Ok, I took Mississippi history in high school, and I have lived in Mississippi since birth, so I am a little embarrassed to admit that until recently, I knew nothing of Jones County’s secession from the Confederacy during the Civil War. Horrible, I know. To offset this awful deficit of personal knowledge, I began reading the newest book on the topic: The State of Jones by Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer.
To begin with, and I can’t believe I am saying this, I am enjoying this nonfiction book. I am not a nonfiction reader, (usually they just put me to sleep) but the longer I work here, the more often I find myself interested in nonfiction. While some say that it is easier to write nonfiction, I usually say that it is easier to read fiction. However, this is the second well-written nonfiction as of late (the first being Public Enemies by John Walsh) that has not only grabbed my interest, but with its flowing prose has kept my interest peaked. A good nonfiction book can sometimes be hard to find for some of us, so I find myself gushing about this book as often as I can.
This book was reviewed in the New York Times Review of Books on Sunday, and David Reynolds brings to light certain discrepancies in the facts presented in this rendition of Jones County’s history. Reynolds refers to Victoria Bynum’s The Free State of Jones (published in 2001) as being well researched and questions whether this new telling is factual or fictional.
Much of the book centers around the biography of Newton Knight, a citizen of Jones County who led a group of over fifty men in a fight against the Confederacy. While Jones County never officially seceded from the Confederacy, fifty-three Southern men from Jones County did make it to New Orleans to enlisted in the Union army. Knight’s whereabouts during most of the Civil War can only be guesstimated, a point Reynolds does not hesitate to bring to light in his book review.
Many books have been written about the internal conflict that plagued the South during the Civil War – here are a few I find worthy of note:
The Free State of Jones by Victoria Bynum: 
written in 2001, Bynum not only focuses on the history of Jones County and Newton Knight, but also the class, gender, and race issues that afflicted the South’s people during the Civil War from the perspective of the white yeoman farmer.
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Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War by David Williams: 
Williams shows that the South was more divided internally than it ever was with the North.
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A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868 by Anne Sarah Rubin: Rubin argues that the South’s national identity, now something we call Southern pride, did not truly form until it became apparent that the Civil War would not end quickly.
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How the South Could Have Won the Civil War by Bevin Alexander: 
Author of such book as How Hitler Could Have Won World War II and How America Got it Right, Alexander focuses his book on the small set backs that led to the eventual demise of the Confederacy.
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Dixie Betrayed: How the South Really Lost the Civil War by David Eicher: 
Again, Eicher draws on information about the internal workings of the Confederacy, such as Jefferson Davis’ constant fights with his own cabinet, the Confederate House and Senate, and state governors, to show how the Southern states brought their own failure in the Civil War.
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The State of Jones by Jenkins and Stauffer may not be completely accurate, but it has opened my eyes to a whole section of history I would otherwise been unaware of. To end, here is a quote from the prologue of the book:
“[Newton Knight] was a slave owner’s grandson who never owned slaves; a dead-eyed shot who could reload a shotgun before the smoke cleared; a father and husband who after the war had two families, one white, the other black; a white man who in his later years was called a Negro. He fought for racial equality during the war and after, and he envisioned a world that would only begin to be implemented a century later.
“Those were the facts. The full story was even more complicated.”
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