The Free State of Jones: History or Hollywood?

[Gaddafi Duck]

You lost.

Nah, I think not. When all you got left is a rhetorical statement on matters of fact, you've dealt all your cards.

 

[otherone]

Read up on the "Mason-Dixon line". Maryland is a southern state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_United_States

But, it is hilarious you're resorting to "Whataboutism" trying to diminish Confederate slavery by pointing to other southern states not in the CSA as if that's some sort of defense.

You are tilting at windmills.
I don't diminish southern slavery in the least. You, however, seem to believe that the federal government had a problem with it, which is factually untrue.

 

[Gaddafi Duck]

You are tilting at windmills.
I don't diminish southern slavery in the least. You, however, seem to believe that the federal government had a problem with it, which is factually untrue.

Nice try. The federal government DID have a problem with it---see 13th and 14th Amendments, and note the South's blatant disregard for human rights by scoffing and re-enslaving freedmen following the Civil War.

 

[Swordsmyth]

Nice try. The federal government DID have a problem with it---see 13th and 14th Amendments, and note the South's blatant disregard for human rights by scoffing and re-enslaving freedmen following the Civil War.

Those amendments were meant as PR to back up the late war propaganda and to further destroy the southern economy, the vagrancy laws that you keep mentioning were not stopped by the Yankee occupiers because they did not really care about the blacks.

 

[Gaddafi Duck]

Those amendments were meant as PR to back up the late war propaganda and to further destroy the southern economy, the vagrancy laws that you keep mentioning were not stopped by the Yankee occupiers because they did not really care about the blacks.

LOL, "PR". Emancipation was a "public relations" deal.

"Further destroy the Southern economy"....an economy built on slavery? LOL, seems like you have contempt for emancipation. I can understand being upset over the invasion (well, the South should've never fired upon Fort Sumter to begin with. Strategic error, but the South weren't very forward thinkers), but your venom you spew over the 13th/14th Amendments is indicative of your sympathy towards Southern slavery. If emancipation "further destroys the Southern economy", then destroy it. Your economy is built on an abomination.

But yeah, I don't glorify the North, but the Neo-Confederates revisionist history of the South is indeed disturbing---where they romanticize the institution of slavery by quickly deflecting and pointing elsewhere with Whataboutisms. At the very least, the North was far more strategic in their thinking. The South, by seceding, voided the Fugitive Slave Laws. They signed their own death warrant. Their economy, built on coercion, was doomed as slaves fled in droves.

Not to mention all the military blunders of the South. It's a shame they didn't have better leaders like the Neo-Confederates like to believe they did.

 

[Swordsmyth]

LOL, "PR". Emancipation was a "public relations" deal.

Yes it was, the Yankees never cared about the blacks, many even wanted to destroy them.

Full article at: https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/c...about-slavery/



