The State of Jones: The Small Southern County that Seceded from the Confederacy
By Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer
Dr, Stauffer and Ms. Jenkins are a bit of an odd couple when it comes to writing books; let me illustrate this. Sally Jenkins who was born on October 22, 1960, in Fort Worth Texas, the daughter of Dan Jenkins, the Hall of Fame sportswriter for Sports Illustrated. Like her father, she is a sports columnist and was a senior writer for Sports Illustrated before moving on to the Washington Post. Of the twelve books she's written, counting this one, eleven are about sports, two are about Lance Armstrong. She was named the nation's top sports columnist by the AP sports editors four times and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. They don't pull names out of a hat for those honors. That said, she pales in comparison to her co-author Dr. Stauffer, of English, American, and African American studies at Harvard. He’s the author or editor of twenty books, and over 100 articles focusing mainly on history, social protests, and/or anti-slavery topics. He's served as a consultant for films such as Django Unchained and the Free State of Jones. He's been a speaker and scholar for the US State Department International Information Program. His books focus on the civil war period or the lead up to it, mostly looking at the experience of African Americans at the time
(An oft-neglected and hard-to-research topic given that slaves got executed for literacy.). He currently teaches at Harvard, despite getting his Ph.D. at Yale in 1999
(The Ivy League does that a lot. Honestly their Ph.Ds aren’t any better than the rest of ours, but they get special treatment. I have a friend who got a tenure track position straight out of her Ph.D. from Harvard. She studies the history of the USSR. Granted, that might have less to do with her Harvardness - where she helped organize their grad student union - and more to do with the fact that she speaks something like six languages did a shitload of work in Kosovo when they declared independence from Serbia, and taught English at the university level in Moldova before she ever went to Harvard… I am totally undermining my own point here, but she lets me play Six Degrees of Joseph Stalin with only three jumps.). I'm not trying to be a snob here, I'm just wondering what the first conversation working together on a book was even like. That said both of them brought considerable talent and contribution to this book so I guess it's a testament to how seemingly odd partnerships can bear good fruit.
The fruit in question is the book we're reviewing today, The State of Jones. The State of Jones was published in 2009 by anchor books and I'm pleased to have finally gotten to it. The book is incredibly relevant to the state of our nation today and I'm fairly sure all of you will get why
(I will be blunt: Fuck the CSA, fuck their racist reactionary nostalgists and the apologists for the orchards of strange fruit that litter this nation. A pox be upon them and all their works, including the current occupants of the White House. We still have not - and must - cleanse and atone for this country’s original sins.{There was a point where I would edit out the reference to 45 but after finding out about the bounties? Fuck him.}
). Unlike a lot of the other history books we've reviewed, this is not a story of the wealthy and powerful. This book is about Newton Knight, Rachel Knight, and the families that knowingly or unknowingly trace their ancestry to one or both of them. So who are these two and why are they the subject of today's book? Well, Newton Knight was a conscript who deserted from the Confederate Army and became a leader of a guerrilla group fighting for the Union in Mississippi
(The only righteous act that a conscript in the Confederate Army can commit. Desertion and active armed resistance. The only innocents in the Confederacy were the partisans.). Rachel was the slave of Newton's estranged grandfather who risked her life to help Newton and his troops. She would also live with him as his wife after the war. This would enrage the entirety of white society in their state and lead to their social isolation but we'll get to that vile hypocrisy in a minute, promise. The book covers, in varying amounts of detail, their entire lives, from the beginning to their deaths and going a bit into the lives of various decedents such as Davis Knight, who would be put on trial in 1948 by Mississippi over his ancestry
(Wait WHAT!? {You remember how racial intermarriage was illegal back then? The state accused him of being a son of Newton and Rachel, which would make him legally black, despite being as pale as me. He got married after coming back from WWII and they took him to trial}
Oh okay. That makes more sense. He ran afoul of the One Drop Rule that is still in common use to this day by white supremacists. Discovery Fun Fact Kids: Any time you see a reference to Ethnic Replacement, White Genocide, or anything like that, they are using the One Drop Rule. Clutching their pearls that pure whiteness will disappear because even a single non-white ancestor corrupts it forever. Don’t fall for it. Instead, punch the fascist in the face - metaphorically...). This is done by using first-hand testimony, stories from living people who remember the history or had it passed on them, and a raft of primary and secondary sources, including an interview that Mr. Knight gave to a reporter in 1921, months before his death in 1922. Unfortunately, we have nothing in Rachel's own words, so her own beliefs and thoughts on the history she lived are forever lost to us
(This makes me sad.). We have to make do with what was remembered by her children and grandchildren and passed down the family lines.
