Legend of the Free State of Jones

By Rudy H. Leverett

A maverick, unionist district in the heart of the Old South? A notorious county that seceded from the Confederacy? This is how Jones County, Mississippi, is known in myth and legend.

Since 1864 the legend has persisted. Differing versions give the name of this new nation as Republic of Jones, Jones County Confederacy, and Free State of Jones. Over the years this story has captured the imaginations of journalists, historians, essayists, novelists, short story writers, and Hollywood filmmakers, although serious scholars long ago questioned the accuracy of local history accounts about a secessionist county led by Newt Knight and a band of renegades.

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. This book surveys the facts, the records, and the history of the "Free State of Jones" and may provide the whole story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Oct 7, 2009
• ISBN: 9781496807199

Rudy H. Leverett

Rudy H. Leverett was born in an unplumbed cabin in the woods outside of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He had a doctoral degree in education and spent his life writing extensively on the subjects of philosophy, the American South, and the McLemore family. He died on his birthday in 1999.

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The Legend

On 12 July 1864, the Courier newspaper in Natchez, a town then long since occupied by the Union army, announced to the world that Jones County in southeastern Mississippi had seceded from the state and formed its own government with its own army. This new nation, readers were told, called itself the Republic of Jones. It had its own commander-in-chief, a Major R. Robinson; a secretary of war, the Honorable A. C. Williams; foreign ministers; and a congress. The Courier writer explained that since the state and Confederate governments did not acknowledge the right of a county to secede, notwithstanding their own involvement with secession from the Union, those governments had declared war against the Republic of Jones, and a desperate battle had been fought. By this account, the armies of the Republic, under the command of Major Robinson, had routed the Confederate forces sent from Mobile under the command of Colonel Mowry. Following this battle, an armistice was declared, during which the belligerents tried to resolve their differences, but failed even to arrange a cartel for the exchange of prisoners of war. When negotiations collapsed, according to the story, the Republic recalled its ministers and prepared to resume the conflict. The congress of the Republic debated the prospect of forming an alliance with the United States but abandoned that idea on the grounds that the United States had already made clear its position on the question of secession by its war with the Confederacy. Finally, the newspaper declared that the Republic paroled the Confederate prisoners captured in its battle with Colonel Mowry’s army and that the Republic expelled from its borders all persons who refused to declare loyalty to the Republic of Jones.

As proof of the veracity of its story, the Courier printed a copy of what it called a dispatch, sent from the battlefield by Major Robinson to his secretary of war announcing the victory over Colonel Mowry. Also printed was a copy of another document alleged to be a parole issued to a Confederate soldier named Ben Johnson. An editorial appearing elsewhere in the same issue of the Courier provided two additional details pertaining to the new nation: not only did the Republic of Jones have its own army, but it had its own navy as well; and, due to a shortage of paper in Jones County, paroles issued to POWs had been written on the bark of birch trees.

As far as is known, the legend of the Republic of Jones began with the publication of the 12 July Courier article. Within a few days of its initial appearance, the article was reprinted in Yankee newspapers from New Orleans to New York. The story, in anything resembling the form given it by the Courier, was not carried in Southern papers for a great many years. However, as much as three months before the publication of the Courier story, Southern papers had carried news articles on certain events in Jones County that formed the basis for a different, but related, legend. In mid-April of 1864 Southern–oriented papers had published accounts of the expedition of Confederate Colonel Robert Lowry into the northern parts of Jones County for the purpose of suppressing and punishing the criminal activities of a band of deserters led by Newton Knight. The Southern news articles were mildly concerned with showing that the Jones County deserters were criminals rather than pro-Union partisans but contain nothing that even remotely suggests an attempt by the deserters to establish an independent, sovereign nation. Nevertheless, in the course of time, the legend that grew in southeastern Mississippi around Newt Knight’s deserters and their skirmishes with Colonel Lowry became assimilated into the legend of the Republic of Jones as developed in the Northern-oriented press. Newt Knight replaced Major R. Robinson as the leader of the Republic, and Colonel Lowry replaced Colonel Mowry or Maury as the leader of the Confederate forces, thus producing the main outline of the modern legend of the Republic of Jones.