I am going to do something radical. I am going to review what Northerners had to say about the war. Not a single Southern source, Southern opinion, or Southern accusation will I present. Just the words of Northerners (and a few foreign observers) on what the war was “about.”
Abraham Lincoln was at pains to assure the South that he intended no threat to slavery. He said he understood Southerners and that Northerners would be exactly like them living in the same circumstances. He said that while slavery was not a good thing (which most Southerners agreed with) he had no power to interfere with slavery and would not know what to do if he had the power. He acquiesced in a proposed 13th Amendment that would have guaranteed slavery into the 20th century. Later, he famously told Horace Greeley that his purpose was to save the Union, for which he would free all the slaves, some of the slaves, or none of the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation itself promised a continuance of slavery to States that would lay down their arms.
All Lincoln wanted was to prevent slavery in any territories, future States, which then might become Southern and vote against Northern control of the Treasury and federal legislation. From the anti-slavery perspective this is a highly immoral position. At the time of the Missouri Compromise, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison said that restricting the spread of slavery was a false, politically motivated position. The best thing for the welfare of African Americans and their eventual emancipation was to allow them to spread as thinly as possible.
Delegation after delegation came to Lincoln in early days to beg him to do something to avoid war. Remember that 61% of the American people had voted against this great hero of democracy, which ought to have led him to a conciliatory frame of mind. He invariably replied that he could not do without “his revenue.” He said nary a word about slavery. Most of “his revenue” was collected at the Southern ports because of the tariff to protect Northern industry and most of it was spent in the North. Lincoln could not do without that revenue and vowed his determination to collect it without interruption by secession. He knew that his political backing rested largely on New England/New York money men and the rising power of the new industrialists of Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago who were aggressively demanding that the federal government sponsor and support them. The revenue also provided the patronage of offices and contracts for his hungry supporters, without which his party would dwindle away.
Discussing the reaction to secession, the New York Times editorialized: “The commercial bearing of the question has acted upon the North. We were divided and confused until our pockets were touched.” A Manchester, N.H., paper was one of hundreds of others that agreed, saying: “It is very clear that the South gains by this process and we lose. No, we must not let the South go.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress officially declared that the war WAS NOT AGAINST SLAVERY but to preserve the Union. (By preserving the Union, of course, they actually meant not preserving the real Union but ensuring their control of the federal machinery.)
At the Hampton Roads peace conference a few months before Appomattox, Lincoln suggested to the Confederate representatives that if they ceased fighting then the Emancipation Proclamation could be left to the courts to survive or fall. Alexander Stephens, unlike Lincoln, really cared about the fate of the black people and asked Lincoln what was to become of them if freed in their present unlettered and propertyless condition. Lincoln’s reply: “Root, hog, or die.” A line from a minstrel song suggesting that they should survive as best they could. Lincoln routinely used the N-word all his life, as did most Northerners.
A statement in which Lincoln is said to favour voting rights for black men who were educated or had been soldiers has been shown to be fraudulent. Within a few days of his death he was still speaking of colonization outside the U.S.
The South, supposedly fighting for slavery, did not respond to any of these offers for the continuance of slavery. In fact, wise Southerners like Jefferson Davis realized that if war came it would likely disrupt slavery as it had during the first war of independence. That did not in the least alter his desire for the independence and self-government that was the birthright of Americans. Late in the war he sent a special emissary to offer emancipation if European powers would break the illegal blockade.
Saying that the South was fighting only to defend the evils of slavery is a deceitful back-handed way to suggest that, therefore the North was fighting to rid America of the evils of slavery. Nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, secession did not necessarily require war against the South. That was a choice. Slavery had existed for over two hundred years and there was no Northern majority in favour of emancipation. Emancipation was not the result of a moral crusade against evil but a byproduct of a ruthless war of invasion and conquest. Not one single act of Lincoln and the North in the war was motivated by moral considerations in regard to slavery.
Even if slavery was a reason for secession, it does not explain why the North made a war of invasion and conquest on a people who only wanted to be let alone to live as they had always lived. The question of why the North made war is not even asked by our current historians. They assume without examination that the North is always right and the South is always evil. They do not look at the abundant Northern evidence that might shed light on the matter.
When we speak about the causes of war should we not pay some attention to the motives of the attacker and not blame everything on the people who were attacked and conquered? To say that the war was “caused” by the South’s defense of slavery is logically comparable to the assertion that World War II was caused by Poland resisting attack by Germany. People who think this way harbor an unacknowledged assumption: Southerners are not fellow citizens deserving of tolerance but bad people and deserve to be conquered. The South and its people are the property of the North to do with as they wish. Therefore no other justification is needed. That Leninist attitude is very much still alive judging by the abuse I receive in print and by e-mail. The abuse never discusses evidence, only denounces what is called “Neo-Confederate” and “Lost Cause” mythology. These are both political terms of abuse that have no real meaning and are designed to silence your enemy unheard.
Let us look at the U.S. Senate in February 1863. Senator John Sherman of Ohio, one of the most prominent of the Republican supporters of war against the South, has the floor. He is arguing in favour of a bill to establish a system of national banks and national bank currency. He declared that this bill was the most important business pending before the country. It was so important, he said, that he would see all the slaves remain slaves if it could be passed. Let me repeat this. He would rather leave all the slaves in bondage rather than lose the national bank bill. This was a few weeks after the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation.
What about this bill? Don’t be deceived by the terminology. So-called National Banks were to be the property of favoured groups of private capitalists. They were to have as capital interest-bearing government bonds at a 50% discount. The bank notes that they were to issue were to be the national currency. The banks, not the government, had control of this currency. That is, these favoured capitalists had the immense power and profit of controlling the money and credit of the country. Crony capitalism that has been the main feature of the American regime up to this very moment.
Senator Sherman’s brother, General Sherman, had recently been working his way across Mississippi, not fighting armed enemies but destroying the infrastructure and the food and housing of white women and children and black people. When the houses are burned, the livestock taken away or killed, the barns with tools and seed crops destroyed, fences torn down, stored food and standing crops destroyed, the black people will starve as well as the whites. General Sherman was heard to say: “Damn the *******! I wish they were anywhere but here and could be kept at work.”
General Sherman was not fighting for the emancipation of black people. He was a proto-fascist who wanted to crush citizens who had the gall to disobey the government.
The gracious Mrs. General Sherman agreed. She wrote her husband thus:

“I hope this may not be a war of emancipation but of extermination, & that all under the influence of the foul fiend may be driven like swine into the sea. May we carry fire and sword into their states till not one habitation is left standing.”​

Not a word about the slaves.
As the war began, the famous abolitionist Theodore Weld declared that the South had to be wiped out because it is “the foe to Northern industry—to our mines, our manufactures, our commerce.” Nothing said about benefit to the slaves. The famous abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher enjoyed a European tour while the rivers of blood were flowing in America. Asked by a British audience why the North did not simply let the South go, Beecher replied, “Why not let the South go? O that the South would go! But then they must leave us their lands.”
Then there is the Massachusetts Colonel who wrote his governor from the South in January 1862:

“The thing we seek is permanent dominion. . . . They think we mean to take their slaves? Bah! We must take their ports, their mines, their water power, the very soil they plow . . . .”​

