The State of Jones

Also by Sally Jenkins

The Real All Americans

Also by John Stauffer

Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln

The Black Hearts of Men

For Gary Ross, Phyllis Grann, and Jim Kelly,
the three great minds who brought us
together, with enormous gratitude
and affection

I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to “remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them.” I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done—in behalf of his despised poor, was not wrong, but right.

—John Brown, “Last Address to the Virginia Court,” 1859

Prologue: The South’s Strangest Soldier

1
:
Corinth

2
:
Home

3
:
The Swamp and the Citadel

4
:
The Hounds

5
:
The Third Front

6
:
Banners Raised and Lowered

7
:
Reconstruction and Redemption

8
:
The Family Tree

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

1921, Border of Jones and Jasper Counties, Mississippi

T
he newspaperman drove his big city
car along a rutted red-clay country road, sending up garlands of Mississippi backwoods dust. Newton Knight was hard enough to find when he was living. Dead, he would always be a fugitive, the newspaperman supposed. The old Civil War guerrilla was said to be nearing ninety years of age, and it wouldn’t be long before he escaped his worldly pursuers and went to the grave—and plunged straight to hell, his enemies hoped. But before he did, the newspaperman intended to take down his story with an honest pen.

The chance to interview Knight was an irresistible summons to Meigs O. Frost. An Andover- and Harvard-educated correspondent for the
New Orleans Item
, Frost, thirty-eight, was always on the lookout for a rich subject. He’d made a career out of exploring the queer angle, the surprising complication, and the buried secret. Newton Knight qualified on all of these counts; there wasn’t a more controversial—or reclusive —Civil War figure in the South. He’d still
be debated long after the last headstone of the oldest combatant was covered with moss, Frost guessed.

Frost pressed the gas of his black Model T and endured the jouncing of his wheels, the rattling of the shutter hood, and laboring of the crankshaft. The rough road, littered with stones and pine boughs, wound through steep, wooded fields and across the crest of a lonesome timber-covered ridge. At last, a clearing opened up. Frost braked to a stop, with a sound of
ahooga
from the brass horn. He sat on the cape of a remote hill, with a sentinel-like view of the surrounding ridges. It was a place that suggested guardedness rather than peace.

Before him was a weather-beaten cabin, sheltered by lofty pines and crooked oaks, the sort the Confederate cavalry had hung traitors from. Frost got out of the car, and as the dust swirled around his cuffed pants and city shoes, he felt a stir of anticipation. He just might get the answers to some long-asked questions. Everyone had an opinion about the man whose loyalty to the Union had caused him to betray the South. But no one had ever heard the opinions of Newton Knight himself.

Knight’s role in Civil War Mississippi had been argued over ever since the surrender. The debate as to who he was and what he meant by his actions raged on, in old letters in school-taught hands, overlooked depositions, and wartime documents. Only one characteristic of the man did they all agree on.

“Just a fightin’ fool when he got started,” a friend described him.

From 1863 to 1865, Knight, an antislavery farmer in Jones County, Mississippi, led an insurrection against the Confederacy. For two long years he fought a war from within, successfully evading every bloodhound and tough-booted rebel that came after him. Working side by side with blacks and fellow fugitives, he raised the American flag in the marrow of the South, Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s home state, and became such an effective opponent that in the last year of the war exaggerated reports circulated that he and his compatriots seceded from the Confederacy and formed a separate government. The phrase “The Free State of Jones” earned
a storied if apocryphal place in Mississippi, and in the American imagination.

For all of that, “Captain” Newton Knight remained one of the less known and most poorly understood warriors of the Civil War. An expert in the art of disappearance, he had faded into the weeds of time the way he once faded into the canebrake of the Mississippi Piney Woods region. Virtually every local account of him was bent by lore or bitter memory. Depending on who told the story, he was called a hero, outlaw, soldier, or murderer.

“I believe in giving the devil his due, Newt was a mighty sorry man,” declared his old Confederate neighbor, Ben Graves.

Yet, to one local boy named Monroe Johnson, Knight left the indelible impression of a patriot. He looked, Johnson said, “like George Washington, with his long white hair.”

Who was he, really?