The full details of just how the two strands of the legend came together may never be known. But in 1886, a generation after the end of the Civil War, an article titled A Confederacy Within a Confederacy was published in the Magazine of American History. This article, attributed to G. Norton Galloway, Historian of the 6th Army Corps, contributed additional details to the story of the Republic. According to Galloway, about whom nothing else is known, the name of the new nation was the Jones County Confederacy. Its president was Nathan or Nate Knight, a man of intense force of character, bold, defiant, and without fear, but one of the most illiterate citizens of Jones County. In addition to its chief executive and his cabinet, the Jones County Confederacy is said to have had a bicameral legislature, which publicized its statutes by nailing copies of them to the trunks of trees. Galloway further informs us that this little Confederacy had a population of some twenty thousand people, most of whom were refugees from the Davis government. Galloway estimated the size of Knight’s army at ten thousand, and he named General Lowry as the Confederate officer sent to crush the rebellion in Jones County.

The credibility of the Galloway article received an impressive boost in 1891, five years after its publication, from Harvard University history professor Albert Bushnell Hart. Writing in the New England Magazine, Hart indirectly endorsed the historicity of the Galloway story by citing its details as an example of what he believed to be the few instances of conflict during the Civil War between the Confederate government and its constituent state and local governments. Hart added no new substance to the legend but lent it the authority of his name and institution. The article which appeared in two successive issues of the Nation magazine in 1892, sparked a heated debate about the truth of Galloway’s claims, thereby further publicizing the story to a nationwide audience. This debate involved correspondence between Hart’s adversary, Dr. Samuel Willard, and Mississippi governor, J. M. Stone, as well as an exchange of letters between Stone and former Mississippi governor Robert Lowry. The debate over the truth of Galloway’s story was pursued in the Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, where, over the following twelve years, two important papers were published on the subject, in 1898 and 1904.

None of the writers mentioned so far claimed firsthand knowledge of the events they described. The first witness to claim such personal knowledge from a national forum was Union Major Eli Lilly of the Ninth Indiana Cavalry Regiment. Lilly, the founder of the pharmaceutical company that bears his name, was captured in late summer or early fall of 1864 and imprisoned at Enterprise in Clarke County, Mississippi. Speaking at the National Encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic at Indianapolis, Indiana, on 6 September 1893, the year following the debate in the Nation, Major Lilly told his audience what had happened to him and his fellow prisoners in November 1864 while they were awaiting exchange at Enterprise:

One night an old darkey came to our quarters and announced that de Republic ob Jones is a-comin up here and dey’l rob and kill ebery one ob you. After investigation we found that there existed in Jones County, about thirty miles southwest of us, an organization called the Republic of Jones which held supreme control over Jones County and the surrounding country. They had their President, Vice-president, Cabinet and an army of several hundred men, banded together for mutual protection, general plunder, and to keep out of the Confederate army. If a small force was sent to conscript them they would pitch in and wipe them out. If a large force was sent they would take to the swamps and pine barrens and could not be found. So they maintained themselves throughout the war.

It seems the location so near them of a lot of unguarded prisoners supposed to have plenty of money, watches, and good clothing was a temptation they could not withstand.

Major Lilly’s basic claim that the Union POWs at Enterprise were threatened by the Republic of Jones was corroborated twenty-one years later by another of the Union prisoners who had been held at Enterprise. In 1914, former Lieutenant W. A. Duckworth of the 110th Colored Infantry Regiment published an article in the Annals of Iowa that confirmed Lilly’s story but echoed some of the claims now familiar to us from earlier sources. Duckworth’s principal contribution was the introduction of the name of Newton Knight in its correct form into the Northern strand of the legend of the Republic of Jones.

