The State of Jones: The Small Southern County that Seceded from the Confederacy

by Sally Jenkins, John Stauffer

Covering the same ground as the major motion picture The Free State of Jones , starring Matthew McConaughey, this is the extraordinary true story of the anti-slavery Southern farmer who brought together poor whites, army deserters and runaway slaves to fight the Confederacy in deepest Mississippi. "Moving and powerful." -- The Washington Post .

In 1863, after surviving the devastating Battle of Corinth, Newton Knight, a poor farmer from Mississippi, deserted the Confederate Army and began a guerrilla battle against it. A pro-Union sympathizer in the deep South who refused to fight a rich man’s war for slavery and cotton, for two years he and other residents of Jones County engaged in an insurrection that would have repercussions far beyond the scope of the Civil War. In this dramatic account of an almost forgotten chapter of American history, Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer upend the traditional myth of the Confederacy as a heroic and unified Lost Cause, revealing the fractures within the South.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Civil War, American History, American Civil War, War, Biography

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Sally Jenkins is an American sports columnist and feature writer for The Washington Post, and author. She was previously a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. She has won the AP Sports Columnist of the Year Award five times, received the National Press Foundation 2017 chairman citation, and was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. She is the author of a dozen books. Jenkins is noted for her writing on Pat Summitt, Joe Paterno, Lance Armstrong, and the United States Center for SafeSport.

Reviews

[♥ Sandi ❣ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It does not read like a text book...it is non fiction but mixes the historical fact of the civil war with the war that was going on in Mississippi with the Jones County Scouts led by Newton Knight. Knight and a small group of men spent considerable time for two years in the Piney Woods fleeing both the North and the South as they tried to help the Negro claim his independence. Even with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and Reconstruction the black man still suffered for another 100 years before they were not intimidated at the voting polls, were not seen as a second rate citizen, and the "colored" water fountains and restrooms were finally dispensed with.
Intermixed was the life that Newton Knight lead. His two "wives", white Serena and black slave Rachel, and all the children he fathered with both women. It tells of his time in the Army, his time fighting against the Army - both Union and Confederate - his leadership of both white and black men, fear for his life even after the conflict ended, detailing his part in the class struggle of the South.
Surprisingly this book came about after the movie. Director Gary Ross who did the research on the movie - speaking with the historians, archivists, family and descendants of Newton Knight, Rachel Knight and Serena Knight - pitched the book idea to Doubleday, where it was published in 2009. Goes to show you how long a completed movie sits in the can - at least 9 years after the idea was presented for the book - the movie is just now being presented for viewing.

[Carol Storm · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the Matthew McConaughey movie FREE STATE OF JONES so much that I grabbed this book right away from the library. It's the true story of a poor white farmer from Mississippi who deserted from the Confederate army in the Civil War. But he didn't just desert. He disappeared into the swamps with a small group of friends, and gradually built up a small army of deserters and runaway slaves that was able to take an entire county back from the Confederacy. After the war, Newton Knight not only married a black woman but he fought a decades long battle to see to it that their children could own their own land and have access to education.

This is a great story, but sadly it's not a great book. The authors do their best, but unlike the movie, they can't simply invent dramatic scenes, or love scenes, and they can't have Newton Knight say much of anything in his own words. So much of the narrative breaks down into one random gun fight or ambush after another, with tons of generic background thrown in about the Civil War. And over and over again the authors say, "We don't know how Newt felt about this," or "It's not hard to guess how Newt reacted when this happened." Of such stuff is compelling drama not made. Where the movie benefits from a sensational star turn by Matthew M. the book has a shadow for a hero, a man who was basically "disappeared" from all the Southern history books for a hundred years. Also, the movie makes it look as if the Knight rebellion was a series of flashy big-scale battles, but the book makes it look more like a series of low-down Clint Eastwood style shoot-outs, with good guys and bad guys alike mostly sneaking up on each other and firing into cabins late at night.

