Product Description

New 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.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16260 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-23
• Released on: 2009-06-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780385525930
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, July 2009: Make room in your understanding of the Civil War for Jones County, Mississippi, where a maverick small farmer named Newton Knight made a local legend of himself by leading a civil war of his own against the Confederate authorities. Anti-planter, anti-slavery, and anti-conscription, Knight and thousands of fellow poor whites, army deserters, and runaway slaves waged a guerrilla insurrection against the secession that at its peak could claim the lower third of Mississippi as pro-Union territory. Knight, who survived well beyond the war (and fathered more than a dozen children by two mothers who lived alongside each other, one white and one black), has long been a notorious, half-forgotten figure, and in The State of Jones journalist Sally Jenkins and Harvard historian John Stauffer combine to tell his story with grace and passion. Using court transcripts, family memories, and other sources--and filling the remaining gaps with stylish evocations of crucial moments in the wider war--Jenkins and Stauffer connect Knight's unruly crusade to a South that, at its moment of crisis, was anything but solid. --Tom Nissley

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Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer on State of Jones

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.

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)

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The grandson of a wealthy Mississippi slave-owner, Newton Knight was an abolitionist and two-time rebel deserter who actively fought against the Confederacy, and bore a large family with a former slave. His home, Jones County, Miss., saw great hardship during the Civil War; Confederate taxes "pushed small farm families, who provided the rank and file foot soldiers, to the brink of destitution." Jenkins (The Real All Americans: The Team That Changed a Game, a People, a Nation) and Stauffer (Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln) employ painstaking research into Knight and Jones County, resulting in an engaging and original portrait of life inside the Confederacy. Knight's Scouts, formed after Vicksburg set off a wave of rebel desertions, carried out their own justice in Jones County, using clever techniques for communication, intimidation and warfare against the home team ("the sorts of exploits" that Sherman would appreciate). Knight's post-war efforts for equality included building an integrated school; when residents objected to his own mixed-race children attending, however, Knight burned it to the ground. Spanning more than 100 years, this family story brings home the lasting effects of hate and fear, love and acceptance, as well as the strides that have brought us to where we are.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Stephen Budiansky By the end of the Civil War, more than 100,000 men had deserted from the Confederate Army. Nearly all were from the poorest class of non-slaveholding yeomen farmers, and they bitterly resented the aristocratic disdain of their officers, the plight of families left to wrest subsistence from hardscrabble farms, and a war that increasingly seemed only to serve slavery and the wealthy planter class. As one Alabama farmer put it, "All tha want is to git you . . . to fight for their infurnal negroes and after you do their fightin' you may kiss their hine parts for o tha care." Above all, the poor Southerners resented the law passed by the Confederate Congress in October 1862 that exempted from the draft one able-bodied white man on every plantation with 20 or more slaves. "I'm through," declared one Mississippi infantryman when he heard of the "Twenty Negro Law." He then uttered a phrase that, as Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer observe in "The State of Jones," echoed through the South for the rest of the war: "This . . . makes it a rich man's war and a poor man's fight." Thousands of deserters returned to their homes in the upcountry of northern Mississippi and Alabama, east Tennessee and western North Carolina, determined not merely to sit out the war but to actively oppose the Confederacy. Ten thousand men in western and central North Carolina formed the "Heroes of America," carried out raids on Confederate sympathizers and helped fellow Unionists escape to join the federal army. And in the backwoods of Jones County, Miss., a band of deserters and other Unionists became a virtual law unto themselves for the last two years of the war, organizing an infantry company, declaring their allegiance to the United States and assassinating Confederate cavalry officers sent to round them up. The captain of these "Jones County Scouts" was a hard-bitten farmer named Newton Knight, and his story forms the centerpiece of Jenkins and Stauffer's occasionally engrossing but uneven book. As the authors rightly emphasize, the very existence of such men as Knight poses a challenge to the Lost Cause mythology that the defeated South embraced. In many ways the Confederacy won the war for memory for a century to come, making heroes of its leaders, expunging from