In 1919, the material from the Natchez Courier article and that from the Galloway story were brought together in the Literary Digest, in part via certain New York newspapers, in a story titled The American ‘Republic of Jones’ of 1864. This article influenced other writers such as Mary L. Looram, whose story published in The Outlook in 1920 was heavily indebted to it. That same year the Literary Digest piece was reprinted in Jones County by the Laurel Daily Leader newspaper. This seems to be the first publication of what was essentially the Northern version of the legend in the place where the legendary events were supposed to have taken place. The following year the New Orleans Item newspaper printed an interview of Meigs O. Frost with Newton Knight, then a very old man, which allowed Knight to go on record with his version of many events associated with the legend. Knight died less than a year after this interview, but the publication of Frost’s article seems to mark a shift in the development of the legend toward greater reliance upon Southern sources, especially upon the Jones County folklore associated with Newt Knight; the legend retained, however, many of the elements of the Northern strand. The work of Craddock Goins, which appeared in 1941 in The American Mercury, and that of Jack D. L. Holmes published in The Civil War Times Illustrated in 1965 are examples of this trend.

The Jones County folklore dealing with the activities of Newt Knight during the Civil War exists basically in oral form. The principal written versions of this material are the privately published works of Knight’s son, Thomas Jefferson Knight, and another member of that family, Ethel Knight. The work of the former includes a muster roll of Newt Knight’s company of deserters and a list of that company’s battles with Confederate forces, both of which are attributed to Newt Knight himself. In these local materials Captain Knight, as he is often called, is portrayed variously as a sort of rustic Robin Hood character dedicated to protecting helpless women and children from Confederate tax-collectors; as a Confederate army deserter-turned-traitor dedicated mainly to saving his own hide; and as a Union loyalist committed to fighting a guerrilla war behind Confederate lines. Standard episodes of the Knight legend include his being drafted and consenting to serve only as a hospital orderly; his deserting the Confederate army when the Congress passed its Twenty Nigger Law, thereby proving that it was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight; his killing of a senior Confederate officer and subsequent organization of his own para-military company; his capture of a Confederate supply train; his killing of two Confederate tax-collectors; his raid on a Confederate supply depot; and various of his battles with the cavalry forces of Colonel Lowry.

Important for our understanding of the development of the legend is the fact that, in Jones County folklore, it is always Colonel Lowry who is the principal adversary of Newt Knight. Colonel Henry Maury and his earlier expedition against the deserters in Jones County play no explicit role in the Knight stories. [The Courier article, which gave Colonel Maury’s expedition such a pivotal role in the creation of the Republic of Jones did not mention Newt Knight or Colonel Lowry at all but named Major R. Robinson as the leader of the Republic and its armed forces. Moreover, to the extent that politics enters as a theme into the Knight legend, it focuses on the question of Knight’s dubious loyalty to the Union, not on the dream of establishing a new state that would be independent of both the Union and the Confederacy.]

With the convergence of the Northern and Southern strands of the legend, the story of the secession of Jones County became well-known locally. Even so, it does not constitute a significant theme in the local lore about Newt Knight. Local tradition does not hold, for example, that Captain Knight killed Major Amos McLemore, the senior Confederate officer in the area, as an act of revolutionary political purpose. Nor does local tradition hold that Knight organized his company of deserters as a revolutionary army. Rather, these episodes are recounted, as often as not, for their inherent literary value. The story of McLemore’s murder, for example, is a famous Southern ghost story, which has been collected by Kathryn Tucker Windham in her 13 Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey under the title Out of Devil’s Den. The secession story is sometimes cited by natives as well as by professional writers as the explanation of the county’s ancient cognomen, the Free State of Jones, a name that has come to have more or less vague associations with the Knight legend. In 1936, for example, James H. Street published The Story of Ellisville in his book, Look Away! A Dixie Notebook, in which Street credits Knight as the author of the county’s nickname but stops short of claiming that the Free State of Jones was a sovereign nation with Knight as its president. There are other local traditions concerning the origins of the county’s nickname. Street later developed the material in his story into a best-selling novel titled Tap Roots, which, in 1948, was released by Universal-International as a motion picture under the same title. The film starred Van Heflin, Susan Hayward, and Boris Karloff, with Julie London and Ward Bond acting in supporting roles.

In the years since 1864, the legends of Newt Knight and the Republic of Jones have been treated in dozens of newspapers and magazine articles, books, personal memoirs, public addresses, scholarly essays, and a variety of literary media. It has become an established part of the folk literature of the Southern people. Like many folk legends, these tales are historically ambiguous, structurally