Ironically, the best sections of the book are probably the ones at the end. The authors do a great job of showing how Newton Knight's legacy lasted for generations, and how dozens of black, white, and mixed race people named Knight (or McKnight) live in Jones county to this day. The drama of seeing the "white" Knights challenging the racist school system to have their children admitted to white schools in the nineteen forties was much more compelling than the shadowy gun fights. And there was one sentence about a lynching that really grabbed me, where the authors mention almost by chance that a black man who was lynched in the 1920's was hung on the same tree where three white Union men were hung in the 1860's.

Now that's the kind of story William Faulkner won't write.

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

The authors missed so many basic facts, that I found myself wondering how much I could believe. For example: they described the muskets as weighing 18 lbs! (maybe two muskets might weigh that) On another page, they described the sound of musket hammers falling on gunpowder. On the standard muskets used by both sides, the hammers fell on percussion caps producing a sharp snap, not the pfft they claimed.


I finally gave up when Knight (maybe) kills McLemore, and the authors claimed the others in the room had eyes filled with cordite smoke. Cordite was a smokeless propellant invented in England a quarter of a century after the end of the Civil War.


For me, they lost all credibility at about page 134.


If they cannot get basic information correct, their interpretation becomes suspect. Granted the deatils I found annoyingly wrong MIGHT be construed as "artistic license" for dramatic effect, but this is proported to be history, not a novel.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you like Southern history, especially the Civil War era, this drawn out account might be a good bet for you. I won't rehash the plot. The premise, a white man "married" to an African-American lady, in race-torn Mississippi during the reign of Jim Crow is an intriguing one. Newton Knight is a strong character with a definite worldview on things. Some of the material, like Grant's gritty siege of Vicksburg, is familiar ground to us Civil War buffs. From what I can tell, the title is well-researched and spot on. Co-author Sally Jenkins writes some hard-hitting columns for the Washington Post Sports. I read her stuff all the time, so I'll admit to that bias.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

This and interesting story of southern unionists and confederate deserters. Although the story focuses on Newt Knight, it really talks in general about the life of poor farmers who were opposed to the confederacy during the civil war and afterward. Its appalling the conditions people were expected to life and fight under. Particularly Mississippi after the war was horrific. An interesting read, but the book was slow at times.

[Michael T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here's a book to confound your sense of the Civil War era deep south as "unified, racist & Confederate". Dirt farmer Newton Knight was none of these things. A lifelong resident of rural Jones County, Mississippi, Knight was morally opposed to slavery, and an avowed Unionist. He resented, naturally, being conscripted into a Confederacy which did not represent him nor his interests, nor the interests of the poor people with whom he lived. And he was far from alone. Knight and his fellow insurrectionists (mostly Confederate army deserters like himself) numbered in the hundreds, and essentially controlled Jones County for the last half of the Civil War. This was the era that the term "A rich man's war & a poor man's fight" was first coined. Some of the documentation of Knight during this period and after is sadly fragmentary, because, after all, while the Confederacy lost the Civil War, her racists essentially won the peace, & had everything their own way for about the following hundred years. This included not only "Jim Crow" laws, the Klan, lynchings, etc, but also the way that the history itself was told. But, working with what documentation has survived (and an invaluable interview which a 90+ year old Newton Knight finally granted in 1921 to New Orleans journalist Miegs O. Frost), Sally Jenkins & John Stauffer have accomplished a fascinatingly readable chronicle of the whole period from the perspective of an individual who, given the mythology of the "lost cause" of the Confederacy, & the "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags" of the following Reconstruction era which many of us learned in High School, we scarcely would have believed even existed. But Newton Knight did exist -- as did his second wife Rachel, a former slave with whom Knight started a second family after the War. It was also Rachel who had probably been single-handedly responsible for keeping Knight alive when he was first on the run. And while it was not unusual for a white man to father children with black women during this time, what Newton Knight did was VERY unusual -- he not only acknowledged his children and his union with Rachel, but he went out of his way to make sure that Rachel was able to inherit a share of his land. Unheard of at the time. And scandalous, even to -- or rather, ESPECIALLY to -- members of Knight's own white family. But I am condensing a story which Jenkins & Stauffer tell much better. If any of this has piqued your interest, I highly recommend this one.

[Mariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am assigning the prologue and first chapter to my students this semester. I wanted a book that talked about the war and the conditions of war without focusing on military history in a battle-tastic way. There is a compelling narrative here, well written, straight-forward without being boring. The book does a great job presenting the class differences of the South, which sometimes gets lost in the discussion.

[Steven Peterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the more intriguing tales of the Civil War. In Jones County, Mississippi, we see a movement by residents to steer clear of the South. Yes, in Mississippi--at the heart of the Confederate States of America and home of Jefferson Davis' plantation. This breakaway region fought against and gave heartburn to the Confederacy.

The book focuses on the character of Newton Knight. He began the war drafted into the southern force. He fought at the bloody battle in Corinth, where a harebrained general, Earl Van Dorn (a book based on current knowledge should be written about him!!), was thoroughly whipped despite the valiant efforts of Confederate troops. Knight and many others were upset by the killing of so many of their friends. Even worse, sometime after the battle the "Twenty Negro Law" was passed, excusing those who owned 20 or more slaves. This alienated many non slave owners, who would refer to the phrase "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight" as a result. Knight and others deserted as a result.

The book then describes the opposition to the southern government and its military in Jones County. Knight, clearly, was involved, but so, too, were others. A sort of guerilla war ensued, a Civil War within a Civil War, so to speak.

Especially interesting about this book is its view of Knight after the war. He had multitudinous children by his own wife, Serena, as well as many children by an African-American woman, Rachel, whom he seemed to deem as his "second wife." This, of course, was scandalous and ended with Knight being shunned by many of even his own former rebels. For the time, his choice was remarkable. So, too, the fact that for some years, children of Serena and Rachel worked and played--and sometimes married--together. Over time, the forces of Jim Crow created huge tensions among the families.

All in all, a story that is frankly absolutely fascinating. There are issues with this book. I do not know enough of the actual history of events depicted in the book to be able to challenge specifics as other reviewers do. The book is not the most smoothly written book that I have read. And then there are points that jarred. For example, in describing the battle of Corinth that (page 25) ". . .grapeshot tore into the neat Confederate lines. . . ." The authors were probably referring to canister, since grapeshot was not used nearly so much as canister in the Civil War (basically cans filled with zillions of tiny pieces of metal, acting as a large shotgun and cutting swaths through lines of infantry). Also, the linkage with a movie after the fact raises a few questions for me, but is not, in the end, a serious matter in my mind.

[Neil Pierson · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's pretty widely known that a large number of northerners opposed the Civil War. But I didn't realize that a lot of southerners opposed secession and the war. In this telling, the Confederacy was an attempt by wealthy, upper class landowners to maintain their privileges, only one of which was ownership of slaves. Yeomen--poor whites farming small patches of land and owning no slaves--had nothing to gain from secession or war.

But they stood to lose what little they had, as the men were forced to serve in the army for little if any pay, then died from disease or in battle. Meanwhile, the Confederate government adopted increasingly repressive measures to fund the war. It empowered itself to seize without compensation food, cloth, farm animals, or anything else that would be useful. These seizures were widely seen more as corrupt enrichment for property collectors than as contributions to the war effort.

In 1862, the Twenty Negro Law was passed, which inflamed class divisions among whites. It exempted from military service a white man if he owned twenty or more slaves. The ostensible reason was to maintain production on the large plantations to feed the south and support the war. Poor whites saw it as outright evasion of the misery and danger of fighting by the upper class.

The book focuses on one poor white in Jones County, Mississippi. Newton Knight was a remarkable figure if for no other reason than he was hard to kill. He deserted from the Confederate army and led a guerrilla group of raiders that attacked the army and government officials. He had two families--one with his white wife, Selena, and another with his black wife, Rachel. He was equally attentive to both families.

His exploits as a guerrilla remind us that one person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist. The tactics are the same. In this case, though, the cause was as different as black and white (figuratively and literally).

