon the track, though impeded by the water.
At length, to my great joy, I came to a wide bayou, and plunging in, had soon stemmed its sluggish current to the other side. There, certainly, the dogs would be confounded — the current carrying down the stream all traces of that slight, mysterious scent, which enables the quick-smelling hound to follow in the track of the fugitive.
And from these quarters, word spread by grapevine, that the time would soon come when all would be free, regardless of the struggle between the States.
There was not a Negro in Jones County that did not know that a white man had run away from the army, to come back to lead the slaves out of bondage.
For more than four centuries, the communities formed by runaways dotted the fringes of plantation America, from Brazil to the southeastern United States, from Peru to the American Southwest.
For while they were, from one perspective, the antithesis of all that slavery stood for, they were at the same time everywhere an embarrassingly visible part of these systems.
Just as the very nature of plantation slavery implied violence and resistance, the wilderness setting of early New World plantations made marronage and the existence of organized maroon communities a ubiquitous reality.
Maroon men throughout the hemisphere developed extraordinary skills in guerrilla warfare. To the bewilderment of their European enemies, whose rigid and conventional tactics were learned on the open battlefields of Europe, these highly adaptable and mobile warriors took maximum advantage of local environments, striking and withdrawing with great rapidity, making extensive use of ambushes to catch their adversaries in crossfire, fighting only when and where they chose, depending on reliable intelligence networks among nonmaroons both slaves and white settlers , and often communicating by horns.
We know that Northern and Southern white men did not simply battle over rival notions of freedom and economic principles while dependents passively awaited the outcome.
We also know that Southern white men fought among themselves as well as with Yankees, and that they did not fight alone.
Gainesville is only some miles below here on the Pearl River. Reliable information has been obtained that Yankee Soldiers White and black occupy and garrison the place.
It is the paradise of Deserters who flee from their own Swamps. Many have gone there with their families and draw rations from the Enemy, and I doubt not a raid may be attempted from that point.
Clayton to destroy these disturbing elements. Your Excellency having required of me to inform you at any moment of any section in which it would be proper to have martial law proclaimed and rigidly enforced, I now unhesitatingly have the honor to report to you that it is necessary that it should go into immediate effect in the following counties: Nassau County, Duval County, Clay County, Putnam County, Saint Johns County, and Volusia County.
That martial law should be ordered in these counties appears to be a measure of absolute necessity, as they contain a nest of traitors and lawless negroes.
As soon as I hear from you I will carry out your orders with the utmost promptitude. Thus far treason has boldly appeared in our midst with impunity; the hour to deal with it summarily has arrived.
The same month a confederate officer, John K. These depredatory bands have even threatened the cities of Tallahassee, Madison, and Marianna. Thus, after the slave Harry Jarvis escaped a gun-toting master and sailed to Fortress Monroe sometime in the spring or early summer of , he asked General Butler to let him enlist.
Jarvis not only made his way to Fortress Monroe by rejecting the authority of his master and by carrying clear ideas about what was going on and what he might find, he also relied heavily on the intelligence and support provided by slaves who had not yet decided to go: food while he hid out in the woods and particularly information about the reaction of his owner and the whereabouts of a boat.
And Jarvis was by no means alone. Slaves who contemplated flight knew they would be assuming the status of runaways and rebels; and so they had to determine to their satisfaction the political stakes of the war, and they had to obtain more specific intelligence about the shifting of Union lines, the patrolling of Confederates or Home Guards, the location of enslaved allies, and the best trails to follow—which is to say that even small-scale flight was necessarily a collective undertaking.
But it was not simply acts of flight, informed by political interpretations and collective activities, that suggest a large and increasingly massive rebellion of slaves; it was also how the acts of flight made possible new forms of politicization and new forms of struggle against the institution of slavery.
Indeed, while most recent historical accounts construct a narrative in which slaves are effectively assimilated to the nation, in which the goals of the slaves and those of the federal government steadily coincide, there is good reason to regard slaves—and slaves turned freed people—as discrete, ever-developing political and military bodies moving into and out of alliances as the circumstances of power and politics allowed.
She must have done so because she was no longer able to support the family, once the rebels had burned them out.
This also kept you from running away for the horns would catch in the bushes. After this infliction [whipping and brine poured on wounds], he was placed in the dark dungeon for two days, and then made to walk up and down before the house in chains, with a bell upon his head, which is fixed in the following manner: — a band of iron goes round the waist with upright bands connecting it with the collar, from whence two other upright pieces terminated in a cross bar, to the center of which, beyond the reach of the wearer, a bell is suspended; this degrading instrument he wore for several days, and was then sent to the field, being locked up and chained nightly for five or six months, by which time he was supposed to be cured of running away, and had promised on his knees not to repeat the attempt.
In the files of the Woodville Republican [Wilkinson County] between the years of and , a total of five hundred and fifty fugitive slaves were described.
Of this number, fifty-eight bore on their bodies permanent marks of punishment. Eleven had been branded, usually on the forehead, cheek or breast.
Forty-one had scars of whippings, some of them severe and not merely temporary marks One of the fugitives had an iron collar around his neck, and six of them had iron bands about their legs.
There, certainly, the dogs would be confounded—the current carrying down the stream all traces of that slight, mysterious scent, which enables the quick-smelling hound to follow in the track of the fugitive.
So we stayed out in the woods minding our own business, until the Confederate army began sending raiders after us with bloodhounds. Then we saw we had to fight.
Yes, those ladies sure helped us a lot. But 42 of them hounds just naturally died. Even under the best of circumstances, those remaining in the same area confronted many obstacles.
Living conditions could be harsh, with inadequate food, water, shelter, clothing. Often the weather—stifling heat, incessant rains, and in the border states, frigid cold—could be as much a problem as finding food.
In addition, the increasing density of settlement, improvements in communication, and the increasing frequency of patrols created problems. More effective than patrols in finding runaways were slave catchers.
Among this group were men who specialized in tracking slaves. They sometimes owned or could secure dogs and were willing to expend substantial effort to find their prey … To slow the tide of runaways, southern states relied on a system of patrols.
Beginning in colonial times, legislatures passed laws granting local officials, including county judges, authority to constitute patrols to control the slave population.
They ranged in size from two or three to a dozen and more. They were organized in military fashion, with captains, sergeants, and patrollers [privates]; and they had legal authority to search virtually anywhere for fugitives.
Some planters chose not to rely on sporadically operating slave patrols, and instead hired extra patrollers for their own plantations. Former slaves like Hannah Crasson and Solomon Northup remembered that owners hired their own private patrollers during the Civil War.
The increased activities of some patrol groups in included attempts to root out maroon communities that in an earlier time might have been left unmolested.
They did not want to be put under a slave government. They believed in a free government, equal rights to all people, rich or poor.
It should not make any difference who they were. So as my father told us the men that voted to stay with the Union about of them met together with the understanding they would come together and bind themselves together and to constitute a Free State of Jones.
The Knight Company was organized in the fall of Newt recorded fourteen separate battles fought between his company and Confederate forces between October 13, , and January 10, Mississippi City, April 7, Maj.
Though dispersed from Perry and Jones Counties, they appear in other parts. Large numbers of these from Jones County have gone down Pearl River to and near Honey Island, where they exist in some force and hold the country in awe, openly boasting of their being in communication with the Yankees.
