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Loading... The State of Jonesby Sally Jenkins
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. 2   sjmccreary | Sep 1, 2009 |  Incredible and appalling. This reader had no conception of life within the confederacy or that there were any in the South who were opposed to secession. That the South could continue to fight major battles while outright insurrection within was occuring is amazing. Worse, yet, is that the losers continued as before. (  ) DeaconBernie | Aug 28, 2009 | Read many books on the American civil war and you'll read about the battles, the generals, the slaves, the politics, and the causes (justified or not) for succession. But careful scrutiny will show that many white southerners not only opposed secession, but traveled across state borders to fight for the Union. Many others would desert the army to become guerrilla fighters within the Confederacy. In Jones County, Mississippi, one Union sympathizer would take up such a calling, leading a group of men known as the Jones County Scouts in armed insurrection. That man was Newton (Newt) Knight, and this is his story. Born in 1837 near the Leaf River in Jones County, Mississippi, Newt Knight was the grandson of a slave owner, but like his father had chosen not to follow in his footsteps. Enlisting in Company F of the 7th Battalion, Mississippi Infantry, Newt Knight avoided the inevitability of the draft and was thereby able to choose with whom he would serve and a role that would not involve killing fellow Unionists. With problems on the home front however, and the passing of the "Twenty-Negro Law", he would eventually, after a crises of conscience, desert like many of his friends, crossing 200 miles of backwoods country. Hiding from confederate patrols, receiving help from former slaves, he would eventually find his way home and into the history books. Captured, impressed back into service, and sent to Vicksburg; he would desert once more, to form the Jones County Scouts; and as their leader be suspected of the murder of Confederate Major Amos McLemore who was leading a search for deserters in Knight's county. Knight and his Scouts would go on to so effectively hamper the confederates in the lower third of Mississippi that news of his efforts would reach the president. With little to no opposition Jones County would (legitimately or not) 'secede' from the confederacy as the "Free State of Jones". Knight flouted conventions in other and more significant ways too - by openly living with a former slave, Rachel, with whom he would bare several children and eventually marry after separating from his first wife, Serena. Newt Knight survived the war, and after a brief stint working for the Republicans, and with threats against his life, would retire to his small farm; a recluse amidst the dramatic political and social swings of the post-civil war era. Newt Knight died at the age of 85, in 1922, of natural causes. In The State of Jones, Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer bring Newt Knight's incredible story to life using interviews, contemporary records, and court transcripts. And where records or educated conjecture fall short, the authors effectively use a range of relevant sources to paint a picture of the times and events through which Knight lived. Superbly researched, Jenkins and Stauffer extend Knight's story beyond his civil war exploits to show how, even in victory, increasing racial tensions caused his white and black family to split apart, while his great grandson would be charged in 1948 for marrying a white woman. Highly recommended. (  )4 petermc | Aug 4, 2009 | There is a part of the history of the American Civil War that is not very well-known, that is rarely taught in the schools. It is the story of southerners who believed in the Union, who not only refused to fight for the Confederacy, but actively fought against it. Some did so by joining the Union forces, others did so by engaging in guerrilla warfare. The rural county of Jones in Mississippi was a stronghold of men who opposed secession. Some were staunch Unionists. Some were anti-slavery. Some believed it was a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. One such man was Newton Knight, and this is his story. Newton Knight was the grandson of Jackie Knight, one of the early settlers in this part of Mississippi. By the time war came, he was "merely a rich man in a state full of tycoons", but the owner of several hundred acres of cotton and rice, and of a couple of dozen slaves. But his son, Albert, Newton's father, unlike Jackie's other children, refused to own any slaves, and led a modest life as a shoemaker and tanner. This split in the family would echo down through the years and the generations. When the Civil War began, Newton, like many others, was forced into service in the Confederate Army. After Vicksburg, he, like many others, deserted. He spent the rest of the war with a band of like-minded souls, fighting the Confederacy in Jones County. The book does not, however, end with Lee's surrender, because the war really