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I heard the authors on NPR and thought that the story sound intriguing. I knew nothing about the particulars of the story of Newton Knight and his fellow countians/Mississippians who fought in Mississippi to preserve the Union. It really is a story of the poor yeoman farmer in the South who had little in common with the upper elite of the Confederate army who ultimately came to the conclusion that the Southern motive were not worth fighting and dying for. The story centers on Newton and his family during and after the Civil War. As is often the case the poor yeoman farmers and their families' stories have been preserve through oral tradition. The authors used documentation to support, when available, the story of county of Jones and its resistance to the authority of the Confederacy. Apparently the book is in the process of being screen scripted to be made into a movie.

[Bob Costello · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listened to recording. Very interest history of Mississippi during and the 20 years after the civil war. The write up on the cover is misleading when it says the Jones county seceded for the Confederacy. In the middle of the war Jones county was the center of Confederate deserters who were pro-union. They were able for a short time make Confederate civil authorities flee the county. The sadist part of the story was the rise of the clan and the suppression of the blacks in the 1870s, as former leaders of the confederacy take back political power, while killing any republican leaders both black and white that tried to resist the power grab.

[Mickie Benson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book about the Civil War, and a man in the deep south who, after being drafted to fight for the South, joins the North to preserve the Union. It is a true story, and his life and family had far reaching effects in the years that follow.

[Kara Zelasko · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is so problematic. I had to put it down several times out of sheer anger at the insensitivity and complete lack of nuance when these authors attempted to construct the experiences of enslaved people.

[Alger Smythe-Hopkins · Rating 2 out of 5]

A solid mid-range historical work written for a general audience.

