Mixed Race Studies

Review: Matthew McConaughey Rebels Against Rebels in ‘Free State of Jones’

The New York Times
2016-06-23

A. O. Scott, Film Critic

Matthew McConaughey, left, and Jacob Lofland in “Free State of Jones.” Credit Murray Close/STX Entertainment

“Free State of Jones” begins on the battlefield, with a flurry of the kind of immersive combat action that has long been a staple of American movies. The setting is familiar in other ways, too. As a line of Confederate troops marches across a field into Union rifle and artillery fire, a haze of myth starts to gather over the action, a mist of sentiment about the tragedy of the Civil War and the symmetrical valor of the soldiers on both sides of it. But this is a sly piece of misdirection: The rest of the movie will be devoted to blowing that fog away, using the tools of Hollywood spectacle to restore a measure of clarity to our understanding of the war and its aftermath.

Directed by Gary Ross (“Seabiscuit”) with blunt authority and unusual respect for historical truth, “Free State of Jones” explores a neglected and fascinating chapter in American history. Mr. Ross consulted some of the leading experts in the era — including Eric Foner of Columbia University, whose “Reconstruction” is the definitive study, and Martha Hodes of New York University, author of a prizewinning study of interracial sexuality in the 19th-century South — and has done a good job of balancing the factual record with the demands of dramatic storytelling. The result is a riveting visual history lesson, whose occasional didacticism is integral to its power.

The hero of this tale is Newton Knight, a poor farmer from Jones County, Miss., who led a guerrilla army of white deserters and escaped slaves against the Confederacy during the war. Afterward, he tried to hold this coalition together as a political force in the face of Ku Klux Klan terror. As played by Matthew McConaughey, Newton is an ordinary man radicalized by circumstances. His hollow cheeks and wild whiskers suggest a zealous temperament, but the kindness in his eyes conveys the decency and compassion that lie at the heart of his moral commitment…

…“Free State of Jones” is careful not to suggest that the conditions endured by disenfranchised white and enslaved black Mississippians were identical. The system may be rigged against both, but in different ways. Especially after the war, the alliance proves fragile, as white supremacy reasserts itself with renewed brutality. Its persistence is emphasized by a subplot that takes place 85 years after the war in a Mississippi courtroom, where Davis Knight (Brian Lee Franklin), a descendant of Newton’s, is on trial for breaking the state’s law against interracial marriage…

Read the entire review here.

Legend of the Free State of Jones

University Press of Mississippi
2009-10-07
143 pages
3 maps, 7 b&w illustrations
5 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches
Paper ISBN: 978-1-60473-571-0
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-60473-572-7

Rudy H. Leverett

The original, full accounting of a rebellion in the heart of Dixie

A maverick, unionist district in the heart of the Old South? A notorious county that seceded from the Confederacy? This is how Jones County, Mississippi, is known in myth and legend.

Since 1864 the legend has persisted. Differing versions give the name of this new nation as Republic of Jones, Jones County Confederacy, and Free State of Jones. Over the years this story has captured the imaginations of journalists, historians, essayists, novelists, short story writers, and Hollywood filmmakers, although serious scholars long ago questioned the accuracy of local history accounts about a secessionist county led by Newt Knight and a band of renegades.

Legend of the Free State of Jones was the first authoritative explanation of just what did happen in Jones County in 1864 to give rise to the legend. This book surveys the facts, the records, and the history of the “Free State of Jones” and well may provide the whole story.

Rudy H. Leverett was born in an unplumbed cabin in the woods outside of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He had a doctoral degree in education and spent his life writing extensively on the subjects of philosophy, the American South, and the McLemore family. He died on his birthday in 1999.

On The Free State Of Jones

The Huffington Post
2016-06-20

Steven Hahn, Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History
University of Pennsylvania

Three quarters of a century ago, “Gone with the Wind,” a film that mythologized an Old South of wealthy planters and obedient slaves, premiered in Atlanta amidst great fanfare and public interest. This week, a very different sort of film about the South of the Civil War and Reconstruction era – “Free State of Jones” — will have its premiere, and as we commemorate the 150th anniversary of the War and Reconstruction and struggle through our own time of social and racial divisiveness, the public would do very well to take the film’s measure.

