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    The State of Jones: The Small Southern County that Seceded from the Confederacy
    Unavailable
    The State of Jones: The Small Southern County that Seceded from the Confederacy
    Unavailable
    The State of Jones: The Small Southern County that Seceded from the Confederacy
    Audiobook (abridged)6 hours

    The State of Jones: The Small Southern County that Seceded from the Confederacy

    Written by Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer

    Narrated by Don Leslie

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    New York Times bestselling author Sally Jenkins and distinguished Harvard professor John Stauffer mine a nearly forgotten piece of Civil War history and strike gold in this surprising account of the only Southern county to secede from the Confederacy.

    The State of Jones is a true story about the South during the Civil War-the real South. Not the South that has been mythologized in novels and movies, but an authentic, hardscrabble place where poor men were forced to fight a rich man's war for slavery and cotton. In Jones County, Mississippi, a farmer named Newton Knight led his neighbors, white and black alike, in an insurrection against the Confederacy at the height of the Civil War. Knight's life story mirrors the little-known story of class struggle in the South-and it shatters the image of the Confederacy as a unified front against the Union.
    This riveting investigative account takes us inside the battle of Corinth, where thousands lost their lives over less than a quarter mile of land, and to the dreadful siege of Vicksburg, presenting a gritty picture of a war in which generals sacrificed thousands through their arrogance and ignorance. Off the battlefield, the Newton Knight story is rich in drama as well. He was a man with two loves: his wife, who was forced to flee her home simply to survive, and an ex-slave named Rachel, who, in effect, became his second wife. It was Rachel who cared for Knight during the war when he was hunted by the Confederates, and, later, when members of the Knight clan sought revenge for the disgrace he had brought upon the family name.
    Working hand in hand with John Stauffer, distinguished chair and professor of the History of American Civilization at Harvard University, Sally Jenkins has made the leap from preeminent sportswriter to a historical writer endowed with the accuracy, drive, and passion of Doris Kearns Goodwin. The result is Civil War history at its finest.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJun 23, 2009
    ISBN9780739382820
    Unavailable
    The State of Jones: The Small Southern County that Seceded from the Confederacy
    Author

    Sally Jenkins

    Sally Jenkins has been a columnist and feature writer for The Washington Post for more than twenty years. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2020 and in 2021 was named the winner of the Associated Press Red Smith Award for Outstanding Contributions to Sports Journalism. She is the author of twelve books of nonfiction including The Real All Americans, the story of the Carlisle Indian School and its use of football as a form of resistance following the close of the Indian Wars. Her work for The Washington Post has included coverage of ten Olympic Games. In 2005, she was the first woman to be inducted into the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Stanford University in 1982 and resides in New York.

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    Reviews for The State of Jones