Ms. Jenkins and Dr. Stauffer are also very careful to give us the context in which Newton and Rachel's life was lived in. Unlike what we see in most movies about the antebellum south, that context isn't in grand plantations with a legion of single room slave cabins hidden in the back. Newton was a dirt farmer, his father Albert had broken from Newton's Grandfather over slavery. While Newton's Grandfather was successful and moderately wealthy due to the unpaid labor of black men and women that he held in chains, Newton himself would grow up poor and anti-slave
(I am obliged to point out, as a Marxist and a human being, {I am not a Marxist and would like to note that my editor does not represent the review in his statements}
that the wealthy of our own age still benefit from the primary wealth generated by slave labor. They also benefit from the currently-existing system of slave labor that still exists in our prison system, and from the lesser degree of exploitation that is wage labor. The Bourgeois, no matter the age, {Or the political/economic system.}
grow fat on the labor of others, and utilize the systems of prejudice they create to keep the proletarian masses from becoming conscious of their own exploitation, uniting, and building guillotines.). He wrested - from the worst parts of the Mississippi soil - a hard-living that could be described by invoking God's curse on Adam in Genesis 3. The dirt farmers of Mississippi were skeptical of breaking the Union and we learned that Jones county itself sent a Union delegate to the vote for secession. A delegate who promptly voted for secession because, in his own words, he feared for his life
(Because let’s be blunt: that vote was not a free one. It’s almost like people who make their living enslaving others care not one bit for concepts like rights or democracy.). Starting what has become a recurring pattern in the American South, the secessionists used violence and intimidation to ensure their electoral victories and then used violence and intimidation to keep everyone in line while decrying the Union's own use of violence against them
(And they still do it!). While the African Americans of the South were the greatest victims of this violence, being white was no protection against them, especially if you were poor. In April 1862 (a full year before the Union would pass a draft) the Confederate government passed a Conscription Act, making all white males between 18 and 35 liable for 3 years of service. They would later expand the age rate to 17 and 50 and make the period of service unlimited. They would to the rage of men like Newton exempt the owners or overseers of plantations that had more than 20 slaves present on them in October
(Again: they make their living on exploitation. While they rationalized their perfidy through an ideology of white supremacy, in reality they were naked in their desire to maintain their own power, and it’s hard to maintain your own power when you’ve been torn to pieces by Union canister shot. So they made the poor fight for a system that oppressed them. In the CSA, if you did not own slaves, you might as well have been a slave.). Who wouldn't be angry in this situation though? You are made to suffer deeply for a cause you hate while the very people who benefit the most get to sit it out. Worse, you have to listen to natter about what noble and just creatures they are and how they are all glorious
(The plantation owners should have been hung along the roadsides from the District of Columbia to Fort Worth {doing that pretty much promises to drag out the war and leave large chunks of the nation in ruin. As well as insure that whites will murder even more black people as revenge killings. That said leaving the plantation class intact with their wealth was a horrible mistake. Their land should have broken up, given mainly to their former slaves and they left with just enough land to farm for food. Property should have been shared out to loyal whites as well to give them a material stake in keeping the plantation class from retaking power; without their land or money, they’re powerless.}
).
Desertion became rife and as Ms. Jenkins and Dr. Stauffer detailed a lot of the average Confederate Infantryman, the question isn't why did so many desert. It's why weren't mutiny and fragging officers a common event and I can only assume that the Southern officers survived due to their men being decent enough to be opposed to cold-blooded murder no matter how provoked. To paint the picture, imagine you marched over ten miles today, you have no shoes
(Because the CSA’s economy was so wrapped up in slavery that no one invested insufficient machinery for large scale shoe production; so they lacked that industry entirely.). Your dinner is a thin gruel of cornmeal with some bacon
(Active soldiers doing relatively light work need 3000 calories or so per day. The CSA had its enlisted men on literal starvation rations.). You haven't been paid in 6 months, not that it matters as you only get 11 dollars a month anyways
(And Confederate dollars were worthless.). You've been issued a single set of clothes which are filthy and falling apart, you're covered in vermin because you have no soap
(Again, the industry to produce these things was all in the North. The CSA exported it’s cotton and lacked the industrial capacity to convert it to textiles.). Tomorrow you're going to go into battle and if you get injured, there's precious little medicine for you. Just one doctor for the battalion if you're lucky
(And his education is dubious at best.). Your officers, who are uniformly from the plantation owning class, are just coming back from a ball in high society, and if you complain you'll be lectured about the grand cause and how everyone needs to make sacrifices. We also get a peek at the letters of those officers who often refer to the lower classes that made up the infantry as uppity serfs or ignorant wretches without any moral fiber. This is a profound piece of hypocrisy
(Not really. They fancied themselves as Noble Aristocracy. Excuse me as I vomit into my mouth.) but it's only the first layer of the cake. You have however received a letter from your wife, who is telling you that your children are starving back home because Confederate tax collectors seized all the food on the farm and walked off with the plow horse to boot. This is because the Confederate government passed laws allowing taxes to be paid in kind, which means the physical goods of anyone who doesn't have money
(I don’t want to beat the dead plow horse here…{never stopped you before}
Quiet you!). Not that you've seen any of this food they keep seizing. All of this, so your officers can keep slaves. If you're a man like Newton Knight, you desert. Nor was he an isolated case, the Confederate Army saw over a 100000 men desert, over 1/3rd of the army, and head back home, often due to the urging of their families.
