Friday Review: The State of Jones

A title is a promise, at least for a work of nonfiction. It’s what draws you in, after all, and convinces you to give a book more attention. The full title of this book by Washington Post reporter Sally Jenkins and Harvard professor John Stauffer is The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded From the Confederacy. It’s a case that Jenkins and Stauffer don’t make.

Which is a shame, because the story they have to tell is fairly fascinating in its own right and something that a lot of Americans don’t know about. Revolving around a backwoods Mississippi “dirt farmer” named Newton Knight, it’s a tale of racial and class divisions before, during, and after the Civil War. Poor farmers from areas of Mississippi like Jones County had little interest in defending the ability of wealthy elites elsewhere to own slaves. Faced with the horrors of war in places like Corinth and Vicksburg and with families starving back at home due to shitty wartime economics, Knight and a group of others deserted from the Confederate army and headed back home.

Back in the Mississippi countryside, Knight and company organized an armed group that basically made life impossible for the Confederacy in Jones and surrounding counties. In addition to skirmishing with soldiers dispatched to arrest them for desertion, Knight’s group raided Confederate supply lines and tax collectors. It’s fair to say, based on the evidence presented in the book, that Jones County was effectively outside the sphere of Confederate power well before the end of the war.

But that’s not the same as secession. Maybe it’s because I’m a West Virginian and familiar with our unique history when it comes to the birth of the state and kind of sensitive about it, but secession is a formal, political act, not the de facto result of guerrilla military activity. Jenkins and Stauffer never provide evidence of such an act and, in fact, don’t really show whether Knight and his company were more pro-Union insurgents or simply a group of outlaws who gathered together to protect themselves and, as a side effect, cleared the Confederates from Jones.

It’s an important distinction because there was a hot debate when The State of Jones came out about its quality as work of history. Detractors argued that Jenkins and Stauffer massaged the historical record (and filled in gaps with imaginative extrapolations) to make Knight more of a modern progressive figure than he actually was (see, e.g., here and here). As for the question of secession itself, in part two of her three part review, professor Victoria Bynum (author of another book on Jones County) writes:

The old tale that Newt Knight and his band of renegades drew up a Constitution during the Civil War that declared Jones County, Mississippi, to have seceded from the Confederacy has been a favorite of journalists, folklorists, and even a few historians, since the late nineteenth century. Until historians finally shattered this myth, its effect was to paint the men of the Knight Company as hyper-secessionists rather than Unionists; i.e. as good old Southern white boys on a tear against any and all authority—rebels against the Rebellion, if you will.

Stauffer’s defense is, in my opinion, weak:

From Newton Knight’s perspective, neither he nor his fellow Unionists seceded from the Union, which means they were never part of the Confederacy. Knight insisted that since Jones County had voted against secession, it ‘never seceded from the Union into the Confederacy.’

But from the perspective of the Confederacy, Knight and his fellow Unionists did secede. Confederate officers wrote that Jones County was in ‘rebellion’ against the Confederacy, and they referred to Knight and his men as ‘traitors.’ These were the same terms Republicans used to describe Confederates.

It simply doesn’t work that way. Whatever irregularities existed with Jones County’s delegate to the Mississippi secession convention (the book alleges that he switched his position and voted for secession, even though the county had voted overwhelmingly against it), the convention voted to secede and the state as a whole was along for the ride. As was Virginia, of course, except for the counties west of the Alleghenies that stood up, said “bullshit to this,” and created, eventually, the state of West Virginia. Statewide votes are binding on the entire state. Individual disaffected voters don’t get to ignore results they don’t like.

Aside from the whole secession issue, The State of Jones has some other flaws that keep it from being easily recommended. For one thing, it’s focus shifts without any good reason from the more personal story of Knight and his family to broad depictions of several major engagements during the war (one of which, Bynum argues, Knight wasn’t present for). Those get tedious, mostly because they drive home the same point each time – war is hell, the Confederate foot soldier’s life was one of near constant starvation and disease, and it’s easy to see why anyone would want to escape it. Once we’ve gotten that point, do we really need it made over and over again?

