Historians Jared Frederick, host of Reel History, and Rich Condon analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the movie Free State of Jones. One of its greatest strengths, they agree, is the portrayal of post-Civil War “national reconciliation” as a tragedy that enabled pro-Confederates to destroy Mississippi’s fragile class and race-based era of Reconstruction and return pro-Confederate politicians to power. Institutionalization of White Supremacy followed.
Tag: free state of jones
The Southern California Civil War Roundtable Alliance meets with Victoria Bynum
On June 26, 2022, I joined the Southern California Civil War Roundtable Alliance via zoom to discuss the Free State of Jones and more. In this video of the event, I provide a PowerPoint presentation of Newt Knight’s leadership of Mississippi’s guerrilla band of pro-Union deserters, his relationship with his grandfather’s slave, Rachel, and the larger scope of anti-Confederate warfare from Jones County down to Hancock County, Mississippi. Michael Hoover’s interview of me follows, during which we discuss the broader scope of my scholarship. Brian Cieslak concludes our event by fielding questions from the audience.—VB
Victoria Bynum to speak at Southern California Civil War Roundtable Alliance
I hope you’ll join us on June 26 for this discussion on Civil War dissent and The Free State of Jones!
“Our Southern Souls”: an interview with “Frankie” of Jones County, MS.
“I was born in 1934. I’m the ninth child of 10 children. We grew up on a small farm in Jones County, Mississippi, between Laurel and Soso.
In those days we heard about Newt Knight, a white man who lived in a mixed-race community in the swamps. They rebelled against the Civil War and would not secede from the union. They wouldn’t accept any government and wanted to be left alone. They declared the area between Laurel and above Soso as a free state and called themselves the Free State of Jones. Newt had two families, one white and one black. We lived on a dirt road, and they walked that road. They were very tall, light-skinned, and slim people. We were always sympathetic with Blacks, but they didn’t socialize with anyone outside of their community.
I remember seeing the Ku Klux Klan at gatherings outside of town. They burned houses and structures and we were afraid of them. My dad said that anyone who has to cover his head to settle a difference is not a man that you can trust.
We lived about seven miles outside of Laurel. We didn’t have money and raised everything we ate except vanilla, sugar, and flour. We bought those from a rolling store that came by once a month. We waited for that rolling store like it was Santa Claus coming. We would walk in and smell the spices. At that time, we didn’t have electricity. We had an icebox that was cooled by big blocks of ice. Our money was spent on ice first. They had drinks that were in square bottles. We put one or two teaspoons with a little sugar in a glass of water, and it was heaven.
We all worked on the farm, and the younger kids helped the older kids with chores. We had a fun family. We didn’t have a lot of toys or anything, but we had one another to play with. I was a tomboy because I didn’t have enough girls to play with. Most of our games were at night after the work was done. We played hide-and-seek and chased lightning bugs. Our yard was hard dirt, not grass. My brothers dug cups in the ground and gave each one a number. We slid washers on the dirt to see which cup you could roll it in. We peeled and sliced potatoes and put them on a frying pan in a coal bucket with two racks. My brothers put the potatoes in a frying pan and cooked them like potato chips.
We had 40 acres and mules. We raised corn, cotton, turnips, potatoes, cows, chickens, and turkeys. We used everything on the hog. We had a smokehouse with a fireplace on one side for the hickory smoke. On the other side was a bin filled with salt. We put the hams in the salt to cure them. We hung the sausage and bacon to smoke to keep it from spoiling.
After my grandmother died, my grandfather stayed with each of his children and we loved when he came to us. He sat on our front porch, dressed in a suit and a white shirt. As we came in and out through the door, he called us over, reached in his pocket, and pulled out one of those orange marshmallow peanuts for us.
After my grandfather died, we got most of his estate and used it to pay for electricity and an indoor bathroom. We bought a refrigerator and had electric lights. It was unreal. The lights were just hanging bulbs but it was still so bright that it took some getting used to. We also bought a radio. People brought food over on Sundays and listened to baseball games. Neighbors were gathered around our radio the day that Pearl Harbor was bombed. My mother and the women put their hands up and cried. I asked my sister, ‘Why are they crying? She said, ‘The war has started, and our brothers will have to go.’
One of my brothers tried to dodge the draft by shooting off his big toe. He missed and shot off his second toe. He had to go anyway. Two of my brothers went to war and were stationed in the Pacific. We weren’t supposed to know the details of their location. We got one letter that sounded crazy and not like the other letters. We realized my brother wrote in code to tell us he was in Guam. We had ration stamps during the war. We didn’t need the ones for lard, butter, and milk because we made our own. We traded those stamps for shoes and things we couldn’t make.