Men like Newton would have often have to travel hundreds of miles on foot to get home while being hunted. The Confederacy would turn to slave hunters to hunt deserters and those slave hunters gleefully used hounds, traps, torture, and blackmail, treating deserters and their families just like escaped slaves and their families
(Isn’t this shocking!? I am shocked! SHOCKED I tell you!). Newton by his own admission only survived because of the teaching and direct aid of escaped slaves and was often fed by slaves on plantations. Many of the slaves had decided it was in their best interests to make it as easy for deserters to escape as they could, not that they could do much. It's here that Rachel really enters the story, she was originally the property of Newton's Grandfather but was deeded to a cousin when he died
(That sound is the sound of my grinding teeth, and proletarian rage.). The same cousin who is believed to have been the father
(By rape. Because it was Always Rape.) of at least two of her children, who were also slaves. I have to stop here real quick to point out another layer of hypocrisy. Rachel is often described as resembling a Native American, that isn't terribly unusual because it's quite likely that her father and grandfather were white. So it wasn't enough to commit the crime of enslaving people, but in the south, it was common to keep your own blood relatives as slaves to the point that there were slaves that were 7/8ths European, many of whom would slip off into white society after the war and “pass”. Now keeping a white person in slavery isn't any worse than keeping a black person in slavery, both actions are an abomination before Man and God but I have to note that it's an especially cruel, brutal and disgusting society that not only sanctions the enslavement of your own children but reacts with rage and horror at the idea of freeing them which was the south's reaction to such ideas
(As I said, the entire slave-holding class should have been executed during reconstruction. Like, this shit is when my inner Tankie comes out, because by not completely eliminating the old power structure, we get shit like the Klan, the Convict Leasing system, current practices of Prison Labor, Jim Crow. Had we executed every single one of those motherfuckers and distributed their property to the newly-freed slaves and poor whites, the United States would be better off today {Should have taken their property and banned them from politics at the very least.}
.).
Being hunted like an animal and seeing his family abused (Newton did have a white wife and children at this point) pushed Newton and men like him to the breaking point. They formed a company specifically to strike back at the Confederacy and fight for the Union. Some would sneak off to occupied New Orleans to join the Federal Army directly. Newton, however, rallied a force of men to fight a bloody guerrilla war for the fate of Jones County. He killed Confederate officers, poisoned dogs, led raids to seize corn and other foods, and worked with the slave community to terrorize Confederate supporters
(I love this man. Statues of him and his comrades should be raised throughout the South on the plinths left behind from Confederate statue removal. Them, John Brown, Nat Turner etc.). He would attack at night, strike from ambush, and retreat into swamps and wilderness when the Confederates sent in too many soldiers for him to fight. In turn, they hunted him and his men with dogs, torture their families, and hang relatives and friends from trees in a macabre foreshadowing of the lynching movement to come. During all of this Rachel emerged as his right-hand woman and the life long affair likely started at this point. She provided food and intelligence, often working with the wives and children that the men had to leave behind.
Newton would be rewarded after the war with a position in the local Union government, although congress unjustly would refuse him a pension. However when reconstruction collapsed because the secessionists returned to their campaign of violence and intimidation, also described in haunting and horrifying detail in this book, Newton found himself besieged. This is even though he and others did their level best to fight against the Jim Crow government taking power through corrupt elections - and they were corrupt. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, there were flat out battles between unrepentant Confederates and freed blacks and their shrinking group of white allies. The white allies were targeted first, often murdered in the streets, or run out of the South at gunpoint. This was met with increasing federal indifference driven by a North that didn't want to empower the black community and would accept if not embrace white supremacy becoming the explicit and open law of the land as long as the South would accept federal rule
(In the end, Slavery returned by another name, and spread like a cancerous tumor across the country.). Newton was too terrifying to run off and too canny and violent to murder but he was abandoned in turn by the white men who fought with him for the crime of keeping Rachel as his wife
(Hypocritical fucks. So much for those statues.). Newton, you see was not only open about being in a relationship with Rachel but even gave her land and admitted to being the father of her children and that drove Mississippi white society into a bigoted frenzy.