Seizing Southern resources was a common theme among advocates of the Union. Southerners were not fellow citizens of a nation. They were obstacles to be disposed of so Yankees could use their resources to suit themselves. The imperialist impulse was nakedly and unashamedly expressed before, during, and after the war.
Charles Dickens, who had spent much time in the U.S. a few years before the war, told readers of his monthly magazine in 1862: “The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states.”
Another British observer, John Stuart Mill, hoped the war would be against slavery and was disappointed. “The North, it seems,” Mill wrote, “have no more objections to slavery than the South have.”
Another European thinker to comment was Karl Marx. Like many later Lincoln worshippers, Marx believed that the French Revolution was a continuation of the American Revolution and Lincoln’s revolution in America a continuation of the French. He thought, wrongly, that Lincoln was defending the “labour of the emigrant against the aggressions of the slave driver.” The war, then, is in behalf of the German immigrants who had flooded the Midwest after the 1848 revolutions. Not a word about the slaves themselves. Indeed, it was the numbers and ardent support of these German immigrants that turned the Midwest from Democrat to Republican and elected Lincoln. It would seem that Marx, like Lincoln, wanted the land for WHITE workers.
Governor Joel Parker of New Jersey, a reluctant Democratic supporter of the war, knew what it was all about: “Slavery is no more the cause of this war than gold is the cause of robbery,” he said. Like all Northern opponents and reluctant supporters of Lincoln, he knew the war was about economic domination. As one “Copperhead” editor put it: the war was simply “a murderous crusade for plunder and party power.” “Dealing in confiscated cotton seems to be the prime activity of the army,” he added.
Wall Street agreed and approved. Here is a private circular passed among bankers and brokers in late 1861:

“Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power and this I and my friends are all in favor of, for slavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it the care of the laborers, while the European plan, led on by England, is that capital shall control labor by controlling wages. The great debt that capitalists will see to it is made out of the war must be used as a means to control the volume of money.”​

It is not clear whether this is authentic or a satire, but it tells the truth whichever.
The libertarian Lysander Spooner, an abolitionist, called the Lincoln rule “usurpation and tyranny” that had nothing to do with a moral opposition to slavery. “It has cost this country a million of lives, and the loss of everything that resembles political liberty.”
Here is Frederick Douglass, the most prominent African American of the 19th century:

“It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit . . . Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man. He was preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time . . . to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of his country.”​

What better testimony is needed that emancipation was a by-product, not a goal, of a war of conquest. Let me repeat: emancipation was a by-product of the war, never a goal.
How about these curiosities from the greatest of Northern intellectuals, Emerson. He records in his journals: “But the secret, the esoteric of abolition—a secret, too, from the abolitionist—is, that the negro and the negro-holder are really of one party.” And again, “The abolitionist wishes to abolish slavery, but because he wishes to abolish the black man.” Emerson had previously predicted that African Americans were like the Dodo, incapable of surviving without care and doomed to disappear. Another abolitionist, James G. Birney, says: “The negroes are part of the enemy.”
Indeed a staple of Northern discourse was that black people would and should disappear, leaving the field to righteous New England Anglo-Saxons. My friend Howard White remarks: “Whatever his faults regarding slavery, the Southerner never found the existence of Africans in his world per se a scandal. That particular foolishness had its roots in the regions further North.”
In 1866, Boston had a meeting of abolitionists and strong Unionists. The speaker, a clergymen, compared the South to a sewer. It was to be drained of its present inhabitants and “to be filled up with Yankee immigration . . . and upon that foundation would be constructed a new order of things. To be reconstructed, the South must be Northernized, and until that was done, the work of reconstruction could not be accomplished.” Not a word about a role for African Americans in this program.
One of the most important aspects of the elimination of slavery is seldom mentioned. The absence of any care or planning for the future of black Americans. The Russian Czar pointed this out to an American visitor as a flaw that invalidated the fruits of emancipation. We could fill ten books with evidence of Northern mistreatment of black people during and after the war. Emancipation as it occurred was not a happy experience. To borrow Kirkpatrick Sale’s term, it was a Hell. I recommend Kirk’s book Emancipation Hell and Paul Graham’s work When the Yankees Come, which are available here.
I suspect many Americans imagine emancipation as soldiers in blue and freed people rushing into one another’s arms to celebrate the day of Jubilee. As may be proved from thousands of Northern sources, the Union solders’ encounter with the black people of the South was overwhelmingly hate-filled, abusive, and exploitive. This subject is just beginning to be explored seriously. Wrote one Northerner of Sherman’s men, they “are impatient of darkies, and annoyed to see them pampered, petted and spoiled.” Ambrose Bierce, a hard-fighting Union soldier for the entire war, said that the black people he saw were virtual slaves as the concubines and servants of Union officers.
Many black people took to the roads not because of an intangible emancipation but because their homes and living had been destroyed. They collected in camps which had catastrophic rates or mortality. The army asked some Northern governors to take some of these people, at least temporarily. The governors of Massachusetts and Illinois, Lincoln’s most fervid supporters, went ballistic. This was unacceptable. The black people would be uncomfortable in the North and much happier in the South, said the longtime abolitionist Governor Andrew of Massachusetts. Happier in the South than in Massachusetts?
What about those black soldiers in the Northern army, used mainly for labour and forlorn hopes like the Crater? A historian quotes a Northern observer of U.S. Army activities in occupied coastal Carolina in 1864. Generals declared their intention to recruit “every able-bodied male in the department.” Writes the Northern observer: “The atrocious impressments of boys of fourteen and responsible men with large dependent families, and the shooting down of negroes who resisted, were common occurrences.”
The greater number of Southern black people remained at home. They received official notice of freedom not from the U.S. Army but from the master who, when he got home from the Confederate army, gathered the people, told them they were free, and that they must work out a new way of surviving together.
Advocates of the war was “caused by slavery” say that the question has been settled and that any disagreement is from evil and misguided Neo-Confederates deceived by a “Lost Cause” myth.
In fact, no great historical question can ever be closed off by a slogan as long as we are free to think. Howard White and I recently put out a book about the war. Careful, well-supported essays, by 16 serious people. Immediately it appeared on amazon, someone wrote in: “I’m so tired of the Lost Cause writing. Don’t believe the bull$#@! in this useless pamphlet.” He could not have had time to actually read the book. It can be dismissed unread because he has the righteous cause and we do not. This is not historical debate. It is the propaganda trick of labeling something you do not like in order to control and suppress it. Such are those who want the war to be all about slavery—hateful, disdainful, ignorant, and unwilling to engage in honest discussion.
But if you insist on a short answer solution as to what caused the war I will venture one. The cause of the greatest bloodletting in American history was Yankee greed and hatred. This is infinitely documented before, during, and after the war.