Another problem with the book is, as noted above, its use of speculation and conjecture to fill in the blanks of Knight’s life and the lives of those around him. To be completely fair, Jenkins and Stauffer don’t hide it when they do it. To the contrary, many times they discuss a particular event, then transition into something along the lines of “we don’t know what Knight thought about this, but it might have been . . ..” Nonetheless, it’s frustrating to have the actual history whither down such dead ends.

I’m glad I read The State of Jones, if only because I knew nothing about this particular part of the Civil War before. But, after reading it and much of the discussion about it around the Web, I wouldn’t recommend it. There are other, more scholarly (if drier, perhaps), accounts out there. But The State of Jones is the one most likely to be encountered by the general public. That’s OK, if it serves as a jumping off point, rather than a comprehensive education.

The Details
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The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded From the Confederacy
By Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer
Published 2009

Your Side Lost. Get Over It.

There's an old episode of Family Guy where the family is relocated to the "deep South" as part of a witness protection program.  Peter and Brian attend a "Southern tradition" - a reenactment of the Civil War.  The reenactment actually consists of one guy playing a sober, dignified Robert E. Lee who is being insulted by a drunken U.S. Grant.  Lee gets up from the table, pushes Grant over on his ass ("I am vanquished!"), turns to the crowd and says, "I hereby declare victory, in the name of the Confederacy!"  The crowd cheers.  Peter stands up and points out the obvious - that's not how it happened ("that drunken idiot kicked your asses south of the Donna Dixon line!").  Unpleasantness ensues.

I used to think what made that scene so funny was that it took a kernel of truth, that Southerners still haven't gotten over losing the Civil War, and blew it up to an outrageous extreme.  I'm not so sure how outrageous it is anymore.

As the 150th anniversary of the Civil War gets underway, some folks in the South are marking the occasion as something worth celebrating.  Something worth remembering fondly.  You know, like they won the war, or something.

First there was the "secession ball" held in (the other) Charleston last year.  Invitations promised "a joyous night of music, dancing, food and drink."  What better way to commemorate the beginning of a crisis that nearly tore the country apart?


Now, last weekend we had a celebration of the inauguration of Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the CSA.  At the event:

an amateur actor playing Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy on the steps of the Alabama Capitol on Saturday, an event framed by the firing of artillery, the delivery of defiant speeches and the singing of 'Dixie.'

What both events have in common, aside from a creepy nostalgia founded on the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, is the relegation of slavery to a bit part in the whole thing, if it's even mentioned at all:

The Sons [of Confederate Veterans]’ principal message was that the Confederacy was a just exercise in self-determination that had been maligned by “the politically correct crowd” through years of historical distortions. It is the right of secession that they emphasize, not the cause, which they often describe as a complicated mix of tariff and tax disputes and Northern attempts to politically subjugate the South.

The other matter of subjugation — that is, slavery — went unmentioned on Saturday. (Davis himself did not refer to it in his inaugural address, but he emphasized the maintenance of African slavery as a cause for secession in other high-profile settings.). And the issue of slavery was largely brushed aside in interviews as a mere function of the time, and not a defining feature of the Confederacy.

The idea that slavery played a bit role in the Civil War is, of course, horseshit as any number of Confederate leaders were happy to tell you at the time (see statements collected in these posts).  The fact that, in 2011, people stand up and assert otherwise comes down to two things.  One is our piss poor history education in this country, which mangles the Civil War up until the college level (in my experience).  The other is the fairly large hunk of Southerners who need to justify the actions of their ancestors and therefore do all they can to make the war about anything other than slavery.

The first problem can be fixed.  I don't know about the second one.  Folks are free to buy into whatever revisionist history they want, of course.  Hopefully, one day, those who try to divorce the Civil War from slavery will be no the same plane as Holocaust deniers - marginalized and mocked by those with some connection to the real world.  Will it happen in time for the 200th anniversary?  Somehow, I doubt it.