In fact, it is dangerous to travel in that part of Louisiana. In Marion County, Miss. Your obedient servant, Danl. Polk to His Excellency President Davis, March 21, "In regard to the inefficiency and mischiefs of the conscription system now in operation, it is sufficient to refer to this state of things in the southern counties of Mississippi.
If the whole of the executive part of all military operations in the department were placed in the hands of the department commander, these evils could not arise, and many lives sacrificed in suppressing them would be saved to their families and the country.
In regard to the condition of affairs in the counties alluded to, I have to report that Col. My orders were very stringent, and very summary measures were taken with such as were captured, and with marked benefit to many of the rest.
Some escaped to the bottoms on Pearl River, swearing they would return with Yankee re-enforcements; others were brought to reason and loyalty, and have come in and surrendered themselves.
I have today dispatched another expedition from this place to the counties of Smith and others lying on the Pearl River, to break up an organization which has been formed there, and which has held three public meetings.
I shall not stop until these outbreaks are suppressed and their authors punished, but it would be far better for the Government to dispose of its military resources in such a way as to prevent them.
The country is entirely at their mercy. Colonel Maury with a regiment of cavalry had been sent from Mobile into Jones County and had encountered and captured some of them, but cavalry, unaided by well-drilled infantry troops in large forces, will never be able to dislodge them and relieve the country.
I beg leave also to say something in regard to tories and deserters, who infest Jones County and a portion of Lauderdale [where Meridian is]. At Meridian I found that the enemy had burned and destroyed all of the Government houses except one house, in which a family was living.
They also burned a good deal of private property, consisting of two hotels and all the stores in the place, as well as the Clarion office.
In Enterprise all the Government houses were burned, as well well as a good deal of private property. The bridge across the river was also burned.
All the cotton along the road was burned. The tories in Jones County made a raid on Paulding not many days ago, about strong, and carried off a good deal of corn as well as other property.
They are becoming very troublesome, as well as dangerous, to the country around. In regard to the tories and deserters in Lauderdale County, I have to say that a citizen of the county, Mr.
Hall, who was at one time a member of the Legislature, informed me that in the western portion of Lauderdale County, where he was just from when I saw him, there was being formed a company of men who intend joining the Federal army as soon as possible.
He [Lieutenant General Leonidas Polk] found many thousands of deserters and absentees from the army banded together throughout Mississippi, perpetrating outrages.
In the county of Jones and its vicinity there is a formidable organization of disaffected persons, threatening upon the appearance of the enemy to cut the line of railroads from Meridian to Mobile.
He [Polk] estimates that on assuming command, there were in his territorial limits 10, men liable to military duty absent from their commands and evading the claims of the Government for their services.
In the county of Jones, in Mississippi, as heretofore intimated, were a large number of disaffected persons who had proceeded to such extremities as to engage in a raid upon and plunder of the public stores at Paulding, in Jasper County.
Conscripts and deserters have banded together in Jones County, and others contiguous, to the number of several hundred; have killed the officer in charge of the work of conscription [Amos McLemore] and dispersed and captured his supporting force.
They are increasing in numbers and boldness; have destroyed the houses of many loyal men by fire, plundered others, and have within a few days made a raid into Paulding with a wagon train and helped themselves largely to Government and other stores.
The forces I have in the field will have to be turned aside to put down this combination, which is fast attaining formidable proportions, greatly to my inconvenience and the interference with permanent duties elsewhere.
I took the boys up there to Paulding. There was a guard of Confederates over the building. The supplies was all corn. They made out I took right smart other stuff.
But it was all corn. I remember there was some Irish families there at Paulding. They were pretty bad off. Then we took the rest back to our headquarters in the woods.
Sir: I would most respectfully submit for your consideration the following statement of facts, and for the relief of the loyal citizens of Southeastern Mississippi earnestly solicit the attention of the War Department to the condition of affairs now existing in that section of the State.
I have just returned to the army from a short leave of absence, which I spent in Greene County, Miss. Previous to starting to Mississippi I was aware of the presence of large numbers of deserters and conscripts in that section of the State, but until I arrived in the country I did not know that they were in organized bodies and committing depredations and deeds of violence, bloodshed, and outlawry, and that there was no force in the country to contend against them or to defend the loyal portion of the citizens from their savage caprices and brutal whims.
But such I found to be the case, and the whole southern and southeastern section of Mississippi is in a most deplorable condition, and unless succor is sent speedily the country is utterly ruined, and every loyal citizen will be driven from it or meet a tragic and untimely fate at the hands of those who are aiding and abetting our enemies.
Several of the most prominent citizens have already been driven from their homes, and some have been slaughtered in their own homes because they refused to obey the mandates of the outlaws and abandon the country.
Numbers have been ordered away and are now living under threats and in fear of their lives. It is a matter of great personal danger and risk for an officer or soldier of the Confederate army to make his appearance in the country, and so perfect are these organizations and systems of dispatching that in a few hours large bodies of them can be collected at any given point prepared to attempt almost anything.
On the 24th of February Capt. John J. Bradford, of Company B, Third Mississippi Regiment, who had previously been commanding conscript rendezvous at Augusta, Perry County, was captured by them and barely escaped with his life by accepting a parole, the conditions of which were that he would never again enter the county as a Confederate officer under orders or authority, or in any way aid or assist in molesting them.
The house in which he was sleeping was surrounded at daylight, and he was called out, and after some discussion and persuasion on the part of the gentleman with whom he was staying, they agreed to take a vote of the crowd as to whether he should be hanged or be permitted to accept the parole, and by a majority of one vote he was granted the parole.
There were in that company 21 men, well armed and equipped, and on the same day they took forcible possession of the depot containing the tax in kind and compelled one of the citizens to issue it out to families in the neighborhood.
Every officer or soldier who enters the county is compelled, if they can catch him, to submit to one of the following requirements: First, desert the army and join them; second, take a parole not to molest them or give information in regard to their acts and localities of rendezvous, or to pilot Confederate cavalry into the country; or, third, to leave the country immediately.
Through the instrumentality and assistance of loyal friends, and my own influence with certain citizens whom I knew to be vedettes [mounted sentinels] and spies for these outlaws, I remained in the country several days without being troubled, but was compelled to be very guarded in my actions and words.
The citizens are afraid to speak of them in their own houses for fear of spies. Government depots filled with supplies have been either robbed or burned.
Gin-houses, dwelling-houses, and barns, and the court-house of Greene County, have been destroyed by fire.
Deserters from every army and from every State are among them. They have colonels, majors, captains, and lieutenants; boast themselves to be not less than a thousand strong in organized bodies, besides what others are outsiders and disloyal citizens of whom I regret to say there are many.
They have frequent and uninterrupted communication with the enemy on Ship Island and other points; have a sufficiency of arms and ammunition of the latest Northern and European manufacture in abundance, and I was told that they boast of fighting for the Union.
Gentlemen of undoubted veracity informed me that the Federal flag had been raised by them over the court-house in Jones County, and in the same county they are said to have fortified rendezvous, and that Yankees are frequently among them.
The loyal citizens are sorely oppressed and are looking to the Government for relief, and unless they get such relief soon the country will be utterly and irretrievably ruined.
