New book sheds light on 'patriot'

ELLISVILLE, Miss. - Newton Knight still haunts the Piney Woods and swamps of Southern Mississippi, 140 years after the Civil War.

Knight, subject of the new book "The State of Jones" by journalist Sally Jenkins and Harvard University historian John Stauffer, remains an obscure Civil War figure. To the authors and some in Jones County where Knight led a campaign against the Confederacy, he's an American hero.

"Southern humanism is just a very overlooked subject in general," said Jenkins, a Washington Post sports writer. "It's not as romantic, it's not 'Gone With the Wind.' It's truer. What we really hope the book will do is rescue the reputation of an American patriot. History got turned on its head in a way. He's been treated historically as a traitor and an outlaw because he was as loyal to the United States as a man can be."

To others, though, memories of him are best left in the swamp where he successfully mounted a campaign against Confederate soldiers. In these parts, being loyal to the Union during the Civil War doesn't always earn you a medal. Knight's legacy occasionally is debated in Jones County where he lived from 1829 until his death in 1922.

Most of his neighbors thought Knight had a nefarious background and some funny ideas.

"Some of his relatives certainly would make him a hero, but I think, generally, he was accepted as a scoundrel," said Barbara Knotts, a 76-year-old retired schoolteacher who is chairwoman of the Deason House committee, which oversees the historic building in Ellisville that was the scene of one of Knight's attacks. "Now listen, let me make this clear, there's a large Knight family in Jones County and he was only one man. The others were well respected members of the community."

A yeoman farmer who lived near Ellisville and owned no slaves, Knight was conscripted into the Southern army. He eventually turned his back on the Confederacy and began his own campaign against the South as leader of a band of "unionists." He went on to start a large family with a freed slave and his descendants - white and black - count in the hundreds.

"It was the first civil rights movement and he was right in the middle of it," said Jim Kelly, a Knight cousin and historian who served as the authors' guide in Jones County.

Knight, a large man with startling eyes and a thick beard, gathered a group of fellow deserters. Since slaves usually were owned by the rich planter class, Knight and others like him felt they had no stake in a horrific war that left Mississippi in tatters for decades.

Laws passed to free the rich from military service and tax goods and crops produced

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