The Free State Of Jones And The Echo Of The Black Horn

Subject of the upcoming film Free State of Jones, this book provides recollections of the man who took on the Confederacy during the Civil War and established the liberated Mississippi county. Soldier, Father, Rebel. Outlaw. A man of deep convictions, Captain Newt Knight disagreed with the values of the South and was accused of deserting the Confederate army. He was a believer in doing what was just. During the Civil War, he formed his own band of deserters who would rebel against the Confederacy and support the Union. In the spring of 1864, the government in Jones County was effectively overthrown, and, the county was dubbed “The Free State of Jones.” Eventually, Knight would establish a mixed race town for both whites and former slaves to inhabit together. This edition merges two rare books on the subject; Thomas Jefferson Knight’s The Life and Activities of Captain Newt Knight and Ethel Knight’s The Echo at the Black Horn. Each paints a singular portrait of this elusive historical figure. Was he Civil War-Era Robin Hood or a manipulative cult leader? Both surely have fictitious elements determined by the authors' biases. Historian Jim Kelly provides a forward that helps examine the importance of each position on Newt Knight’s role in the conflict and what his motivations truly were. Now the subject of a new feature film, the experiences of Newt Knight will be brought back to light. This highly informative book helps to explore his life and give an in-depth look at the man—through the eyes of his son and grand-niece.

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 and now to a major motion picture starring Matthew McConaughey.

Covering the same ground as the major motion picture The Free State of Jones, starring Matthew McConaughey, this is the extraordinary true story of the anti-slavery Southern farmer who brought together poor whites, army deserters and runaway slaves to fight the Confederacy in deepest Mississippi. "Moving and powerful." -- The Washington Post. In 1863, after surviving the devastating Battle of Corinth, Newton Knight, a poor farmer from Mississippi, deserted the Confederate Army and began a guerrilla battle against it. A pro-Union sympathizer in the deep South who refused to fight a rich man’s war for slavery and cotton, for two years he and other residents of Jones County engaged in an insurrection that would have repercussions far beyond the scope of the Civil War. In this dramatic account of an almost forgotten chapter of American history, Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer upend the traditional myth of the Confederacy as a heroic and unified Lost Cause, revealing the fractures within the South.

Across a century, Victoria Bynum reinterprets the cultural, social, and political meaning of Mississippi's longest civil war, waged in the Free State of Jones, the southeastern Mississippi county that was home to a Unionist stronghold during the Civil War and home to a large and complex mixed-race community in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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 Long Shadow of the Civil War relates uncommon narratives about common Southern folks who fought not with the Confederacy, but against it. Focusing on regions in three Southern states--North Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas--Victoria E. Bynum introduces Unionist supporters, guerrilla soldiers, defiant women, socialists, populists, free blacks, and large interracial kin groups that belie stereotypes of Southerners as uniformly supportive of the Confederate cause. Centered on the concepts of place, family, and community, Bynum's insightful and carefully documented work effectively counters the idea of a unified South caught in the grip of the Lost Cause.

Bob Lemmons is famous for his ability to track wild horses. He rides his horse, Warrior, picks up the trail of mustangs, then runs with them day and night until they accept his presence. Bob and Warrior must then challenge the stallion for leadership of the wild herd. A victorious Bob leads the mustangs across the wide plains and for one last spectacular run before guiding them into the corral. Bob's job is done, but he dreams of galloping with Warrior forever to where the sky and land meet. This splendid collaboration by an award-winning team captures the beauty and harshness of the frontier, a boundless arena for the struggle between freedom and survival. Based on accounts of Bob Lemmons, a formerly enslaved person, Black Cowboy, Wild Horses has been rewritten as a picture book by Julius Lester from his story "The Man Who Was a Horse" in Long Journey Home, first published by Dial in 1972.

Countless authors have swept us into the exotic east, but few based their tales there. In a time when westerners still spoke publicly about "the white man's burden," Harold Lamb was crafting action-packed stories featuring Arabs, Mongols, and Hindus as heroic, sympathetic, and believable characters: men of honor and integrity ready to lay down their lives for their countries and their comrades.

"Set on the Blackfeet Reservation, the life of one Indian boy, Doby Saxon, is laid bare through the eyes of those who witness it: his near-death experience, his suicide attempts, his brief glimpse of victory, and the overdose of one of his best friends." "But through Doby there emerges a connection to the past, to an Indian Agent who served the United States Government over a century before. This revelation leads to another and another until it becomes clear that the decisions of this single Indian Agent have impacted the lives of generations of Blackfeet. And the life of Doby Saxon, a boy standing in the middle of the road at night, his hands balled into fists, the reservation wheeling all around him like the whole of Blackfeet history."--BOOK JACKET.