I went to the country school in Calhoun and got the bare minimum, but I wanted to be a nurse. One of my sisters married and moved to Mobile. She suggested that I go to nursing school at the Old Mobile City Hospital in a beautiful white building on St. Anthony and Broad. This hospital was run by the Daughters of Charity. I didn’t have any money for college, but they worked with me. Dad sold a calf for $300, and that got me started. I was one of the first coeds at Springhill College. I came with very little education and was in pre-med classes including chemistry, biology, and microbiology. My vocabulary was terrible and I didn’t know half of the words. Much of my time was looking up words in the dictionary. On weekends, I worked at Dykes Drive Inn making sandwiches. I prayed my way through college, but I was determined I was going to do it.
The hospital had an isolation wing with all kinds of diseases including polio, diphtheria and tetanus. The polio patients were in iron lungs. When the electricity went off, we students had to run to those patients and pedal to keep the air going through to their lungs. We were so happy when the Salk Polio Vaccine came out.
I got my nursing license in 1955 and worked 7 p.m. to 7 a.m in the emergency room. City Hospital was the trauma center for Mobile and Baldwin counties. We saw everything, and I was the only nurse there on that shift.
Things weren’t disposable like they are now. We kept glass syringes on a rack and disinfected the needles in a pan. We sharpened needles on a stone and put them in disinfectant. Gloves were rewashed and tested to make sure there were no holes. We even reused tubing and catheters.
The patients were divided by race. We had a little black boy who had been there for a long time. We asked to take him to a Mardi Gras parade, but as students we had to wear our white uniforms. We got on the bus and the driver made him go to the back of the bus. He was too young to realize what color was. I was so angry.
Nursing has changed a lot. We once gave patients backrubs as part of their nightly care. It was comforting to them. Then they changed it to where we couldn’t include this.
I married and moved to Nashville. We moved to Fairhope and I worked in the emergency room and ICU at Thomas. My five kids grew up and I got a divorce. I became a travel nurse and traveled around the south. I met and married Jim Hyde. I retired so we could travel. Jim died and I worked for Bay Eyes for 11 years. I retired a couple of years ago.
My biggest accomplishment is my five children and their families. I have two daughters, two granddaughters, and a daughter-in-law who are nurses. There were days my granddaughters and I worked in the same unit and we had many laughs.
I have gone from no electricity to cell phones. I don’t think I want to learn anymore. Out of ten children, only two of us are left. Our children, nieces, and nephews want to hear these stories, so I am trying to pass them down.”
Frankie
For this interview and others, or to buy the book, click: our Southern Souls: sharing the Soul of the South one person at a time
From the Southern Quarterly, Wtr 2017: Susannah Ural Interviews Victoria Bynum
An Interview with Victoria Bynum on The Free State of Jones
Victoria Bynum recently visited Southern Miss to kick off the 2016-2017 University Forum with a talk on her book The Free State of Jones and the movie it inspired. She is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at Texas State University, San Marcos, and a scholar of gender and race relations, as well as class, in the Civil War era South. Bynum has published three books and numerous articles, including Unruly Women: the Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), winner of Phi Alpha Theta’s Best First Book award, which analyzed the effects of class, race, and war on female-specific crimes. In 2001, she published her now well known and respected study, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press), which documented Mississippi’s legendary uprising against the Confederacy and provided much of the research for the recent movie of the same name. Bynum’s third book, The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010) expanded her research on Southern dissent to include Texas as well as North Carolina and Mississippi. In 2008, Bynum created the popular Civil War Era blog, Renegade South, which features her own and others’ research on political dissenters, Unionists, unruly women, and mixed-race families of the South. I conducted the following interview with Bynum in September 2016.
SU: What inspired you to write The Free State of Jones?
VB: As a college undergraduate, I stumbled on the legend of Jones County, Mississippi’s secession-within-secession in the footnotes of a Civil War text book. Because of my growing interest in the Civil War, plus the fact that my father was from Jones County, I was intrigued. But it wasn’t until I’d written my first book, Unruly Women, and inadvertently discovered the depth of opposition to the Confederacy among the white yeomanry of the North Carolina Piedmont, that I determined to make my second book about the Free State of Jones. The fierceness of community opposition to the Confederacy and the participation of women and children in these inner civil wars fascinated me.
SU: When you first wrote the book, what did it challenge at the time about home front dissent during the American Civil War?
VB: In both this book and my later works on Southern Unionism, I used military correspondence, local and federal records, and personal kinship information to show that class-based political ideologies as well as economic suffering contributed to home front dissent on the eve of and during the Civil War. This was not a new idea, but an affirmation of one long contested among historians. In the process, I detailed the extent to which civilian family members and local slaves directly participated in the Jones County insurrection, revealing the community nature of such dissent.
SU: How have Jones County and/or Unionist descendants responded to your book and to the film?
VB: Among descendants of Knight Company members, the response has been enthusiastic and ongoing through the years. Many descendants contribute family stories and participate in ongoing discussions about the Free State of Jones on my blog, Renegade South. These descendants are eager to take the story beyond stereotypes associated with desertion, and to explore the deeper causes of their ancestors’ dissent. Other Jones County descendants remember Newt Knight and the Knight Company as a band of traitors, criminals, and murderers. Not surprisingly, they reject the movie’s presentation of Newt as a hero. Some also reject my book’s analysis of the Jones County insurrection as a crisis of authority that centered on issues of class, slavery, and community survival.
The descendants of Newt and Rachel are eager to move beyond assumptions about interracial relations in the Civil War Era South, but without losing sight of the effects of racism, both then and now, on the experiences of the mixed-race Knight community. Some have expressed a desire for a fuller portrayal of Newt Knight’s interracial family than that provided by the movie.
SU: What do Rachel and Newt Knight tell us about racial and gender tensions and complexities in the mid-nineteenth-century South?
VB: A common remark made by twentieth century Jones County commenters is that Newt Knight’s crossing of the color line, rather than the wartime insurrection he led, was what turned local (white) people, including his own kinfolk, against him. Evidence of what whites thought of Newt and Rachel’s relationship during the war has yet to emerge. Legend suggests that Rachel aided the entire Knight band, not just Newt, in providing its members food and cover in hopes of gaining her own freedom. She’s been credited along with the wives and mothers of Knight Band members with disabling Confederate hounds by sprinkling the trails with ground glass and red pepper. So, while many whites would have disapproved of Newt’s open relationship with his grandfather’s slave, it appears that others may have accepted it as a product of war.
Newt’s reputation plummeted even among allies after the war as Democratic white supremacy replaced the reforms of Reconstruction. The instituting of racial segregation and the rewriting of the Civil War as a “lost cause” to preserve states’ rights contributed to the image of Newt Knight as a man guilty of both miscegenation and treason.
SU: What do the Unionists of Jones County tell us about class tensions?
VB: First and foremost, that those tensions existed. The inner civil wars that erupted throughout the Confederate South are largely inexplicable if white men are viewed simply as slaveholders and aspiring slaveholders. Under those terms, economic differences become nothing more than a gap between success and the failure to prosper. When denied a worldview, or an ethos, struggling farmers are typically described as primarily envious or resentful of their “betters.” Uprisings such as the Free State of Jones offer an alternative image of nonslaveholding, property-owning farmers. The core of the Knight Company was comprised of inter-related families who valued a way of life based on farming and herding. Although by 1850 even small farmers concentrated more and more on cash crops, in Jones County there was still a high degree of self-sufficient farming and stock-raising on the eve of the Civil War.
When we consider the decision by southwestern migrants to avoid plantation regions, combined with the nationalizing effects of the American Revolution and the War of 1812, widespread opposition to secession from the Union appeared a rational choice for the citizens of Jones County, Mississippi.
SU: You’ve received some criticism for dedicating only two chapters of the book to the American Civil War. Can you explain how and why you organized the book as you did?
VB: Because my training began as a historian of the Old South, I have tended to view the Free State of Jones as more a Southern story than as Civil War history per se. The war’s importance to that story is obvious. Death and destruction wreaked havoc on communities and lives, while slavery was destroyed in the process. A new democratic order was promised under Reconstruction, but was followed by a vicious counter-revolution. My goal was to explain why Jones County’s people reacted the way they did to secession and war, why the community divided along the lines it did, how the war changed people—for surely no one who survived it was left unchanged—rather than revisit the larger story of the Civil War. Without such historical context, the tendency is to view the Free State of Jones as Newt Knight’s war, and from there to assign him superhuman or demonic motives depending on one’s point of view about the Confederate cause.
To understand the community that produced the Knight Company, I devoted four chapters to tracing the historical events and geographic movement that shaped the lives of Jones County’s first generation of settlers. In so doing, I discovered that the American Revolution, religious revivals, and frontier wars profoundly shaped the consciousness of families that frequently migrated together, married among one another, and carved out settlements and communities along the way. By tracing this early history, I discovered the fault lines of Jones County’s future divisions over the war. That legacy of four horrific years of war is told in the book’s final two chapters, as well as in the introduction and epilogue that begin and end with Davis Knight’s miscegenation trial. The arc of the story thus bends from war and dissent to racial mixing, racial identity, and the law. We see that the Free State of Jones is really two stories, each with its own dramatic lessons, yet so tightly interwoven as to make them interdependent.