That is because “Free State of Jones,” challenges our many misconceptions of the Civil War and Reconstruction and can promote a dialogue about what may have been possible more than a century ago – and what is very much possible in our own day. “Free State of Jones” is based on a true story of interracial resistance to the Confederacy in Civil War Mississippi. It is the story of how a white farmer from humble origins named Newton Knight came to see how the Confederacy favored the rich planters at the expense of men and women like himself and chose to organize a rebellion aimed at establishing a terrain of freedom, a “free state,” in the county of Jones…

…But Newton Knight eventually went further still. The strongest resistance to the Confederacy came, not from poor white folk, but from those who were destined to be its main victims: the slaves. In Mississippi and elsewhere in the Confederate South, they took the opportunity of the War to flee their plantations and farms, head to Union lines, or form maroons in swamps and remote woodlands, denying slaveholders the labor and submission that had been expected. During his own battles with the Confederacy in rural Jones County, Knight forged alliances with African Americans, most specifically a slave named Rachel with whom he developed an intimate relationship and eventually raised a family…

Read the entire article here.

A Confederate Dissident, in a Film With Footnotes

The New York Times
2016-06-15

Jennifer Schuessler

The forthcoming Matthew McConaughey drama “Free State of Jones” lays claim to being the first Hollywood film in decades to depict Reconstruction, the still controversial post-Civil War period that attempted to rebuild the South along racially egalitarian lines.

But the movie, written and directed by Gary Ross, might also lay claim to a more unusual title: the first Hollywood drama to come with footnotes.

The film recounts the true story of Newton Knight (Mr. McConaughey), a Confederate deserter who led a ragtag dissident army from the swamps of Jones County, Miss., and continued to fight for the rights of African-Americans after the Civil War ended…

…Where Mr. Ross has invented characters or episodes or made guesses about motivations, he explains why, pointing to justifications in the historical record. For example, the film depicts Knight’s decades-long relationship with Rachel (played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw of “Belle”), a former slave who once belonged to his grandfather and with whom he had several children. The site shows an 1876 document in which Knight (who remained married to his white wife) deeded her 160 acres of land — an indication, Mr. Ross writes, that theirs was “a loving relationship that grew over time,” rather than manifesting a “Thomas Jefferson/Sally Hemings power dynamic.” Knight did not own slaves.

The extent of Knight’s collaborations across the color line has been a point of sometimes hot debate among scholars, including those on Mr. Ross’s team. In 2009, after Mr. Stauffer and Sally Jenkins published “The State of Jones,” a book inspired by Mr. Ross’s screenplay, Ms. Bynum posted a blistering three-part review on her blog, questioning what she called its “highly exaggerated claims” that Knight had fought for racial equality before and after the war…

…It remains to be seen how Mr. Ross’s film will land with audiences. Kellie Carter Jackson, an assistant professor of history at Hunter College and the author of the coming book “Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence,” said there was a need for a more accurate depiction of Reconstruction, but noted that Hollywood “has a hard time divesting white men from the center of the universe.”…

Read the entire article here.

Conversations: Victoria Bynum

Mississippi Public Broadcasting
Aired: 2016-06-16
Length: 00:26:46

Historian and author Victoria Bynum talks about her book, “The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest War.” First published in 2003, the book tells the story of Jones County residents who opposed secession from the Union during the civil war. The true story is receiving a resurgence in interest now that it has been made into a major motion picture starring Matthew McConaughey.

Not-So-Solid South

Triton
University of California, San Diego Alumni
2016-05-05

Sherilyn Reus ’16

Historian Victoria Bynum, M.A. ’79, Ph.D. ’87, is a Civil War myth-buster.

Folklore is deeply embedded in American culture—whether told at the dinner table, around the campfire or just before bedtime, tall tales and legends about the nation’s history have the power to build a common identity and unify its people. For Victoria Bynum, M.A. ’79, Ph.D. ’87, American folklore is not just an opportunity for a great story, but a chance to look more closely at the finer threads of our heritage.

Interestingly enough for a noted historian of the 19th-century American South, Bynum was born and raised mostly in California. Her father, however, was born in Jones County, Miss., a location steeped in history and primarily known for its anti-Confederate rebellion during the Civil War. For Bynum, who gravitated toward history throughout college, the dynamics and repercussions of the uprising were captivating. “Here was a story that countered conventional images of the Civil War and ordinary white Southerners,” she says. After hearing a plethora of different sides to the story, Bynum was convinced that Jones County was begging for a deeper historical analysis…

Read the entire article here.

‘Free State of Jones’ author talks

The Clarion-Ledger
Jackson, Mississippi

2016-03-02

Author Victoria Bynum discusses her book, Free State of Jones, which is now a new Hollywood movie starring Matthew Mcconaughey.

Watch the interview here.