didn't end there. There was a period when men like Knight were in the ascendancy, when it looked as though the Union had won the war. But it soon became apparent that, in Mississippi at least, the South had won. National politics meant that the federal government soon declined to enforce the rule of law, and ex-Confederates came to power through murder and intimidation at the polls, leaving a legacy of racial injustice that still haunts this country today. There's another part of Newton's story that's told here, the story of his love for a black woman, a woman named Rachel who was owned by his grandfather. Newton was married to a woman named Serena, by whom he had several children, but he also had children by Rachel. Now, it wasn't unusual for a white man to have children by a slave woman. What was unusual was that theirs was a true consensual relationship. He viewed her as his wife (the authors suggest that later conversions of some members of the family to Mormonism might have been caused, at least in part, by that faith's then recognition of plural marriage), he recognized and helped to raise and support his children by her, he made sure she had financial independence. One would like to know what it was that caused Albert (and, through him, his children) to be not only opposed to slavery, but a friend to African-Americans. I cannot, however, fault the authors for being unable to answer this question; it is, at this remove, likely unanswerable. I was, for the most part, riveted by this book. If I have any quibble with it, it is that in the early part it jumps around a bit too much for my taste. However, the authors combine serious scholarship and research (among other things, they located and interviewed descendants of Knight) with good storytelling. Civil War buffs will appreciate the vivid descriptions of the battle of Corinth, the siege of Vicksburg, and the guerrilla bands. About the only folks who won't like this book are those who don't want their preconceived ideas about the south and the Confederacy disturbed. (For another story of Union sympathizers in the South, this one fiction, I highly recommend Sharyn McCrumb's Ghost Riders, one of her "Ballad Series".) 2 lilithcat | Jun 30, 2009 | This is a dark and unrelenting book about a dark and unrelenting time. All wars are brutal, but the Civil War was particularly so, and this book doesn't stint on making one understand its horrors. One of the co-authors of the book, John Stauffer, wrote the book Giants: the Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, which I read and thoroughly enjoyed. State of Jones is centered on the story of one man, Newton Knight, who was a poor farmer in Jones county, Mississippi. Knight's grandfather was a fairly wealthy slave owner, but his eldest son and all twelve of the son's children refused to own slaves. This may have come from being Primitive Baptists, who believed that all souls were equal. Knight was not in favor of succession when it happened, but was conscripted into the Confederate army and fought, but deserted a couple of times. There were probably a couple of points that broke his will to fight... one was when the Confederate government passed a bill that those who owned twenty slaves or more were exempt from fighting. Another was the siege of Vicksburg, which he endured and survived. Moreover his family may have been in dire straits, as many of the wives of soldiers were close to starvation. After Knight escaped for the last time and returned to Jones County, he was forced to live in the local swamps, which he knew intimately. He wasn't the only one. The swamps were full of soldiers who had deserted, and runaway slaves. They all helped each other, and Knight became the leader of a pro-Union band of soldiers who ran a guerilla operation for the rest of the war. At one time most of the lower third of Mississippi was out of effecftive Confederate control. The partisans of the free state of Jones were poorer yeoman farmers who didn't own slaves, and resented the slave-owning aristocracy. During the war, Knight met a slave named Rachel, and they were as close to married as they could be, given that he was already married. He continued to live with and have children with both women until Rachel's death. Sometime after that his white wife left him. The Confederates lost the war, the land was devastated, but they determined they would win the peace, and they did. By the late 1879s the Northern populace, including President Grant, had become apathethic and no longer willing to fight. The Democrats took over by a reign of terror that didn't let up until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. The Ku Klux Klan were the terrorists, and blacks and Republicans were murdered, including by lynching, for the crimes of voting, seeking social equality, or for speaking up for their rights. How Knight survived is a mystery, except that he always had a pistol and a shotgun with him and people knew it. He and his large mixed-race family became socially isolated, as even his former fellow soldiers couldn't abide his domestic arrangements. The