Now I will be blunt here and say I think sleeping with another woman when you're in a monogamous relationship is wrong. Even if you provide for both of them and are a good father to both sets of children. Because you've broken your word and you're frankly being callous to your partners forcing them to accept another party into your relationship that they didn't agree to
(There is polyamory though. It is possible his original wife was fine with it? {I kinda doubt they were in a polyamorous relationship. I do know his eldest son was pretty angry about it and his white wife left when the children were grown. Frankly, I think she made peace with it out of a lack of options more than anything else}
That’s fair. Though without the personal writings of the direct parties it’s hard to know {Oh I’ll grant that.}
.). However, the greater sin in my eyes lies with everyone else, because every damn one of them had no problem with Newton sleeping with Rachel when they thought it was just a fling and for that matter, they would have no problems with white men sexually preying on black women
(And keeping the children of those rapes as slaves.). Just as long as no one openly admitted it or committed the deep and grievous sin of treating a black woman as a person worthy of respect or being in a non-abusive relationship with one. It is rancid hypocrisy that makes any pretension of piety, morality, or simple decency a laughable lie at best and it is the parent of a vileness that lurks in American society still
(I am not sure it is actually hypocritical. Black people were objects to them. Things to be used. As vile as that is - and it is vile enough that I get really bloody minded about the wages of white supremacy. Thinking of it like this, the crime isn’t procreating with a black person, it is treating a black person like, well, a person.). The idea that because of your class, your race, your gender you should be allowed to prey on people who lack the power or connections to resist is one that stains our society. A stain that cannot be hidden no matter how much some would like to deny it, nor should we pretend that it is contained to the South. By its very nature, such loathsomeness knows no borders and respects no boundaries. While I cannot condone Newton Knight cheating on his wife, at least he tried to do right by both women as he understood it. I cannot say that for men who boast about using their power and fame to aid and abet terrible behavior while condemning people for lesser sins. Sadly the last part of the book as you can guess is very much a voyage into darkness as the men who fought for the Confederacy ran off or recruited the Southern Unionists into making common cause with them to maintain white supremacy as the law of the land, no matter what brutality or lawlessness they had to embrace to do it. Newton, Rachel, and their children retreat to the isolated hilltops of their land and spend the rest of their days as poor farmers in a world that hated them for simply being who they are. Despite that, they were able to live, raise their families, and die on their own terms and that is more than many others got. So I guess there is a victory to be had here
(As sad as it is that such was the best they could hope for under the circumstances. There is a reason my capacity for patriotism is basically zero.{Mine is much higher, because if nothing else we manage to improve and move forward. As long as we keep doing so, there is hope that we will construct the society promised to us in our founding documents. Our nation is better than it was in 1922 and it will be better in the future, as long as we all keep trying. That is something to be proud of, along with the good that the nation has already done.}
).
This book is a stake in the heart of many of the narratives that support the Lost Cause Myth and exposes not just the cruelty suffered by the black population of the American South but how the white lower class was ruthlessly targeted for exploitation and held in contempt by the very government presuming to represent them on the battlefield. It also peels back the lid on a lot of the hypocrisy that is required to uphold ideas like white supremacy, slavery, and others. If it were up to me this book would be mandatory in our schools today, no matter how many organizations screamed in outrage
(Agreed. The Lost Cause Myth is a lie promulgated by confederate apologists as a deliberate literal white-wash of history that is still taught in southern schools to this day, and because Texas, creeps into the history textbooks of most states. It must be destroyed. The only way to destroy it is through education, and thus this book should be absolutely fucking mandatory. Almost no one who doesn’t study US history actually knows what happened during Reconstruction and it’s failure. They don’t even really know it failed.). It challenges many of the ideas that we, unfortunately, see parroted in popular entertainment and does so with well-cited and supported historical sources. The only issue I have here is that at times the book is very sparse on details about Newton and Rachel's lives because neither of them really left us any written records. This leads our authors to speculate and guess at their feelings, motives, and goals which is a chancy thing to do at best when discussing historical figures. That said, The State of Jones: The Small Southern County that Seceded from the Confederacy by Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer easily earns an A and is a book I would recommend to just about everyone. Because the best way to avoid repeating our history is to know what actually happened and why.
So yeah, I know this review was a bit heavy but I still hope you enjoyed it dear readers. If you enjoy our work though and would to support it consider joining us at
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Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders
