The Quern

The State of Jones — Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer

Rating:  4/5

The State of Jones is a Civil War history, but one from a fairly unique perspective.  The main focus of the book is Newton Knight, a barely-better-than-subsistence farmer in Jones County, Mississippi.  Mr. Knight’s grandfather was a slaveholding planter with a moderate-sized plantation, but his father was opposed to slavery and struck out on his own.  Newton grew up in a Primitive Baptist milieu, with a doctrinal emphasis on the equality of man and a distrust for the hierarchy of politicians, planters, and preachers that helped stabilize the institution of slavery in the Southern states.

It comes as no surprise that when the war came, Newton was opposed to it, but the groundswell of support for secession ensured it would take place regardless.  Newton was conscripted and served in the Confederate Army through several harrowing battles, until finally, after the particularly insane slaughter at Vicksburg, he deserted and returned home to Jones County.  He hid out in the swamps along with other deserters and runaway slaves, avoiding dogs and patrols sent to root them out and return them to service, eventually forming a band of deserters into a pro-Union militia and effectively driving the Confederates out of Jones County for a period of time.

After the war Newton Knight’s star rose high for a while.  Reconstruction-era elections ensured that the Republican party was in power, and officials sympathetic to what he had done in the war were able to reward him in certain ways.  As the North withdrew and suppression of the black vote started to turn the political tide, however, Newton Knight was increasingly put on the defensive, and eventually he stayed on watch at his family farm, presiding over two families — a white one with his wife, and a black one with Rachel, a former slave who had helped him in his swamp-running days.

The book does a great job of characterizing Newton Knight, thanks to some oral interviews he gave near the end of his life.  It also does a nice job of providing historical context for the events of the book — we know that the “Twenty Negro Law”, which effectively exempted rich planters from military service, correlated closely with an increase in desertion from the Confederate Army, as soldiers realized that the law made official what was widely known already:  that the conflict was, in the words of one soldier, “a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.”

The book also goes into fairly extensive detail about the devastation inflicted on the South during the war, both by the direct assault of the Union armies and through confiscatory policies imposed by the Confederates themselves.  The effects of both of these were brutal to the farmers (mostly women) left behind to survive and try to raise families with their men off serving in uniform.  The fact that so much of this oppression was self-inflicted is particularly tragic, and the authors pull few punches in describing it.

The last section of the book, however, is the most fascinating, describing Newton Knight’s dual family and what happened to his descendants in post-Reconstruction Mississippi.  This section of the book contains much that probably seems absurd to 21st-century Americans, but should serve as a powerful reminder of the oddities and cruelties of race relations in the recent past.  One of the scenes examined is the miscegenation trial of one of Newton Knight’s descendants, which hinged on an exhaustive legal examination of how much African ancestry Rachel actually had, with witnesses asked probing questions about, among other things, how kinky her hair was.  Perhaps the most powerful image of the book is the final one:  Newton Knight, over 80 years old, still camped on his porch every night, a rifle on his lap, on a silent vigil to protect his large family from the unpredictable threat of racial violence.

This is Civil War history at the scale of individual humans, and also the story of a fascinating, obscure personality.  I think it succeeds on both levels, and I have no qualms about recommending it.