book takes one story and through it tells some difficult truths about Southern history. Fisrt of all, it explodes the myth of the solid South. There were many pro-Union Southerners. Moreover the Southern revenge and the regaining of power were not a win for democracy. The former slave owners won back power by terror pure and simple, like many of the worst dictators in history. I have an odd reaction to books about the Civil War and the South. I am a white woman born in the South who has spent most of my life here, an for most of that time, I've hated the bigotry and despised Southern romanticism about the Old South... something my mother was prone to. This book in a way gives me a sense of coming home, knowing that there were Southerners who repudiated slavery and even a few who believed in the equality of all. It also sheds an interesting light on General Sherman, Sherman's brutality in war was born of the conviction that making the war one of maximum destruction would shorten it. His opinon about war was summed up in the following quote: "Its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentation of distant families." (p. 166) The book is as well written as I expected from Stauffer. It has good footnotes, not obrusive, and a good bibliography. My copy was an advanced reader's copy, and is missing features I hope will be in the final book, including an index, maps, and photographs. Exvellent book of history about a brutal time and place whose effects still reverberate in our culture. ( )1 reannon | Jun 2, 2009 | 
 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?... 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.  This sounds like a gripping tale, but it falls flat in the hands of Washington Post reporter Sally Jenkins and Harvard professor John Stauffer. Taking a bare framework of documented evidence, they upholster it heavily with supposition, presumption and contrived scenes based on the experiences of people who had little or nothing to do with Knight. The result is a discursive kind of pseudohistory. Ms. Jenkins, a journalist, and Mr. Stauffer, a historian, have brought fresh attention to a little-known and interesting sidebar of Civil War history...It would have helped the authors’ argument if the book were simply better organized—the narrative is often difficult to follow—and if they had been more comfortable with Civil War history.  [Jenkins and Stauffer] relate Newt Knight’s story in suitably dramatic and often flamboyant fashion.  The State of Jones is an entertaining, informative book about a courageous group of Southerners clearly ahead of their time. It offers a refreshing look at the issues surrounding the Civil War, and some delightful surprises for even the most knowledgeable history buff.
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0385525931, Hardcover)Book DescriptionNew York Times bestselling author Sally Jenkins and distinguished Harvard professor John Stauffer mine a nearly forgotten piece of Civil War history and strike gold in this surprising account of the only Southern county to secede from the Confederacy. The State of Jones is a true story about the South during the Civil War—the real South. Not the South that has been mythologized in novels and movies, but an authentic, hardscrabble place where poor men were forced to fight a rich man’s war for slavery and cotton. In Jones County, Mississippi, a farmer named Newton Knight led his neighbors, white and black alike, in an insurrection against the Confederacy at the height of the Civil War. Knight’s life story mirrors the little-known story of class struggle in the South—and it shatters the image of the Confederacy as a unified front against the Union. This riveting investigative account takes us inside the battle of Corinth, where thousands lost their lives over less than a quarter mile of land, and to the dreadful siege of Vicksburg, presenting a gritty picture of a war in which generals sacrificed thousands through their arrogance and ignorance. Off the battlefield, the Newton Knight story is rich in drama as well. He was a man with two loves: his wife, who was forced to flee her home simply to survive, and an ex-slave named Rachel, who, in effect, became his second wife. It was Rachel who cared for Knight during the war when he was hunted by the Confederates, and, later, when members of the Knight clan sought revenge for the disgrace he had brought upon the family name. Working hand in hand with John Stauffer, distinguished chair and professor of the History of American Civilization at Harvard University, Sally Jenkins has made the leap from preeminent sportswriter to a historical writer endowed with the accuracy, drive, and passion of Doris Kearns Goodwin. The result is Civil War history at its finest. Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer on State of Jones