He was a slave owner’s grandson who never owned slaves; a dead-eyed shot who could reload a shotgun before the smoke cleared; a father and husband who after the war had two families, one white, the other black; a white man who in his later years was called a Negro. He fought for racial equality during the war and after, and he envisioned a world that would only begin to be implemented a century later.

Those were the facts. The full story was even more complicated.

That Newton Knight deserted and fought against the Confederate army was well known. Less well known, and seldom publicly acknowledged was Newton’s long alliance with a woman named Rachel, a slave owned by his family, a woman of manifest strength and arresting appearance whom he was rumored to have loved, and even married. Rachel aided and protected Newton during the Civil War and after it bore his children. Newton shared his homestead with her until her death in 1889, and perhaps breaking the biggest taboo of all, he had acknowledged their children and grandchildren as his own. “What he did after the war was worse than deserting,” old Ben Graves said.

The recovery of the life of this poor Mississippi farmer who
fought for the Union was an important story, Frost believed. For one thing, Knight contradicted the romantic vision of the Southern past as a glorious Lost Cause. In this view, the Confederacy was a noble but failed attempt to declare independence from Northern aggressors—and slavery was ignored. One would never know, based on this Lost Cause mythology, that countless gallant Confederate heroes had committed treason, in defense of a still deeper crime. Or that the majority of white Southerners had
opposed
secession, that many Southern whites fought
for
the Union, and that a few of them, like Knight, burst free of racial barriers and forged bonds of alliance with blacks that were unmatched even by Northern abolitionists, and remained loyal against all odds.

Newton Knight was a spectacular reminder to Meigs Frost that the South was plagued by bloody internal estrangements. In fact, a major reason for the South’s defeat stemmed from its enemies within, blacks and whites. In Jones County, fifty-three men had not only fought as anti-Confederate guerrillas, but formally enlisted in the Union army in New Orleans.

Definitive statements about Knight’s career were perilous, given the scantiness of the record and the competing agendas of the witnesses. But this much Frost was sure of: for two long years Knight and his band “remained unconquered though surrounded by Confederate Armies from start to finish.” Their resistance had hampered the Confederate army’s ability to do battle against the North, forced it to conduct a third-front war at home, and eroded its fierce will to fight.

Not that anyone had ever thanked him for it. Newton Knight remained such a sore subject that many Mississippians refused to say his name, except to cuss him, and some of his own relatives even denied kinship with him. To them, he was a criminal.

“No romance about it at all, sir,” an old Confederate said to Frost. “Just a bunch of deserters hidin’ out and bushwhackin’.”

To an extent, Knight’s personal reticence had allowed others their opinions of him over the years. Knight never talked about the war.
He gave only a few firsthand accounts of himself, even to his white son, Thomas Jefferson Knight. “One of the strange things about my father’s activities was that he would never tell anyone how many men they killed or wounded,” Tom Knight observed.

Newton believed it did no good to talk about the war and stir up the old bitterness. He made exceptions on five occasions between 1870 and 1900, when he filed claims through Congress seeking compensation for his service to the Union army. The claims were denied—Northern politicians were skeptical that any Southerners could have been loyal to the federal side. The rejection reinforced Newton’s predisposition toward silence on the subject.

But he was reaching the end of his life, and he was tired of being misunderstood. In 1920, the white-haired old man had sent out a missive from his hilltop property. He wished to tell his story to an independent historian. He had heard too many “lies of the times,” he said. He wanted to correct them.

An Ellisville attorney named J. M. Arnold wrote a note to Dunbar Rowland, Mississippi’s preeminent military historian and archivist:

That was how Newton had come, on that spring day in 1921, to grant an audience to the journalist Frost. Yet even with an invitation,
Frost was warned, it might be difficult to get Knight to talk much about the old days. The war still rankled in him, as it did in his enemies in Jones and the surrounding counties. “Watch out you don’t come back with a charge of birdshot in your legs, if Uncle Newt ain’t feelin right,” a local told Frost.

Frost approached the weathered old cabin, in the shade of the long-straw pines. As he opened the gate of a hand-hewn split rail fence, a hound bayed, and a young couple wandered out to the front porch. Knight’s daughter, Cora, wore an old-fashioned calico dress; her husband was in overalls.