The goal of the book is admirable; to complicate the simplistic "Yankee versus Rebs" formula that dictates how Americans remember the Civil War by bringing forward a rarely mentioned, but significant resistance to the Confederacy within its own borders. These dissenters used a variety of tactics to destabilize, resist, and sometimes actively fight to overthrow the government in Richmond. The story of that resistance has been largely erased from popular memory because it does not fit the post-Reconstruction consensus that allowed the nation to re-knit the raveled fabric of the national identity. The ridiculous Lost Cause fable, that somehow still persists to this day, insists that we agree that the war was not fought over slavery, that the important and tangible arguments were rooted in a simple disagreement over modes of economic production (free/slave), also that everyone who participated in the rebellion was motivated by noble ideals concerning State's Rights that were worth defending, and that the loss of the war by the Confederacy was not an actual defeat of their ideals of personal liberty and determination, but was rather the fated end to an outmoded system of production that was fading anyway. The presence of a resistance to the Confederacy is hard to reconcile with the Lost Cause narrative because including a determined resistance requires that you recognize the importance of class, the oppressive, if not occasionally tyrannical, misrule of the Confederate Government, and the actual presence of a massive population of enslaved people who had their own opinions about freedom and their being property.
One of my primary disappointment with this book is that it doesn't do much more than gesture to the hugely complicated and morally bankrupt social disaster that the Confederacy was defending, and instead turns our attention to a new hero narrative, one to replace the old simpleminded Lost Cause fable. Almost entirely sourced in a 1921 interview with Newton Knight, The State of Jones does try to accommodate some of the uglier facts about the war and slavery that the Lost Cause story elided completely, but only when required to explain why Our Hero Newton chose to fight on the side of the Union. In the measured retelling by the authors we are exposed to a South where social classes did matter in how you felt about the war, even if they only recognize the class distinctions as slave owning, and non-slave owning. The authors acknowledge some of the uglier facts of slavery, including the constant threats of murder, rape, torture, maiming, and sadism. They also make the admirable choice to forego the usual moral arithmetic comparing the 'bad' slave owners with that 'good' slave owners and how that might factor into how their enslaved property thought about them. The authors also document the incredible number of abuses and injustices the poorer citizens of the Confederacy were expected to endure, partly bringing into view the extent to which the rebellion was an aristocratic tyranny whose primary goal was the preservation of the prerogatives of the elite.
Upon these new foundations the authors build a new narrative, and one with Newton Knight as an avatar of the True Southern Hero, a man who fought the oppressive Confederacy at the cost of everything, and whose principles, like a compass, pointed him due north.
There is a lot to unpack here, and I can't say that I am fully comfortable with the authors' willingness to accept Newton's narration of events at face value, especially when he is telling the story of the events that led to six decades of his being an outcast. Neither am I happy with the implicit assertion that his marriage to Rachel (a former slave) is proof of his egalitarian principles and his commitment to the Union/abolitionist cause. However, the major point of contention for me is the attempted replacement of one White-wash mythos of the Civil War with another.
While Newton became a symbol of resistance to the Confederacy, the reason for his notoriety was the shock that a White Man of Good Family would be willing to act against the interests of his own race. Surely he had some thrilling adventures and provided a locus for an organized resistance to the Confederacy, but he only survived because of help from the local population of slaves who supplied, educated, informed, and protected him. Also, it is hard to overlook that for all of Newton's later claims of scruples about joining the rebellion, he did join the Confederacy, and he fought in their army for the first two years of the war. For all of the evidence that he loved Rachel, he didn't make any moves during the war to liberate other slaves or to assist escaped slaves to reach Union lines. Also, he wound up with Rachel after his white wife left him and he was a judged a notorious character among the White community (a fact that is hard to reconcile with the authors' premise that Jones County was a hotbed of anti-Confederate sentiment). For his all of his professed dedication and loyalty to the Union cause, he did not become a resistance fighter until the Confederacy has already declared him an outlaw, had destroyed his property, and threatened his family. For all of the evidence that he worked hard to improve the state of the Freemen in Jones County, these efforts happened at the point where his own fate was entirely bound to that of the success of the Freemen. The is borne out by the eventual failure of Reconstruction being his final moment of respectability. Six decades later, a hopeful newspaper reporter arrives casing leads that might put him on the trail of a hero, and unsurprisingly he finds one.
The Southern society described in this book is incomplete and problematic. The motives of the main actors are uncomplicated and appear insufficient to explain their actions. The incomprehensible need to make Newton a hero and thereby minimize the efforts of the slaves and their important contributions to keeping Newton and his allies alive is infuriating. This should have been a book about Rachel, who risked considerably more than Newton. Had he been killed he would still have been remembered. Had she been caught while assisting him, she would have been even more entirely erased from memory. Her reward for risking what little she had is a modest recognition as Newton's helpmeet in this book. She deserves better, as do all of the slaves who gave their utmost to achieve their own freedom. So a solid work, but it is the wrong project.

[Robb · Rating 3 out of 5]

After seeing the film ( which I loved) I decided to give the book a try. I liked the book ( and coming from a person that mostly reads fiction) it was engrossing. It wasn't one of the best books ever but it was worth the read. I really like stuff about the Civil War and love stories that are from unpopular and generally untold viewpoints. I would have gave this a better review if the chapters had not been so long. I personally am not a fan of long chapters, and for the other fault in the book: I really wished it would have stuck with Newton Knight's story more, than haranguing on and on about a dozen or so people that are mentioned once. So many people were talked about, that it was offputting to have to remember everyone. I do realize this a true account of what happened but I found Newton and Rachel's story much more interesting than everyone else's. I think the details of what happened to the soldiers and slaves is what kept me reading. I think this book would be a good read for a political science major or a history buff. I think if there was more books about the Civil War that was told in this manner, I would be interested in reading them.

[Emily Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly well written, a personal account of a Union sympathizer surrounded by a local government that wants to kill him. A new perspective on the South that makes me proud of my country, to have someone fight so hard for equality in the late 1800s, refusing to give in to the tyranny of the postwar Confederate ideals. Parts of it are harsh, and I had to literally close the book a few times. Humans are cruel, but the main character had beautiful morals that made me want to finish his story.

