Newton Knight

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Newton Knight, photograph of unknown date

Newton Knight (born 10. November 1829 in Jones County , Mississippi ;. Died 16th February 1922 in Jasper County , Mississippi) was a deserter of the Confederate Army in the Civil War and the local tradition of the founder of the Free State of Jones in Jones County. He gained national fame through the American feature film Free State of Jones from 2016, which was based on his biography.

Life

Knight served in a Mississippi battalion during the Civil War . Although he refused to allow the southern states to leave the American Union, he had volunteered. By 1863 general support for the Confederation cause had waned in many areas of the southern states , in Mississippi this particularly affected the northeastern counties, where many smallholders were calling for an end to the civil war. In Jones County, the now deserted Knight led the resistance to further recruitment . To do this, he carried out raids on Confederate cavalrymen with a group of like-minded people in the style of a guerrilla . The fact that Knight announced the apostasy of Jones County from the Confederation, that is to say founded the Free State of Jones with him as president, has been preserved as a local legend, but lacks a reliable historical factual basis. Nonetheless, the survival of this tale shows how strong the anti-civil war sentiment was at the time. Is secured that Knight and his men, the Confederate Administration in the spring of 1864 Ellisville sold and the Courthouse , the flag of the United States hoisted.

After the Civil War, although already married, he lived with his grandfather's former slave , Rachel. This relationship resulted in five children, while he and his official wife Serena had nine children. Both families lived in two different houses on the nearly 65-acre Knights estate. During the Reconstruction , he worked for federal agencies and freed African American children whose previous owners refused to release them from slavery . He also served in a regiment that consisted predominantly of blacks and, if necessary, defended the voting rights of this population group with violence. In 1876, Knight officially transferred 65 acres to Rachel, making Rachel one of the very few African-American landowners at the time in Mississippi.

filming

In 2015, Gary Ross filmed the life story of Newton Knight, who was played by Matthew McConaughey . The feature film Free State of Jones was released the following year.

literature

  • Thomas Jefferson Knight, Ethel Knight: The Free State of Jones and the Echo of the Black Horn: Two Sides of the Life and Activities of Captain Newt Knight. Racehorse Publishing, New York 2016, ISBN 978-1-944686-95-6 .
  • Sally Jenkins, John Stauffer: The State of Jones. Doubleday, New York 2009, ISBN 978-0-385-52593-0 .
  • Victoria E. Bynum: The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 2001, ISBN 0-8078-5467-0 .
  • Rudy H. Leverett: Legend of the Free State of Jones. University of Mississippi, Jackson 1984, ISBN 0-87805-227-5 .

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Westley F. Busbee, Jr: Mississippi: A History. Second edition. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester 2015, ISBN 978-1-118-75590-7 , pp. 145f.
    Richard Grant: The True Story of the 'Free State of Jones'. In: Smithsonian Magazine. March 2016.
  2. ^ Richard Grant, The True Story of the Free State of Jones. In: Smithsonian Magazine. March 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Knight, Newton
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American deserter
DATE OF BIRTH November 10, 1829
PLACE OF BIRTH Jones County , Mississippi
DATE OF DEATH February 16, 1922
Place of death Jasper County , Mississippi