(Newt Knight)
OXFORD, Miss. – Newt Knight is described as a “deserter,
renegade, and assassin” on the Web site of the local Sons of the Confederate
Veterans chapter in Jones County, Miss., but Lew Smith in the nearby town of Sumrall has a
different view.
“Old Newt is a big hero to me personally,” says Smith, who
describes himself as a “life-long union man, white guy” who has been married to
an African American woman for 45 years. “His willingness to stand tall for his
ex-slave wife and bi-racial family.”
Add to that Knight’s willingness to challenge the “rich
man’s war and poor man’s fight” that essentially was the Civil War.
Smith hasn’t seen the new film “The Free State of Jones”,
starring Matthew McConaughey and Mississippi-bred talent such as Oxford’s own
Johnny McPhail. “In a way I’m hesitant to watch the movie. … So often Hollywood
screws things up.”
He needn’t worry. I’ve seen the movie, and it’s excellent.
Director Gary Ross, whose credits include the now-classic “Seabiscuit”, spent
two years researching the complex history of Jones County, Miss., during the
Civil War, research that included Victoria E. Bynum’s book, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s
Longest Civil War.
It’s a 150-year-old story that resonates today as
Mississippi still wrestles with the Confederate symbolism that rests on its
flag as well as on its countless courthouse lawns. It’s a story that’s also
still current in its challenge to the racial divisions that have forever
haunted Mississippi and the South.
Newt Knight was a tee-totaling backwoodsman from southeast
Mississippi who volunteered to serve in the Confederacy. He began his own
rebellion against the Confederacy after passage of the so-called “Twenty Negro
Law”, which allowed Southerners to avoid conscription if they owned 20 slaves
or more. Most of the small farmers who dominated rural Jones County and
surrounding counties owned no slaves and had little interest in preserving
slavery.
Furthermore, the Confederacy allowed troops to confiscate small
farmers’ crops and livestock as a kind of insidious “tax” to support the war
effort. “You think they do that to the plantation owner in Natchez?”
McConaughey’s Newt Knight tells his fellow Southerners as he launches his
rebellion. “We got no country. We are the country. No man ought to stay poor so
another can get rich.”
Knight leads an armed and violent resistance against the
Confederacy that declares Jones County a “free state”. His break with Southern
tradition extends to his personal life when he enters into a long-term
relationship with a slave named Rachel and sires children by her. Their
descendants still live today in the Jones County area.
“The Free State of Jones” stands out in the recent crop of
Civil War or slavery-related films—“Lincoln”, “12 Years a Slave”, and Nate
Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation”. Each challenges the myths and stereotypes
embedded in Hollywood classics like D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” in 1915
and David O. Selznick’s “Gone With The Wind” in 1939.
What distinguishes “The Free State of Jones” is its direct
challenge to prevailing myths such as what Ross calls the “monolithic”
ante-bellum South. “There were areas of Southern unionism all across the South,”
he says in a Huffington Post Facebook
video.
Jones County may one of the more famous examples, but
another is the entire state of West Virginia, which exists because it refused
to follow Virginia’s secession from the union. Many of the small farmers and
mountain folk in the western portion of my own native North Carolina rebelled
against the Rebels. They didn’t own slaves and saw no reason for the fight.
“The Free State of Jones” points to a dark consistency in
Southern history that stretches from ante-bellum day until today. Soon after
the Civil War, a landowning elite returned to power and instituted the
so-called “Black Codes” that allowed black children to be taken into a forced
“apprenticeship” that meant back to the fields. Of course, Reconstruction was
eventually followed by Jim Crow, sharecropping and tenant farming, the entire
retinue of the Southern elite’s insistence on cheap and, if possible, free
labor.
Mississippi and the South as a whole are still dealing with
the legacy of what forced Newt Knight to rebel against the Southern rebellion. Witness
the ongoing controversy about the Confederate flag emblem in Mississippi’s
state flag. At the University of Mississippi, a plaque is being placed next to
the Confederate statue on campus that says the monument may honor Confederate
soldiers’ sacrifice but it “must also remind us that the defeat of the
Confederacy actually meant freedom for millions of people.”
Newt Knight’s story reaches beyond the South. His statement in
the movie that “no man ought to stay poor so another can get rich” could be a
rallying cry for the entire nation.
This column ran recently in the Jackson Free Press of Jackson, Miss.