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 3 out of 5]

The events that followed the end of the American Civil War from 1865 through roughly 1900, known as Reconstruction, mark the darkest days and events in American history, because they revealed a cold-blooded racial hatred that was deep-seated in the hearts and minds of the majority of white Americans. The history of individual families, black and white, from those years who lived through the worst of the violence, particularly in the deep south states like Mississippi, is one of terror and violence, fear and death, with a twisting of politics, history, culture, language, and geography so intensely tangled that it was easy to forget, or hard to remember, who had won the great Civil war and why it had been fought.

I found Sally Jenkin's and John Stauffer's retelling of Union loyalists in the Deep South during the Civil War and how these loyalists fared during the war a let down for two key reasons.

1. The title promised a tale it didn't deliver. Indeed, there is a body of evidence, that Jenkins and Stuaffer mine, that secession was not universally supported even in slave-owner controlled Mississippi. Small landowners and poor laborers who did not own slaves and in fact were politically and economically disadvantaged by the slave economy sometimes had the courage (and it took much) to stand against secession and for the Union. But there was no "state of Jones", but rather a small core of men and women who acted on their convictions to stand loyal to the Federal government during the Civil War. By applying the title "State of Jones", the authors' imply a solidarity and success for a quixotic effort that was more short-lived, spatially limited, and literally shot down than successful. Indeed the story of this lost cause of Lost Causes would be better told from the standpoint of its impossibility in light of the odds and the eventual outcome of Reconstruction. This small point of light was quickly expunged by lynching, Jim Crow, and the Klan.

2. By deciding to focus on one county in Mississippi, and primarily on one family in that county, the authors' left themselves too little documentary evidence to craft a narrative, so they constructed one from a broader pool of data. This kind of constructed narrative is frustrating to read because of the authors' attempted telling of the titled story results in too many "could have beens" or "events like this". This dilutes the impact of the narrative, and leads the reader to question how much of the evidence really applies to the narrative and how much is brought in to artificially construct it.. I would guess that less than 20% of the documentary evidence Jenkins and Stauffer cite is directly related to Jones County or the Knight family.

Given that percentage of direct versus constructed narrative, I think an author might need to make a decision to abandon a narrative type approach based on a single location or family, and instead write a broader survey history of Union loyalists in the Deep South during the Civil War and how these loyalists fared during the war and influenced the postwar Reconstruction. Or, while I am not normally a fan of historical fiction, the author who wanted to sustain the narrative approach might decide to write a historical fiction based on a county and family, and provide an afterward documenting the historicity of the novel to the extent that it exists.

Either approach would have been preferable to me than the approach actually taken.

Still, I rate this book three stars because while not agreeing with the approach the authors took to tell the story, I found the story well worth the telling. The history of Union loyalists in the Deep South during the Civil War and how these loyalists fared during the war and influenced the postwar Reconstruction is a story that needs to be read

[Joan]

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 Rideres, one of her "Ballad Series".)

[Stephanie Pounds · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the middle of the Civil War, after participating as a Southern soldier in two losing battles, Newton Knight left the Confederate Army and returned to his home in Jones County, Mississippi. A few months later he was leading a group of over 150 men in open rebellion against the Confederacy. I enjoyed listening to this book. It dealt with a part of history that I didn't know about, and in fact, had never really thought about. What happened to American loyalists in the South after secession? The authors did a good job of combining the general history of the war with the particular history of Jones County, although sometimes the sections on the general history seemed to take an over long time to explain. When the book reached the end of the Civil War, there were still three hours of audio left, and I wondered what else could be told. The story continued with what happened to the loyalists during Reconstruction. This is a period of history I need to know more about and I appreciated the long historical explanations here. I was fascinated by how the loyalists, who ended up on the winning side of the War, ended up on the losing side of Reconstruction as the old leaders of Confederate Mississippi regained control of the state only a few years after the end of hostilities. If I had any criticism at all it would be the passages where the authors speculate what could have happened or what might have happened based on reports by others with similar stories. These were disconcerting in a history book, but all in all I thought this was a very good story told well.

