((free)) Free State Of Jones Access

The Confederacy, already stretched thin by the Union army, sent Lieutenant Colonel Robert Lowry (later Governor of Mississippi) to crush the rebellion. Lowry hanged ten of Knight’s men and terrorized the countryside, but he never captured Newton Knight. The Knight Company, as they called themselves, fought on until the war’s end in 1865.

In 2016, director Gary Ross brought us Free State of Jones , a film that shatters that binary narrative. Starring Matthew McConaughey as the enigmatic Newton Knight, the movie tells a story that feels so impossible, so contradictory to what we learned in school, that many viewers left the theater asking: free state of jones

While every historical drama takes liberties, the film gets the big things right: The Confederacy, already stretched thin by the Union

In the film (and in history), Knight deserts the army. He returns home, not to hide, but to organize. What follows is a guerrilla war within a war, as Knight and a band of fellow deserters, runaway slaves, and sympathetic women take control of Jones County, declaring it the "Free State of Jones." In 2016, director Gary Ross brought us Free

Confederate authorities seized livestock, crops, and meat from struggling families to feed the army, leaving many women and children on the brink of starvation.

Newton Knight lived until 1922, a defiant relic of a path not taken. For over a century, the story of the Free State of Jones was either suppressed or twisted. Local white historians in Mississippi often portrayed Knight as a traitor, a renegade, and a “white n— lover.” In the town of Ellisville, a statue of Confederate General Lowry (who had hanged Knight’s men) stands to this day, while Knight’s grave remains a modest, often overlooked site.