Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Rating as Historical Fact: * Rating as Historical Novel: *** "State of Jones" purports to deal with the events surrounding an insurrection against Confederate authority that took place in 1863-4 in Jones County, Mississippi. Prior to the outbreak of the war, the Piney Woods area in which Jones County is situated had relatively few slaves and an economy based on livestock rather than cotton. Hence many of its men were reluctant participants in the war and, when Union forces clearly established the upper hand with the fall of Vicksburg in July 1863, they deserted and returned to their farms. Their numbers and their effective control of the area alarmed Confederate officials who sent in troops. There were several small scale engagements and about a dozen of the deserters (and a few unfortunate kinsmen) were hanged. Whether the Piney Woods renegades were simply deserters and bushwhackers or were true Unionist--and to what degree they were truly an effective military force--has been debated ever since. Adding to the debate is its central character: Newton Knight. Knight was the leader of the most prominent band of deserters. Following the Civil War he capped his lifetime of independent action by maintaining a second family with a mulatto woman, Rachel Knight--a former slave who had assisted him during the war. The book under review has received a fairly substantial promotional push by its publisher perhaps owing to the fact that, as the authors note in their acknowledgement, it developed out of a screenplay for a proposed movie project by Gary Ross (Seabiscuit). The authors have made liberal use of a number of secondary historical accounts, the most frequently referenced (if not too openly acknowledged in their interviews) being Rudy Leverett's "Legend of the Free State of Jones" and Victoria Bynum's "Free State of Jones." But popular depictions of the Free State of Jones go back to the 1940s publication of James Street's novel "Tap Root" which, following the more usual course of events, was subsequently made into a movie. Thus the authors of "State of Jones" are disingenuous in their repeated claims to have uncovered a story overlooked by history (see most recently their letter of 17 July, 2009 to the Wall Street Journal) and are docked one star for this distasteful arrogance. But a crucial problem for those of us familiar with the known facts are the substantial liberties the authors have taken with these facts--and the instances where they have gotten these facts wrong. To cite just two (and my personal tally runs several pages): 1) The authors state that pioneer settler Stacy Collins "had spoken out vehemently against secession" (p 15) when, in fact, he died in Texas ca 1853 and the two sources they cite for this statement do not support it. 2) The authors state as fact that Jones County voted to elect an anti-secessionist delegate to the Mississippi Secession Convention by a margin of 374 to 24 (p 73). And this is, indeed, what myth laden secondhand sources have stated. But the actual document reporting the vote count is housed in the Mississippi Archives and shows the tally was 166 to 89. Still a substantial vote against secession, but not a mythic one. It can be noted that Bynum, using a more reputable secondary source, gave the correct election result in her more scholarly and, by my estimation, much more accurate account. The list of such factual errors that interrupted my reading goes on and on, but would be tedious for all but obsessive researchers like myself. Let it just be said that the book contains a perplexing number of such factual errors, both small and large. More troubling is the narrative style of the book. To make the narrative an easy, exciting read (and, in general, it is) the authors have dropped the usual qualifiers that should pepper an account for which so few original records exist. In this they are only following the regrettable trail blazed by other popular historical accounts such as "Isaac's Storm" where suppositions are paraded as facts and the caveats relegated to the fine print of the end notes. Still, with one of the authors being a prize winning Harvard professor, one would have hoped that so much dubious hypothesizing would not have been implied as fact simply for the sake of propelling the narrative. The assertive narrative style allows the authors to mask gapping holes in our understanding of Newton Knight by depicting him as a, well, very cinematic John Brown of the Piney Woods. What we do know about Newton Knight is that neither he nor his father owned slaves (although his grandfather did) and that his relationship with his "outside" wife Rachel was conducted openly in defiance of social conventions. Accounts reveal that he encouraged some of his children into mixed race marriages. All this makes him a highly unusual character for the place and times, but that should be enough without forcing undocumented ennobling ideology onto the back of his actions. Where the book does have a credible claim to staking some new ground is in its examination Newton Knight's postwar pursuit of a Union pension. Even here, however, the authors forsake historical analysis for the sake of narrative simplicity. Thus all Newton's claims of his pro-Unionist stance are taken at face value. But Knight had good reason to embellish his activities. Maybe not falsify, but embellish. A number of his band, in the wake of the Confederate actions against them, fled to New Orleans and enlisted in the federal army. These men, or their survivors--since a fair number died of disease following their enrollment--obtained pensions. It is reasonable that Newton Knight, accurately viewing himself as the guiding force in the organization of the deserters into a fighting force, felt he was also due compensation. And perhaps by moral right he was. But the laws governing pensions were strict and Knight fell outside their scope--unless his story was refashioned. And during the 1870s Washington was filled with lawyers who earned their livelihood by helping persons obtain pensions legally due them--or possibly not. Knight was not represented by some backwoods Southern lawyer. His pension counsel was based in Washington and, I believe, encouraged him to enhance his descriptions of his activities in order to have the best chance to obtain compensation. In good history the examination of such possibilities would be expected. But in "State of Jones" the authors consistently favor plotline over analysis. And this, along with the other reasons cited above, makes it difficult for me to accept the designation of this book as a history. It seems more a novelization of a screenplay with reference notes. So where does this leave us? The real facts clearly show Newton Knight led a quasi-military insurgency against Confederate authority in the Piney Woods of Mississippi. He was a strong-willed, complex man of action who did as he damned well pleased. This placed him in a leadership role in the Piney Woods insurgency and quickly made him a social pariah after the war. The insurgency over which he assumed control was just one of many throughout those sections of the South where the cotton economy did not predominate. Sadly, the authors of "State of Jones" refused to examine Newton Knight on his own terms, but instead collaborated in the production of a classic Hollywood makeover.