It is a serious matter, one that calls loudly for prompt and immediate attention on the part of the Government, and as a Confederate officer, as a citizen of that portion of Mississippi, whose friends and family are exposed to this growing evil, I have felt it my duty to lay the matter before the proper authorities and in behalf of the oppressed to solicit the consideration and succor of the Government.
I give it as my honest opinion, based upon what I saw and learned, that not less than a brigade of well-drilled infantry troops, a force sufficient to sweep the country at once, will be able to exterminate them from the country.
Cavalry can never do it, and as yet only cavalry has been sent, and only in small bodies. These they have heretofore driven out of the country, and have grown the more daring after each success.
Trusting that this may meet the serious consideration of those into whose hands is committed the destinies of our struggling young country, and with the assurance that I can substantiate by as much evidence as may be desired all and even more than has been stated in the foregoing, I am, very respectfully, your obedient servant.
Enclosed herewith… A declaration of independence by certain people who are trying to avoid the Southern conscription, and lie out in the swamps.
I promised them countenance, and encouraged them to organization for mutual defense. It may be interesting to many of our citizens to know that the county of Jones, State of Mississippi, has seceded from the State and formed a Government of their own, both military and civil.
The Confederacy, after claiming the right of secession, not being willing to extend the same to the said Republic, has declared war against it and sent an army under Col.
Mowry, of Mobile, to crush the rebellion. Confederates captured by Newt and his men were usually paroled, meaning that instead of being killed or kept prisoner, they were released after pledging not to resist them or other Unionists, Northern or Southern.
They have been seizing Government stores, have been killing our people, and have actually made prisoners of and paroled officers of the Confederate army.
They now threaten to interfere with the repairing of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. They are represented to be more than strong, with artillery.
Colonel Henry Maury, in charge of capturing and killing Newt and his men, received ample supplies: cavalry, a battalion of sharpshooters, and artillery.
But these were ineffective in the swamp warfare that Newt and his men had mastered. In a letter to his commanding officer, Maury exaggerates his success against Jones County Unionists: Yesterday we moved on Leaf River, 10 miles west of this place [Ellisville, in Jones County], and I am satisfied that there no longer remains any organization of deserters in this county, although some few have to be hunted out with dogs.
They have scattered in every direction; some west, but most for Honey Island [in Hancock County] and the coast.
They brag that they will get Yankee aid and return. They are panic-stricken, and although their leaders twice got them in position to ambush me, they fled both times to the swamps on my approach.
There has never been at any time more than resident deserters in this county, although some more have been over from Perry and Covington to help to whip the cavalry.
Maury against the traitors and murderers of Jones and other counties in Southern Mississippi has succeeded in killing and capturing a number of their ringleaders and breaking up their bands.
A salutary effect has been produced upon that infected district, and many of the deserters are now coming in. Jack: I sent Colonel Maury with cavalry of his regiment, a battalion of sharpshooters, and a section of horse artillery, by rail as far as Shubuta [between Ellisville and Meridian], to move at once into Jones County and break up the organized deserters who were threatening to interfere with the repairs of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad.
He appears to have discharged the duty assigned to him with his accustomed vigor and success. I have received no detailed report from him yet, but have learned from him that he has long ago broken them up and driven them out of Jones County; caused them to cease their depredations and break up their organizations in the neighboring counties of Covington and Perry.
In several instances he inflicted summary punishment upon those captured. I have ordered him to withdraw his forces, and have taken measures to cause the deserters to come in and report to their regiments.
Counties about a week ago. The campaign to destroy the Piney Woods Unionists failed. They distributed Confederate supplies, food, and arms to fellow Unionists throughout the region.
He referred to the raid by Newt and his men on the tax-in-kind storehouse in Augusta. Southern Unionists effectively undermined the ability of agents to collect taxes-in-kind from farmers in and around Jones County.
The quartermaster, James Hamilton, details this in a letter: The state of affairs in a portion of this district [including Jones County] is very annoying.
The deserters have overrun and taken possession of the country, in many cases exiling the good and loyal citizens or shooting them in cold blood on their own door-sills.
The tax-in-kind agent in Jones County was ordered by them to leave the county, since which time he has not been heard from.
The tax-in-kind agent in Covington County has been notified by them the deserters to desist from collecting the tithe and to distribute what he has to their families, and the agent continues his duties at the risk of his life and property.
The deserters from Jones and Perry Counties made a raid upon Augusta, in Perry County, capturing a part of the small force there and destroying the public stores which we had collected there.
This is not so. I am just from Jones County. The expedition consisted of the 6th and 20th Mississippi Regiments and my cavalry company, the whole under the command of Col.
Robert Lowry, of the 6th Mississippi Regiment. We entered Smith County on the 27th of March, and on the 28th hung two noted deserters and leaders of squads.
These were all the men who were hung in Smith County. There was a Union flag, or rather a ludicrous representation of the United States flag, captured at the home of one Hawkins of Smith County ; it was concealed on the person of Mrs.
Hawkins, who would not deliver it until after much persuasion and a few threats. That day the man who fired into the party on the piazza was arrested, after being wounded and run down by dogs, and promptly executed.
His name was D. A young man by the name of Gregg was with him, was shot while running, and soon died from the wound. Our boys promptly charged the ambush and captured two, Ben Knight and a lad, Sillman Coleman, and shooting one other.
Knight and Coleman were both promptly executed. They were put before a court martial, and on their own confession of resisting with arms military arrests, were on the morning of April 16th, executed by hanging.
In my seventh-grade year, my school took a bus trip from our native Baltimore to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the sanctified epicenter of American tragedy.
Preposterous notions abounded. Black people talked openly of covert plots evidenced by skyrocketing murder rates and the plague of HIV.
Conscious people were quick to glean, from the cascade of children murdered over Air Jordans, something still darker—the work of warlocks who would extinguish all hope for our race.
The stratagem of these shadow forces was said to be amnesia: they would have us see no past greatness in ourselves, and thus no future glory.
The attempt was gallant. It enlisted every field, from the arts Phillis Wheatley to the sciences Charles Drew. I was on the Thurgood Marshall team.
Given this near-totemic reverence for black history, my trip to Gettysburg—the site of the ultimate battle in a failed war to protect and extend slavery—should cut like a lighthouse beam across the sea of memory.
I remember riding in a beautiful coach bus, as opposed to the hated yellow cheese. I remember cannons, and a display of guns. But as for any connections to the very history I was regularly baptized in, there is nothing.
In fact, when I recall all the attempts to inculcate my classmates with some sense of legacy and history, the gaping hole of Gettysburg opens into the chasm of the Civil War.
We knew, of course, about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. But our general sense of the war was that a horrible tragedy somehow had the magical effect of getting us free.
Its legacy belonged not to us, but to those who reveled in the costume and technology of a time when we were property.
Our alienation was neither achieved in independence, nor stumbled upon by accident, but produced by American design. In the popular mind, that demonstrable truth has been evaded in favor of a more comforting story of tragedy, failed compromise, and individual gallantry.
For that more ennobling narrative, as for so much of American history, the fact of black people is a problem. In April , the United States was faced with a discomfiting reality: it had seen 2 percent of its population destroyed because a section of its citizenry would countenance anything to protect, and expand, the right to own other people.
