'State of Jones' reveals life of Newton Knight By Chris Talbott (Confederate "Lost Cause" Myth)

The Canadian Press via Google News ^ | 7-13-2009 | Chris Talbott

[Colonel Kangaroo]

ELLISVILLE, Miss. — Newton Knight still haunts the Piney Woods and swamps of southern Mississippi, 140 years after the Civil War.

Knight, subject of the new book "The State of Jones" by journalist Sally Jenkins and Harvard University historian John Stauffer, remains an obscure Civil War figure. To the authors and some in Jones County, where Knight led a campaign against the Confederacy, he's an American hero.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

There once was a time when many white and black southerners joined forces to defeat the Confederacy. It is too bad that too many Americans of all backgrounds do not know this under-reported tale of cooperation and goodwill for a noble end.

[Psycho_Bunny]

Interesting.....I seem to recall Ken Burns calling it "The Kingdom of Jones"....I always liked that.

I may be remembering it wrong, though.

[VicVega]

A Lincoln Republican married openly to a black woman. STOP. We all know that democrats are the all loving of all races. Just ask Senator Byrd.

[Islander7]

I attended school with several of Newt’s great, great, great grand kids. Yolanda was HOT!

[I Buried My Guns]

There was also was a time when many white and black Southerners joined forces to defeat the usurpations of a illegal and immoral attack on their Southern homeland.

It is too bad that too many Americans of all backgrounds think it was all about slavery. It was not.

While slavery was obviously a negative and an evil, I find the true nobility in giving your life for your family, community, values, and culture.

[SampleMan]

There once was a time when many white and black southerners joined forces to defeat the Confederacy. It is too bad that too many Americans of all backgrounds do not know this under-reported tale of cooperation and goodwill for a noble end.

A bit of a stretch. People like Jones just wanted to be left alone, not defeat the Confederacy. "Kingdom of Jones" suggests coordination with the North, but there simply isn't any proof of that.

[Moose4]

That’s much the same reason that there was so much infighting in the more remote regions of the Appalachians; the people may have considered themselves Virginians or North Carolinians or Tennesseeans, but they didn’t have a lot in common with the aristocracy and the planters “down east” and didn’t feel like getting drafted and dying in “their” war.

}:-)4

[Colonel Kangaroo]

The interracial cooperation I alluded to was written about oin another book, Bitterly Divided by professor David Williams of Valdosta State in Georgia. This book tells of a Confederacy coming apart at the seams due to internal conflicts largely arousing from the avarice and hypocrisy of the pro-secession elite.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

I think it helps to separate the motives of the political secessionists from the poor guys who did the fighting for them. The motive of the political secessionists were largely slavery and avarice. The poor guys who did the fighting for them were forced into a hard choice not of their making and many decided that the better choice was to choose to repel an outside army. But sometimes the invaders were the Confederates such as a June, 1861 incident in Cleveland, Tennessee where this Unionist community was threatened and intimidated by a passing regiment of Mississippi soldiers for the sin of continuing to fly the Stars and Stripes. In locales like that, the Yankees, with a significant contribution of local soldiers, were the liberators.

The Civil War was much more complex and convoluted than North versus South.

[SunkenCiv]

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[Jubal Madison]

“The Kingdom of Jones...”

I recall reading it called that in an old book I own. The account in the book was different than what was in the article - although it did agree that a lot of the citizens were disloyal to the Confederacy. To say they were pro - Union might be a stretch. My own uneducated guess is they just wanted to be left alone - a trait which survives in a lot of the rural south today.-—JM

[SunkenCiv]

There was also was a time when many white and black Southerners joined forces to defeat the usurpations of a illegal and immoral attack on their Southern homeland.

No, there was not. Late in the war, Lee asked Richmond to offer freedom to enslaved blacks who would join the army. A relative handful did so. Early in the war some of the tiny number of descendants of freedmen tried to enlist as Confederates and were turned away.

Robert Toombs, Speech to the Georgia Legislature -- "...In 1790 we had less than eight hundred thousand slaves. Under our mild and humane administration of the system they have increased above four millions. The country has expanded to meet this growing want, and Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, have received this increasing tide of African labor; before the end of this century, at precisely the same rate of increase, the Africans among us in a subordinate condition will amount to eleven millions of persons. What shall be done with them? We must expand or perish. We are constrained by an inexorable necessity to accept expansion or extermination. Those who tell you that the territorial question is an abstraction, that you can never colonize another territory without the African slavetrade, are both deaf and blind to the history of the last sixty years. All just reasoning, all past history, condemn the fallacy. The North understand it better - they have told us for twenty years that their object was to pen up slavery within its present limits - surround it with a border of free States, and like the scorpion surrounded with fire, they will make it sting itself to death."