    4/5

    56 ratings8 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This is a dark and unrelenting book about a dark and unrelenting time. All wars are brutal, but the Civil War was particularly so, and this book doesn't stint on making one understand its horrors.One of the co-authors of the book, John Stauffer, wrote the book Giants: the Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, which I read and thoroughly enjoyed.State of Jones is centered on the story of one man, Newton Knight, who was a poor farmer in Jones county, Mississippi. Knight's grandfather was a fairly wealthy slave owner, but his eldest son and all twelve of the son's children refused to own slaves. This may have come from being Primitive Baptists, who believed that all souls were equal.Knight was not in favor of succession when it happened, but was conscripted into the Confederate army and fought, but deserted a couple of times. There were probably a couple of points that broke his will to fight... one was when the Confederate government passed a bill that those who owned twenty slaves or more were exempt from fighting. Another was the siege of Vicksburg, which he endured and survived. Moreover his family may have been in dire straits, as many of the wives of soldiers were close to starvation.After Knight escaped for the last time and returned to Jones County, he was forced to live in the local swamps, which he knew intimately. He wasn't the only one. The swamps were full of soldiers who had deserted, and runaway slaves. They all helped each other, and Knight became the leader of a pro-Union band of soldiers who ran a guerilla operation for the rest of the war. At one time most of the lower third of Mississippi was out of effecftive Confederate control. The partisans of the free state of Jones were poorer yeoman farmers who didn't own slaves, and resented the slave-owning aristocracy. During the war, Knight met a slave named Rachel, and they were as close to married as they could be, given that he was already married. He continued to live with and have children with both women until Rachel's death. Sometime after that his white wife left him.The Confederates lost the war, the land was devastated, but they determined they would win the peace, and they did. By the late 1879s the Northern populace, including President Grant, had become apathethic and no longer willing to fight. The Democrats took over by a reign of terror that didn't let up until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. The Ku Klux Klan were the terrorists, and blacks and Republicans were murdered, including by lynching, for the crimes of voting, seeking social equality, or for speaking up for their rights. How Knight survived is a mystery, except that he always had a pistol and a shotgun with him and people knew it. He and his large mixed-race family became socially isolated, as even his former fellow soldiers couldn't abide his domestic arrangements.The book takes one story and through it tells some difficult truths about Southern history. Fisrt of all, it explodes the myth of the solid South. There were many pro-Union Southerners. Moreover the Southern revenge and the regaining of power were not a win for democracy. The former slave owners won back power by terror pure and simple, like many of the worst dictators in history.I have an odd reaction to books about the Civil War and the South. I am a white woman born in the South who has spent most of my life here, an for most of that time, I've hated the bigotry and despised Southern romanticism about the Old South... something my mother was prone to. This book in a way gives me a sense of coming home, knowing that there were Southerners who repudiated slavery and even a few who believed in the equality of all.It also sheds an interesting light on General Sherman, Sherman's brutality in war was born of the conviction that making the war one of maximum destruction would shorten it. His opinon about war was summed up in the following quote: "Its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentation of distant families." (p. 166)The book is as well written as I expected from Stauffer. It has good footnotes, not obrusive, and a good bibliography. My copy was an advanced reader's copy, and is missing features I hope will be in the final book, including an index, maps, and photographs.Exvellent book of history about a brutal time and place whose effects still reverberate in our culture.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      The story of the pro-Union guerrilla resistance organized by hard-scrabble dirt farmer Newton Knight in southeastern Mississippi, which appears to be the Wild West of the South. Despite his great success, at great cost, Knight's post-war struggle against the overwhelming pressures of the Southern Cause is heart-breaking. The aristocrats who made up the Confederacy shoved through secession even though Jones County was overwhelmingly pro-Union. When the war ended, politics returned them to power starting with President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's Southern Democrat successor who may have been pro-Union, but was unrelentingly racist. Congress took the power over the South away from him and kicked the rebels out, but Grant, of all people, returned them to power as a trade-off, then the Democrats, seeking to replace the Republicans in office, defanged and later removed the military occupiers, letting the ex-Confederates drive out and kill Republicans and blacks - who were often the same - and use the law as locally interpreted, to keep the black man down for another 100 years. Knight, who should've been a hero, was forced to withdraw to his farm, always armed against possible assassination. But while he rode during the Civil War with his Union guerrillas - so recognized by the North - he delivered amazing rear-area victories. Well-deserved recognition for a man little known whose story will be retold, in Hollywood fashion, in an upcoming Mathew McConaughey movie. Brilliant story, a genuine page-turner. Revealing in its view of life in the South, the attitude towards the aristocratic secessionists, and the success in achieving rebel goals after the war ended, among other things.
    • 5/5
      This amazing history book reads like a novel. I was fascinated at every turn: The description of the siege at Vicksburg, the utter decimation visited on the South as wartime policy, and the heartrending aftermath of the war. I'd been aware that blacks had been granted the vote in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War; I had never fully understood why the federal government allowed Jim Crow laws and the essential reversal of all the North fought for.

      This beautifully written tome explains a great deal of how deep and all-encompassing not only Southern pride, but Southern racism really was. Is? It didn't touch on current politics, seeming to assume that in the decades since the Civil Rights Act, the teeming morass of racism, classism and political division has been largely tamped -- or perhaps assuming it best not to touch on current issues.

      I finished this book shocked and horrified at all the atrocities committed during the Civil War and the following decades. During the first part of the book, Newton Knight and his band of Unionists reminded me so much of Robin Hood that I was actually disappointed when Confederate generals succeeded in hanging or shooting men from Jones County. Disappointed not just for the pointless deaths, but that Knight hadn't ridden down like an avenging angel and stopped the Confederate troops after they caught his men.

      Ridiculous, I know, but seriously. Read about Knight defying Confederate-installed sheriffs, robbing from rich plantation owners to feed the poor whites and emancipated slaves, and living in the Mississippi swamps throughout the war and try not to make the Robin Hood parallel.

