Most people think of the American Civil War as a tidy split between North and South. Blue versus Gray. You’re either for the Union or you’re for the Confederacy. But if you walk through the piney woods of Southeast Mississippi and start asking about the Jones County Civil War, you'll realize the history is way messier than what you read in high school textbooks.
It wasn't just a skirmish. It was an insurrection within an insurrection.
Basically, a group of local farmers, led by a guy named Newton Knight, decided they were done with the Confederacy. They didn't just desert; they fought back. They formed what became known as the Knight Company. They declared Jones County a "Free State." It’s a story about class warfare, desperate survival, and some of the most brutal guerrilla fighting you’ve ever heard of. Honestly, the real details are much weirder and more complex than the Hollywood version starring Matthew McConaughey.
Why Jones County Broke Away
So, why Jones County? You have to look at the dirt. This wasn't the Delta. This wasn't the land of massive cotton plantations and thousands of enslaved people. Jones County was "piney woods" country. The soil was sandy and poor. Most people living there were yeoman farmers. They owned a little bit of land, maybe a few head of cattle, and they worked the ground themselves.
When the war started in 1861, a lot of these guys weren't exactly rushing to die for a cause that didn't benefit them. In fact, Jones County’s delegate to the Mississippi secession convention actually voted against leaving the Union. The people there felt like they were being dragged into a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight."
Then came the "Twenty Negro Law."
This was the tipping point. The Confederate government passed a law saying that if you owned 20 or more enslaved people, you were exempt from the draft. Imagine being a struggling farmer in Jones County, watching your sons get shipped off to Virginia while the wealthy plantation owner down the road gets to stay home and sip mint juleps because he’s rich. It didn't sit well. To make matters worse, Confederate tax-in-kind collectors started roaming the countryside. They weren't just taking extra supplies; they were taking the last bit of corn and the only meat these families had to survive the winter.
Newton Knight had enough. He deserted the Confederate Army after the Battle of Corinth and headed back to the swamps. He wasn't alone. By 1863, the woods were crawling with deserters and Union sympathizers.
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The Knight Company and the Guerrilla War
By late 1863, the Jones County Civil War had officially turned into a localized bloodbath. Newton Knight organized a group of about 125 men. They weren't a formal army, but they were dangerous. They knew every inch of the Leaf River swamps. They used "the Devil’s Punchbowl"—a thick, nearly impenetrable thicket—as their hideout.
They didn't just hide, though. They raided.
They intercepted Confederate supply wagons. They redistributed captured corn to starving families. They executed tax collectors. It got so bad that the Confederate authorities in Richmond actually started receiving panicked letters saying that Jones County was "in open rebellion."
The violence was intimate and terrifying. This wasn't two armies lining up in a field. This was neighbors killing neighbors. If you were a local official still loyal to the Confederacy, you might wake up to find the Knight Company on your porch. One of the most famous incidents involved the killing of Major Amos McLemore. He was sent to Jones County to round up deserters. While he was resting at a friend's house, someone shot him through the window. Legend says it was Newt Knight himself, though Newt never officially admitted to it in a way that would stand up in court.
Life in the "Free State of Jones"
Did they actually secede? It’s a bit of a historical debate. There’s no surviving "Declaration of Independence" for the Free State of Jones, but for all intents and purposes, the Confederacy lost control of the region. They even started calling the county "Davis County" and the county seat "Leesburg" for a while to try and scrub the name Jones—which was named after John Paul Jones—of its rebellious reputation.
The Knight Company supposedly flew the U.S. flag over the courthouse in Ellisville. They were living in a vacuum. The Union Army was too far away to help them, and the Confederate Army was too busy with Sherman and Grant to commit a full division to deal with a few hundred "mossbacks" in the swamp.
But eventually, the Confederacy decided they couldn't ignore the embarrassment anymore.
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General Leonidas Polk (who was also an Episcopal Bishop, weirdly enough) sent Colonel Henry Maury and later Colonel Robert Lowry into the county to crush the rebellion. They used bloodhounds. They tracked the men into the swamps. They captured and hanged several members of the Knight Company, often in front of their families. It was a scorched-earth policy meant to terrify the local population back into submission.
