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99 of 119 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Okay historical novel, but bad history, July 19, 2009
Rating as Historical Fact: *
Rating as Historical Novel: ***
"State of Jones" purports to deal with the events surrounding an insurrection against Confederate authority that took place in 1863-4 in Jones County, Mississippi. Prior to the outbreak of the war, the Piney Woods area in which Jones County is situated had relatively few slaves and an economy based on livestock rather than cotton. Hence many of its men were reluctant participants in the war and, when Union forces clearly established the upper hand with the fall of Vicksburg in July 1863, they deserted and returned to their farms. Their numbers and their effective control of the area alarmed Confederate officials who sent in troops. There were several small scale engagements and about a dozen of the deserters (and a few unfortunate kinsmen) were hanged. Whether the Piney Woods renegades were simply deserters and bushwhackers or were true Unionist--and to what degree they were truly an effective military force--has been debated ever since. Adding to the debate is its central character: Newton Knight. Knight was the leader of the most prominent band of deserters. Following the Civil War he capped his lifetime of independent action by maintaining a second family with a mulatto woman, Rachel Knight--a former slave who had assisted him during the war.
The book under review has received a fairly substantial promotional push by its publisher perhaps owing to the fact that, as the authors note in their acknowledgement, it developed out of a screenplay for a proposed movie project by Gary Ross (Seabiscuit). The authors have made liberal use of a number of secondary historical accounts, the most frequently referenced (if not too openly acknowledged in their interviews) being Rudy Leverett's "Legend of the Free State of Jones" and Victoria Bynum's "Free State of Jones." But popular depictions of the Free State of Jones go back to the 1940s publication of James Street's novel "Tap Root" which, following the more usual course of events, was subsequently made into a movie. Thus the authors of "State of Jones" are disingenuous in their repeated claims to have uncovered a story overlooked by history (see most recently their letter of 17 July, 2009 to the Wall Street Journal) and are docked one star for this distasteful arrogance.
But a crucial problem for those of us familiar with the known facts are the substantial liberties the authors have taken with these facts--and the instances where they have gotten these facts wrong. To cite just two (and my personal tally runs several pages):
1) The authors state that pioneer settler Stacy Collins "had spoken out vehemently against secession" (p 15) when, in fact, he died in Texas ca 1853 and the two sources they cite for this statement do not support it.
2) The authors state as fact that Jones County voted to elect an anti-secessionist delegate to the Mississippi Secession Convention by a margin of 374 to 24 (p 73). And this is, indeed, what myth laden secondhand sources have stated. But the actual document reporting the vote count is housed in the Mississippi Archives and shows the tally was 166 to 89. Still a substantial vote against secession, but not a mythic one. It can be noted that Bynum, using a more reputable secondary source, gave the correct election result in her more scholarly and, by my estimation, much more accurate account.
The list of such factual errors that interrupted my reading goes on and on, but would be tedious for all but obsessive researchers like myself. Let it just be said that the book contains a perplexing number of such factual errors, both small and large.
More troubling is the narrative style of the book. To make the narrative an easy, exciting read (and, in general, it is) the authors have dropped the usual qualifiers that should pepper an account for which so few original records exist. In this they are only following the regrettable trail blazed by other popular historical accounts such as "Isaac's Storm" where suppositions are paraded as facts and the caveats relegated to the fine print of the end notes. Still, with one of the authors being a prize winning Harvard professor, one would have hoped that so much dubious hypothesizing would not have been implied as fact simply for the sake of propelling the narrative.
The assertive narrative style allows the authors to mask gapping holes in our understanding of Newton Knight by depicting him as a, well, very cinematic John Brown of the Piney Woods. What we do know about Newton Knight is that neither he nor his father owned slaves (although his grandfather did) and that his relationship with his "outside" wife Rachel was conducted openly in defiance of social conventions. Accounts reveal that he encouraged some of his children into mixed race marriages. All this makes him a highly unusual character for the place and times, but that should be enough without forcing undocumented ennobling ideology onto the back of his actions.
Where the book does have a credible claim to staking some new ground is in its examination Newton Knight's postwar pursuit of a Union pension. Even here, however, the authors forsake historical analysis for the sake of narrative simplicity. Thus all Newton's claims of his pro-Unionist stance are taken at face value. But Knight had good reason to embellish his activities. Maybe not falsify, but embellish. A number of his band, in the wake of the Confederate actions against them, fled to New Orleans and enlisted in the federal army. These men, or their survivors--since a fair number died of disease following their enrollment--obtained pensions. It is reasonable that Newton Knight, accurately viewing himself as the guiding force in the organization of the deserters into a fighting force, felt he was also due compensation. And perhaps by moral right he was. But the laws governing pensions were strict and Knight fell outside their scope--unless his story was refashioned. And during the 1870s Washington was filled with lawyers who earned their livelihood by helping persons obtain pensions legally due them--or possibly not. Knight was not represented by some backwoods Southern lawyer. His pension counsel was based in Washington and, I believe, encouraged him to enhance his descriptions of his activities in order to have the best chance to obtain compensation. In good history the examination of such possibilities would be expected. But in "State of Jones" the authors consistently favor plotline over analysis. And this, along with the other reasons cited above, makes it difficult for me to accept the designation of this book as a history. It seems more a novelization of a screenplay with reference notes.
So where does this leave us? The real facts clearly show Newton Knight led a quasi-military insurgency against Confederate authority in the Piney Woods of Mississippi. He was a strong-willed, complex man of action who did as he damned well pleased. This placed him in a leadership role in the Piney Woods insurgency and quickly made him a social pariah after the war. The insurgency over which he assumed control was just one of many throughout those sections of the South where the cotton economy did not predominate. Sadly, the authors of "State of Jones" refused to examine Newton Knight on his own terms, but instead collaborated in the production of a classic Hollywood makeover.