SU: Some impressive scholarship pushes the popular notion that the American Civil War was caused by the rich, but fought by the poor. Most notably, Joseph T. Glatthaar showed that wealthy white Southern men were overrepresented, not underrepresented, and served in all ranks, at least in the most famous of Confederate armies, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. How does your book or the film challenge popular ideas of “a rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight” and how have some persisted stubbornly?
VB: It is certainly true that Jones County’s more elite citizens were well-represented in the Confederate army and suffered their share of deaths, on and off battlefields. When considering the phrase, “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight,” it’s therefore important to understand the poor man’s “fight,” not in terms of numbers on the battlefield, but in terms of what the war cost him and his family. Perceptions of elite privilege in the ranks and reports of deprivation at home influenced common soldiers to turn against the Confederacy. Disgruntled conscripts might mistakenly believe that slaveholders escaped service in far greater numbers than they did, but they were correct in assuming that the upper-class’s eagerness for war reflected its tangible stake in victory—the protection of slavery. Small farmers especially resented the seizure of their produce and livestock under tax-in-kind laws, particularly when tax agents abused their prerogatives.
Political corruption drove many women and men to complain to authorities, especially when planters and merchants charged exorbitant prices for necessary staples that were particularly scarce because many planters grew cotton and tobacco instead of edible crops. Not surprisingly, they denounced the Twenty Negro law for giving these same planters and merchants the option of exemptions for themselves, sons, and employees. Similarly, bitter denunciations were hurled at millers, blacksmiths, and the like who gained exemptions as indispensable servants of the community. When denied the same exemptions, many men became convinced that elite connections made the difference.
SU: You mentioned recently that you would like to see someone expand on the story of Serena and Rachel Knight, getting us past the completely undocumented notion that they bonded as sisters through their shared relationship with Newt.
VB: During Rachel Knight’s lifetime, at least three masters owned and exercised control over her body. She was bought, sold, and raped; she gave birth to her first child at age 14. By the time she became associated with the Knight Band, Rachel was the mother of three, possible four, children.
In 1865, Rachel gave birth to Martha, believed to be the first of five children born to her and Newt Knight during the decade following the Civil War. Was this child the product of rape? If not, how did Rachel’s sexual relationship with Newt Knight differ from her previous ones?
No first-hand accounts from Rachel, Newt, or people who knew them personally inform us of how they felt about or treated one another. We are left to surmise the answers by examining stories passed down through several generations. There is reason to hope that more such accounts are forthcoming. For now, we know the following:
Rachel was never Newt’s slave, nor did Newt own slaves. A few Knight descendants have described both Newt and his parents as having opposed slavery. Their sexual relationship is assumed to have begun during the Civil War, when Rachel collaborated with the Knight Company against the Confederate army. After the war and emancipation, Rachel and her children moved to Newt’s farm, where they lived alongside his white family, including his wife Serena and their children. Newt continued to have children with both Rachel and Serena.
SU: How would you like to see a writer (historian or screen writer) investigate the question of consent in Rachel’s relationship (as an enslaved or recently freed woman of color) with Newt?
VB: When we talk about “consent,” we need to consider the above factors, but also the historical context in which this interracial household emerged in the postwar South. Freed women such as Rachel had few options for making a living and supporting a large household of children beyond unremitting farm labor. Racism was rife in this ardently patriarchal society in which white men had dominance over black women and white women of their own class.
Future historians or screenwriters must therefore examine “consent” within stark social, economic, and political realities. Newt Knight openly acknowledged his and Rachel’s children. He deepened their family ties when he presided over the intermarriage around 1878 of two of Rachel’s children with two of his and Serena’s children. He also deeded land to her and their children, and helped arrange for the children’s education. Further suggesting Rachel’s consent is the fact that she remained with Newt until her death in 1889 at age 49.
Future researchers should also examine the circumstances under which Serena Knight “consented” to Newt and Rachel’s relationship. Although Serena was white, her options were limited by class and gender. I’ve seen no evidence that she left Newt’s household during the war despite the movie’s portrayal of her doing so. Rather, she seems to have endured her husband’s second family, and perhaps accepted it as her own. If she had objected, where might she have fled? Family narratives suggest that the entire family was ostracized. By 1880, it appears that Serena was as much a part of the mixed-race Knight community as any other member. Two of her children had by then intermarried with Rachel’s children. Their children were her grandchildren as well as Newt and Rachel’s.
