Vikki

As for the authors’ statement during the book talk that Newt lived in a “black community,” I doubt Newt would have agreed with such a remark. What he did, and it was certainly remarkable, was live openly among his white and multiracial descendants. That choice, however, was decidedly not the same as that made by abolitionist John Brown–to whom they consistently liken Newt Knight–to live in a black community of unrelated people in a region outside his home state. It is not even clear that Newt Knight considered his mixed-race children and grandchildren to be “black.” As Knight descendant Yvonne Bivins points out, most of them were light-skinned, and many of the 3rd and 4th generations strove to identify as white.

Jenkins and Stauffer’s exaggerated portrait of Newt Knight and the Knight Company is historically irresponsible and a terrible setback to our understanding of white southern Unionism and interracial relationships of the nineteenth century South. They seek to tell a specific moral tale, and they have willfully compromised their evidence in order to do so. Thankfully, such books have historically had little staying power. We shall see.

Vikki

At the outset of the presentation, Ms Jenkins admitted that she had been retained to ‘punch up’ the narrative, and that it focused on telling the story of Newton Knight as they interpreted it. They still defended the accuracy of the book, however. She also made some statements about how Knight’s story showed that ‘dissent can be the highest form of patriotism’. I found that an odd interpretation, and how they think his story supports that sentiment was not fully discussed during the program. I would have liked to know who they considered Knight to be dissenting against, since his Unionist views were mainstream in the North and he was certainly no supporter of the Confederate States.

Professor Stauffer detailed how he began the book as a research project for a motion picture project that he expects to start filming in the near future, and later expanded it into a book length treatment of Newton Knight. He also made quite clear that he applied a class-based analysis to Jones County’s history, emphasizing how Knight and his small farmers were among a minority of Southern whites able to overcome the false consciousness that enabled racist attitudes and to determine that his economic status dictated that he should ally with blacks to overthrow the Southern planters. Another undeveloped underlying theme in the presentation was the need for a more nuanced view of white Southerners as being capable of having good relations with blacks like Knight, but being stymied and forced into racist views by a propagandizing overclass of white supremacists like Lowry. This was an assertion presented as self-evidently true and fits neatly into Stauffer’s theory that poor Southern whites were brainwashed into thinking they could aspire to own slaves when they should have been aiding the slaves in rebellion.

When contrasted with your review, it seems to me that Jenkins and Stauffer backed away from making Vicksburg the turning point for Newton Knight. They engaged in an extended discussion of how the battle of Corinth (MS) precipitated the desertion of Knight and other soldiers from Jones County. Vicksburg was mentioned only in passing.

A number of the statements made by Jenkins and Stauffer seemed to be thinly supported, and upon reading your review my suspicions were confirmed. If they view Knight as an abolitionist, then they must think John F. Kerry is anti-abortion activist because he is Catholic, says he is personally opposed to abortion, and never participated in or obtained an abortion.

They both consistently refered to the Confederate governemnt as an ‘almost totalitarian’ system. They seem to base this on the taxation practices of the Confederate states, the Confederate draft laws, and the fact that Missississippi secced even though Jones County voted against sucession(!). As one of your commenters noted about the book, they tended to present facts as if they were a unique situation even when evidence to the contrary is available. They engaged in an extended discussion of the ‘twenty Negro’ exception to Confederate draft laws without seeming to realize that the Union allowed men to be exempted from the draft if they were capable of paying a three hundered dollar fee. I’m quite sure that poor farmers in the North found taxation to be just as vexing, and I’m not sure when it became necessary to allow a minority to prevail in an election in order to be considered a democracy (even if the vote results in a war to defend slavery). I was left wondering if they considered Lincoln to be a despot since he suspended habeous corpus and used the US military to suppress dissenting views on the war. Unfortunately the audience at the talk accepted what they had to say uncritically.

My overall impression was that Jenkins and Stauffer are trying to present the book as a heoric correction to what they feel is the erronous but mainstream view that the antebellum South was monolithically pro-slavery, driven to war by Northern aggression, and that slavery played only a small part in the war. Even though they attempted to claim a naunaced view of race relations in the South, it was evident through out the talk that they regard the South as having been, and even to still be, dominated by a small white supremacist minority.

Is “butternut” in reference to State of Jones’s dust jacket? If so, I agree–poor design.

Vikki

Vikki

Is this book posing as a scholarly text? One of the authors (who seems to be the main author, because she’s the one who is shilling it on talk shows) is a journalist. I don’t see why a non-academic historical book is such a problem, unless its marketing makes it out to be something it’s not. Roots, The Scarlett Letter, and Mouse are all “docudramas” that use historical research in order to tell a better story. Of those, I think Roots has been subject to the most scrutiny and criticism of its handling of facts, and the problems with the way entire groups of people are represented in it were especially problematic in the effects on debates and public understanding in the 1970s and 80s. Nonetheless, all of them, and many others like them, do a great service in awaking broad interest which could be used as a starting off point for deeper understanding of the complexities of historical situations.

There must be something else going on here for this book to raise such ire. What is it?

Greg

Vikki