On a recent episode of “The Daily Shoah,” the anti-Dixie flop “Free State of Jones” came up in a discussion about (((Hollywood))). Sven commented on the “hate” fueling Hollywood’s “disgusting anti-Confederacy tropes” and doubted the historical accuracy of the movie. “They hate Southerners so much – the Jews in Hollywood,” answered Mike Enoch. “I have never seen any movie out of Hollywood that had any sympathy for the Confederates whatsoever.”
Indeed, one of the most popular Hollywood tropes these days is the portrayal of the Confederacy as an oppressive, abusive military dictatorship occupying its own country, along with the portrayal of deserters, abolitionists, and, of course, blacks as the only Southerners with any moral worth. This is no exception in “The Free State of Jones,” where Confederate soldiers are portrayed as thugs pillaging their own people so that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer as well as hanging anyone who resists.
Prior to “The Free State of Jones,” the all-time worst example of this was the historical romance “Cold Mountain.” Jude Law played a Confederate deserter from the Army of Northern Virginia during the Siege of Petersburg. As he trekked home to his wife, Nicole Kidman, living in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, Law escaped depraved whites (a sexually perverted family), befriended virtuous blacks (a slave girl raped and nearly murdered by the local reverend), and fought the sadistic “Home Guard” (which tortured civilians to death).
This trope is galling to Southerners, even worse than the played-out portrayal of slavery as some sort of nightmare from a hell dimension.
In a war where invading Yankee armies literally raped and pillaged their way across the South – where whatever property that could not be confiscated was destroyed, including/especially crops and livestock – where homes were looted and vandalized – where towns and cities were burned – where women were outraged – where elderly men were executed – to portray the defending army as the real perpetrators of such crimes is nothing less than a Stalinist-style erasure of history.
Such rank deceit pardons the guilty (Yankee soldiers), blames the victims (Southern civilians), and frames the innocent (Confederate soldiers).
For what it is worth, there is no truth to the trope. In The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat, the University of Virginia historian Gary W. Gallagher draws heavily from primary sources to document an intense Southern patriotism that existed in the Confederacy throughout the War, right up until the very end:
Scholarship on the Confederacy over the past several decades has yielded a paradoxical result. Historians have exploited a variety of sources and approaches to illuminate many facets of the Confederate experience, but the overall effect of much of this work has been to distort the broader picture. Moving beyond the traditional emphases on military events, politics, and prominent leaders, many recent scholars, concentrating on the analytical categories of race, class, and gender, have highlighted social tensions and fissures to create a portrait of Confederate society crumbling from within by the mid-point of the Civil War. All too aware that the Confederacy failed in its bid for independence, many historians have worked backward from Appomattox to explain that failure. They argue that the Confederates lacked sufficient will to win the war, never developed a strong collective national identity, and pursued a flawed military strategy that wasted precious manpower. Often lost is the fact that a majority of white Southerners steadfastly supported their nascent republic, and that Confederate arms more than once almost persuaded the North that the price of subduing the rebellious states would be too high.
Although class tension, unhappiness with intrusive government policies, desertion, and war weariness all form part of the Confederate mosaic, they must be set against the larger picture of thousands of soldiers persevering against mounting odds, civilians enduring great human and material hardship in pursuit of independence, and Southern white society maintaining remarkable resiliency until the last stage of the war.
In fact, contrary to the portrayal of Confederate armies as hostile occupation forces which terrorized civilians, Gallagher notes that Confederate armies were the most potent source of Southern patriotism:
As the war progressed, Confederate citizens increasingly relied on their armies rather than on their central government to boost morale, and Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia eventually became the most important national institution.
Revealing just how stupid and hysteric academia has become, Gallagher is careful to disavow the commission of any “neo-Confederate” thought crimes:
Any historian who argues that the Confederate people demonstrated robust devotion to their slave-based republic, possessed feelings of national community, and sacrificed more than any other segment of white society in United States history runs the risk of being labeled a neo-Confederate. As a native of Los Angeles who grew up on a farm in southern Colorado, I can claim complete freedom from any pro-Confederate special pleading during my formative years. Moreover, not a single ancestor fought in the war, a fact I lamented as a boy reading books by Bruce Catton and Douglas Southall Freeman and wanting desperately to have some direct connection to the events that fascinated me. In reaching my conclusions, I have gone where the sources led me. My assertions and speculations are certainly open to challenge, but they emerged from an effort to understand the Confederate experience through the actions and words of the people who lived it.
In other words, you are a “neo-Confederate” if, in the process of your historical research, you come to any conclusions which contradict the demonization of the Confederacy. If, while researching Bolshevism, I deduce that the Bolsheviks were sincere in their Marxism-Leninism, that does not that make me a Bolshevik or a Marxist-Leninist, any more so than noticing that it is a rainy day makes me a rain-cloud. This nonsense is literally the logic here.
Southerners loved and were loyal to their Confederate soldiers, as is amply evident from the monuments which cropped up across the South after the War, which today can still be seen in most Southern town squares. These Confederate monuments were not installed top-down, like publicly funded Holocaust museums, but rather bottom-up – that is, with the approval and aid of the community.