Lowry claimed he cleared the county, but the second his troops marched out, Newt Knight and his core group crawled back out of the swamps. They never really surrendered.
The Complicated Legacy of Newt Knight
If the story ended with the war, it would be a simple tale of Southern Unionism. But the Jones County Civil War had a second act that lasted for decades.
After the war, Newton Knight didn't just go back to being a quiet farmer. He became a high-ranking official in the Reconstruction government, helping to register Black voters and even leading a regiment of the "Loyal National Guard"—which was basically a pro-Union militia.
Then there’s the personal side. Newt eventually walked away from his white wife, Serena, and started a common-law marriage with Rachel, a woman who had been enslaved by his grandfather. They lived together on a farm and had several children. In the Jim Crow South, this was a massive scandal. It created a unique, multiracial community in Jones County that persisted for generations.
The Davis Knight Case
The tension from the Civil War era didn't actually vanish until well into the 20th century. In 1948, Newt’s great-grandson, Davis Knight, was put on trial for miscegenation. He had married a white woman, but because he was a descendant of Newt and Rachel, the state of Mississippi argued he was legally Black (under the "one-drop rule") and therefore his marriage was illegal.
He was initially convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. Think about that. The fallout from the Jones County Civil War was still putting people in jail eighty years after the war ended. The conviction was eventually overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court, but only because they couldn't "prove" Rachel was Black, not because the law was wrong. It’s a stark reminder that the rebellion in Jones County wasn't just about taxes or the draft; it was a fundamental rejection of the social order of the Deep South.
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What Most People Get Wrong
People love to romanticize this story. They want Newt Knight to be a modern progressive hero or a flawless Union patriot. The truth is more rugged. He was a man who felt betrayed by his own government. He was a man who chose his family and his survival over an abstract "Lost Cause."
A lot of historians, like Victoria Bynum in her book The Free State of Jones, point out that this wasn't an isolated incident. There were pockets of resistance all over the South—in the mountains of North Carolina, the hills of Alabama, and the Ozarks. Jones County just happened to be the loudest and most defiant.
Another misconception is that the whole county was united. They weren't. It was a civil war within a county. There were plenty of Jones County men who fought bravely for the Confederacy until the very end. The bitterness between the "Knight people" and the "Confederate people" lasted well into the 1900s. If you grew up in that area, you knew which side your family had been on, and you didn't forget it.
How to Explore the History Today
If you’re interested in the Jones County Civil War, you can’t just go to a single museum and see it all. You have to piece it together.
- Visit the Deason Home: Located in Ellisville, this is the house where Major Amos McLemore was assassinated. You can still see the bloodstains on the floorboards (or so the local legend goes). It’s one of the few physical remnants of the conflict.
- The Knight Family Cemetery: You can find the graves of Newton and Rachel Knight. Newt famously insisted on being buried next to Rachel, which was illegal at the time. His headstone reads, "He lived for others."
- The Leaf River Swamps: While much of the land is private now, driving through the backcountry gives you a sense of why it was so easy to disappear there. The terrain is thick and unforgiving.
- Read the Primary Sources: Check out the letters in the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion. Look for the correspondence from Confederate officials complaining about the "deserter problem" in Jones County. It’s the best way to see how much of a thorn in their side Newt Knight really was.
Moving Forward With the Facts
The Jones County Civil War serves as a vital correction to the "solid South" myth. It proves that the Confederacy was never a monolith. There were always people—even in the heart of Mississippi—who refused to go along with the plan.
To really understand this history, stop looking for "heroes" and "villains" in the traditional sense. Instead, look at the economic pressures and the sheer grit of people who felt they had nothing left to lose.
If you want to dive deeper into the genealogy and the specific legal battles that followed, start by researching the "Knight Negro" court cases in Mississippi archives. It’s a rabbit hole of legal history that shows how the lines of race and loyalty were blurred in the piney woods. You should also look into the works of Ethel Knight, Newt’s grandniece, who wrote a very different (and much more critical) version of the story in her book The Echo of the Black Horn. Seeing those two conflicting narratives—the hero Newt versus the traitor Newt—is the only way to get the full picture of why this story still riles people up today.