"Further destroy the Southern economy"....an economy built on slavery? LOL, seems like you have contempt for emancipation. I can understand being upset over the invasion (well, the South should've never fired upon Fort Sumter to begin with. Strategic error, but the South weren't very forward thinkers), but your venom you spew over the 13th/14th Amendments is indicative of your sympathy towards Southern slavery. If emancipation "further destroys the Southern economy", then destroy it. Your economy is built on an abomination.

I always have and always will condemn slavery, I also condemn the North's hypocrisy, in my opinion the 13th amendment should have been a time delayed piece of the original Constitution like Article 1 Section 9.

But the North only cared about destroying the South.

But yeah, I don't glorify the North, but the Neo-Confederates revisionist history of the South is indeed disturbing---where they romanticize the institution of slavery by quickly deflecting and pointing elsewhere with Whataboutisms. At the very least, the North was far more strategic in their thinking. The South, by seceding, voided the Fugitive Slave Laws. They signed their own death warrant. Their economy, built on coercion, was doomed as slaves fled in droves.

Proving that the other motives for Secession were more important.

 

[Dark_Horse_Rider]

Not sure what I meant by this? Are you aware, sir, the South owned slaves in 1860? Just checking.

And what "northern" states owned slaves? Are you referring to the border states that didn't secede? Hardly the North. Take a geography class sometime.

Rhode Island was big player in slavery.

And much later, the Klan burned school for African children there.

Browns ( who Brown University is named after ) were some of biggest players in slave trade.

Let's not forget the slaughter and theft of lands carried out after Civil War on Lakota and other tribes by supposedly virtuous northerners.

Oh yeah, let not forget the holocaust level of killing happening today, carried out under the name of the U.S. government.

 

[Gaddafi Duck]

I always have and always will condemn slavery, I also condemn the North's hypocrisy, in my opinion the 13th amendment should have been a time delayed piece of the original Constitution like Article 1 Section 9.

HAHAHAHAH!!!

Just read what you wrote. You managed to offer a minor concession ("I condemn slavery"...yeah, who doesn't??), but then proceed to blame the NORTH for SOUTHERN SLAVERY?!?!? HAHAHAHAH!!! But then why would that matter??? You blame, again incorrectly, the North's tariffs for the Civil War, so why wouldn't you blame a provision for emancipation put in by the North on the North causing the secession?? It's unreal you how just parry and deflect. You don't like slavery, but you bend over backwards to point the figure at the North and criticize why they didn't do more to stop the South from itself. Denialism.

But hey, it's over and done with. The South was poorly led--which has to be heartbreaking for Neo-Confederates to hear given they're bitter and stubborn and insist the South was superior in every way. Too bad the South didn't think strategically. The strategic thinkers of the North knew when the South seceded that slavery was de facto abolished because they pulled out of an arrangement where the North HAD to enforce and protect Southern slavery. When the South left, bye-bye went the Fugitive Slave Laws!! LOL, what dorks who couldn't think beyond the day in front of them. Without slavehunters in free lands, slaves just up and left in droves. Stupid move by the South who were rather impulsive. Fort Sumter embodies Southern thinking: be the first to throw the punch, that way you alienate all foreign sympathy, and rally the North to unify in the cause of reunification.

 

[Swordsmyth]

HAHAHAHAH!!!

Just read what you wrote. You managed to offer a minor concession ("I condemn slavery"...yeah, who doesn't??), but then proceed to blame the NORTH for SOUTHERN SLAVERY?!?!? HAHAHAHAH!!! But then why would that matter??? You blame, again incorrectly, the North's tariffs for the Civil War, so why wouldn't you blame a provision for emancipation put in by the North on the North causing the secession?? It's unreal you how just parry and deflect. You don't like slavery, but you bend over backwards to point the figure at the North and criticize why they didn't do more to stop the South from itself. Denialism.

