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The True Story of the ‘Free State of Jones’

A new Hollywood movie looks at the tale of the Mississippi farmer who led a revolt against the Confederacy

With two rat terriers trotting at his heels, and a long wooden staff in his hand, J.R. Gavin leads me through the woods to one of the old swamp hide-outs. A tall white man with a deep Southern drawl, Gavin has a stern presence, gracious manners and intense brooding eyes. At first I mistook him for a preacher, but he’s a retired electronic engineer who writes self-published novels about the rapture and apocalypse. One of them is titled Sal Batree, after the place he wants to show me.

I’m here in Jones County, Mississippi, to breathe in the historical vapors left by Newton Knight, a poor white farmer who led an extraordinary rebellion during the Civil War. With a company of like-minded white men in southeast Mississippi, he did what many Southerners now regard as unthinkable. He waged guerrilla war against the Confederacy and declared loyalty to the Union.

In the spring of 1864, the Knight Company overthrew the Confederate authorities in Jones County and raised the United States flag over the county courthouse in Ellisville. The county was known as the Free State of Jones, and some say it actually seceded from the Confederacy. This little-known, counterintuitive episode in American history has now been brought to the screen in Free State of Jones, directed by Gary Ross (Seabiscuit, The Hunger Games) and starring a grimy, scruffed-up Matthew McConaughey as Newton Knight.

Knight and his men, says Gavin, hooking away an enormous spider web with his staff and warning me to be careful of snakes, “had a number of different hide-outs. The old folks call this one Sal Batree. Sal was the name of Newt’s shotgun, and originally it was Sal’s Battery, but it got corrupted over the years.”

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Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-free-state-jones-180958111/#0XhF2lUyRwzFyJaF.99

And of a unbelievably courageous and visionary man, I am sure.

It is really just not the time for yet another story about a white savior of the...."coloreds."

Waiting for this one.

It portrayed him as only a man who fell into circumstances that put him into situations that were once one thing and 100 years later are very much the same in parts of the south.

I hope we can find it in our area.

most of the southern states that had a similar history.

A lot of people think that the South was nothing but cotton plantations and everyone here owned a bunch of slaves, but it wasn't really like that. A large majority of whites were poor farmers or tradesmen who didn't own any slaves. Generally speaking, the more hilly or mountainous areas had the fewest number of plantations and slaves. Those areas had a lot of people who weren't in favor of the war but were more or less dragged into it.

I'm glad that this movie came along to give an alternative view of the southern perspective during the war. Just as there were different attitudes about the war in the North, so there were in the South. I like to see more nuanced portrayals of life during that time. It wasn't the monolithic culture that we've been led to believe.