The mass bloodletting shocked the senses. Five years later, , Americans were dead. But the fact that such carnage had been wreaked for a cause that Ulysses S.
Honor is salvageable from a military defeat; much less so from an ideological defeat, and especially one so duly earned in defense of slavery in a country premised on liberty.
Historical lies aside, the Lost Cause presented to the North an attractive compromise. By the time of the 50th-anniversary commemoration of Gettysburg, this new and comfortable history was on full display.
Randall minimized the role of slavery in the war; some blamed the violence on irreconcilable economic differences between a romantic pastoral South and a capitalistic manufacturing North, or on the hot rhetoric of radical abolitionists.
With a firm foothold in the public memory and in the academic history, the comfortable narrative found its most influential expression in the popular media.
Films like Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind revealed an establishment more interested in the alleged sins perpetrated upon Confederates than in the all-too-real sins perpetrated upon the enslaved people in their midst.
That predilection continues. The comfortable narrative haunts even the best mainstream presentations of the Civil War. Lee was personally against slavery.
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Nothing has engendered more controversy than whether or not an independent state was declared in southeast Mississippi by Newt and his supporters.
Was there in fact a Free State of Jones? Did it officially secede from the Confederacy? The declaration of an independent state has ample support.
Newt and his men mustered an organized, effective anti-Confederate force that controlled this region of Mississippi through guerrilla tactics until the end of the war.
Even Confederate correspondence references the Union flag being raised over the courthouse in Ellisville. Rather than engage a decades-old debate in these pages, I will simply offer the primary sources here in support of the Knight Company, its rebellion, and a declaration of a Free State of Jones.
Newt and his men mustered an organized, effective anti-Confederate force that controlled this region of Mississippi until the end of the war.
Of the numerous Unionist revolts in the South, few if any took place without the support or alliance of slave networks and maroons. Victoria Bynum author of The Free State of Jones maintains that it would be hard to imagine that the Knight Company was not supported by runaways or other slave networks.
The first deaths of band members at the hands of Confederate cavalry occurred early that year. Most accounts were reported by Confederates alarmed at these mixed-race uprisings.
For those who would like to read further, extensive primary- and secondary-source accounts of all of these rebellions are contained here.
Until Ellisville is seized, only the small band of maroons who initially harbor Newt are depicted fighting with him.
But the history of anti-Confederate resistance in the South is clear: it was most often and understandably a collaboration between African Americans seeking freedom and Unionist resisters fighting a system that they vehemently opposed.
Victoria Bynum author of The Free State of Jones maintains that it would be hard to imagine that the Knight Company was not supported by runaways, or other slave networks.
Most Americans think the Civil War ended in , but in many ways the real struggle for freedom began after Appomattox.
Freedom is a spectrum, and the mere fact of technical emancipation was not enough to secure real independence for the nearly four million former slaves in the post-war South.
When General Sherman issued Field Order 15, giving forty acres and a mule to the freedmen in conquered lands of Georgia and the Carolinas, true freedom could finally be glimpsed.
It reserved the land for only freedmen, protected them from being conscripted except by order of the highest federal authority, guaranteed them the right to pursue a trade and not just field labor, and granted them self-governance in these regions.
In many ways, the freedmen wanted what Newt and the yeoman farmers had fought for: the right be self-sufficient and farm their own land, the right to political self-determination, the right enjoy the fruits of their own labor.
And for a few brief months they had that. At the end of the war, freedmen began to farm their own plots of land.
But no sooner were the former Confederates pardoned than they set about restoring a plantation system that had made them rich. With the amnesties granted by President Johnson came political power for the plantation owners, and with that power came draconian laws that amounted to a second slavery.
Freedmen were restricted from working anywhere but on a plantation, lest they be arrested for vagrancy. Corporal punishment was permitted, returning the lash to the plantation.
Laborers were paid only after the seasonal harvest, tying them to the land, and were left with virtually nothing once they were billed for room and board.
The president, who had pardoned the Confederates, hardened in his defense of them, and a new war erupted between these two branches of government.
He could not hire and fire his own cabinet secretaries; he could not issue direct orders to the military. Eventually Johnson defied these edicts, and Congress impeached him for it.
But just as Johnson had hardened in his defense of the former Confederates, so Congress had hardened in its desire to secure real freedom for the formerly enslaved.
This process led to what is known as Military Reconstruction. The South was placed under martial law, and states could be readmitted to the Union only if they ratified the Fourteenth Amendment.
Freedmen were granted the right to vote, and African Americans began to hold elective office for the first time.
It was a period of great promise. Many of these legislatures reflected African American majorities well into the mids.
Two black United States senators were sworn in from Mississippi. There were half a dozen black representatives in Congress.
There had always been local militias. First they were organized as the slave patrols, in the war they were called the home guard, and after the war they morphed into the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations.
Klan violence was the counter-revolution to the social revolution that was Reconstruction. A wave of violence followed that was almost unprecedented in American history.
To paraphrase Yeats, a blood-dimmed tide was loosed. Soon the Northern will to combat this reign of terror wavered. After decades of conflict with the South, political corruption in Washington, and the anxiety and drain of a recession, Northerners were losing their resolve.
It is moving to read the imploring letters of Governor Adelbert Ames as he begged the federal government for more troops to combat this counterrevolution.
But no help was forthcoming, and the vision of freedom that African Americans had hoped for at the end of the war and glimpsed briefly in Reconstruction suddenly began to fade.
So many African Americans were murdered leading up to that election that Congress refused to recognize the electors from three Southern states. An electoral crisis ensued that ended in a deal.
The Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, would be elected if federal troops were withdrawn from the South. This effectively ended Reconstruction and began the long and terrible period we have come to know as Jim Crow.
Nothing set the stage for the cruel disappointment of Reconstruction more than the repeal of Field Order Amnesties issued all through that summer returned the Confederates to power.
The image at right, where freedmen learn of this broken promise, was a way of depicting this pivotal moment in the Civil War era.
He helped to build a school to educate all children, but numerous accounts describe Newt burning it to the ground when the white schoolmaster refused to teach mixed-race kids.
The image at right, where the Jones County sign is replaced with one bearing the name Jefferson Davis County, is not a cinematic invention.
It actually happened in , when the Confederates regained their land and their power. Such were the ongoing struggles for the meaning of the conflict after it was over.
The Black Codes were enacted locally, and federal officers were powerless to stop them until Military Reconstruction began several years later.
The apprenticeship statute that is read out loud in the magistrate scene at right is quoted directly from the Mississippi statute on apprenticeship from that year.
But nothing supports this. In fact, in a world where Newt was not legally allowed to marry Rachel, he went to the remarkable lengths of deeding her acres of land, making her one of the few African American women to own land in the South.
Finally, this photograph of Newt one of two that exist , formally and defiantly posing with his mixed-race grandson, says everything about his identity and his willingness to embrace it.
In spite of the tragedies during Reconstruction, there were so many inspiring and hopeful moments. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments left a legacy of freedom that bloomed again in the twentieth century.
African American legislators left a stunning record of accomplishment. Two black U. One of the most inspiring aspects of Reconstruction was the Union League movement.
