SOMETHING ELSE WORTH WATCHING
I just finished watching “The Free State of Jones.”
For those unaware of the movie, here’s its logline:
“Set during the Civil War, Free State of Jones tells the story of defiant Southern farmer, Newt Knight, and his extraordinary armed rebellion against the Confederacy. Banding together with other small farmers and local slaves, Knight launched an uprising that led Jones County, Mississippi to secede from the Confederacy, creating a Free State of Jones. Knight continued his struggle into Reconstruction, distinguishing him as a compelling, if controversial, figure of defiance long beyond the War.”
At the time of its release, the movie received mostly negative reviews, with many questioning the authenticity of the story, despite the list of Historical Consultants starting with Eric Foner, the leading historian of Reconstruction.
Interestingly, about a month after it was released, a researcher at the National Archives found the 1864 letter in which Newton Knight requested of General Sherman that the Knight Company, which effectively controlled southeastern Mississippi, be recognized as a unit of the Union Army. The document proves the essential truth of the story.
I had known of the Free State of Jones since I first started reading “alternative” Civil War history about the real battles in the Confederacy. Most people are unaware that of the Southern men who fought in the Civil War, one-third fought for the Union. Approximately one-third of the territory of the Confederacy in Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississipi and Louisiana was “no go” territory to Confederate soldiers, held by informal “armies” of Confederate deserters, runaway slaves, and Southern Unionists.
All that history was suppressed when the Confederate enslavers resumed power in the South once the Northern Republicans pulled the Army out of the South and ended Reconstruction in return for the Southern Democrats allowing Rutherford B. Hayes to be made president in 1877.
“The Free State of Jones” is the first and so far the only cinematic depiction of that history.
Given the issues we are dealing with today in the country, the movie is very timely, since the same forces are in opposition again.
The movie is available on demand and is also playing on cable networks this month.
Blog sez, Check. It. Out.
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Thank you for the recommendation Tom. I hadn’t heard of it and it sounds very interesting, and timely. Maybe I will watch it tonight with my extra hour. We have been getting drenched here in Oregon and I was looking for a movie.
The notion of "The South will rise again" - we are all living the hell of it from the long arc of history that was never acknowledged in full, the sins of our father: slavery that has been whitewashed after the Civil War. The Confederacy was whitewashed into "our heritage" in the South. There is no other arc that is so direct between Germany nazism and America's Jim Crow era. The agents of the Confederacy were allowed to walk free, and since then, generations later, they have morphed into this Bible thumping Christo fascists that they always were ---the Republican Party is terrifying the rest of us, rearing its ugly fascist head of "The South will rise again"