Short answers, pulled from the story.
Newton Knight was a Mississippi farmer who enlisted in the Confederate Army in July 1861, deserted in October 1862, and went on to lead the Knight Company, a guerrilla band of Confederate deserters who resisted Confederate authority in Jones County, Mississippi. By the spring of 1864, Confederate generals were writing to Jefferson Davis describing the county as effectively beyond Confederate control.
The Free State of Jones refers to local legends that Knight and his followers declared Jones County independent of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Historians including Dr. Victoria E. Bynum and Dr. Rudy H. Leverett both concluded that Jones County did not formally secede; Knight himself and two close associates separately insisted during their lifetimes that Jones County had never left the Union in the first place.
Knight was reported absent without leave in October 1862. His motivations included the Confederate seizure of his family's horses, reports that a relative was abusing his children, and anger at the Twenty Negro Law, which exempted plantation owners from military service if they held twenty or more slaves. Knight later defended his desertion by saying, "If they had a right to conscript me when I didn't want to fight the Union, I had a right to quit when I got ready."
After separating from his first wife, Serena, in the mid-1870s, Newton Knight married Rachel, a freedwoman who had formerly been enslaved by his grandfather. The marriage was illegal under Mississippi law, which banned interracial marriages both before and after the war, with only a brief exception during Reconstruction. Rachel died in 1889, and Newton was buried beside her at his request in the Knight Family Cemetery in Jones County.
Major works include Newton's son Tom Knight's 1935 biography, The Life and Activities of Captain Newton Knight; Ethel Knight's 1951 history, Echo of the Black Horn; Dr. Rudy H. Leverett's 1984 academic study, The Legend of the Free State of Jones; and Dr. Victoria E. Bynum's 2003 book, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest War. Films include the 1948 movie Tap Roots, directed by George Marshall, and the 2016 film Free State of Jones, directed by Gary Ross and starring Matthew McConaughey.
After the Civil War, Knight distributed food to struggling families in Jones County on behalf of the Union Army and led a raid that freed children still held in slavery in Smith County. In 1872, he was appointed deputy U.S. Marshal for the Southern District of Mississippi. In 1875, Republican Governor Adelbert Ames named him colonel of the First Infantry Regiment of Jasper County, an otherwise all-black regiment organized to defend residents against white paramilitary insurgents.