Part fraternal society, part political organization, part educational institution, the Union League was an incubator of black political agency.
Branches spread throughout the South, and members would meet, often in secret, to pledge solidarity to each other and the Republican Party.
New members would swear an oath of allegiance and an affirmation of their freedom. In an era when political expression required incredible courage, the Union League gave the freedman strength.
As the post-war era dragged on, the struggle of freedmen to secure or guarantee their rights lost support from the North, where former allies slowly turned their backs on the freedmen and their cause.
Even members of the Knight Company withdrew from this conflict and went back to their lives of yeoman farming. Newt was therefore left with a choice: retreat from the cause he had embraced or join it completely.
When he moved to Soso, Newt began to live more and more in the world of freedmen. His former comrades stayed behind.
The final act of Reconstruction is a tragic one. As freedmen exercised their franchise and served at every level of state government, a counter-revolution of terrorism erupted.
Though the Klan and other organizations had been suppressed by Military Reconstruction, new white supremacist groups emerged. In Mississippi it was called the White League, and it began a violent reign of terror that culminated in the election of In the scene below where Newt marches into downtown Ellisville to vote alongside freedmen, the details of an election during Reconstruction are accurate right down to the glass jars.
In the mid s you voted in public. The vote tally— to 2—is also accurate. I felt it was important to personify the cotton economy that drove the Civil War, and the plantation culture that enforced and fought to perpetuate slavery.
One cannot understand the Civil War or the slavocracy without understanding the absolute power of the planters. One cannot understand Reconstruction without understanding the speed and determination with which they seized power all over again.
Eakins embodies all of those things, and though he is not based on a single individual, he is based on many. This flag was also used as the Confederate naval ensign.
As a filmmaker, I did not feel that either the Mississippi flag a magnolia tree or the second national flag would register clearly enough in a split second of film.
Thus I used one flag over another for clarity, even if I employed creative license. Colonel Elias Hood is a fictional name for a character conflating three real Confederate officers who all pursued Newt Knight.
He was murdered in the home of local merchant Amos Deason, most believe by Newt Knight. After the death of McLemore, the Confederacy dispatched two different offensives to rout the Knight Company from the region.
The first was led by General Maury, who arrived in Jones County with a force of nearly a thousand men. He did his best to subdue the Knight Company and did hang a dozen deserters, but he found the swamps impenetrable and his opponents formidable.
He admitted he was lucky to escape without losing troops to ambush. A short while later, Colonel Lowry arrived with twice the number of men.
His tactics were more ruthless: rounding up Jones County residents, hanging many including young teenagers as detailed in section 22 , and torturing others for information.
This drove the Knight Company down to the Honey Island swamp, but it did not crush them. Most of these incidents are depicted in the film, but the three separate Confederate antagonists have been conflated into one for the sake of dramatic clarity.
For example, Newt kills an officer who hunts him in the film, just as the real Newt Knight is thought to have killed McLemore. A Confederate officer did order the hanging of boys who had been a part of the company, but this time it was Lowry.
I felt it would be inappropriate to ascribe the actions of one man to the character of another, so I have conflated these acts into a single character and used a fictional name accordingly.
Birmingham, it has been pointed out to me, is an industrial town created for its proximity to iron ore, lime, and water—the main ingredients for making steel.
It was founded in , though the scene in question is set in I felt it was important to personify the cotton economy which drove the Civil war, and the plantation culture which enforced and fought to perpetuate slavery.
One cannot understand the Civil War or the slaveocracy without understanding the absolute power of the planter.
Eakins embodies all of those things and though he is not based on a single individual, he is based on many. Testimonies to the Southern Claims Commission expose the summary manner in which young men were conscripted into the Confederate military.
Both biographical examples particular to Newt and other widespread historical accounts of the era point to numerous abuses of the tax-in-kind system.
Numerous letters in the The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion detail incidents of mixed-race bands engaging Confederate forces.
Slave owners affixed a variety of iron collars around the necks of slaves who attempted escape, as a punishment, a hindrance to such future efforts, and an example to other slaves.
Some, like the one depicted on the slave Wilson Chinn in the historical photograph shown, had upward prongs that would catch in bushes in addition to making it all but impossible for the wearer to sleep lying on the ground.
Other collars incorporated bells that, like those worn by cows in the field, would give notice of any movement. Several independent sources including Newt himself cite the threat posed to runaways by paddy rollers:.
Ethel Knight, Thomas J. Knight, and other historians all cite the formation of the Knight Company in their respective books.
According to Victoria Bynum, 14 separate battles were fought between his company and Confederate forces. Thomas J. Additional sources corroborating the Knight Company rebellion in The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion include letters such as:.
Additional sources further corroborate the dangers a slave might face in striving to attain literacy. The ages of the Coleman boys who were hanged by Colonel Lowry are estimated at anywhere from from 12 to Victoria Bynum has confirmed that Noble Coleman, aged 12 or 13 in , disappeared from census records after the reputed hangings.
Supporting independent memoirs, letters, and interviews are cited below. The two citations below are significant.
It is the paradise of deserters who flee from their own Swamps. In fact, the very next line describes it as a paradise of deserters who flee from their swamps.
In alone, with most of the refinements yet in the future, cotton brought seven hundred thousand dollars of income to its planters in just the region around Natchez.
That meant an annual income averaging more than seven hundred dollars for each of the 9, citizens of the area, a phenomenal sum by frontier standards, and higher even than most areas in the affluent Northeast Half a century later would see Natchez itself inhabited by more millionaires than any other city in the nation, all of them either by cotton or by trading with those who planted it.
If there was one lesson to be learned from the whole history of the settlement of the southern half of the continent, it was that the first men in one generation to reach the newest edge of the wilderness became the landed aristocrats, the wealthy and influential, of the next.
Those who came after them often scrambled for smaller and smaller shares of what remained, and having before them so visibly the example of the planter lords, decided instead to try again by moving farther west Places like Natchez and Mobile and Washington especially put lie to the notion of southwestern indifference to money.
Natchez in time would come to house more millionaires per capita than any other city in the United States. An institution that had been in decline throught the eighteenth century in the Upper South was revivified in the lower South at terrible cost; by , there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the United States.
The Slave Barons looked behind them and saw to their dismay that there could be no backward step. The slavery of the new Cotton Kingdom in the nineteenth century must either die or conquer a nation—it could not hesitate or pause.
It was an industrial system built on ignorance, force and the cotton plant. The slaves must be curbed with an iron hand.
A moment of relaxation and lo! And slavery had made revenge and ambition one. Such a system could not compete with intelligence, nor with individual freedom, nor with miscellaneous and care-demanding crops.
It could not divide territory with these things; to do so meant economic death and the sudden, perhaps revolutionary upheaval of a whole social system.
This the South saw as it looked backward in the years from to Then its bolder vision pressed the gloom ahead, and dreamed a dazzling dream of empire.
In , the states of Mississippi and Louisiana produced about twenty million pounds of cotton. By , the comparable figure was million pounds.
And of course cotton and slavery went together. Throughout the nineteenth century, prices in the slave market varied directly with those in the cotton market—no surprise in an economy where planters reckoned the productivity of labor in cotton rather than in currency.
