The True Story of the ‘Free State of Jones’. History. With two rat terriers trotting at his heels, and a long wooden staff in his hand, J. Watch Unfinished Sky Full Movie on this page. R. Gavin leads me through the woods to one of the old swamp hide- outs. A tall white man with a deep Southern drawl, Gavin has a stern presence, gracious manners and intense brooding eyes. At first I mistook him for a preacher, but he’s a retired electronic engineer who writes self- published novels about the rapture and apocalypse. One of them is titled Sal Batree, after the place he wants to show me.

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The True Story of the ‘Free State of Jones’ A new Hollywood movie looks at the tale of the Mississippi farmer who led a revolt against the Confederacy.

I’m here in Jones County, Mississippi, to breathe in the historical vapors left by Newton Knight, a poor white farmer who led an extraordinary rebellion during the Civil War. With a company of like- minded white men in southeast Mississippi, he did what many Southerners now regard as unthinkable. He waged guerrilla war against the Confederacy and declared loyalty to the Union. In the spring of 1. Knight Company overthrew the Confederate authorities in Jones County and raised the United States flag over the county courthouse in Ellisville.

The county was known as the Free State of Jones, and some say it actually seceded from the Confederacy. This little- known, counterintuitive episode in American history has now been brought to the screen in Free State of Jones, directed by Gary Ross (Seabiscuit, The Hunger Games) and starring a grimy, scruffed- up Matthew Mc. Conaughey as Newton Knight. Knight and his men, says Gavin, hooking away an enormous spider web with his staff and warning me to be careful of snakes, “had a number of different hide- outs.

The old folks call this one Sal Batree. Sal was the name of Newt’s shotgun, and originally it was Sal’s Battery, but it got corrupted over the years.”We reach a small promontory surrounded on three sides by a swampy, beaver- dammed lake, and concealed by 1. I can’t be certain, but a 9. Odell Holyfield told me this was the place,” says Gavin. He said they had a gate in the reeds that a man on horseback could ride through. He said they had a password, and if you got it wrong, they’d kill you. I don’t know how much of that is true, but one of these days I’ll come here with a metal detector and see what I can find.”.

On his property, Jones County’s J. R. Gavin points out a site that was a hide- out for Newt Knight. The Confederates kept sending in troops to wipe out old Newt and his boys,” says Gavin, “but they’d just melt into the swamps.”. William Widmer)We make our way around the lakeshore, passing beaver- gnawed tree stumps and snaky- looking thickets. Reaching higher ground, Gavin points across the swamp to various local landmarks. Then he plants his staff on the ground and turns to face me directly.“Now I’m going to say something that might offend you,” he begins, and proceeds to do just that, by referring in racist terms to “Newt’s descendants” in nearby Soso, saying some of them are so light- skinned “you look at them and you just don’t know.”I stand there writing it down and thinking about William Faulkner, whose novels are strewn with characters who look white but are deemed black by Mississippi’s fanatical obsession with the one- drop rule. And not for the first time in Jones County, where arguments still rage about a man born 1.

I recall Faulkner’s famous axiom about history: “The past is never dead. Watch Erik The Viking HD 1080P on this page. It’s not even past.”After the Civil War, Knight took up with his grandfather’s former slave Rachel; they had five children together. Knight also fathered nine children with his white wife, Serena, and the two families lived in different houses on the same 1. After he and Serena separated—they never divorced—Newt Knight caused a scandal that still reverberates by entering a common- law marriage with Rachel and proudly claiming their mixed- race children. The Knight Negroes, as these children were known, were shunned by whites and blacks alike.

Unable to find marriage partners in the community, they started marrying their white cousins instead, with Newt’s encouragement. Newt’s son Mat, for instance, married one of Rachel’s daughters by another man, and Newt’s daughter Molly married one of Rachel’s sons by another man.) An interracial community began to form near the small town of Soso, and continued to marry within itself.“They keep to themselves over there,” says Gavin, striding back toward his house, where supplies of canned food and muscadine wine are stored up for the onset of Armageddon.

A lot of people find it easier to forgive Newt for fighting Confederates than mixing blood.”**********I came to Jones County having read some good books about its history, and knowing very little about its present- day reality. It was reputed to be fiercely racist and conservative, even by Mississippi standards, and it had been a hotbed for the Ku Klux Klan. But Mississippi is nothing if not layered and contradictory, and this small, rural county has also produced some wonderful creative and artistic talents, including Parker Posey, the indie- film queen, the novelist Jonathan Odell, the pop singer and gay astronaut Lance Bass, and Mark Landis, the schizophrenic art forger and prankster, who donated fraudulent masterpieces to major American art museums for nearly 3. This story is a selection from the March issue of Smithsonian magazine. Buy. Driving toward the Jones County line, I passed a sign to Hot Coffee—a town, not a beverage—and drove on through rolling cattle pastures and short, new- growth pine trees.

There were isolated farmhouses and prim little country churches, and occasional dilapidated trailers with dismembered automobiles in the front yard. In Newt Knight’s day, all this was a primeval forest of enormous longleaf pines so thick around the base that three or four men could circle their arms around them. This part of Mississippi was dubbed the Piney Woods, known for its poverty and lack of prospects. The big trees were an ordeal to clear, the sandy soil was ill- suited for growing cotton, and the bottomlands were choked with swamps and thickets.

There was some very modest cotton production in the area, and a small slaveholding elite that included Newt Knight’s grandfather, but Jones County had fewer slaves than any other county in Mississippi, only 1. This, more than anything, explains its widespread disloyalty to the Confederacy, but there was also a surly, clannish independent spirit, and in Newt Knight, an extraordinarily steadfast and skillful leader.