But hey, it's over and done with. The South was poorly led--which has to be heartbreaking for Neo-Confederates to hear given they're bitter and stubborn and insist the South was superior in every way. Too bad the South didn't think strategically. The strategic thinkers of the North knew when the South seceded that slavery was de facto abolished because they pulled out of an arrangement where the North HAD to enforce and protect Southern slavery. When the South left, bye-bye went the Fugitive Slave Laws!! LOL, what dorks who couldn't think beyond the day in front of them. Without slavehunters in free lands, slaves just up and left in droves. Stupid move by the South who were rather impulsive. Fort Sumter embodies Southern thinking: be the first to throw the punch, that way you alienate all foreign sympathy, and rally the North to unify in the cause of reunification.

I blame both sides that the 13th amendment was not a time delayed part of the original Constitution, I never pointed the finger at the north for that, the hypocrisy I condemn is that the North pretended that it cared about the blacks when it did not.

 

[Swordsmyth]

be the first to throw the punch, that way you alienate all foreign sympathy, and rally the North to unify in the cause of reunification.

The foreigners almost interceded on the side of the south, and the North was so united that the upper south seceded and Maryland had to be occupied to prevent it's secession, and Lincoln had to institute tyranny to suppress the pro-south anti-war movement in the North, because everyone could see the South had a right to take Ft. Sumpter with it.

 

[Swordsmyth]