Between 1870 and 1920, Newt Knight maintained a lifestyle condemned by white society. He was the patriarch of a mixed-race community that by most descendants’ accounts was a benevolent one. Still, like most men of his day, Newt appears to have exercised authority over his wife, lovers, and children. As free women, Rachel and Serena’s consent to their lives with Newt is implied, but, without their own words, the level of choice they exercised remains speculative.
SU: How did you feel about having a topic you have worked on so closely become a Hollywood movie? Did you have actors in mind to play the characters when you first knew the movie rights have been purchased? Did you have any influence on that?
VB: I was quite excited in 2005 to learn from the University of North Carolina Press that my book, The Free State of Jones, had been optioned by Hollywood. Even more exciting was when the movie went into production ten years later. My biggest adjustment was coming to terms with the transition to screen of a story that I’d studied for years and written about in great detail. You might say I knew too much. I played no role in casting the actors, which was no doubt for the best. Although I enjoy watching old movies, and often showed them in the classroom to demonstrate historical points of view, I rarely watch first-run movies. I learned a lot, however, from visiting the set of Free State of Jones, and consulting with director Gary Ross. In the process, I came to appreciate the creative genius and sheer work required to transform a complex story into 2 ½ hours of plot, dialogue, and action.
SU: What can movies illuminate that books cannot (and visa versa)? Did the film miss some key points that you wish viewers understood?
VB: Through images, action, and dialogue, the movie Free State of Jones dramatically compressed and conveyed the horrors of war and Newt Knight’s consequent evolution into an articulate, class conscious leader and opponent of that war. Likewise, the haunting, foreboding beauty of the swamps and the yelping of bloodhounds hot on the trail of deserters elicits far more emotional intensity from audiences than most authors of academic books dare hope for. On the other hand, for those who relish the fine details of a true story, backed up by documentation and historical context, there’s nothing like a well-sourced book, footnotes and all. Historically-based movies and historical works are in fact complementary. Both should inspire and inform us, despite appealing to our different senses; both should make us want to know more.
Overall, I hope that movie-goers will want to know more about the community’s involvement in Jones County’s insurrection. Newt Knight was neither the first nor the best known Unionist of Jones County. The ensuing inner civil war that spread throughout southern Mississippi featured numerous leaders, and was duplicated in other communities throughout the South. Likewise, the full story of Newt and Rachel, the mixed-race community, and the Davis Knight trial of 1948 presents a far more complex story of race in American than possible in an already over-burdened screenplay. Likely this story requires a movie of its own, perhaps a sequel of sorts in which the Civil War and Reconstruction provide the backdrop.
SU: Did you find the actors true to the biographies of the historic figures they were playing? Was the casting credible?
VB: The three major members of the Knight band—Newt Knight, Jasper Collins, and William Sumrall—were well cast and credibly portrayed within the limits of a Hollywood movie. Because Jasper Collins was the most clearly Unionist of the three, I would like to have seen his character expanded.
My chief difficulty with the cinematic Newt Knight is the level of Baptist religious devotion ascribed to him. I found no evidence that Newt was more than conventionally religious. In a worshipful biography filled with inaccuracies, Newt’s son, Thomas Jefferson Knight, claimed that Newt joined a Primitive Baptist church around 1886, but there is no corroborating evidence for this, and in any case it would have been long after the war and Reconstruction ended. There’s better evidence that Newt and Rachel Knight briefly joined the Mormon Church around 1883, perhaps in hopes of gaining sanction for their marriage.
SU: Was the film’s setting credible, too?
VB: The landscape and swamps of Louisiana captured the feel and appearance of Civil War Mississippi quite effectively. A charming replica of the town of Ellisville, Mississippi, was rebuilt in Louisiana. Still, many Jones County descendants pointed out that their slaveholding ancestors lived in far more modest structures (reflective of Jones County’s location outside the plantation belt) than those presented in the movie, and that the elegant old court house of Clinton, Louisiana, bore little resemblance to the modest court house of Ellisville where Davis Knight’s trial took place in 1948.
SU: Did the film/directors slant or skew any key historical events?
VB: Many of the movie’s most dramatic scenes—the interracial composition of the Knight Band, the postwar Union League meeting, the lynching of Moses Washington—are plausible but not documented for Jones County. There is plenty of evidence of interracial collaboration between deserters and slaves during the Civil War, and about Union Leagues and lynching during Reconstruction. There is no hard evidence, however, that Newt allied with maroons in the swamps, or that men of color joined the Knight Company. Likewise, while there is solid evidence that Newt Knight served in the Radical Republican Administration of Adelbert Ames, there is no evidence that he participated in a Union League organization. Finally, because Moses Washington is a fictional character, so is his murder. Nonetheless, it does have historical precedent in Jones County. A similar lynching of a politically active freedman, Sandy McGill, is described in two separate oral interviews that were conducted some 45 years after Reconstruction. And, of course, there is ample documentation of the lynching of black men throughout the South during Reconstruction.