[Nklein98 · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are so many books about the Civil War that I'm surprised to find one that is totally unique. This is the story of the Unionists who fought on the side of the Union even though they were deep in Confederate territory and formed independently of the Union Army. It is also the story of Newton Knight who was a member of the Jones County Unionists and also a white man who "married" an African American woman and raised a family, who he acknowledged as his own, with her. Sadly it also points out the post war Mississippi that refused to even ratify the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution until 1995. Knight was ostracized even by his comrades in arms who fought against the Confederacy.
A good read about not only the Civil War, but human nature.

[Marsha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This history of a southern county that did not secede from the Union during the American Civil War reads like a novel.

Newton Knight was an abolitionist from Jones County, Mississippi, who actively fought against the Confederacy. Several times impressed into Confederate ranks, he returned to his home none-the-less, despite threats of execution for desertion. Having survived the war and reconstruction, Knight's views on race relations (he in fact had a second family with a black woman named Rachel)was way ahead of his time.

As the author's note, Knight and Jones County were not alone in the south in their rejection of the Confederacy and slavery. This story is as fascinating as it is unknown.

[Brenda Osborne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I admit I never heard of this book until I saw the movie with Matthew McConaughey. The movie intrigued me and I found this book very satisfying. There is a lot about Newton Knight that we will never know. This book mixes fact with some pretty accurate sounding conjecture. Knight was a Confederate soldier who deserted and led a packet of like-minded soldiers in guerrilla warfare against The South. Newton ends up fathering at least eight children with his Black common law wife and about as many with his white wife. This was unheard of in Mississippi at that time! This book gives you Newton's story interspersed with the stories of many poor Confederate farmers. It is both heartbreaking and inspiring!!

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mississippi before, during and after the Civil War. There were Unionists who didn't agree with secession. They lived primarily in Jones County, and the leader was Newton Knight. What a wonderful book about how the Confederacy treated not just blacks, but poor farmers who made up the majority of the troops, and about how those downtrodden folks maintained their dignity and strength to build lives in a nondemocratic state.

[Dominic · Rating 5 out of 5]

The State of Jones is a great book based on the Civil War contributions of Newton Knight and his band of men that ditched the Confederate Civil War effort in a small Mississippi county. Jenkins and Stauffer show how a country man changed the course of the Civil War and racial relations in the postbellum years and into the mid-20th century. This book tells an amazing story and is written in such a way that it is almost like a novel and not a history book.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written with fascinating language, this tale of the sins of the fathers in SE Mississippi before, during, and after the Civil War is riveting and thought provoking.

I believe the first lines of chapter 4 are some of the best I've ever read in a book about war, "War destroyed all that was familiar to Mississipians; it collapsed the old certainties like bricks and boards and altered the physical profiles of things into narcotic seeming visions."

[Edward Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating, largely unknown piece of Civil War history. There were a considerable number of anti-slavery, pro-Unionists living in southern Mississippi, some of whom took part in guerilla warfare against Conferderate forces. The authors sometimes rely too much upon conjecture and speculation, but the book appears to be well-researched and quite interesting.

[james · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book chronicles a civil war inside the Civil War. From 1863 to 1865, most of the southeastern part of Mississippi was opposed to the Confederacy and the then government of the state. Attempts by the Confederate Army to restore control were disastrous defeats for that army. Most of this rebellion was centered in the area of Jones County, which contains the city of Laurel, and thus the name.

[Tom Darrow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good story. Does a good job at showing how the south was not united as one in their fight against the north. Class divisions were pretty extreme and caused many lower class people to give up the fight or, in the case of Jones County, try to join the other side. Does a good job at showing the nature of backcountry fighting and how the home guard units operated in the south.

[Qelilah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't say enough about this book. This should be a must read before or even after viewing the movie. This book will assist in fact and fiction and also show that there is always 2 sides to history. This countries history just shows that it is full of individuals as well as groups. Amazing part of history and so relevant today for the poor in America.

[Jim Blessing · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read numerous civil war books, but this tale was unfamilar to me. It involves a county in Mississippi that seceded from the Confederacy during the war, due to the horrible treatment of yeoman farmers by the aristocratic farmers. It's a great story!