1) The Title – The Free State of Jones is a name that still resonates in the county with a great deal of pride. It can still be seen on car tags and county government seals. But the nickname is not about the Newt Knight saga. In fact at the time of this rebellion, it was referred to in a Natchez newspaper as the “Republic of Jones,” a name extensively used throughout the last 150 years, especially by historians writing on the subject. Other names for the Knight rebellion have also been used: the “Jones County Confederacy,” a “Confederacy within a Confederacy,” and even the “Kingdom of Jones,” which I had never heard until I watched the Ken Burns “Civil War” documentary.
The name “Free State of Jones” can be traced back to the 1830s and 1840s. When new lands opened up in South Mississippi, thanks to the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830, Jones County, already sparsely populated, lost a sizable portion of its population, as people sought out more land and better opportunities. As that shift occurred, the civil government, in place since the county’s inception in 1826, essentially collapsed. With few slaves, not much government, and a small population, it was a very free place to live. In fact, the state legislature had to pass a law in 1843 to reorganize the non-existent county government. Many years after the war, the name “Free State of Jones” came to be associated with the Knight rebellion.
2) Jones County Unionism – The essence of the film was that Jones County, as well as a few of the surrounding counties, was a hotbed of unionist, as well as anti-slavery, support since it was sparsely populated with slaves. In fact, there were just over 300 blacks in the whole county in 1860. The film makes it seem as though the majority unionist Jones Countians reacted against the plantation-slave-cotton economy of the South, every bit as much as the hated “Twenty Negro Law” and the Confederate “tax-in-kind” policy.
And to build up this dramatic, anti-wealth narrative, what we see is a large-scale plantation right in the center of Ellisville, complete with a big house with a cruel and unjust master, named James Eakins, who raises a lot of cotton, enough to fill the cotton market in the small town. The set up seems to be taken right from Natchez and transplanted in the heart of Jones County. But it is complete fiction. Jones County had no major plantations and was comprised mainly of small yeoman farmers, who raised more cattle than cotton.
In fact, aside from Eakins, there are many fictional characters in this film, nearly as many as authentic characters in the true story – Moses Washington, the main freed slave in the Knight Company who occupies much of the center stage throughout the film, and Daniel Knight, Newt Knight’s nephew killed at the Battle of Corinth at the start of the movie, are both completely fabricated.
As for Confederate tax policy, the “tax-in-kind” that required farmers to give ten percent to the government, it was a tough tax in those farm-based areas and there were reports of rough tactics used to collect it. But the film essentially portrayed the Confederate army and tax collectors as barbarians. I was unsure if I was seeing the Confederate army or the first coming of Hitler’s Wehrmacht. One particularly nasty tax-collecting officer, a Lt. Barbour, was also a fictional character.
But the film left out the fact that the Confederate Congress changed the tax several times, including a major change in February 1864 that exempted poor and needy families but also heavily taxed the rich and affluent. One political scientist from Yale wrote that the Confederate Congress, in this new change, “taxed all property including slaves at 5%; all gold, silver, and jewels were taxed at 10%; all shares or interest in banks, companies or businesses were taxed at 5%; monies in any form were taxed at 5%; and taxes on profits were increased to 10%, with companies that made more than a 25% profit taxed at 25%.”[4] And all because of the complaints of, and out of concern for, struggling farmers.
And of course the film completely omits the fact that the Knight Company was burning homes and plundering farms of those who remained loyal to the Confederacy in a fashion much worse than actions undertaken by the Confederate army.
In one letter from Captain W. Wirt Thompson to the Confederate Secretary of War, James Seddon, he recounts the carnage: “Several of the most prominent citizens have already been driven from their homes, and some have been slaughtered in their own homes because they refused to obey the mandates of the outlaws and abandon the country. Numbers have been ordered away and are now living under threats and in fear of their lives.”[5]
Although there was a rebellion in Jones, the county was not nearly as unionist as it is portended to be. Jones raised eight companies of troops for the Confederate army, a sizeable number for a county of just 3323 white souls when the war started. Colonel John Marshall Stone, who commanded Mississippi troops in the war and later served 12 years as governor, wrote that Jones County “furnished perhaps as many soldiers to the army of the Confederacy as any other county of like population.”[6]
Several of these units had very colorful names, indicating their loyalty and patriotism toward the Confederate cause: Ellisville Invincibles (Co. K, 8[SUP]th[/SUP] Mississippi, in which my 4[SUP]th[/SUP] great grandfather William Hugh Graham fought and died doing his part to stop Sherman’s rampage in Georgia), Jones County Rosin Heels (commanded by Amos McLemore, who was murdered by Knight), the Beauregard Defenders, and the Renovators.[7]
3) The “Battle of Ellisville” and the Knight Company – The climatic battle scene, a full-pitched clash in the middle of town, is completely fabricated. The fights between the Knight Company and Confederate forces were more of a guerilla, hit-and-run nature, more akin to what you can see in the Mel Gibson film, “The Patriot.” Or as many a former Confederate said, “Just a bunch of deserters hidin’ out and bushwhackin’” Confederates.[8]
But McConaughey’s “Newt Knight” boasts in the film that his company defeated an entire division of Confederate troops. The Knight Company, though, has been estimated by several sources to be around 125 men, so the very idea of his victory over a unit that would have consisted of 9,000 to 12,000 men is completely unrealistic and utterly false. The Confederate government did not send an entire division into Jones to defeat Knight. A much smaller force under Colonel Robert Lowry came in 1864 and scattered most of the outlaws.
And even the Knight Company’s status in the Jones County rebellion is disputed. According to Rudy H. Leverett, author of The Legend of the Free State of Jones, there “never existed in Jones County a single, monolithic organization of deserters. Instead, some of the resident deserters were organized into networks or confederations of small, neighborhood squads, each with its own leader.” And only banded together, he writes, as “occasion demanded.”[9]
The most serious engagement during the war years near Ellisville is known as the skirmish on Rocky Creek, in June 1863, where a Union cavalry unit from Illinois, sent to cut the railroad at Mobile, was ambushed and decisively defeated by Confederate troops from Tennessee, along with the formation of a “home guard” unit consisting of mainly older men and young boys, because most of the military aged men in the county were at the front. The skirmish did not concern the Knight Company, or any other deserter unit, and thus did not make it into the film.
But the incident is telling. After the fight concluded, Lt. Wilson, commanding the 43[SUP]rd[/SUP] Tennessee, wrote his report, from which we can gain a lot of understanding about the true nature of Jones County during the war, more evidence of an adherence to the Confederacy than in the control of a band of deserters.
Writes Leverett: “From Wilson’s report of this truly remarkable achievement, we learn a number of relevant facts. We learn, for example, that the Union raiders received no assistance, either before or after their capture, from any indigenous partisan force; we learn that Piney Woodsmen who were too old or too young for regular military service were eager to fight for the Confederate cause, even to the extent of doing battle with an elite group of Union cavalry raiders; and we learn that even after the Union soldiers were captured, Wilson had his hands full in protecting them from the natives. Concerning the latter, Wilson wrote, ‘It was as much as I could possibly do to keep sufficient order to guard my prisoners.’ In other words, among the ordinary ‘Piney Woodsmen’ of Jones County, there was no disloyal sentiment apparent in the early summer of 1863.”[10]
4) The Declaration of the Free State of Jones – Even though it might be a nice thought to consider the Free State of Jones to have existed in fact, and although Newt Knight was often said to have been the “Governor” or “President” of it, simply put there is no evidence that any official act, or any dramatic public declaration of the establishment of a “Free State of Jones,” as the movie portrays, ever took place.
There are references, however, to some kind of declared independence in a Natchez newspaper and in one letter in General Sherman’s correspondence but because of a lack of evidence is most likely rumor and hearsay.
