Newton Knight

• 1. Introduction

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  Newton Knight spent the Civil War doing something that could get a man killed: fighting back against the very army he had enlisted in. Born in Jones County, Mississippi, Knight went from Confederate soldier to fugitive to the elected captain of a guerrilla band that Confederate generals wrote about in alarmed dispatches to Jefferson Davis himself. By the spring of 1864, Lieutenant General Leonidas Polk was telling Davis that Knight's followers had thrown off Confederate authority entirely, calling themselves "Southern Yankees" and daring the Confederacy to come and take them.

  The questions Knight's life leaves open are still argued today. Was he a principled Unionist or an opportunist? Was the so-called Free State of Jones a genuine act of political resistance, or a legend built up over generations? And what do we make of a man who, after the war, married a formerly enslaved woman and was buried beside her on a Jones County hillside, defying Mississippi law even in death?

• 2. Roots and Unlikely Origins

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  John "Jackie" Knight, Newton's grandfather, was one of Jones County's largest slaveholders before the war. His family had traveled a long arc across the eastern seaboard before arriving in Mississippi: from Worcestershire, England, to Yorktown in 1674, then to Culpeper County, Virginia, south to Brunswick County, then Richmond County, North Carolina, then Dawson County, Georgia in 1788, and finally to Mississippi in 1801 when Jackie Knight settled first in Union County before moving to the Jasper County area in 1811.

  But Newton's father, Albert Knight, who lived from 1799 to 1862, neither owned slaves nor inherited any when Jackie died. Newton himself never owned slaves. His son later wrote that he was morally opposed to slavery because of his Primitive Baptist faith, which also led him to forswear alcohol, a departure from both his father and grandfather. He learned to read and write from his mother, since there were no public schools for yeomen children in the area. He married Serena Turner in 1858, and they established a small farm just across the county line in southwest Jasper County.

• 3. The Decision to Desert

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  Knight enlisted in the Confederate Army in July 1861, joining the 8th Mississippi Infantry Regiment. Six months later he was allowed home to care for his ailing father. In May 1862, he and several friends and neighbors chose to re-enlist together in Company F of the 7th Mississippi Infantry Battalion, unwilling to serve among strangers.

  By the summer and fall of 1862, several pressures were converging. The siege of Corinth left Confederate units short of food and supplies. Letters from home described wives and children struggling to keep farms running without their husbands. Then two personal blows arrived: Confederate authorities seized Knight's family's horses, and he received word that his brother-in-law Morgan, thought to be Morgan Lines, a convicted murderer, was abusing his children in his absence.

  But many historians believe the decisive blow was the Twenty Negro Law. This Confederate policy exempted large plantation owners from military service if they held twenty or more slaves, with further exemptions for each additional twenty. Knight saw this as a war fought by poor men for the benefit of wealthy ones. He was reported absent without leave in October 1862. After walking roughly 200 miles home from Corinth, he allegedly shot and killed Morgan. In early 1863, Confederate authorities arrested him, possibly tortured him, burned his homestead, and left his family without shelter or livelihood.

• 4. The Knight Company

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  On the 13th of October 1863, Knight and a gathering of deserters and fugitive slaves organized what became known as the Knight Company. They drew members from Jones and the adjacent counties of Jasper, Covington, Perry, and Smith. Knight was elected captain, and their main hideout, called "Devils Den," sat along the Leaf River at the Jones-Covington county line. Local women and slaves supplied them with food and intelligence, blowing cattlehorns to warn the men when Confederate forces approached.

  From late 1863 into early 1865, the company allegedly fought fourteen skirmishes with Confederate forces. On the 23rd of December 1863, a skirmish at the home of a supporter named Sally Parker left one Confederate soldier dead and two badly wounded. Knight also led a raid into Paulding in which his men captured five wagonloads of corn and distributed them among the local population. By early 1864, numerous tax collectors, conscript officers, and other Confederate officials were being reported killed. A letter discovered in 2016 at the National Archives, dated the 13th of February 1864, from a Union scout addressed to Major General John M. Palmer, estimated the company's numbers at as many as 600. Knight himself later gave a very different count, saying, "There was about 125 of us, never any more."

  On the 29th of March 1864, Confederate Captain Wirt Thomson wrote to Secretary of War James Seddon claiming the company had captured Ellisville and raised the U.S. flag over the courthouse, adding, "The country is entirely at their mercy." General William Tecumseh Sherman received a letter from a local group declaring its independence from the Confederacy, and in July 1864 the Natchez Courier reported that Jones County had seceded from the Confederacy.

• 5. The Confederate Response

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  General Leonidas Polk first sent Colonel Henry Maury into Jones County in February 1864. Maury reported the area cleared, but warned that the deserters had threatened to seek Union assistance and return. Polk then dispatched a veteran force from the 6th Mississippi Infantry Regiment under Colonel Robert Lowry, who would later become governor of Mississippi and who described Knight as an "ignorant and uneducated man."