school textbooks and battlefield monuments any mention of slavery as the cause of the war, elevating the fight to a noble crusade whose defeat was not a repudiation but merely a tragic failure. And so the story of Southern Unionism and its internal opposition to the Confederacy largely vanished from the narratives of the war and its aftermath. Southern Unionists were dismissed as a few "tories," "low scoundrels" or "traitors." Knight committed an even more unpardonable sin when he and a former slave named Rachel lived as man and wife. That gives his story both a poignancy and a strange power that reverberated through the following century of racial tribulations. In 1948, Knight's great-grandson was arrested and tried for the criminal offense of marrying a white woman: The state of Mississippi alleged that since his great-grandmother was black, he had one-eighth negro blood, which made him black under the state's miscegenation laws. That as many as one-third of white Southerners opposed the Confederacy has been well known to historians of the Civil War for at least half a century. But their stories have yet to penetrate popular consciousness, which is why rescuing the biographies of men and women like Newton Knight and Rachel remains an urgent and compelling task. "The State of Jones" contains much that is moving and powerful. It also suffers from many flaws, some of which are avoidable and others not. The unavoidable problem is that the historical record of poor Southern whites and African Americans of 150 years ago is full of holes. The avoidable flaws arise from the authors' questionable decision to fill those holes with many imagined descriptions of scenes. The authors note that a filmmaker who had written a screenplay about Jones County introduced them and suggested they collaborate on a book. Sally Jenkins, a staff writer for The Washington Post, is the ghostwriter of memoirs by Lance Armstrong and other sports figures. John Stauffer, a professor of American studies at Harvard, is the author of "Giants," a superb linked biography of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass -- and clearly a writer who does not need assistance in producing vivid and finely crafted prose. But many of the re-created scenes in "The State of Jones" are not only unconvincing but overwritten and full of false notes that betray an unfamiliarity with the details of farm life, nature and the weapons and battle the authors purport to convey. It is absurd to suggest that a man like Knight needed to be "taught" how to avoid water moccasins while hiding out in the swamp; a grain mill is not a "gin"; a ramrod is not used to "prime" a gun "for reloading"; shotgun blasts are hardly likely to either "bleach" or "blanch" the night or twilight; mud snakes are not brown. There are other problems. A quotation from a white Mississippian describing sexual exploitation of black women by "our hot-blooded youth" as a necessary outlet to protect the purity of "the white ladies" is misattributed to an old-guard Yazoo County planter. In fact, the words were uttered by a northern Mississippi Unionist, a careless error by the authors but reflective of their tendency to gloss over the often virulent racism of the anti-Confederate, native white Southerners whom they romanticize in their book. And in several places the authors overstate the notion that Southern Unionism was, and remains, a dark secret. Noting that Knight sought compensation from Congress for his wartime service, they write, "The claims were denied -- Northern politicians were skeptical that any Southerners could have been loyal to the federal side." In fact, in 1871 Congress established the Southern Claims Commission, which paid out $5 million to thousands of Southern claimants for their aid -- and loyalty -- to the Union during the war. Still, this is an important story that personalizes what remains abstract and counterintuitive in much of our received history of the Civil War, even as we approach its 150th anniversary.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Customer Reviews

Okay historical novel, but bad history
Rating as Historical Fact: *
Rating as Historical Novel: ***

"State of Jones" purports to deal with the events surrounding an insurrection against Confederate authority that took place in 1863-4 in Jones County, Mississippi. Prior to the outbreak of the war, the Piney Woods area in which Jones County is situated had relatively few slaves and an economy based on livestock rather than cotton. Hence many of its men were reluctant participants in the war and, when Union forces clearly established the upper hand with the fall of Vicksburg in July 1863, they deserted and returned to their farms. Their numbers and their effective control of the area alarmed Confederate officials who sent in troops. There were several small scale engagements and about a dozen of the deserters (and a few unfortunate kinsmen) were hanged. Whether the Piney Woods renegades were simply deserters and bushwhackers or were true Unionist--and to what degree they were truly an effective military force--has been debated ever since. Adding to the debate is its central character: Newton Knight. Knight was the leader of the most prominent band of deserters. Following the Civil War he capped his lifetime of independent action by maintaining a second family with a mulatto woman, Rachel Knight--a former slave who had assisted him during the war.