“Uncle Newt home?”

“No, suh. He’s oveh at the otheh place, bout three miles off.”

She gestured into the woods, a direction that presumably led to the home of Knight’s black family. Frost surveyed the rough, uneven ground with dismay; the thickets and tangled underbrush made it impossible to go any farther by car. He would have to hike. The man in overalls pointed to a narrow dirt footpath that wound into the woods. “Over yonder, past that naked pine.”

Frost had just started up the undulating path into the dense woods when a figure loomed ahead, trudging through the brush. The tall, gaunt form that mounted the hill was a trifle stooped, but even with an old man’s hunch in his back, Newton Knight was still formidably built. Frost surveyed a frame that was perhaps six-foot-four or taller, in an age when the average male height was about five feet seven. He was clad in a suit of dark homespun, heavily booted, and topped by a great-brimmed slouch hat of light-colored felt, which only made him seem larger.

The face that peered from beneath the hat was eagle-like. “A mighty beak of a nose jutted out like a promontory,” Frost noted. “The jaw was seen through a sparse white beard. The white hair, uncut for years, hung about his shoulders.” But it was the eyes that made the impression on Frost: they were the pale blue color of the winter sea, and they suggested all of the isolation and self-sufficiency of a survivalist who was willing to do whatever it took to endure. To
Frost, they were the eyes of a gunfighter. “They were that cold, clear, blue-grey eyes of the killer now vanishing from the west,” he wrote. “They looked clear through you. And by some peculiarity of control, hawk-like, the lower lids never moved.”

The gaze was unnerving enough in peacetime, Frost thought. In fighting times—well.

“Glad to see you sir,” Knight said, offering a handshake. The outstretched hand was a great slab of a thing, palm toughened and heavily muscled from a lifetime of hefting axes, wrestling livestock, and wielding firearms.

His accent was pure backwoods Mississippi, soft on the A’s and hard on the E’s. For emphasis, he used phrases like “right smart” or “right peart.” The words came out “raht smahrt” or “raht peert.” Knight suggested they move into the house to get out of the raw spring weather and warm themselves next to the hearth. “I’m feeling right peart this morning but I reckon a fire would feel good, don’t you?” he said.

As Frost followed Knight along the path, the old man covered the uphill ground like an athlete. He had once been a king of backwoods fighters, a bare-knuckled, crotch-kicking, ear-biting hellion. “He used to have the biggest, longest teeth you ever saw,” one friend remarked.

They crossed the porch of the cabin, stamping dirt from their boots on the threshold. Knight’s living room was a plain, barnlike space of rough plank floors and matchboard walls. A giant whitewashed stone hearth took up most of one side of the room. Above, mounted on a rack and gleaming, was a twin-hammered shotgun.

Frost wasn’t intimidated by the weapon, or by the old soldier. The reporter had an air of the patrician about him—he was a Connecticut Yankee and a remote cousin of the poet Robert Frost—but he was also an ex-soldier himself and a former foreign war correspondent. As a young man he had once tried to chew buckshot, to build up his determination. Following Harvard and a brief stint as a reporter for the
New York Times
, Frost had enlisted in the Marines.
He had chased Pancho Villa across Mexico and fought in the Great War. He still had a silver plate in his leg, which had been shredded by shrapnel. As a war correspondent he had covered a half a dozen Latin American revolutions and lost the sight in one eye from an infection contracted crawling through a jungle. He had finally settled down in New Orleans, where he wrote about everything from ghosts to corruption. But he remained a notoriously tough reporter, who would help bring down Louisiana governor Huey Long by exposing his scandal-ridden administration.

As they stood by the fire, Frost forthrightly introduced the subject he had come to talk about: did Knight remember much about the war?

“Well I remember a right smart of it,” Knight said.

“Memory still as good as your eyes?” Frost asked.

“Better,” Knight shot back. “My memory’s all right. ’Bout my eyes, I’ve worn out three-four pair of spectacles. Don’t think much of ’em. Quit ’em. I can see enough to shoot a bird on the wing or a rabbit on the run yet. That’s good enough for me.”