The Natchez Courier newspaper wrote this in July 1864: “It may be interesting to many of our citizens to know that the county of Jones, State of Mississippi, has seceded from the State and formed a Government of their own, both military and civil. The Confederacy, after claiming the right of secession, not being willing to extend the same to the said Republic, has declared war against it and sent an army under Col. Mowry, of Mobile, to crush the rebellion.”[11]
The letter from General Sherman in the Official Records: “I enclose herewith … a declaration of independence by certain people who are trying to avoid the Southern conscription, and lie out in the swamps. I promised them countenance, and encouraged them to organization for mutual defense.”[12] But what that declaration was has never been found.
Even Newt Knight himself never claimed the county seceded. In the only interview Knight ever gave, in 1921 to Meigs O. Frost of the New Orleans Item, he disputed it: “There’s one story that after Jones County seceded from the Union she seceded from the Confederacy and started up a Free State of Jones. That ain’t so.”[13]
Of course Knight’s reasoning was that since the county did not vote to secede, then it did not join the rest of the state in the Confederacy. By that twisted logic, the county had no need to secede because it was still with the Union. But counties are not sovereign, nor autonomous, and therefore could not separate itself from the state. The Constitution is very clear: A sovereign state cannot be divided without the state’s permission.
Compounding the issue further is Knight’s service in the Confederate army, which was of his own accord until at least 1863, when he deserted for good. Yet in his later years, Knight tried to down play his service. In a petition to Mississippi governor Sharkey in the summer of 1865, Knight wrote, “We Stood firm to the union when secession swept as an avalanche over the state. For this cause alone we have been treated as savages instead of freeman by the rebel authorities.”[14] But his Confederate service disproves that entire petition.
To get around that problem, as Knight told Meigs Frost, he only served because he was forced into service. Mississippi voted to secede from the Union, he said, then the “next thing we know they were conscripting us. The rebels passed a law conscripting everybody between 18 and 35. They just come around with a squad of soldiers ‘n’ took you.” But the conscription act did not pass until April of 1862, after Knight was already in the army, so he had, in fact, voluntarily joined, as did a great many members of his future Knight Company, including Jasper Collins.
As the movie portrays, and as Knight told Frost, he refused to fight and worked as a nurse. “I didn’t want to fight. I told ‘em I’d help nurse sick soldiers if they wanted. They put me in the Seventh Mississippi Battalion as hospital orderly. I went around giving the sick soldiers blue mass and calomel and castor oil and quinine. That was about all the medicine we had then. It got shorter later.” But he is not listed on any muster rolls as a hospital orderly and eventually reached the rank of fourth sergeant during his time in the army. He just decided to desert and start a campaign of “bushwhackin’.”
Despite the fantasy of Hollywood, there is no record of any official declaration, a vote on county secession, or a great flag-raising ceremony, as Knight and his merry band raise the US flag above the courthouse in Ellisville, an event that although the consultants say is documented, the only evidence of it is based on one letter that is itself based on second-hand information.[15]
Colonel Robert Lowry, sent in to put down the rebellion, and who later served two terms as governor from 1882-1890, wrote of Jones: “The county furnished nearly and probably its entire quota of soldiers, many of whom did splendid service. No such effort as establishing a separate government was ever attempted. The story of withdrawal and establishing of a separate government is a pure fabrication – not a shadow of foundation for it.” Other Mississippi governors of the period said much the same thing.[16]
Nor did the alleged “Free State of Jones” encompass as much territory as Knight proclaimed in the film. In his grand speech on the courthouse steps, under the fluttering Union flag, he claims it extended as far south as the Pascagoula swamps and over to the Alabama line, which would have covered most of southeast Mississippi. Yet in reality it would have extended no further than the 700 square miles of the county of Jones. Knight’s influence scarcely extended further.
Writes Leverett: “That there did exist in Jones County in 1864 something called the Republic of Jones or the Jones County Confederacy, or perhaps both, is hard to doubt.” But taken with all the available evidence, including “the total absence in contemporary records of the area of anything even remotely suggesting the secession story,” the only conclusion is that the “Republic of Jones was a legendary, not a historical republic.”[17] In other words, it existed in myth or in name only, not legal fact.
5) The Character of Newt Knight – The film attempts to portray Newt Knight as a great man, but aside from those in the Knight Company, most Jones Countians, then and now, had a low opinion of Knight. He’s well known, even today, as a murderer, thief, plunderer, bandit, outlaw, and an adulterer. One of his own neighbors called him “a mighty sorry man.”[18]
Although a big part of the film centers on the relationship between Knight and the slave Rachel, who is portrayed as belonging to Eakins, the fictional planter in Ellisville, it does not represent it accurately. In the film, Rachel, with some obvious nursing skills, met Knight when she was sent to his house to help his sick son. In reality Rachel belonged to Newt’s grandfather, who apparently owed 22 slaves, making him one of the largest slaveholders in the area, so Knight had presumably known her all his life.
As for Knight’s legal marriage to his white wife Serena, who he wed in 1849, the film shows but one child yet they had nine. While still married to Serena, Knight got together with Rachel, which the film depicts, and they eventually had five children, although only one is shown. Rachel also had three children prior to her relationship with Knight, which the film left out.
Amazing as it sounds, when Rachel died in 1889, Knight actually took up with one of Rachel’s daughters, Georgeanne, and had two children with her, all while Serena lived in the same house. So the adultery charge, as well as the overall characterization of him as a moral degenerate, is very accurate. One old Confederate soldier, speaking of these things, said of Knight, “What he did after the war was worse than deserting.”[19]
Newt Knight was also well known for his meanness, not the film depiction of a kinder, more thoughtful gentleman. In the 1921 Frost article, a Jones Countian told Frost to be careful when meeting Knight. “Watch out you don’t come back with a charge of birdshot in your legs,” he warned him. “If Uncle Newt ain’t feelin’ right…”
Knight allegedly committed two cold-blooded murders before the war, one of which was a slave belonging to his grandfather, after which his mother falsified documents to show him to be a minor at the time of the killing, so as to shield him from the law. The other alleged homicide was his own brother in-law, who he supposedly gunned down in 1861. These facts are not portrayed or even mentioned in the film.
And during his rebellion, Knight killed Confederate Major Amos McLemore in cold blood, which is the centerpiece of the whole affair. McLemore, a native of Jones, was sent by General Braxton Bragg to put down the rebellion and round up the deserters. He was staying in the Ellisville home of Amos Deason, a house that is still standing today and is the focus of the story. Knight and a cohort sneaked up to the house and shot McLemore late at night as the Major prepared for bed.
One version of the incident holds that Knight shot him through the window, or, in another version, burst in the door and shot him. Either way, we do know that Knight shot McLemore in the back. Yet the film portrays this incident in a church, for some reason, with Knight strangling him with his belt, seemingly an attempt to make it a much more dramatic and a more chivalrous act, supposedly in defense of his county and people from the murderous hordes wearing the gray.
6) Reconstruction – This film is one of the few to delve into the Reconstruction period, centering on Knight’s work on behalf of black voter registration, the Republican Party, and the Union League. In one gallant scene, Knight marches into downtown Ellisville, as Federal troops occupy the streets, leading a contingent of black and white Republicans to cast ballots in a state election. But again, there is no evidence that any Union troops were garrisoning Ellisville, or that Knight marched into town to demand the right to vote for everyone. Although Mississippi’s carpetbag governor, Adelbert Ames of Massachusetts, appointed him a colonel of a state infantry regiment in 1875, there is no evidence that Knight was in any Union League after the war.
In fact, Newt Knight is never mentioned in any scholarly work on Reconstruction in Mississippi. And the historical consultant’s footnotes for this particular episode are three secondary books that simply mention the existence of such an organization and the number of black officeholders in the South during Reconstruction, but not Newt Knight specifically.