The book under review has received a fairly substantial promotional push by its publisher perhaps owing to the fact that, as the authors note in their acknowledgement, it developed out of a screenplay for a proposed movie project by Gary Ross (Seabiscuit). The authors have made liberal use of a number of secondary historical accounts, the most frequently referenced (if not too openly acknowledged in their interviews) being Rudy Leverett's "Legend of the Free State of Jones" and Victoria Bynum's "Free State of Jones." But popular depictions of the Free State of Jones go back to the 1940s publication of James Street's novel "Tap Root" which, following the more usual course of events, was subsequently made into a movie. Thus the authors of "State of Jones" are disingenuous in their repeated claims to have uncovered a story overlooked by history (see most recently their letter of 17 July to the Wall Street Journal) and are docked one star for this distasteful arrogance.

But a crucial problem for those of us familiar with the known facts are the substantial liberties the authors have taken with these facts--and the instances where they have gotten these facts wrong. To cite just two (and my personal tally runs several pages):

1) The authors state that pioneer settler Stacy Collins "had spoken out vehemently against secession" (p 15) when, in fact, he died in Texas ca 1853 and the two sources they cite for this statement do not support it.

2) The authors state as fact that Jones County voted to elect an anti-secessionist delegate to the Mississippi Secession Convention by a margin of 374 to 24 (p 73). And this is, indeed, what myth laden secondhand sources have stated. But the actual document reporting the vote count is housed in the Mississippi Archives and shows the tally was 166 to 89. Still a substantial vote against secession, but not a mythic one. It can be noted that Bynum, using a more reputable secondary source, gave the correct election result in her more scholarly and, by my estimation, much more accurate account.

The list of such factual errors that interrupted my reading goes on and on, but would be tedious for all but obsessive researchers like myself. Let it just be said that the book contains a perplexing number of such factual errors, both small and large.

More troubling is the narrative style of the book. To make the narrative an easy, exciting read (and, in general, it is) the authors have dropped the usual qualifiers that should pepper an account for which so few original records exist. In this they are only following the regrettable trail blazed by other popular historical accounts such as "Isaac's Storm" where suppositions are paraded as facts and the caveats relegated to the fine print of the end notes. Still, with one of the authors being a prize winning Harvard professor, one would have hoped that so much dubious hypothesizing would not have been implied as fact simply for the sake of propelling the narrative.

The assertive narrative style allows the authors to mask gapping holes in our understanding of Newton Knight by depicting him as a, well, very cinematic John Brown of the Piney Woods. What we do know about Newton Knight is that neither he nor his father owned slaves (although his grandfather did) and that his relationship with his "outside" wife Rachel was conducted openly in defiance of social conventions. Accounts reveal that he encouraged some of his children into mixed race marriages. All this makes him a highly unusual character for the place and times, but that should be enough without forcing undocumented ennobling ideology onto the back of his actions.

