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Summary
Summary
New York Times bestselling author Sally Jenkins and distinguished Harvard professor John Stauffer mine a nearly forgotten piece of Civil War history and strike gold in this surprising account of the only Southern county to secede from the Confederacy.
The State of Jones is a true story about the South during the Civil War--the real South. Not the South that has been mythologized in novels and movies, but an authentic, hardscrabble place where poor men were forced to fight a rich man's war for slavery and cotton. In Jones County, Mississippi, a farmer named Newton Knight led his neighbors, white and black alike, in an insurrection against the Confederacy at the height of the Civil War. Knight's life story mirrors the little-known story of class struggle in the South--and it shatters the image of the Confederacy as a unified front against the Union.
This riveting investigative account takes us inside the battle of Corinth, where thousands lost their lives over less than a quarter mile of land, and to the dreadful siege of Vicksburg, presenting a gritty picture of a war in which generals sacrificed thousands through their arrogance and ignorance. Off the battlefield, the Newton Knight story is rich in drama as well. He was a man with two loves: his wife, who was forced to flee her home simply to survive, and an ex-slave named Rachel, who, in effect, became his second wife. It was Rachel who cared for Knight during the war when he was hunted by the Confederates, and, later, when members of the Knight clan sought revenge for the disgrace he had brought upon the family name.
Working hand in hand with John Stauffer, distinguished chair and professor of the History of American Civilization at Harvard University, Sally Jenkins has made the leap from preeminent sportswriter to a historical writer endowed with the accuracy, drive, and passion of Doris Kearns Goodwin. The result is Civil War history at its finest.
Author Notes
John Stauffer has published numerous articles on photography and social reform in America, and is the recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, The Pew Program in Religion and American History, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. His forthcoming book, The Black Hearts of Men, won the 1999 Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize for the best dissertation in American Studies from the American Studies Association. He is Assistant Professor of English, History and Literature at Harvard University.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The grandson of a wealthy Mississippi slave-owner, Newton Knight was an abolitionist and two-time rebel deserter who actively fought against the Confederacy, and bore a large family with a former slave. His home, Jones County, Miss., saw great hardship during the Civil War; Confederate taxes "pushed small farm families, who provided the rank and file foot soldiers, to the brink of destitution." Jenkins (The Real All Americans: The Team That Changed a Game, a People, a Nation) and Stauffer (Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln) employ painstaking research into Knight and Jones County, resulting in an engaging and original portrait of life inside the Confederacy. Knight's Scouts, formed after Vicksburg set off a wave of rebel desertions, carried out their own justice in Jones County, using clever techniques for communication, intimidation and warfare against the home team ("the sorts of exploits" that Sherman would appreciate). Knight's post-war efforts for equality included building an integrated school; when residents objected to his own mixed-race children attending, however, Knight burned it to the ground. Spanning more than 100 years, this family story brings home the lasting effects of hate and fear, love and acceptance, as well as the strides that have brought us to where we are. (June) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.
Booklist Review
The myth of the Lost Cause persists: a unified South stood valiantly against Northern efforts to degrade and ultimately destroy Southern rights and culture. In an unabashedly subjective work, the authors attempt to deal a deathblow to the myth. Their focus is Jones County, Mississippi, a hotbed of anti-secessionist sympathy before and during the Civil War. There, pro-Union men resisted Southern conscription, aided and sometimes joined the Union army, and fought a guerrilla war against Confederate militia and regular forces. Jenkins and Stauffer make clear from the outset where their sympathies lie, and they paint the Jones resisters in a rather heroic light. At the center of their narrative is a farmer, Newton Knight, portrayed credibly as a man of immense physical and moral courage. Knight, descended from slave owners, despised slavery. Like many other Southerners, he viewed the Confederate cause as a rich man's war, poor man's fight, and he fought valiantly against it. Despite occasional lapses into hyperbole, this is an excellent work that casts light on an obscure aspect of the Civil War.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE Civil War was not a simple collision of opposites. There was internal dissent on each side: Northerners who wanted to placate the South, Southerners loyal to the Union, and thousands of deserters from both armies. In "The State of Jones," Sally Jenkins, a Washington Post reporter, and John Stauffer, a Harvard historian, recreate the life and times of the bold Southern dissenter Newton Knight An indigent farmer in Jones County, Miss., the flinty, blue-eyed Knight was conscripted into the Southern army in 1862 and soon deserted. He organized a small band of neighbors that used guerilla tactics and swamp hideouts to fend off pursuing Confederate troops. Knight's vastly outnumbered group became a thorn in the side of the South, which was preoccupied with the invasions of Grant and Sherman. Knight and other Jones County residents aided the North during Reconstruction. Although Knight was married to a white woman and had several children by her, he simultaneously had a long-term liaison with a former slave of his grandfather, named Rachel. At a time when most Mississippi blacks did not own land, he deeded farmland to Rachel, with whom he had a number of children who worked side by side in the fields with their white siblings. Jenkins and Stauffer suggest that Knight was a religiously inspired antislavery warrior who "fought for racial equality during the war and after" and "forged bonds of alliance with blacks that were unmatched even by Northern abolitionists." But Knight poses special challenges for biographers. He comes down to us mainly through second-hand accounts, such as his white son Tom's sometimes-unreliable 1934 biography. There's the rub. Jenkins and Stauffer create a lively narrative, but is it factual - or fictionalized, like the movie script about Knight by the screenwriter Gary Ross, which, the authors report, inspired them to write the book? These issues are the subject of an Internet debate that began when Victoria Bynum, a Texas State history professor and author of the well-researched 2001 book "The Free State of Jones," wrote a review on her blog, Renegade South, in which she characterized Jenkins and Stauffer's book as a good read but inaccurate and unjustifiably politicized. Jenkins and Stauffer responded with counterevidence and claimed that Bynum had launched "turf warfare" to promote her own book. Others joined the exchange, pointing out small factual errors made by Jenkins and Stauffer, as well as the larger one that Jones County did not officially secede from the Confederacy, invalidating their book's subtitle. The dearth of dependable primary evidence about Knight forces Jenkins and Stauffer to rely often on conjecture. Their book fills lacunas with words like "perhaps," "it is possible," "likely," "could have," and so on. More than 50 pages is devoted to Knight's war experiences, hard information about which is scant. One battle described, Vicksburg, may have little bearing on his biography, since, as an endnote says, "there is no absolute proof that Newton was at Vicksburg, and a case can be made that he was not." (Bynum gives evidence that he was not.) It's impossible to gauge Knight's alleged early antislavery views, as Jenkins seems to concede in a blog comment: "We don't say categorically he was antislavery before the war." Jenkins and Stauffer describe the ex-slave Rachel as a caring soulmate who symbolized Knight's forward-looking capacity to reach across the racial divide. But we can't be sure, since, as the authors write, "there is precious little direct evidence of their relationship." Jenkins and Stauffer bring historical contexts to life and offer provocative interpretations, but they pile hunch upon hunch about Knight himself. Unless a new cache of sources about his life turns up, he'll remain as elusive to biographers as he was to the Confederate troops that chased him through the wooded marshes of Jones County. David S. Reynolds is a distinguished professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. His most recent book is "Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson."