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16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Good fiction, flawed history, July 18, 2009
The State of Jones is exciting as fiction. The main writer is a very talented one, and the book races along - it is a "good read." However, it is poor history. It is often impossible to find out from what primary sources the authors derived such sentences as "Newton was a gentle, conscientious father" on page 60 (and I could name many, many more) because the notes at the back of the book do not give them. While I like this note format because it doesn't interrupt the narrative with tiny numbers, it has to be done right.
When I read Irving Stone's Lust for Life, I was not a historian (I am now), but nonetheless I was appalled by his habit of putting thoughts in Van Gogh's head. (It was the height of authorial arrogance to invade the mind of a great man, but at least he titled the book as a "biographical novel.") It appalls me here in The State of Jones when I read that something "might" or, worse, "must have" have happened. For instance, ". . .Newton and Rachel's relationship must have involved deep emotional confusion. . ." (Page 157). We do not know if it did or not.
Conscientious historians do engage in speculation, but they are very careful about how they do it. "There is some evidence that Serena complained about these solitary trips" (285) demands more explication than a reference in a note to Ethel Knight's The Echo of the Black Horn. Or isn't it somewhat empty to say: "Newton left no record of his mood after the election of 1875, but it can be guessed at. . .[he] had no hope that the law would protect him. . ." (277); perhaps it would have been better just to describe what was going on in Mississippi after the election of 1875.
In some cases, it seems to me that the author is extrapolating from general history and applying it to a specific case, but she does not make that clear. For example, the notes for the description of Rachel's life in the Knight household (66) cite Deborah Gray White's Ar'nt I a Woman and Elizabeth Fox Genovese's Within the Plantation Household but don't make clear whether the citations refer to the Knight household or another. (In the case of Genovese, it is the Lumpkin household.)
Read The State of Jones for fun, but don't believe everything it says.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Although not a page turner this is well worth a read, especially for Civil War buffs., June 3, 2009
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This book just missed getting four stars from me, likely through no fault of the authors. The problem is that while the topic of the book is utterly fascinating, its narrative suffers greatly from a lack of primary source material.
Doubtless, the intent of the authors was to accomplish three things. First, to shine light on a phenomenon that was utterly foreign to me: Pro-Union Southrons acting against the Confederacy before, during and after the Civil War. Second, to focus in on one particularly strong anti-confederacy pro-Union county in Southern Mississippi. Third to discuss in particular the most dominant actor in that county; who he was, how he lived, what he believed, and how he acted.
In other words, this book has the makings of a real pot boiler for, who'd have thunk that the confederacy was anything but a monolithic pro-slavery anti-union force? Even if we allowed for that possibility, who knew about a small Mississippi county that became a hotbed of anti-insurrection insurrection? Finally, how can we not find ourselves in the thrall of a man who not only waged war against the confederacy from within the confederacy but also practiced a way of life that was completely outside of the normative functions of society then and now?
That's right, one Newton Knight, a Mississippi dirt farmer from Jones County almost singlehandedly defied the might of the rebel government and its military in defense of the United States of America. Not only that, but he also fell in love with an enslaved negress who bore him many children at the same time that we was married to and creating children with a caucasian, maintaining separate but equal households first on shared land and then on adjoining plots of land. Furthermore, he acknowledged and loved both of his families equally a lynching offense at the time.
Needless to say, these activities tried mightily the societal mores of the time, leading eventually to the man being shunned by virtually everybody regardless of their skin color.
A potentially fascinating tale, no?
As stated above, the story falls down because there is very little primary source material: The main protagonist didn't talk much about his activities, nor did he write about them: The pro-Union shadow government and army that was established in Jones County was had an informal framework with no record-keeping bureaucratic apparatus: Mr Knight's descendants were mum for the most part either because they didn't have the resources to make a record of his story, or they intentionally suppressed as much of the information as they could.
Suffice it to say that the book has lots of great elements: Guerilla warfare, formal wartime service in the Confederate Army, miscegenation, polygamy, incest, personal vendettas, ambushes and murder, swamp hideouts, lynchings, shootings, burnings and all manner of disturbing activity. Unfortunately, the authors' discussion of these things often had to be created out of whole cloth as they wove their tale around the small threads of concrete information they actually possessed.
Thus, the book reads a bit like this review: it has a whole bunch of connected stuff woven together haphazardly so that while one wants to connect, the uneven and incomplete presentation of it makes this difficult.
If, when the book is published, pictures are included in it the book will be about 100 percent better because the reader can literally, put faces and places to names. (Newton Knight literally looked extraordinary).
Note also that the discussion of the depravities of the unreconstructed rebels against the freed slaves and their Unionist and 'carpetbagger' defenders causes on to wonder how the USA made it to its present greatness, and with a half-black and half-white president no less. Hooray for America!
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Newton Knight is the most famous Civil War hero you’ve never heard of, because according to Mississippi legend he betrayed not only the Confederacy but his race as well. In 1863 Knight, a poor farmer from Jones County Mississippi, deserted the Confederate Army—and began fighting for the Union—after the battle of Vicksburg. It was rumored he even started a separate Unionist government, The Free State of Jones, and for two years he battled the Confederacy with a vengeance that solidified his legend. During his life Knight was hardly regarded as a proper soldier by either side, and after his death his Mississippi backwoods grave went unstrewn with flowers. Many southerners would have preferred to spit on it, and most northerners never recognized that such loyalty to the United States could exist in Dixie. But in truth, this lost patriot was a vital actor in helping to preserve the Union.
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