Rate this book

The State Of Jones (2009)

by Sally Jenkins(Favorite Author)

3.72 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0385525931 (ISBN13: 9780385525930)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Doubleday

review 1: An extraordinary story of resistance to the Confederacy, both during and after the Civil War. I've read, and researched, considerable Civil War history and find that the authors have been meticulous in their research. Certainly the War Department's Official Records kept enough angry Confederate reports of a loyal Unionist revolt in southeastern Mississippi, but there's signs that their research went much further.Indeed, the story puts the revolt in the greater context - many of the Jones County fighters were men who had been drafted into the rebel army and had survived the terrible battles at Corinth and Vicksburg. These were piney-woods farmers who had had enough of fighting a slaveholders' war.And, as we're told in this book, the war between Confederate government and Un... moreionist rebels was without mercy. The Confederate army had been ruthless, we find, in expropriating the meager crops and livestock of the local farms, from farm women and children whose men had been dragged off to war, and now the revenge would be harsh, and not at all prompted by the distant Union Army forces in the north and west of the state. It would be a war of summary hangings and ambush that would not be recorded in the official, romanticized histories written later. Hardly mentioned, at least, till now.Above all, it's the story of one of the most extraordinary figures of the period, Newton Knight. He would not only lead the revolt but establish, and maintain, two families, one white and one biracial - the latter a cardinal sin in the society that would emerge after the war. We see how the Union would abandon the South after the war, and leave the local struggle, now between Newton Knight and his kindred against the Klan and Jim Crow, for generations, even unto a 1948 miscegenation trial of one of his grandsons.It's worth reflecting just how far American society has had to come: in this book, the war of slaveholder aristocracy and piney-woods farmers, of interracial and racist mindsets, is still a fresh, raw memory.I'll be curious just how this works out as a possible film. Certainly, John Brown would have found Newton Knight a kindred spirit. Both were fierce, indomitable, and profoundly unforgettable.
review 2: With each page, you get transported to events that are amazing to comprehend. What does one do in the 1860's if one sympathizes with the North, but is trapped in the South? Less courageous men would probably "Go With The Flow" and just try and survive...try to remain as invisible and as inactive as possible in the southern ranks and wait out the Civil War as a reluctant conscriptee. Newton Knight started to do just that, but then decided guerilla war against the South was a better idea. Talk about a leap of faith. You'll be amazed at his numerous brushes with death. I will not tell you if he lives or dies violently at the end! less

Download links for: The State of Jones

Advertising