      It's a boldly written, beautifully pieced-together book. It's rife with heroism, love, and betrayal -- all on both a grand and a personal scale. This is probably the most evocative, intriguing look at the Civil War South I've ever had the pleasure of reading.
    • 4/5
      A fascinating, largely unknown piece of Civil War history. There were a considerable number of anti-slavery, pro-Unionists living in southern Mississippi, some of whom took part in guerilla warfare against Conferderate forces. The authors sometimes rely too much upon conjecture and speculation, but the book appears to be well-researched and quite interesting.
    • 4/5
      This is the nonfiction account of Jones County, Mississippi (just north of Hattiesburg) which attempted to seceed from the confederacy during the civil war and become an independent State, supporting the union. The book is based on the story of Newton Knight, a resident of Jones County, and the leader of the unionists. Mr Knight came from a typical slave-owing family, but never owned any himself. In fact, after the emancipation, he took one of his cousin's slaves into his protection and "married" her, producing many children and staying together until she died many years later. Most of the action in the book is focused on the major - and minor - battles in the state, including Corinth and Vicksburg. It tells of the efforts by the confederate leaders to apprehend or subdue the union supporters, who were conscripted into the confederate army but then deserted.Descriptions of battles tends to make my eyes glaze over, but the portion of the book which described the post war conflicts did not. The reconstruction period in Mississippi was almost more oppressive than the antebellum period had been for the former slaves and those who supported their freedom. The same men were in control of the state as had been before, and they refused to allow changes to the social fabric. They enacted laws which made it impossible for freed slaves to make their own lives - they were still virtually enslaved. They used deadly force to prevent slaves and other republicans from reaching the polls and casting votes after the first round of elections following the war put several black men into public office. The descriptions of this activity were horrifying and it began to come clear to me why it was that Mississippi remained the poorest and most backward of the states for so long - even as other southern states finally recovered from the war and began thriving. Mississippi did not ratify the 13th amendment abolishing slavery until 1995.A fascinating account.
    • 5/5
      Incredible and appalling. This reader had no conception of life within the confederacy or that there were any in the South who were opposed to secession. That the South could continue to fight major battles while outright insurrection within was occuring is amazing. Worse, yet, is that the losers continued as before.
    • 4/5
      In the middle of the Civil War, after participating as a Southern soldier in two losing battles, Newton Knight left the Confederate Army and returned to his home in Jones County, Mississippi. A few months later he was leading a group of over 150 men in open rebellion against the Confederacy.I enjoyed listening to this book. It dealt with a part of history that I didn't know about, and in fact, had never really thought about. What happened to American loyalists in the South after secession? The authors did a good job of combining the general history of the war with the particular history of Jones County, although sometimes the sections on the general history seemed to take an over long time to explain.When the book reached the end of the Civil War, there were still three hours of audio left, and I wondered what else could be told. The story continued with what happened to the loyalists during Reconstruction. This is a period of history I need to know more about and I appreciated the long historical explanations here. I was fascinated by how the loyalists, who ended up on the winning side of the War, ended up on the losing side of Reconstruction as the old leaders of Confederate Mississippi regained control of the state only a few years after the end of hostilities.If I had any criticism at all it would be the passages where the authors speculate what could have happened or what might have happened based on reports by others with similar stories. These were disconcerting in a history book, but all in all I thought this was a very good story told well.
    • 4/5
      First let me say this is a well written book that I enjoyed very much. It is the story of the Union sympathizers in south east Mississippi (in and around Jones county) who made life very difficult for the Confederate authorities during the Civil War. They opposed secession and when they served in the Confederate army they sooner or later deserted and returned home to resist the CSA in one way or the other (although Jones county never really seceded from the Confederacy). The story is almost exclusively about Newton Knight and his experiences during the Civil War and Reconstruction and apparently for some that is the problem with the book. The book has been criticized for what other reviewers and historians regard as over emphasizing the role of Knight in the war time resistance and in his relationships with slaves and freedmen. The book is based on a screenplay for a movie about Knight and some people felt that the authors’ relied too much on supposition in order to inflate Knight’s part. I certainly can’t speak to the historical facts but I did notice the following phases on just one random page: “would have” (twice), “almost certainly,” “had likely,” “would likely,” “was probably,” “may have” and “might have.” But aside from all the controversy let me repeat that it was a good story well told.