More at: https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/review/the-free-state-of-jones-history-or-hollywood/

[MENTION=849]jmdrake[/MENTION]

 

[jmdrake]

[MENTION=849]jmdrake[/MENTION]

LOL @ your revisionist history. What you and your fellow neocons (neoconfederates) cannot get around are this:

1) Southern slave owners exempted themselves from the draft. That is something the movie brought out but that is typically left out of the history books. Yet is it 100% accurate.

2) People in the South who were not connected to slavery more than once seceded from the confederate states. This was not the only place where it happened. Look up "Incident at Looney's Tavern." It's not a Hollywood movie, but they have made a local musical about it. In the mountainous areas of North Alabama, where slavery was not profitable, working class whites seceded from Alabama. And the state of West Virginia is the result in secession from the confederacy.

3) It's laughable that on a forum dedicated to a man who declared taxation to be theft, you post an article that tries to come to the defense confederate tax collectors. Seriously? In the name of "states rights", confederates stole from their fellow non slave holding whites and enslaved them to fight for their stupid war.

Seriously, your post is a joke.

 

[jmdrake]

If it goes through Hollywood then it is a bit of both. 'Based on...' I think they call it.

Exactly! I don't see the [MENTION=65299]Swordsmyth[/MENTION] complaining about the historical accuracy of Braveheart (totally made up except for the ending) or The Patriot (no known episode of British soldiers locking Americans in a church and burning it down).

The fact is that the confederacy stole from other whites in the form of taxation and enslaved fellow whites through a draft that exempted slave owners. Yes the North had a draft after the South, but neither abolitionists (against slavery) nor factory owners (pro tariff) exempted themselves from the draft. And naive libertarians aren't running around trying to self-identify with the Union under the false impression that the Union was pro states rights. Clearly it wasn't. But neither was the confederacy. The same people screaming "states rights" and "we have the right to secede" created a constitution that didn't allow states the right to ban slavery and fought viciously against parts of their state that wanted to part of the confederacy.

 

[jmdrake]

The South was destroyed in the war, Carpet-baggers and Scalawags took over, and yet the North still was just as bad or worse.

Besides that this post is about a particular historical incident and it's distortion by Hollywood Yankees, Stop trying to derail it.

The thread itself is stupid. The movie you are attacking is more accurate than Braveheart. Are you going to start a thread on that and call out AntiFederalist?

 

[jmdrake]

Rhode Island was big player in slavery.

And much later, the Klan burned school for African children there.

Browns ( who Brown University is named after ) were some of biggest players in slave trade.

Let's not forget the slaughter and theft of lands carried out after Civil War on Lakota and other tribes by supposedly virtuous northerners.

Oh yeah, let not forget the holocaust level of killing happening today, carried out under the name of the U.S. government.

Let's see. The trail of tears was done by southerner Andrew Jackson. (Libertarian hero for fighting against the national banks). Andy Jackson also threatened to hang the first secessionists. He gets a pass in the South because he was a slave owner and a southerner. The only time I ever hear anyone on this forum criticize Andy Jackson is a belated "Well I don't like him either" when I point out his role is pushing the idea that secession = treason. Also founding father, and slave owner, George Washington showed how much he cared for "limited government" by putting down the whiskey rebellion through force of arms.

 

[jmdrake]

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