Today, of course, savage, parasitical aliens who hate America and Dixie, enabled by the scared silence and “cucked” complacency of ethno-masochistic White Americans, are tearing down these monuments. While this iconoclasm is sickening, insulting, and enraging, even worse than the physical destruction of these monuments is the destruction of what the monuments were meant to memorialize: a heritage and identity of honor.
As far as the historical accuracy of “The Free State of Jones” goes, it is false from start to finish (not unlike the recent adaptation of Nat Turner’s slave revolt, “Birth of a Nation”). The movie purports to tell the true story of Newton Knight, a Confederate deserter from the Army of Mississippi who returned home to Jones County, which he turned into a collectivist utopia for whites and blacks alike and rose in rebellion against the Confederacy.
“The Free State of Jones” was not the name that the rebellious county gave itself, but a preexisting name from 1830-1840 referencing the county’s lack of a functioning government. Jones County was not a hotbed of Unionism. Out of a population of 3,323 white men, women, and children, Jones County raised eight companies (about 800 military-aged men), which was as much as other similarly sized counties. Yankee soldiers who entered Jones County were driven off by the “Home Guard” (old men and young boys). “The county furnished nearly and probably its entire quota of soldiers, many of whom did splendid service,” reported Robert Lowry, a Confederate colonel tasked with quelling the rebellion and was twice-elected as Mississippi Governor. “No such effort at establishing a separate government was ever attempted.”
There was no climactic battle in the town square. The Knight Company (to the extent it was even an organized company, and not just a group of various criminal gangs) did not fight pitched battles, but rather “bushwhacked” (sniped, ambushed, etc.). Most of Knight’s violence, however, was directed not against Confederate soldiers, but local civilians, whom they plundered and murdered. “Several of the most prominent citizens have already been driven from their homes, and some have been slaughtered in their own homes because they refused to obey the mandates of the outlaws and abandon the country,” Captain W. Wirt Thompson reported to the Confederate Secretary of War. “Numbers have been ordered away and are now living under threats and in fear for their lives.” When a small Confederate detachment was dispatched to suppress the rebellion, the gangs disbanded.
There is no direct evidence that Jones County “seceded.” In an interview given after the War, Knight specifically denied that this ever happened. “There’s one story that after Jones County seceded from the Union she seceded from the Confederacy and started up a Free State of Jones,” began Knight. “That ain’t so.” There was widespread lawlessness which amounted to a sort of de facto rebellion, but no glorious declaration of independence and establishment of self-government. The only evidence for secession is secondhand, stemming from unsourced reports, which ran rampant in the presses during the War. There is no direct evidence for a heroic flag-raising ceremony in front of the courthouse, either.
Knight was not an egalitarian who founded an economic and racial commune, but a deserter from what he believed was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” who was forced to live outside the law – not an uncommon problem in war-zones. Prior to the War, Knight had allegedly gotten away with two murders – first one of his grandfather’s slaves and second his brother-in-law. He was not a thoughtful, gentle man, either, but a hard, cold one prone to abusive outbursts. Furthermore, while Knight was married, he carried on an affair with a freedwoman, which produced five children, and then after that freedwoman died, he carried on an affair with one of her daughters (who was likely his aunt or half-sister), which also produced three children. With murder, thievery, adultery, and incest to his name, it is no wonder that one of Knight’s neighbors described him as “a mighty sorry man.”
Last, but not least, while “The Free State of Jones” portrays Knight as a hero, the truth is that he betrayed his nation and race and helped destroy their thriving culture and society. During the War, Jackson (the State capital), Meridian, and Oxford (home of the University of Mississippi) were burned, while Corinth and Vicksburg were besieged and bombarded. Approximately 8,000 Mississippi soldiers were killed (10% of all those who served), along with an unknown number of Mississippi civilians. During Reconstruction, Yankee overlords, empowered by emancipated slaves as well as treacherous whites like Knight, ruled Mississippi for their own profit (and a century later, finished what they started with civil rights).
Today, Mississippi is one of the blackest States, with a 37% black population. As a result, Mississippi, once one of the finest States in the Union, is now one of the worst.
Mississippi is one of the poorest States, with a poverty rate of 22% (the blacker or whiter the county, the poorer or richer, respectively).
Mississippi is one of the fattest States; 32% of the population has a body-mass index over 30 (blacks are obese at higher rates than whites).
Mississippi is one of the dumbest States, with an average ACT score of 19 (making up 51% of students, 22% of blacks are college-proficient overall, 36% are proficient in English, 15% are proficient in math, and 7% are proficient in science).
Mississippi is one of the most dangerous States, with violent crime on a scale of 81 out of 100 (the blacker or whiter the county, the rougher or safer, respectively).
In short, since her military defeat and the revolutionary regimes of Reconstruction and Civil Rights, Mississippi has fallen from the top to the bottom. Knight, who chose preying on his neighbors over fighting off invaders, was no hero; the real heroes were the men and women who fought against this fate – the very same people whom Knight and his gang terrorized.
In seceding from the Union, Mississippi warned that if the North ruled the South, then it would “ruin our agriculture…prostrate our industrial pursuits, and…destroy our social system.” Mississippi added that while the North “advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst,” the North also “seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better.” According to Mississippi, “There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.”
Now Mississippi has, in effect, become the Free State of Jones.