Where the book does have a credible claim to staking some new ground is in its examination Newton Knight's postwar pursuit of a Union pension. Even here, however, the authors forsake historical analysis for the sake of narrative simplicity. Thus all Newton's claims of his pro-Unionist stance are taken at face value. But Knight had good reason to embellish his activities. Maybe not falsify, but embellish. A number of his band, in the wake of the Confederate actions against them, fled to New Orleans and enlisted in the federal army. These men, or their survivors--since a fair number died of disease following their enrollment--obtained pensions. It is reasonable that Newton Knight, accurately viewing himself as the guiding force in the organization of the deserters into a fighting force, felt he was also due compensation. And perhaps by moral right he was. But the laws governing pensions were strict and Knight fell outside their scope--unless his story was refashioned. And during the 1870s Washington was filled with lawyers who earned their livelihood by helping persons obtain pensions legally due them--or possibly not. Knight was not represented by some backwoods Southern lawyer. His pension counsel was based in Washington and, I believe, encouraged him to enhance his descriptions of his activities in order to have the best chance to obtain compensation. In good history the examination of such possibilities would be expected. But in "State of Jones" the authors consistently favor plotline over analysis. And this, along with the other reasons cited above, makes it difficult for me to accept the designation of this book as a history. It seems more a novelization of a screenplay with reference notes.

So where does this leave us? The real facts clearly show Newton Knight led a quasi-military insurgency against Confederate authority in the Piney Woods of Mississippi. He was a strong-willed, complex man of action who did as he damned well pleased. This placed him in a leadership role in the Piney Woods insurgency and quickly made him a social pariah after the war. The insurgency over which he assumed control was just one of many throughout those sections of the South where the cotton economy did not predominate. Sadly, the authors of "State of Jones" refused to examine Newton Knight on his own terms, but instead collaborated in the production of a classic Hollywood makeover.

Jones County Native
Being a fan of Dr. Victoria Bynum's well-documented and thoroughly entertaining book on Newt Knight and Jones County, "The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War", and also being a Jones County native, I was excited to learn what Stauffer and Jenkins had discovered to warrant yet another treatment of this oft told tale. (Besides Bynum's book, which is the strongest both in the research and in the telling, there have been at least three other book-length histories plus one fictionalized account which was the basis for the 1948 movie "Tap Roots")

Unfortunately, I have to say, not much new here, except the liberties the authors take with documented source material in an effort to put forth a story-line where none exists. They shouldn't have expended the energy. Even with all the fictional leaps, the unwarranted inferences, and the reshaping of historical figures to appeal to 21st Century sensibilities. the story falls flat. The book reads as if it has been cobbled together, moving bumpily from story to lecture and back again, as if someone accidently shuffled a novelist's manuscript with a history teacher's class notes. I'm also struck with how dependent the authors seem to be on Bynum's research to bolster their own historical suppositions. Why bother, if you are just going to rehash previous work? But then I listened to an interview with the authors in which they stated that their "history" was commissioned by film producer/director Gary Ross, AFTER he had already written his movie script. Now of course, it makes perfect sense why the authors took such liberties to create a sustainable story-line. I guess this is a case of history imitating art.

Scholarly Account
This is a true account of a man in Jones County, Miss., who defected from the Confederate Army because of his moral beliefs, including anti-slavery and "Unionism" (support of the mostly Northern Union states during the Civil War).

It is a scholarly and meticulous, but strangely unexciting, recounting of facts. I'd pick up the book each night, thinking maybe I was just tired the night before and that is why it never grabbed me. So I'd read and try to focus, but it was tough sledding. Facts are related, one after another. Quotes from old letters and journals abound. It should be fascinating--Tom Brokaw says right on the cover of the book that he couldn't put it down!--but I found "getting into" this book was a steep climb.

For me, "State of Jones" is curiously dry and keeps the reader at a scholarly arm's length, failing to capitalize on the real drama of its subject matter. For instance, in early scenes, the Battle of Corinth is described, and even though the authors list the date and HOUR...they then go on to give broad background on the events leading up to the conflict. The next installment is ONE HOUR LATER...but again, the authors fail to move the drama along in real time (although they have cued the reader to expect that, giving dates and hours), instead choosing to again give broad background.

I hesitate to write such a negative review, as the collection of research done here is truly impressive. Unfortunately, though, "The State of Jones" failed to make history really come alive for me. I wanted to love it, but instead of getting absorbed in the book, I had the feeling I was standing in a museum reading a series of bronze plaques in front of Civil War exhibits.

Recommended for studious, diligent and research-minded Civil War enthusiasts.