The census of recorded 69, slaves in Louisiana and 32, in Mississippi. Twenty years later, the respective numbers were , and , And twenty years after that, there were , slaves in Louisiana and , in Mississippi.
The cotton produced by slaves in the Mississippi Valley made its way to market through the port of New Orleans.
Indeed, as the cotton economy grew, so too did river traffic on the Mississippi. In , twenty-one steamboats arrived in New Orleans carrying around 70, tons of freight.
Slave property was mobile, self-supporting, more liquid than any store of value short of sterling bills, and perhaps the most attractive kind of collateral in the entire Western world.
If [planters] could keep possession of their slaves, they could take advantage of those elements of enslaved property, especially if new geographical expansion convinced investors to lend their credit—as they always had before—to entrepreneurially minded planters.
No mere war among men, the bloody battles fought in Civil War Jones County emerged from economic, religious, and social strife that had long simmered between rival families.
Disparate, unorganized resistance to local authority exploded into full-scale rebellion by late , when a number of Jones County deserters organized and armed themselves into a deadly fighting force.
Many more local men were absent from their Confederate units, however, than joined the band. The 7th Battalion, Mississippi Infantry, from which most Knight band members deserted, reported many of its soldiers as AWOL at some point, but most men rejoined the Confederate Army when threatened with arrest.
In contrast, those who joined the Knight Company intended desertion to be permanent. His own memories of the war, shared in with journalist Meigs Frost of the New Orleans Item, suggest as much.
Powell father-in-law of Jasper Collins , defeated the pro-secession candidate, merchant-slaveholder John M. Baylis, to become a delegate to the Mississippi state convention.
Powell then betrayed his antisecessionist constituents. On January 9, , after swift defeat of several ordinances that offered alternatives to secession, he joined the overwhelming majority of delegates and voted to secede from the Union.
The rebels passed a law conscripting everybody between 18 and They just came around with a squad of soldiers [and] took you.
To secure the proper police of the country, one person, either as agent, owner or overseer on each plantation on which one white person is required to be kept by the laws or ordinances of any State, and on which there is no white male adult not liable to do military service, and in States having no such law, one person as agent, owner or overseer, on each plantation of twenty negroes, and on which there is no white male adult not liable to military service: And furthermore, for additional police for every twenty negroes on two or more plantations, within five miles of each other, and each having less than twenty negroes, and on which there is no white male adult not liable to military duty, one person, being the oldest of the owners or overseers on such plantations; are hereby exempted from military service in the armies of the Confederate States.
Jasper Collins was a close friend of mine. When he heard about that law, he was in camp, in the Confederate army. He threw down his gun and started home.
So I started back home. Honorable Sir … We are organizing a Company here which we think will be completed in 2 or 3 weeks, and we have a Vigilance Committee of 15 connected with the Company, and our Consitution makes it the duty of this Committee to ferrit out all disloyal person in our bounds.
This Vigilance Committee, have summoned him to come before them and he will not do it … Please advise us—at your earliest convenience.
The McLeod brothers have been notorious for using abolition sentiments for a year or two. And since the secession of our State from the Federal compact, have been continually abusing the south, wishing Abe Lincoln a final success.
They formed a special committee to wait on four of the McLeods, notifying them to appear before the committee on 8th June. They were examined separately.
Proof against them all will give you a little of the evidence. Allen McLeod has on several occasions swore that he would not fight for the south.
Peter McLeod compares the negroes to the children of Israel … has been talking to R. The Proof against the other two brothers about the same as above.
He now refuses to do either. I am chairman of the Committee and feeling a little delicacy in resorting to extreme measure however great the crime may be without some high authority.
Have taken the liberty of asking from you a word of council. Please answer soon as our next meeting will be on the 8th July.
It has come to a pretty pass that the freedom of the press must be denied to any portion of the people because the majority is believed to be against them.
Albert Knight, the father of Newt Knight and oldest son of Jackie, more than any of his siblings followed an economic path different from that of his father.
In fact, however, Albert Knight was a barely self-sufficient farmer who raised corn and a small surplus of hogs. With much greater accuracy, Knight descendant Kenneth Welch later described Albert as a shoemaker and tanner who was once given a slave by his father, but who did not keep that slave.
Another Knight descendant, Earle Knight, went even further, claiming that Albert rebuked the Confederacy before his death in January Earle speculated later that Albert and Mason might even have opposed slavery, since none of their children, including Newt, owned slaves.
In the final analysis, there is no evidence that either Albert or Mason, his wife, opposed slavery. Nevertheless, this non-slaveholding branch of the Knight family provided a distinct contrast with most other Knight households.
Graves, whose own grandfather owned ten slaves, made clear that his family disdained men like Newt. Newton Knight grew up in a home much plainer than that of his grandfather [a slaveowner], with his cutlery, books, and house slaves.
His father Albert chose to belong to the yeoman rather than planter class, supporting his family as a tanner and a single-handed farmer.
Born in in Georgia, Albert was a grown man when his family arrived in the Piney Woods, and by , he had established enough of a stake to sign his own name to the petition that led to the formation of Jones County.
While his siblings received gifts and deeds of chattel from Jackie, Albert did not. The Knight family schism was reflective of larger rifts taking place all across Jones County, and Mississippi as a whole, during the secession crisis.
The most common division was between rich and poor: it was a state of stark economic differences. On the eve of the Civil War, Jones County was an island of poverty in a sea of cotton- and slave-based wealth.
Economically, the Piney Woods was as stagnant as its swamp water: it had the poorest soil and poorest people in the state.
Sir, The undersigned beg leave to ask of you the true interpretation of the law, relative to exemptions from military duty. Those owning twenty slaves and more … are they entirely exempt or are they only exempt from conscription?
Still being liable as militia in the county, they claim to be exempt all together, for all have claimed, and have been discharged from the service who was drafted as minute men that have twenty Negroes and are now at home.
Our understanding is that we are fighting for equality and States Rights, claiming that all free men are equal, but does this look like equality?
And yet we who have but little or nothing at stake but honor are called on to do the fighting and to do the hard drudgery and bear the burden and brunt of the battle while the rich, and would be rich, are shirking and dodging in every way possible to shun the dangers of war, unless they can get an office that will give them a big name and that will pay well that they may then be seen to strut about the towns and villages to show their brass buttons and blade or get in some commissary, or quarter masters department or anywhere else in the world, but in the ranks as privates, where they ought to be fighting for their property.
Now we admit some men of means are acting nobly but they are scarce. Generally speaking all the help the destitute get come from the poor or common people and not from those who are able.
And as the people, in regards to patriotism, we claim to be as true as any men and will obey laws of our country as faithful citizens, but when we go our rich neighbors who are exempt will be apt to go too.
Or give in advance before we leave to the destitute such amount as we think aught to give: and besides they will have to keep their Negroes home on Sundays out of the swamps stealing poor peoples fat hogs as they are now doing in this settlement.
Please answer the above questions in regard to exemptions either privately or through the Mississippian newspaper and confer or give out favor on the community generally and more especially on the undersigned.
Platt John A. When the southern states was all taking a vote on whether to secede, we took the vote in Jones County, too. There was only about folks in Jones County then.
All but about seven of them voted to stay in the union. But the Jones County delegate went up to the state convention at Jackson, and he voted to secede with the rest of the county delegates.