Kaleidoscope: Redrawing an American Family Tree

University of Arkansas Press
2015-06-01
140 pages
10 images
6″ x 9″
Paper ISBN: 978-1-55728-815-8

Margaret Jones Bolsterli, Emeritus Professor
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

In 2005 Margaret Jones Bolsterli learned that her great-great-grandfather was a free mulatto named Jordan Chavis, who owned an antebellum plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi. The news was a shock; Bolsterli had heard about the plantation in family stories told during her Arkansas Delta childhood, but Chavis’s name and race had never been mentioned. With further exploration Bolsterli found that when Chavis’s children crossed the Mississippi River between 1859 and 1875 for exile in Arkansas, they passed into the white world, leaving the family’s racial history completely behind.

Kaleidoscope is the story of this discovery, and it is the story, too, of the rise and fall of the Chavis fortunes in Mississippi, from the family’s first appearance on a frontier farm in 1829 to ownership of over a thousand acres and the slaves to work them by 1860. Bolsterli learns that in the 1850s, when all free colored people were ordered to leave Mississippi or be enslaved, Jordan Chavis’s white neighbors successfully petitioned the legislature to allow him to remain, unmolested, even as three of his sons and a daughter moved to Arkansas and Illinois. She learns about the agility with which the old man balanced on a tightrope over chaos to survive the war and then take advantage of the opportunities of newly awarded citizenship during Reconstruction. The story ends with the family’s loss of everything in the 1870s, after one of the exiled sons returns to Mississippi to serve in the Reconstruction legislature and a grandson attempts unsuccessfully to retain possession of the land. In Kaleidoscope, long-silenced truths are revealed, inviting questions about how attitudes toward race might have been different in the family and in America if the truth about this situation and thousands of others like it could have been told before.

The Free State of Jones, Movie Edition: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War

University of North Carolina Press
March 2016
352 pages
32 halftones, 10 maps, 4 tables
appends., notes, bibl., index
Paper ISBN 978-1-4696-2705-2

Victoria E. Bynum, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

With a New Afterword by the Author

Between late 1863 and mid-1864, an armed band of Confederate deserters battled Confederate cavalry in the Piney Woods region of Jones County, Mississippi. Calling themselves the Knight Company after their captain, Newton Knight, they set up headquarters in the swamps of the Leaf River, where they declared their loyalty to the U.S. government.

The story of the Jones County rebellion is well known among Mississippians, and debate over whether the county actually seceded from the state during the war has smoldered for more than a century. Adding further controversy to the legend is the story of Newt Knight’s interracial romance with his wartime accomplice, Rachel, a slave. From their relationship there developed a mixed-race community that endured long after the Civil War had ended, and the ambiguous racial identity of their descendants confounded the rules of segregated Mississippi well into the twentieth century.

Victoria Bynum traces the origins and legacy of the Jones County uprising from the American Revolution to the modern civil rights movement. In bridging the gap between the legendary and the real Free State of Jones, she shows how the legend–what was told, what was embellished, and what was left out–reveals a great deal about the South’s transition from slavery to segregation; the racial, gender, and class politics of the period; and the contingent nature of history and memory.

In a new afterword, Bynum updates readers on recent scholarship, current issues of race and Southern heritage, and the coming movie that make this Civil War story essential reading.

The Free State of Jones film, starring Matthew McConaughey, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Keri Russell, will be released in May 2016.

“The Free State of Jones” on Film: A Q&A with Victoria Bynum

The Society of Civil War Historians
2016-03-01

Megan Kate Nelson

This May, STX Entertainment will release the film Free State of Jones, which tells the story of the Knight Company and the Jones County rebellion, a Civil War history first told by Victoria Bynum in her 2001 book The Free State of Jones. A few weeks ago, Bynum and I discussed her experiences working as a consultant on the film, and seeing her book come alive on the screen.

MKN: Did you know at the time you were writing “The Free State of Jones” that it had cinematic potential? And what is it about this story that makes it compelling for filmmakers?

VB: As I researched and wrote The Free State of Jones, I grew increasingly aware of its historical importance as an insurrection that combined elements of class, race, gender, and kinship that, for this story, had long been underestimated, misunderstood, distorted, or simply ignored.

Although I did not write the book with a movie in mind, the story’s vivid real-life characters, its oral and written first-hand accounts of fierce confrontations between Confederates and deserters, the interracial romance between the band’s leader, Newt Knight, and his slave accomplice, Rachel Knight, and the Unionist core of the band itself, convinced me of the story’s cinematic potential.

On the standard author’s questionnaire that I completed for the University of North Carolina Press, I advised the press to consider presenting the book “to television and film companies as a potential docudrama or miniseries.” At that point, however, I did not anticipate Hollywood’s interest in the story…

Read the entire interview here.