SU: Did the musical score capture the period, events, and drama behind the Newt Knight’s movement?
VB: I found the musical score pleasant and unobtrusive. The ending song by Lucinda Williams (a songwriter and performer whose work I greatly respect) was haunting and sad, suggestive of an era filled with political violence and personal angst. The movie’s producers might more effectively have dramatized the story’s key events, however, by incorporating some of the fine songwriting and dynamic performances of less well-known artists who over the years have set the story of the Free State of Jones to music.
Civil War Monitor: The Five Best Books on Civil War Guerrillas
POSTED 9/27/2021 BY Matthew Christopher Hulbert
“This Mr. Wales is a cold-blooded killer. He’s from Missouri where they’re all known to be killers of innocent men, women, and children.” That line from Clint Eastwood’s iconic 1976 film, The Outlaw Josey Wales, reflected—and in some cases still reflects—the three most enduring misconceptions about Civil War guerrillas. First was that irregular combatants were all bloodthirsty psychos. Second, that virtually all irregular combat was confined to the rough-and-tumble Missouri-Kansas borderlands. And third, that the activities of borderland bushwhackers, Jayhawkers, Red Legs, and raiders were distant from the “real war” and had nothing to do with its outcome.
Typically, historians complain about having to undo the damage caused by movies, television, and popular novels. In this case, Hollywood had taken its cues from scholarly literature. In the century after the Civil War, coverage of guerrillas actively fostered fallacies. From John Newman Edwards’ Noted Guerrillas (1877) to William E. Connelley’s Quantrill and the Border Wars (1909) to Albert Castel’s William Clarke Quantrill (1962), the irregular canon frequently revolved around a small cast of notorious men, depicted them as supernaturally violent, and dismissed their legitimacy as combatants. To be sure, the focus on villainous mustachios, quick-drawing gunmen, and homefront atrocities sold books—but it also helped maintain a clear, convenient, and ultimately artificial boundary between regular (read: “civilized”) and irregular (“uncivilized”) versions of America’s re-founding.
In reality, there is no monolithic guerrilla narrative because there was no single guerrilla war. Irregular conflicts followed regular soldiers everywhere: to the Indian territories of the Far West, the Trans-Mississippi Borderlands, the Midwest, Appalachia, and beyond. In some of these places, guerrilla violence predated formal militaries and Napoleonic maneuvers; in others, bushwhacking continued well after Robert E. Lee, Joseph E. Johnston, and Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered their armies. Understandably, such a geographic expanse and the diversity of irregular combatants within it has made answering seemingly basic questions a difficult task. How many men fought as guerrillas? How many were killed? What did they do after the war? We simply don’t know—and probably never will with the specificity of the figures from the regular theater. The nature of guerrilla war does not lend itself to recordkeeping.
Since the 1980s, historians in the vanguard of Civil War guerrilla studies have tried to answer the more existential questions, often through localized lenses. What motivated men to fight as guerrillas? How did guerrilla warfare work logistically? What did it mean to be a “civilian” in a guerrilla-torn community? How did local governments and military officials deal with outbursts of guerrilla war? What did irregular violence mean to the outcome of the Civil War? Rather than rehashing which guerrillas were the bloodiest or which massacre the deadliest, the books listed here grapple with those bigger questions in unique ways. Each is a pioneer thematically, methodologically, or geographically so that each represents a significant turning point in how historians have explored the experiences of Civil War guerrillas.
VICTIMS: A TRUE STORY OF THE CIVIL WAR
(University of Tennessee Press, 1981)
By Phillip Shaw Paludan
Philip Shaw Paludan’s Victims: A True Story of the Civil War has a tendency to slip under the radar in discussions of Civil War guerrilla literature. This unfortunate oversight is due partly to Paludan being best known as a historian of Abraham Lincoln and partly to the book’s chronicling of events far from Missouri and Kansas at a time when the western borderlands were still synonymous with homefront violence. In addition to being a beautifully written and accessible work of history, Paludan’s retelling of the 1863 Shelton-Laurel Massacre in North Carolina—in which 13 southern Unionists were summarily executed by regular Confederate forces—examines terrible acts of violence without playing to their sensationalism. Victims opened the door for micro- or community-level histories of irregular warfare in other parts of the country. Better still, the book set a new standard for illustrating how regular forces were often called on to deal with guerrillas and underscored how the definitions of “civilian” and “combatant” and the line that supposedly separated them were much more fluid than military historians traditionally depict.
