Book Review - Lack of evidence leads to thin history

By: By Steve Wishnevsky | JOURNAL BOOK REVIEWER
Published: October 11, 2009

THE STATE OF JONES: The Small Southern County that Seceded from the Confederacy. By Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer. Doubleday. 416 pages. $27.50.

Having written a history from a paucity of data, I have the utmost sympathy for Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer, who attempt to relate the story of Newton Knight, yeoman farmer, counter revolutionary, patriarch and deifier of social norms, 1837-1922.

The story is as entrancing as the evidence is thin. Knight was a backwoods farmer, a frontiersman in the most rural part of Mississippi, when the Civil War broke out.

Jones County these days is known only as the home of singers Lance Bass, Faith Hill and Leontyne Price. Back then the county reflexively opposed the slave-owning class, but was too weak to resist secession. The rich, this book says, rammed though secession over the disorganized resistance of the poor whites.

The Southern generals, a class more noted for their élan than for their military prowess, at least in the Mississippi and Tennessee campaigns, soon made a hash of the war, leading to dissatisfaction among the lowly poor white farmers, who bore the brunt of the fighting, usually on poor rations, no pay and with pathetic supplies.

Jefferson Davis signed the first conscription law in North America in April 1862. The conception that all the South flocked joyously to the colors is in fact a myth.

Poor dirt farmers knew that leaving for any length of time would doom their families to poverty, if not starvation. There was no actual pay, none in negotiable currency, so families without a male were in dire straits.

The troops' dissatisfaction was increased by the "Twenty Negro Law," which freed slave-owners from service. This made the conflict into "A rich man's war and a poor man's fight."

Knight and thousands of others quietly fled after the Battle of Corinth, in October 1862, and went home to live their lives as best they might. They were obliged to fight off the authorities for their freedom.

Knight's wife had fled back to Georgia, so he took up with Rachel, a more or less "black" woman, who seems to have borne several children to one of Knight's brothers or uncles. Eventually, Knight raised two families, one officially white, one black, under conditions that are at best a matter of surmise.

That is the flaw of the book. No one knows. Knight was demonized by Neo-Confederates, viewed ambiguously by his "white" family, while admired as a heroic character by his hordes of descendants.

A half-dozen works were published on Knight, all sketchy, slanted, dubious. Jenkins, a Washington Post sports writer, romanticizes Knight, while Harvard professor Stauffer tries to tie the book together with solid history. But it remains a pastiche, with clangers aplenty. Jenkins has the reek of cordite in one scene, 20 years anachronistically.

Stauffer has written books on black Americans' perspective on the Civil War, but is less facile understanding the motivations of poor whites -- proof that observers can see only what they can understand.

Steve Wishnevsky is a writer who lives in Winston-Salem.