The state of Jones

The State of Jones
By Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer
Doubleday, 402 pages, $27.50






The idea is beguiling: a ­region in the South during the Civil War where the inhabitants, disgusted by slavery and unwilling to support the Confederate cause, take up arms as Union loyalists. Better still, for storytelling purposes, would be a charismatic leader who organizes the resistance.

Such is the legend of what became known as the “Free State of Jones,” a county deep in Mississippi’s piney woods. The area was one of many pockets in the state where dissatisfaction with the Confederacy boiled for much of the war, but only Jones County was elevated by folklore, ­especially in the decades after the war, into a scene of noble rebellion. It helped that the anti-Confederate ­faction there was led by a tall, stern backwoodsman named Newton Knight.

The operative words here are ­“legend” and “folklore.” Although Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer labor mightily in “The State of Jones” to make the case for Newt Knight and Jones County as emblems of ­enlightened “insurrection” within the Confederacy, the truth, alas, is hardly as inspiring as the authors suppose. Far from being a haven for the ­high-minded, Jones County was a magnet for Confederate deserters. Their hostility to being executed, ­imprisoned or pressed back into the service of a lost cause was the men’s animating principle.




“As far as the foot soldiers were concerned, the other side could have the damned town. The generals might have gladly given it up too, if not for the railroad junction. ” Read an excerpt from ‘The State of Jones’



It would have helped the authors’ argument if the book were simply better organized—the narrative is often difficult to follow—and if they had been more comfortable with Civil War history. They don’t place the ­battle of Corinth, or other Mississippi clashes described in the book, within the larger context of the war. Why did these fights happen and why were they important to the wartime fortunes of ­Mississippi? We’re also left to wonder about Knight’s ­experience in battle. The authors focus mostly on the “insufferable” day-to-day life of Confederate soldiers.

It wasn’t long, of course, before the bothersome deserters in Jones County became irrelevant to a Rebel army in retreat. Here the book’s ­interest shifts fully to the life of Newt Knight, during Reconstruction and beyond. As it happened, Knight was married to a white woman but also had a long-running affair with a black woman, even maintaining two ­separate households. Ms. Jenkins and Mr. Stauffer take this as evidence of Knight’s anti-racist, anti-slavery bona fides, but miscegenation had long been commonplace in the South, even—or especially—among slave owners, who took care of their ­mixed-blood offspring.

To be sure, Knight went beyond most in his studious maintenance of two households, one white and one black. And the arrangement resulted in many trials for him and his ­family—his white wife left him, ­jealousy raged between his two sets of children, and later generations ­intermarried without regard for their blood links. This is a complicated story, and the authors handle it well; it is easily the most interesting part of the book.





— Michael Ballard, the author of “Vicksburg: The Campaign That Opened the ­Mississippi,” is the coordinator of the Congressional and Political Research Center at the Mississippi State ­University Library.








The New York Public Library/Art Resource NY - The Tishomingo Hotel in Corinth, Miss., was used at different times as a hospital by both Union and Rebel troops.















Collection of Herman Welborn - Newton Knight, a Confederate medic and deserter