It would a been kinder unhealthy for him, I reckon. Then next thing we knew they were conscripting us.
They just come around with a squad of soldiers 'n' took you. They put me in the Seventh Mississippi Battalion as a hospital orderly.
I went around giving the sick soldiers blue mass and calomel and castor oil and quinine. That was about all the medicine we had then.
It got shorter later. The sheer potential horror of the hospital experience prompted hundreds of soldiers and civilians to view the field hospital as ghoulish ground.
Gorman, a member of the Fourth North Carolina, felt somehow that Mother Nature herself should be weeping.
Perhaps the most distressing aspect of death for many Civil War Americans was that thousands of young men were dying away from home.
Yet for all the horrors of combat, soldiers dreaded dying of disease even more. The war, Union surgeon general William A.
A wave of epidemic disease—measles, mumps, and smallpox—swept through the armies of volunteers in the early months of war, then yielded precedence to the intractable camp illnesses: diarrhea and dysentery, typhoid and malaria.
The scenes in and around field hospitals during an engagement were quite grim. Those hollow-eyed and sunken cheeked sufferers, shot in every conceivable part of the body; some shrieking, and calling upon their mothers; some laughing the hard, cackling laugh of the sufferer without hope, and some cursing like troopers, and some writhing and groaning as their wounds were being bandaged and dressed.
I saw a man … who had lost his right hand, another his leg, then another whose head was laid open, and I could see his brain thump, and another with his under jaw shot off; in fact, wounded in every manner possible.
We have nothing arranged in the hospital, but it is filled with sick; many of them are on the floors.
One is used as a dining-room, sitting-room, and for making toddies, eggnogs, etc. A number of the officers we had at the Springs have followed us here, and they eat at our table for the present.
They are to have a hospital set apart for them, as it is thought a better plan than having distinctions made where the privates are in the matter of rooms, and eating at separate tables.
The ordeal of a Confederate private illustrates what happened to a typical wounded soldier. On 21 July Private J. As he was marching forward, a bullet entered his right thigh.
The bullet tore through his leg, shattering the femur; he immediately dropped to the ground. The assistant surgeon of the 4th Virginia wrapped a dressing around his leg.
The femur had been completely separated so that his right leg below the wound dangled uselessly. Hurrying to catch up to his advancing regiment, the doctor left Wolf lying alone on the battlefield.
Passersby carried him to Manassas, where he waited all day for transportation to Richmond. He was placed upon the floor of a boxcar.
The train moved very slowly southward, but the two ends of the crushed bone rubbed together every time the car swayed.
Upon arrival in Richmond, Wolf was placed in a small hospital in the city. He was fed and dressing changed. In order to make room for more wounded expected from the battlefield, Wolf was carried back to the railroad station and shipped to Charlottesville.
He was admitted to a ward that had been a classroom of the University of Virginia. Edward Warren examined Wolf; smelly pus oozed from the tissues through holes in the skin.
Warren explained to Wolf that he had to amputate his leg above the site of the femur fracture. He informed the solder that high femur amputations were usually fatal.
Wolf was anesthetized with chloroform and his leg was amputated on 21 August ; he died the following day.
Some of the wounded officers actually checked into the Willard Hotel as ordinary hotel guests and sought medical help from civilian physicians.
As already related, the trip from the Confederate regimental hospital to Richmond was not an easy one. The helpless wounded non-officers were exposed to the elements and suffered hunger as well as the discomfort of their undressed wounds.
The Congress of the Confederate States of America do enact, That from and after the passage of this act, all white men, residents of the Confederate States, between the ages of seventeen and fifty, shall be in the military service of the Confederate States for the war.
April 1, Full Review…. September 26, Rating: 3. August 22, Rating: 2. August 22, Full Review…. View All Critic Reviews Nov 12, Sometimes in a enervatingly slowly pace, this film tells a pretty fascinating, untold story.
There are moments of brilliance, but while some parts drag out forever, others feel rushed. In the end, a lot of developments are merely covered in text captions.
Overall a decent attempt that could have had even more of an emotional impact with a more condensed script. McConaughey is not to blame, he delivers the goods, as always.
Jens S Super Reviewer. Nov 11, You know, I'm gonna repurpose a phrase I attributed to Winston Churchill in my review of The Hatred, a terrible movie.
Well, like I said, I'd like to repurpose that to fit this movie in saying that the only good confederate soldier is a dead confederate soldier.
Talk about a cancer to the country as a whole and the revisionist history some in the south still engage in to this day in order to support their confederacy.
I suppose that's neither here nor there, my political leanings are irrelevant when it comes to this movie. Having said all of that, however, this is definitely an interesting movie that tells a worthy story about Newton Knight, a rebellious confederate deserter, along with fellow hardworking people and escaped slaves in order to, basically, be free of the shackles from both the confederates and the union.
With that said, and I know this is gonna upset some of you 'the south will rise again' assholes out there, the fact of the matter is that Newton and his group of people, fight mostly against confederate forces and the confederate soldiers and this lieutenant are treated as the big bad of the movie.
The union really aren't featured as characters, they're an ancillary presence, only mentioned in conversations and never actually seen outside of the first scene in the movie.
Though the union plays a small part in some of the narrative proceedings, like in the aftermath of the emancipation proclamation.
At first you're like 'what's the point of all this? These are known as Black Codes. They disguised slavery as 'apprenticeship', because that's how low these fucks can get.
They pass laws prettying that are, basically, slavery with a prettier name. Regardless, the point is that no matter how much Newton fought and no matter how much he managed to change things, they have still stayed the same for generations.
Racism is as rampant as ever, thanks to the current dumbfuck troglodyte the US calls its president. Anyway, I get the point they're trying to highlight, showcasing how things aren't that much different in the s, in Mississippi, than they were in the s and 70s.
But I think that they manage to achieve that with the post-emancipation proclamation stuff, which leads to white unrest in the south that, eventually, leads to the rise of KKK.
I get the need to show that racism is being felt generations after Newt's passing, but the scenes with Davis Knight his grandson didn't amount to much to me.
With that said, I do think that there are flaws in the movie that, ultimately, end up dulling the impact of Newton's incredibly worthy story.
I will admit that the best parts of the film are those in which Newton rallies his fellow followers in taking the fight to the confederacy and how his leadership, mostly, unites everybody.
There's still some of the old guard, of course, which leads to some unrest and unease between them and the black people in the group. The group, which starts out very modestly but starts growing in size and power as the film progresses, eventually comes to control three counties in Southeast Mississippi if I remember correctly.
Perhaps one of the issues I had with how this revolt of Newt's followers against the confederacy was portrayed was how it felt like they were just pranking each other.
What I mean by that is that there doesn't seem to be any real rhyme or reason to what they were doing. Sometimes you're thrown into battles between Newt's group and the confederacy and you're literally given no context as to what led to this battle.
Hell, sometimes prank videos on YouTube have more context to explain this prank than this movie did, at times.
It's not like this for every battle, but it is like this for some of them. Another issue I had is that, naturally, real life came rolling through this war with the aforementioned emancipation of slaves, the movie just sort of shifts focus quite abruptly.