INSIDE WAR: THE GUERRILLA CONFLICT IN MISSOURI
(Oxford University Press, 1989)
By Michael Fellman
With Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War, Michael Fellman set out to dissect what he correctly labeled the “war of 10,000 nasty incidents.” At first glance, a return to the well-trod Missouri-Kansas borderlands might seem like a retrogression, especially after Victims; but in fact, it was high time for a professional historian to finally confront more than a century’s worth of myth and hyperbole surrounding the likes of William Clarke Quantrill, William “Bloody Bill” Anderson, Jayhawker chieftains Jim Lane and Charles “Doc” Jennison, and the infamous Lawrence Massacre of August 1863. Inside War is not without issue. Fellman conceded that the book was a reaction to American involvement in Vietnam. As a consequence, it often skewed the political motivations of pro-Confederate guerrillas and presented them as bloodthirsty criminals. But as a counterbalance to numerous neo-Confederate accounts of the irregular war in the borderlands, it cleared the proverbial elephant from the room and left other scholars of guerrilla violence free to branch out geographically and methodologically. For that reason, Inside War is still a must read.
THE FREE STATE OF JONES: MISSISSIPPI’S LONGEST CIVIL WAR
(University of North Carolina Press, 2001)
By Victoria Bynum
Owing to its Confederate bona fides, Mississippi might have seemed an unlikely place to find an internal guerrilla conflict, but that’s precisely what Victoria Bynum writes about in The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War. The book outlines an insurgency within an insurgency: After Mississippi seceded from the Union, a multiracial cohort of disgruntled Jones County residents effectively tried to secede from their Confederate state. (The story was made into a 2016 feature film with that title starring Matthew McConaughey, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Mahershala Ali.) Bynum is among the best writers the field of Civil War history has to offer; her vivid narration of the war to control Jones County marked a high point in the study of southern Unionists and their victimhood. The Free State of Jones also documents that women, African Americans, and even children were direct, active participants in the guerrilla warfare experience, and Bynum reminds us how deeply local outbreaks of guerrilla violence were rooted in the mainstream politics of secession and slavery.
A SAVAGE CONFLICT: THE DECISIVE ROLE OF GUERRILLAS IN THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
(University of North Carolina Press, 2009)
By Daniel Sutherland
In addition to having the biggest spoiler title, Daniel Sutherland’s A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War is something of an anomaly compared to the other books here. Rather than continuing the trend of researching irregular violence at the community, county, or even state level, Sutherland pulled back and reassessed the overall influence of guerrillas on the outcome of the Civil War. The book moves through the divided country one region at a time and gradually pieces together a national tapestry of irregular violence. From raiding and bushwhacking to looting, ambush, espionage, and outright massacre, A Savage Conflict was the first work of its kind to attempt sizing up guerrilla warfare in toto—let alone to document how endemic violence across the homefront influenced morale, swayed political decisions, disrupted supply lines, and altered troop movements. Collectively, these influences played a decisive role in how the Union won the war. Perhaps more than revealing the national scope of guerrilla warfare, Sutherland threw light on the fact that for myriad Americans, irregular conflict was a pretty regular thing.
BUSHWHACKERS: GUERRILLA WARFARE, MANHOOD, AND THE HOUSEHOLD IN CIVIL WAR MISSOURI
(Kent State University Press, 2016)
By Joseph Beilein
Given the backstory on guerrilla literature, it may or may not be fitting that this list of best books on the subject concludes with a Missouri-centric title. Joseph Beilein’s Bushwhackers: Guerrilla Warfare, Manhood, and the Household in Civil War Missouri can be a book both about Missouri and about the broader guerrilla experience in other locations. It blueprints what made waging guerrilla war possible in Missouri. Through his extensive social and genealogical research into the kinship networks of Confederate bushwhackers, Beilein illustrates how the female relatives of men in the bush (wives, mothers, cousins, daughters, aunts, and sisters) served as de facto quartermasters in a war waged from within and upon literal households. This concept of “household war” is undoubtedly applicable to other pockets of irregular conflict; it delivers a model for studying the logistical and material components of bushwhacking while also offering new angles for understanding why and where people chose to fight as guerrillas in the first place.
MATTHEW CHRISTOPHER HULBERT IS AN ELLIOTT ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT HAMPDEN-SYDNEY COLLEGE. HE IS THE AUTHOR OF THE GHOSTS OF GUERRILLA MEMORY: HOW CIVIL WAR BUSHWHACKERS BECAME GUNSLINGERS IN THE AMERICAN WEST (UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS, 2016), WHICH WON THE 2017 WILEY-SILVER PRIZE, AND THE CO-EDITOR OF THREE BOOKS,
This article appeared in the Fall 2021 (Vol. 11, No. 3) issue of The Civil War Monitor.