  Lowry used bloodhounds to track the guerrillas through the swamps. He rounded up and executed ten members of the Knight Company, including two of Newton's cousins: Benjamin Franklin Knight and Sil Coleman. Newton himself evaded capture. He later acknowledged that his company had tried but failed to break through Confederate lines to reach the Union Army.

• 6. Reconstruction and Rachel

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  After the war, the Union Army assigned Knight to distribute food to struggling families in Jones County. He also led a raid into nearby Smith County that freed children still being held in slavery. He aligned with the Republican Party and returned to farming in Jasper County.

  In 1870, he petitioned the federal government for compensation for members of the Knight Company, particularly the ten who had been executed. He gathered sworn statements from a local judge and a state senate candidate attesting to his Union loyalty. The federal Court of Claims denied the petition, finding the evidence insufficient to establish that the Jones County Scouts were organized for Union military service or were genuinely loyal throughout the war.

  In 1872, Knight was appointed deputy U.S. Marshal for the Southern District. In 1875, Republican Governor Adelbert Ames named him colonel of the First Infantry Regiment of Jasper County, an otherwise all-black regiment tasked with defending residents against white paramilitary insurgents. That same year white Democrats retook the state government and forced Ames out of office. Reconstruction ended officially in 1877, and Knight withdrew from politics.

  By the mid-1870s, Knight had separated from Serena. He then married Rachel, a freedwoman who had formerly been enslaved by his grandfather. Their interracial union was illegal under Mississippi law, which banned such marriages both before and after the war, with only a brief exception during Reconstruction. Meanwhile, Knight's adult son Mat married Rachel's daughter Fannie, and Knight's daughter Molly married Rachel's son Jeff, creating three interracial families within the community. Rachel died in 1889. Newton Knight died on the 16th of February 1922, at the age of 92. His gravestone carries the epitaph, "He lived for others." At his request, he was buried beside Rachel in what is now called the Knight Family Cemetery, on a Jones County hill overlooking their farm, despite the Mississippi law forbidding the interment of whites and blacks in the same cemetery.

• 7. Contested Histories

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  Newton Knight's son, Thomas Jefferson "Tom" Knight, published a biography in 1935 titled The Life and Activities of Captain Newton Knight, portraying his father as a Civil War-era Robin Hood who refused to serve a cause he opposed. That book made no mention of Newton's marriage to Rachel.

  A great-niece, Ethel Knight, offered the opposite view in her 1951 history, Echo of the Black Horn: An Authentic Tale of 'The Governor' of the 'Free State of Jones. She cast Newton as a traitor to the Confederacy, condemned his marriage to Rachel, and argued that most Knight Company members had been manipulated into joining rather than acting on genuine Unionist conviction.

  The first academic book-length study came in 1984, when Dr. Rudy H. Leverett, himself the great-grandson of Major Amos McLemore, the man Knight allegedly assassinated, published The Legend of the Free State of Jones through the University of Mississippi Press. Leverett argued that a majority of Jones County residents remained loyal to the Confederacy and that the county never actually seceded. He cited as evidence a Union raiding party that entered the county in June 1863 and was captured in part by civilians and the Ellisville Home Guard, with Union prisoners needing protection from local citizens.

  Dr. Victoria E. Bynum's 2003 book, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest War, drew on economic, religious, and kinship factors to complicate the picture further. Bynum noted that only 12 percent of the county's 1860 population was black, meaning most residents were not slaveholders. She also concluded that Jones County had not seceded from the Confederacy, and she recorded Newton Knight, his first sergeant Jasper J. Collins, and Collins's son Loren all separately insisting that Jones County had never left the Union to begin with. Bynum traced the interracial Knight families into the twentieth century, including a case that reached the Mississippi Supreme Court.

  As late as 1964, in Jasper County, 9-year-old Edgar and 8-year-old Randy Williamson, great-great-grandchildren of Newton and Rachel Knight, had never attended school. Local authorities, fearing community opposition, refused to admit them to a white school; yet because they were only one-sixteenth or one-thirty-second African American, they were barred from black schools as well. In 1965, with assistance from Jasper County, they enrolled at the Stringer School, entering first grade at ages 10 and 11.

• 8. From Page to Screen

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  James H. Street's 1942 novel Tap Roots drew very loosely on the Knight Company's actions, with a protagonist named Hoab Dabney standing in for Newton Knight. The 1948 film adaptation, directed by George Marshall and starring Van Heflin and Susan Hayward, brought that story to a wide audience. Nearly seven decades later, director Gary Ross made a far more direct account: the 2016 film Free State of Jones, with Matthew McConaughey in the role of Knight and Gugu Mbatha-Raw alongside him, follows Knight's life closely and brought renewed national attention to a corner of the Civil War that most history books had long overlooked.