Library Journal Review
New York Times best-selling author Jenkins (It's Not About the Bike) and Stauffer (history, Harvard Univ.) here tell the story of Newton Knight, a Jones County, MS, farmer who spearheaded a quasimilitary insurrection against the Confederacy at the height of the Civil War. Actor/narrator Don Leslie (American Prince) skillfully and convincingly reads this unique work of historical nonfiction; his delivery is lively but not overly dramatic. Largely unknown or forgotten outside the state of Mississippi, this event as recounted here will fascinate all those interested in American history and the Civil War era. Highly recommended.-Kristen L. Smith, Loras Coll. Lib., Dubuque, IA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
ONE Corinth May 1862, Corinth, Mississippi 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. Corinth was pestilential. Even the Union's pitiless William Tecumseh Sherman said the place made him feel "quite unwell." Sherman's superior, Henry Halleck, had such a low opinion of it that when he fell ill with a bowel ailment, he sourly named it "the evacuation of Corinth." It was wretched ground for a fight, with boggy fields, swarms of bugs clouding the fetid air, and a chronic shortage of decent drinking water. A Confederate colonel called it a "sickly, malarial spot, fit only for alligators and snakes." It left no better impression on a Yankee lieutenant from Minnesota, who found the locals "ignorant" and the women "she vipers" with the figures of "shad bellied bean poles," he wrote. As far as he could tell, the chief local produce consisted of "wood ticks, chiggers, fleas, and niggers." But men on both sides understood, if reluctantly, that Corinth was one of the most vital strategic points in the South. It was "the vertebrae of the Confederacy," as one rebel official put it. In the middle of town, two sets of railway tracks crossed each other in a broad X: the Memphis and Charleston ran -east--west, while the Mobile and Ohio ran -north--south. The intersection was a working hive: locomotives screeched and huffed, while men on platforms loaded and offloaded downy bales of cotton, stacks of lumber, crates, barrels, sacks of provisions like salt beef, and other vital war materiel. Trains were the reason for Corinth's existence: the village was just seven years old and the streets were still raw dirt. The largest hotel in town, the Tishomingo Hotel, was a broad -two--story affair with six chimneys that fronted directly on the tracks of the Memphis and Charleston, which ran just outside the front porch. There were 80,000 Confederate troops under General Pierre G. T. Beauregard jammed into the brick and clapboard town, which normally housed just 2,800 inhabitants. Corinth was filled with rebel wounded from Beauregard's catastrophic encounter in April with U. S. Grant's Yankee troops at Shiloh, just a few miles away. The battle, so named for the log church where Grant's men had camped, was the worst bloodbath in the Western Hemisphere to date, with a toll of 20,000 in two days. "God grant that I may never be the partaker in such scenes again," one Confederate survivor wrote. "When released from this I shall ever be an advocate of peace." Corinth was hardly an ideal place to recover. Contagion was inevitable with such a large army closely confined in pestiferous surroundings, the comings, goings, spewings, and brawlings of thousands of men, horses, mules, and oxen trod everything into mud, and their litter and foul runoff attracted hordes of fleas and mosquitoes. There were not enough rooms to accommodate the wounded, much less the sick. On the first floor of the Tishomingo, men lay on blood- and water-soaked carpets or blankets in the vestibule and hallways. On the second floor, the -charnel--house vapors caused some of the doctors and nurses to pass out. One of the wounded was a rugged -thirty--year--old colonel in the 6th Mississippi Infantry, and a future governor of the state, named Robert Lowry. This peacetime lawyer had been raised in Smith County, one county over from Jones. He had taken wounds in the chest and another in the arm, as his company lost 310 men out of 425. The performance had earned his unit the nickname "The Bloody Sixth." Those Confederates who survived Shiloh unharmed were as likely to get sick in Corinth. The rebels were preparing for a state of siege as a federal army of 120,000 under Union genera Excerpted from The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded from the Confederacy by John Stauffer, Sally Jenkins All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