Two Mississippi Museums “Many Stories” presents Newt Knight and The Free State of Jones
The Many Stories presentation on Newt Knight of the Free State of Jones can be viewed directly from the Museum of Mississippi History Facebook page.
Date and Showtime: Thursday, June 3, 2021, 6-7 p.m.
Hope to see you there! —Vikki Bynum
Understanding the Civil War Era South from the Perspective of The Free State of Jones
On July 16, 2019, Dr. Priscilla Leder—my former colleague at Texas State University, and now the host of KZSM’s “Bookmarked” radio show—interviewed me and Dr. Rebecca Montgomery about the Civil War Era South, with a focus on my book, The Free State of Jones.
What a lively afternoon it was! Rebecca, Professor of History at Texas State University, had not only read
and taught the Free State of Jones, but is the author of two works on Southern women and educational reform: The Politics of Education in the New South: Women and Reform in Georgia, 1890-1930, (2006), and Celeste Parrish and Educational Reform in the Progressive Era South (2019).
A freewheeling discussion of class, race and gender relations in the South followed Priscilla’s introductions. We began by discussing why I wrote The Free State of Jones, a few of the authors who previously wrote about it, and how I treated their works in my
own version. From there, we discussed the historical thread that connects Jones County’s insurrection against the Confederacy with the South’s Revolutionary Era struggles over economic divisions, slavery, and religious doctrine. We agreed there is much to be learned about today’s world from the struggles that engulfed plain white and enslaved people during the Civil War.
And, of course, we discussed the 2016 movie version (STX Entertainment)—and how wonderful it was to witness the introduction of this true story into the realm of popular culture via guerrilla leader Newt Knight. But also how satisfying it would be to more fully tell the story of how women—free and enslaved, white, black, and mixed-race—not only directly participated in Jones County’s inner civil war, but in the creation of the mixed-race, biracial community that followed in the wake of the Civil War.
Victoria Bynum to Discuss Hollywood, the Civil War, and “The Free State of Jones” at The University of New Hampshire
Dissent, Desertion, and Unionism in the Confederate South: My Interview with “Red Strings & Maroons”
By Vikki Bynum
I first learned about the Red Strings—known formally as “The Heroes of America“—in 1983 while researching Civil War dissenters, deserters, and guerrilla bands in the North Carolina State Archives. The late historian William T. “Bill” Auman, who counted a few of his own kinfolk among this secret pro-Union organization, was at that time writing Civil War in the North Carolina Quaker Belt, and had already co-written a superb article with David D. Scarboro on the Red Strings. Between Bill’s work and the collections that I daily poured over at the Archives, a fascinating world of rebels and co-conspirators against the Confederacy unfolded before me, one that included ordinary white men and women, slaves, and free people of color. My first book, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control, was the result. Although only two of Unruly Women’s chapters centered on the Civil War, my career as a scholar of Southern dissent had begun.
From the North Carolina Piedmont I moved my research into the Mississippi Piney Woods, where the old legend of The Free State of Jones begged for a modern treatment. Then it was on to Texas, where I found echoes of Jones County’s Free State among a band of “Jayhawkers” in the Big Thicket of East Texas.
Hoping to facilitate a public conversation about the role of dissent in the nineteenth century South, in 2008 I created this blog, Renegade South. Then came The Movie. In June 2016, STX Entertainment released the Hollywood version of The Free State of Jones, with none other than Matthew McConaughey playing guerrilla leader Newt Knight.
More recently, public debates over the continued presence of pro-Confederate monuments throughout the South and beyond have stimulated interest in the origins of the “Lost Cause” version of Civil War history. “Lost Cause” history is shorthand for the popular belief that slavery did not cause the Civil War and that all Southerners—even so-called “good” slaves—were solidly united around protecting “states rights” and Southern honor through secession from the United States. That secession, of course, precipitated the Civil War.
Almost one hundred years ago, historians began demolishing the Lost Cause version of history by providing ample documentation that slavery did indeed cause the Civil War. And more recently historians have cast light on a far-from-“solid” South by exploring various insurrections and inner civil wars that raged against the Confederacy during the Civil War. The following podcast interview with Mitch, moderator of Red Strings & Maroons, gave me a wonderful opportunity to discuss my own research on Civil War dissent that began more than thirty years ago in the very region of North Carolina that inspired his blog. I hope you’ll give it a listen.
PLEASE NOTE: This interview was conducted through the Red Strings And Maroons podcast. You can find similar interviews and more content on iTunes, their patreon page, or their podcasts website.
Renegade South 