[Abraham Lincoln sworn in as President of the United States on March 4, 1861]

CSA Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, Cornerstone speech -- "...last, not least. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution -- African slavery as it exists amongst us -- the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the 'rock upon which the old Union would split.' He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact."

[wardaddy]

I've read all the Newt books going way back when they weren't so favorable to Newt...a multiple murderer.

He didn't want to fight for the south, fair enough and he had a rag tag band of ruffians who were deserters and dodgers and whatnot but he was hardly a Mosby figure from the opposite side. They were bandits/raiders hiding out though new revisionist writers may wish to paint Knight as something else and may well find someone in Hollywood to make a myth movie for them it will remain wishful thinking.

There are still quite a few mulattoes from that era...the Moffatts for example...some of whom were quite fetching as I recall. Many passed as white ( a lady I knew....i wanted her to be my Summer of 42 fantasy..lol....very pretty) and many did not.

I think some of the Jones mulattoes settled down around Mobile north of there near Creola along with many other mulattoes from that Deep South area.

My kinfolks come from above that area by half a day's buggy ride north around Scott and Smith counties but Sullivan's Hollow down towards Mt Olive is fairly close. Many hid below there in the Leaf River swamp even before Newt did.

Jones county has had a vexed history of sorts culminating with the Masonite union violence in the 60s and Laurrel was known for corrupt politics back in an era when corrupt politics in rural Mississippi was not yet the vogue.

One thing Knight did do was singlehandedly defy the custom then (and largely still in Miss) of procreating and marrying outside his race.

I will tell you this, my kinfolks from that area had no good to say of his war exploits as they had been told and quite a few of them had little or no slaves and were piney woods subsistence farmers of light means. They viewed him as ruffian of the lowest class. Course history changes doesn't it? Now 60s radicals and their kids are running our nation so who knows? I'm ambivalent....barely. I think we could find better historical figures than Newt Knight to lionize. Lots of unamed everyday decent Christian and some Jewish folks who took great risk in the Jimmy Crow era and never asked for or got any attention, never murdered folks and because they were imperfect and probably eschewed interracial marriage they would be hounded as racist today even though they took a stand for Negro rights back when there was risk to that. Instead of being acknowledged for taking that risk they would be vilified now by folks who never took such risks.

Usurpers...sorry for the rant btw

[wardaddy]

I went and looked up some data in one of my Newt books and did not realize he was actually from Jasper county, not Jones.

he fought three skirmishes in the area with CSA cavalry including Ellisville (an anti-sesch hotbed then and later home to the TB asylum or something like that)

and had some communication with Union forces from Vicksburg.

the vast majority of men fought and died for the South, like my kin

Newt and his tribe were deserters mostly. That may make the heroes to some today. Obviously you know me Ck so I don’t have to spell it out for ya.

It is a good story though.

[NTHockey]

>>This book tells of a Confederacy coming apart at the seams due to internal conflicts largely arousing from the avarice and hypocrisy of the pro-secession elite.<<

As opposed to the pro-government elite we have today? I dare say that the Confederacy - on its worst day - was infinitely better than the gang of thieves running/ruining the Yankee government today.

Deo vindice

[Colonel Kangaroo]

Thanks for detail from the perspective of one with knowledge of the area. So much of the history of the war was tied up with local situations and local personalities. I admit that Nate's self-interest may not quite rate him the halo of devoted hero of truth and life. But as always, we can all realize that in the stark existence of southern farmers, survival was a full time effort. Most southerners were too busy putting food on the table to be complete heroes or villains. The myth of Gone with the Wind seduces and misleads anti-confederates as well as pro-confederates.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

I totally agree that our nation has strayed far from the Founders’ design for government. But the battle of the 1860s was not between the Confederates and today’s bloated leviathan. The contest was between the power hungry secessionist clique and the greatest government ever known to man, the government of Washington, Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln.

[NTHockey]

>>But the battle of the 1860s was not between the Confederates and today’s bloated leviathan. The contest was between the power hungry secessionist clique and the greatest government ever known to man, the government of Washington, Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln<<

Yeah right, another product of Yankee indoctrination. Do NOT mention Lincoln with the founding fathers. He was a man who subverted the Constitution in every way: he “created” states, with Constitutions written by a power-mad Washington elite; he suspended habeas corpus; he instituted an income tax; he drafted men into the Army; AND he invaded a sovereign nation in a war of naked agression.

The Confederacte states, as sovereign entities, had every right to seceed.