Victoria E. Bynum

I had no idea about this: during the Civil War, Newt Knight and a bunch of his neighbors in Jones County rejected the Confederacy and engaged in armed warfare against its representatives. Bynum tells the story, which involves lots of interrelated families, the white ones usually with both slave-owning and non-slave-owning branches which largely determined whether they supported the Confederacy. The recent film fictionalizes a lot of it, but not the basic facts, including Knight’s show more relationship with Rachel, an enslaved woman who was important to his armed struggle and to his personal life. The book and the film also bring in the later miscegenation trial of their grandson in which the Mississippi Supreme Court ultimately affirmed his “whiteness”—which even had an ironic consequence, in that children in the family were allowed to go to white segregated schools to prevent “integration” in the schools, even though the family was considered “black” by neighbors. The narrative is not one of the white hero, especially given that Newt Knight didn’t succeed in changing much as the Redeemers took over after Reconstruction, but his struggle against the “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” is still very interesting. Bynum also emphasizes the contributions of women, who were fighting to preserve their own farms and homes.

In terms of understanding the historical record, she deals with two competing memoirs by Knight’s descendants, both of them written from the perspective of white Southerners but with very different views of Knight—the rabid segregationist tried to discredit him by foregrounding his interracial relationship, while the one who sung his praises ignored Rachel and focused on his military exploits. Bynum also explores how the story got retold as part of the Lost Cause—to white southerners, Knight and his men were just resistant to all authority, making them even more expressions of white southern manhood; whether Knight actually was a loyal Unionist was therefore a highly political question even decades later. show less

Excellent narrator. Well written, interesting. History of some individuals in the Jones County, how they essentially separated themselves from the rest of the state during the Civil War. Also contains some descendant info.

Highly recommend for anyone, don't need to be a civil war fan to get a good story here.

One of the most important books about the history of Mississippi in particular and the War of the Rebellion in general that I've ever read.