I don't know how many of you got to watch the Daily Show tonight, but damn, watch the replay or go to their website. It's not often that I hear something about the Civil War that I have never heard before. I live in MS and you still can hear old white people refer to it as a war of northern aggression. I'll be damned, I had no idea about Newton Knight.
From Amazon:
Newton Knight is the most famous Civil War hero you’ve never heard of, because according to Mississippi legend he betrayed not only the Confederacy but his race as well. In 1863 Knight, a poor farmer from Jones County Mississippi, deserted the Confederate Army—and began fighting for the Union—after the battle of Vicksburg. It was rumored he even started a separate Unionist government, The Free State of Jones, and for two years he battled the Confederacy with a vengeance that solidified his legend. During his life Knight was hardly regarded as a proper soldier by either side, and after his death his Mississippi backwoods grave went unstrewn with flowers. Many southerners would have preferred to spit on it, and most northerners never recognized that such loyalty to the United States could exist in Dixie. But in truth, this lost patriot was a vital actor in helping to preserve the Union.
The recovery of the life of a Mississippi farmer who fought for his country is an important story. The fact that southern Unionists existed, and in very large numbers, is largely unknown to many Americans, who grew up with textbooks that perpetuated the myth of the Confederacy as a heroic Lost Cause, with its romanticized vision of the antebellum South. Some historians have even palpably sympathized with Confederate cavaliers while minimizing—and robbing of credit—the actions of southerners who remained loyal to the Union at desperate cost.
One would never know that the majority of white Southerners had opposed secession, and that many Southern whites fought for the Union. In Tennessee, for example, somewhere around 31,000 white men joined the Union army. In Arkansas more than 8,000 men eventually served in Union regiments. And in Mississippi, Newton Knight and his band of guerillas launched a virtual insurrection against the Confederacy in Jefferson Davis’ own home state.
“There’s lots of ways I’d rather die than being scared to death,” Knight said, and it was a defining statement. At almost every stage of his life this yeoman from the hill country of Jones County, Miss., took courageous stands. The grandson of a slave owner who never owned slaves, he voted against secession, deserted from the Confederate Army into which he was unwillingly impressed, and formed a band called the Jones County Scouts devoted to undermining the Rebel cause locally. Working with runaway slaves and fellow Unionists and Federal soldiers caught behind enemy lines, Knight conducted such an effective running gun battle that at the height of the war he and his allies controlled the entire lower third of the state. This "southern Yankee,” as one Rebel general termed him, remained unconquered until the end of the war. His resistance hampered the Confederate Army’s ability to operate, forced it to conduct a third-front war at home, and eroded its morale and will to fight.
Knight also burst free of racial barriers and forged bonds of alliance with blacks that were unmatched even by Northern abolitionists. He fought as ardently as any man for racial equality during the War, and after, during the terrifying days of Reconstruction, when his life was, if anything, even more in danger. He lived with an ex-slave named Rachel, fathering several children with her (but he never divorced his Caucasian wife, Serena), and worked on behalf of U.S. Grant’s Republican administration and against the nascent Ku Klux Klan, and envisioned a world that would only begin to be implemented a century later. Moreover, he operated in an inverted moral landscape in which fealty to country was labeled traitorous, and kinship with blacks was considered morally repugnant. He survived only because he could reload a shotgun before the smoke cleared.
If you want to buy it here is the link:
http://www.amazon.com/State-Jones-Sally-Jenkins/dp/0385525931“There’s lots of ways I’d rather die than being scared to death." That quote is gonna be my new sig line.
As a white girl growing up in MS to the daughter of hippie parents and a dad who supported civil rights even though it caused his own father to call him a "n*gger lover." Just hearing about this amazing man has made me so proud. That I could live in a state where someone loved this country so much that he would fight for it literally in the Heart of Dixie, wow just wow. I was called racist earlier today. Why? Because I got mad about the media focusing on the one divisive distracting thing they could find instead of healthcare reform. Which unites us all BTW.
You don't know me. You don't know that my first friend was black. You don't know that I helped my high school plan it's first integrated prom. You don't know about my dad and what he went through being a white kid that supported civil rights in the sixties in MS. You don't know that I taught at an entirely black school deep in the delta. So back off. You have no clue what it is like living here, you don't know what it's like being a loud and proud liberal here either. You don't see the progress, all you see are the racist fucks that get to spout their hate on the tv. It's easy to see the morons that the media gives the mic to and think to yourself "I'm not as racist as those white people in MS, so I'm not really that racist." It's easier than examining yourself and how you really treat people who are different than you.
I said repeatedly today that I think racial profiling is wrong and disgusting, but we should still be focusing on healthcare. Sadly, to no avail, too many people here just wanted to focus on the things that drive us apart instead of the things that help us all. Don't you guys understand that if we help Obama to get good healthcare that it will be a break thru eye opening moment for poor ignorant whites. If Obama, a black man, can really help their lives get better then maybe they might have to re-evaluate the way that they think about some black people.
Newton Knight is now one of my new favorite heros, cause he knew a hundred years before the rest of the country that race shouldn't matter. United We Stand.
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