What had first been a, mostly, historical 'war' movie, if I can say that, turns to a more political drama exploring the aftermath and how freedmen were, after a while, forbidden to own land and slave owners were allowed back in business if they swore allegiance to the union.
I'm not saying that the more political stuff is bad but, again, I do think it is a fairly jarring shift.
I get that life can be incredibly abrupt, but this is a film, they could have done a far better job at transitioning to that, instead of doing it so forcefully.
With that said, however, I do feel that this is still a fairly good movie with a great cast, headed by a committed performance by Matthew McConaughey.
Mahershala Ali is also very good in this movie, but I just wish the movie would have explored their friendship on a deeper level than they did.
Mahershala Ali is so good that he can make his role memorable, but I just wish they would have explored that friendship, whether Moses himself is a composite character or not.
I legitimately did like this movie and it's got an incredible true story at its core, it's just a shame that the movie, whether through scripting, pacing or whatever, dulls some of that impact.
I'm not gonna complain much, however, given that I thought this was still a good movie and I would recommend it if you're into this sort of story.
It's not gonna be for everybody, particularly piece of shit racists, but I enjoyed this movie and, given that this is only the second good movie of the month, I welcome the bump in quality.
Jesse O Super Reviewer. Mar 29, The film follows the life of Newt Knight, a medic in the Confederate Army who deserted to protect his hometown from looters and ended up leading a rebellion made up of deserters and runaway slaves.
McConaughey gives an excellent performance and brings a lot of charisma to the film. However, the storytelling is a bit problematic, as it takes on too much; skipping around a lot and working in a subplot about Newt's great-grandson.
However, the production values are especially good, giving an authentic look and feel for the time period. And the drama is really intense and exciting.
Free State of Jones has a few problems, but overall it's a compelling film about a fascinating piece of American history. Dann M Super Reviewer.
Jan 24, The film isn't perfect and some of the supporting cast let the film drag at times. The court room snippets didn't work and often left little to the overall film, that battle deserves a film on its own merits.
I can't see why this was released in summer, the film died horribly when other films successfully limped along. The strong areas work so well and the aftermath of the battle for Jones is heartbreaking.
There is a great film here but its smothered by unneeded influence by the director Ross. This deserves an audience. Brendan N Super Reviewer.
See all Audience reviews. Newton Knight: From this day forward we declare the land of Pascagoula swamp to be a free state of jones.
She thinks he relished being a soldier. Victoria Bynum traces the origins and legacy of the Jones County uprising from the American Revolution to the modern civil rights movement.
In bridging the gap between the legendary and the real Free State of Jones, she shows how the legend reveals a great deal about the South's transition from slavery to segregation.
Returning home, they found their wives struggling to keep up the farms and feed the children. A Confederate colonel named William N.
In early , Knight was captured for desertion and possibly tortured. After Vicksburg fell, in July , there was a mass exodus of deserters from the Confederate Army, including many from Jones and the surrounding counties.
The following month, Confederate Maj. Amos McLemore arrived in Ellisville and began hunting them down with soldiers and hounds.
By October, he had captured more than deserters, and exchanged threatening messages with Newt Knight, who was back on his ruined farm on the Jasper County border.
Soon afterward, there was a mass meeting of deserters from four Piney Woods counties. They organized themselves into a company called the Jones County Scouts and unanimously elected Knight as their captain.
Joel E. Welborn, their former commanding officer in the Seventh Mississippi, later recalled. In March , Lt. Confederate Capt. Wirt Thompson reported that they were now a thousand strong and flying the U.
That spring was the high-water mark of the rebellion against the Rebels. Polk ordered two battle-hardened regiments into southeast Mississippi, under the command of Piney Woods native Col.
Robert Lowry. With hanging ropes and packs of vicious, manhunting dogs, they subdued the surrounding counties and then moved into the Free State of Jones.
They were deep in the swamps, being supplied with food and information by local sympathizers and slaves, most notably Rachel.
After Lowry left, proclaiming victory, Knight and his men emerged from their hide-outs, and once again, began threatening Confederate officials and agents, burning bridges and destroying railroads to thwart the Rebel Army, and raiding food supplies intended for the troops.
Three months later, the Confederacy fell. In , the filmmaker Gary Ross was at Universal Studios, discussing possible projects, when a development executive gave him a brief, one-page treatment about Newton Knight and the Free State of Jones.
Ross was instantly intrigued, both by the character and the revelation of Unionism in Mississippi, the most deeply Southern state of all.
The first thing he did was take a canoe trip down the Leaf River, to get a feel for the area. Then he started reading, beginning with the five now six books about Newton Knight.
That led into broader reading about other pockets of Unionism in the South. Then he started into Reconstruction. He was giving me no quarter.
Ross worked his way slowly and carefully through the books, and went back with more questions. Foner answered none of them, just gave him another reading list.
Ross read those books too, and went back again with burning questions. You ought to think about studying this. I tell people this movie is my academic midlife crisis.
In Hollywood, he says, the executives were extremely supportive of his research, and the script that he finally wrestled out of it, but they balked at financing the film.
So I went and did Hunger Games, but always keeping an eye on this. Matthew McConaughey thought the Free State of Jones script was the most exciting Civil War story he had ever read, and knew immediately that he wanted to play Newt Knight.
He did so deliberately, and to the hell with the consequences. I really kind of marveled at him. The third act of the film takes place in Mississippi after the Civil War.
There was a phase during early Reconstruction when blacks could vote, and black officials were elected for the first time. Then former Confederates violently took back control of the state and implemented a kind of second slavery for African-Americans.
Once again disenfranchised, and terrorized by the Klan, they were exploited through sharecropping and legally segregated. He was hired by the Reconstruction government to free black children from white masters who were refusing to emancipate them.
His commitment to these issues never waned. Much as Ross wanted to shoot the movie in Jones County, there were irresistible tax incentives to film across the border in Louisiana, and some breathtaking cypress swamps where various cast members were infested with the tiny mites known as chiggers.
Nevertheless, Ross and McConaughey spent a lot of time in Jones County, persuading many county residents to appear in the film.
On the website of Jones County Rosin Heels, the local chapter of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, an announcement warned that the film will portray Newt Knight as a civil rights activist and a hero.
Doug Jefcoate was listed as camp commander. I found him listed as a veterinarian in Laurel, and called up, saying I was interested in his opinions on Newt Knight.
Come to the animal hospital tomorrow. The receptionist led me into a small examining room and closed both its doors. I stood there for a few long minutes, with a shiny steel table and, on the wall, a Bible quotation.
Then Jefcoate walked in, a middle-aged man with sandy hair, glasses and a faraway smile. He was carrying two huge, leather-bound volumes of his family genealogy.
He gave me ten minutes on his family tree, and when I interrupted to ask about the Rosin Heels and Newt Knight, he stopped, looked puzzled, and began to chuckle.
He laughed uproariously, then settled down and gave me his thoughts. Cox, an animated year-old radio and television announcer with a long white beard, welcomed me into a small office crammed with video equipment and Confederate memorabilia.
All he had so far was the credits Executive Producer Carl Ford and the introductory banjo music.
And like all poor, white, ignorant trash, he was in it for himself. Some people are far too enamored of the idea that he was Martin Luther King, and these are the same people who believe the War Between the States was about slavery, when nothing could be further from the truth.
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