The recovery of the life of a Mississippi farmer who fought for his country is an important story. The fact that southern Unionists existed, and in very large numbers, is largely unknown to many Americans, who grew up with textbooks that perpetuated the myth of the Confederacy as a heroic Lost Cause, with its romanticized vision of the antebellum South. Some historians have even palpably sympathized with Confederate cavaliers while minimizing—and robbing of credit—the actions of southerners who remained loyal to the Union at desperate cost. One would never know that the majority of white Southerners had opposed secession, and that many Southern whites fought for the Union. In Tennessee, for example, somewhere around 31,000 white men joined the Union army. In Arkansas more than 8,000 men eventually served in Union regiments. And in Mississippi, Newton Knight and his band of guerillas launched a virtual insurrection against the Confederacy in Jefferson Davis’ own home state. “There’s lots of ways I’d rather die than being scared to death,” Knight said, and it was a defining statement. At almost every stage of his life this yeoman from the hill country of Jones County, Miss., took courageous stands. The grandson of a slave owner who never owned slaves, he voted against secession, deserted from the Confederate Army into which he was unwillingly impressed, and formed a band called the Jones County Scouts devoted to undermining the Rebel cause locally. Working with runaway slaves and fellow Unionists and Federal soldiers caught behind enemy lines, Knight conducted such an effective running gun battle that at the height of the war he and his allies controlled the entire lower third of the state. This "southern Yankee,” as one Rebel general termed him, remained unconquered until the end of the war. His resistance hampered the Confederate Army’s ability to operate, forced it to conduct a third-front war at home, and eroded its morale and will to fight. Knight also burst free of racial barriers and forged bonds of alliance with blacks that were unmatched even by Northern abolitionists. He fought as ardently as any man for racial equality during the War, and after, during the terrifying days of Reconstruction, when his life was, if anything, even more in danger. He lived with an ex-slave named Rachel, fathering several children with her (but he never divorced his Caucasian wife, Serena), and worked on behalf of U.S. Grant’s Republican administration and against the nascent Ku Klux Klan, and envisioned a world that would only begin to be implemented a century later. Moreover, he operated in an inverted moral landscape in which fealty to country was labeled traitorous, and kinship with blacks was considered morally repugnant. He survived only because he could reload a shotgun before the smoke cleared. As an Alabama Unionist told a Congressional committee in 1866 in testifying about the little appreciated service of southern loyalists, “You have no idea of the strength of principle and devotion these people exhibited towards the national government.” —Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer (John Stauffer photo © Greg Martin; Sally Jenkins photo © Nicole Bengiveno)(retrieved from Amazon Sat, 27 Jun 2009 22:15:12 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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Wikipedia in English (1)
Newton Knight is the most famous Civil War hero you’ve never heard of, because according to Mississippi legend he betrayed not only the Confederacy but his race as well. In 1863 Knight, a poor farmer from Jones County Mississippi, deserted the Confederate Army—and began fighting for the Union—after the battle of Vicksburg. It was rumored he even started a separate Unionist government, The Free State of Jones, and for two years he battled the Confederacy with a vengeance that solidified his legend. During his life Knight was hardly regarded as a proper soldier by either side, and after his death his Mississippi backwoods grave went unstrewn with flowers. Many southerners would have preferred to spit on it, and most northerners never recognized that such loyalty to the United States could exist in Dixie. But in truth, this lost patriot was a vital actor in helping to preserve the Union.
Descriptions of battles tends to make my eyes glaze over, but the portion of the book which described the post war conflicts did not. The reconstruction period in Mississippi was almost more oppressive than the antebellum period had been for the former slaves and those who supported their freedom. The same men were in control of the state as had been before, and they refused to allow changes to the social fabric. They enacted laws which made it impossible for freed slaves to make their own lives - they were still virtually enslaved. They used deadly force to prevent slaves and other republicans from reaching the polls and casting votes after the first round of elections following the war put several black men into public office. The descriptions of this activity were horrifying and it began to come clear to me why it was that Mississippi remained the poorest and most backward of the states for so long - even as other southern states finally recovered from the war and began thriving. Mississippi did not ratify the 13th amendment abolishing slavery until 1995.
A fascinating account. (