Confederate "Heritage" Month April 27: A contemporary conservative Mississippi view of race

This post is about an article that doesn't look on its face like it has anything to do directly with the Civil War or Reconstruction. But once you start looking at it, Lost Cause ideology and pseudohistory are just dripping from it. It also shows how the habit of rewriting history became almost second-nature for white Southerners. The fable of the Lost Cause, with all the fuzzy headed-thinking and routine dishonesty that went with it, was one big way that the lesson was conveyed from one generation to the next. The article is, The past is not dead by Wyatt Emmerich Daily Times Leader (West Point MS) 12/09/04. Emmerich is the publisher of the Jackson Northside Sun weekly.

The title, by the way, refers to a famous passage from one of William Faulkner's books, which Emmerich even has the gall to quote in the last paragraph. That especially called my attention to this article, because unfortunately it's stock "Southern moderate" talk, and he tried to dress it up with a quotation from Faulkner. I just don't like to see people misuse Scripture that way. That's even worse than misusing Old Hickory's memory! (And, yes, I consider Faulkner's works part of the canon.)

The article is about a meeting of something called the LQC Lamar Society. I mentioned in an earlier post in this series that I regard LQC Lamar, a "Redeemer" post-Reconstruction political leader and Senator from Mississippi, as one of the least admirable characters in American history. He pretended in the North to be a conciliator between the (white people of) North and South. In Mississippi, he was a hardline racist, like all the "Redeemers" were.

I don't know if it was a reflection of how much the Lost Cause notions permeated the consciousness even of people who really should have known better, or whether it was a calculated Machiavellian notion. But the LQC Lamar Society was apparently set up during the segregation era and the civil rights movement so that Southerners who favored having the American form of democracy in the Deep South states could get their message across to whites.

So Emmerich attended an LQC Lamar Society event recalling the civil rights movement and the end of segregation. The keynote speaker was former Governor William Winter, the best governor Mississippi ever had after Adelbert Ames, the Reconstruction-era Republicans governors who was run out of the state by the "Redeemers." Winter is currently the grand old man of the Mississippi Democratic Party. And he's a real Democrat, of the kind that Andy Jackson would be proud to be in the same room with. The fact that LQC Lamar would have met the same kind of reception from the General as, say, Dick Cheney or Rummy is just one of those weird relics of Mississippi history.

So there's a tangled Lost Cause theme in even trying to explain the name of that group. Here's Emmerich's description of that wretched Lamar:

Lamar drafted Mississippi's secession ordinance in 1860. He later served as a lieutenant colonel for the Confederate States of America. After the war, he accepted defeat and delivered one of the most famous speeches in American history, calling on the South and North to bury their grievances and build a new country. He later served as a United States Senator, a U. S. Supreme Court Justice and U. S. Secretary for the Interior.

Here is how historian Richard Nelson Current describes the honorable gentleman Lamar's role in 1875, when Governor Ames was desperately trying to save democratic government in the state in the face of determined terrorist attempts to overthrow it by force and violence. From Those Terrible Carpetbaggers (1988):

[Various compromise measure agreed to by Gov. Ames and the Republicans] did nothing to appease the Democrats. They were infuriated by other legislation that Ames secured - a law authorizing him to reorganize the militia and to purchase rapid-fire, multiple barrel Catling guns - which they denounced as the "Gatling Gun Bill." The anti-Republican Brandon Republican [newspaper] advised "Mr. Adelbert Ames to pack his carpet bag and take his wife and babies to Massachusetts before he issues an order to his 'melish' to turn his Gatling guns on the white people of Mississippi." Regarding Ames and his prospective "negro regiments," the Mississippi congressman Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar wrote to his own wife: "He will get them killed up, and then Grant will take possession for him." Lamar was to mastermind the strategy by which the Democrats, having learned their lesson from events in Vicksburg, would get enough blacks killed to carry the state election in the fall - and would do it in such a way as to keep Grant from taking possession for Ames.'' (my emphasis)

And this guy was remembered as a moderate! He only supported overthrowing democracy with violence and murder in a moderate way, you see. I could do a whole month of posts easily on Lamar's brand of Southern "moderates." For a reality check, Ames tried to raise a state militia consisting of both black and white citizens, not "negro regiments." Again, the old fear of "servile insurrection" pops up.

For what it's worth, Adelbert Ames for me ranks second only to Lincoln among the greatest Republicans of history. Running him out of the state was one of the most self-destructive things that Mississippi whites ever did.

Later that year, Lamar toured Mississippi with the former head of the Ku Klux Klan of Georgia. In a telegraph to President Grant, Ames observed, "The language they use is not of itself violent, but the conclusions they reach are that this election must be carried [by the Klan Democrats], even if violence be resorted to." Current wrote:

Lamar, now [1876] Alcorn's successor in the Senate, enjoyed throughout the North a reputation as the foremost Southern advocate of reconciliation between the sections and between the races. He was remembered for the eloquence of his eulogy of Charles Sumner after Sumner's death. "No; Lamar makes very different speeches in Mississippi from those he delivers for the Northern market," Ames replied to the newsman's query. "He made the most vituperative speeches during the last campaign, and he owes his election as United States Senator to that fact. He explained away his eulogy to Sumner as being a political necessity - to give the South a hearing in the North."

Current also explicitly addresses John Kennedy's dreadfully wrong assessment of Lamar:

When the prize-winning book Profiles in Courage (1956) came to their attention, Ames's daughters were understandably upset. This book, bearing on the title page the name of John F. Kennedy, then a United States senator from Massachusetts, lauded the Mississippi white-supremacist L. Q. C. Lamar as one of its exemplars of statesmanly courage. In doing so, it slurred Adelbert Ames. "No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi," the book asserted, and it exhumed the stale canard about "the extravagances of the reconstruction government" with its "heavy" state debt. By implication, Governor Ames was to blame. Ames's daughters protested repeatedly to Senator (and later President) Kennedy and to his special counsel, Theodore C. Sorensen. They got only evasive replies. No correction was ever made in any of the successive reissues of the Sorensen-Kennedy book.

No, it wasn't only Southerners who would seduced by the Lost Cause hokum. Kennedy learned an awful lot about Southern segregationists and their lying double-talk during his Presidency. Had he not been killed, there's good reason to think his later writing about the Reconstruction period would have reflected a very different viewpoint.

Back to the present and Emmerich's article. He claims to have been a long-time admirer of Winter's, although the rest of his article hardly seems consistent with that. He talks about attending a party after the speeches where an older lady, one of those hardcore Mississippi Democrats I appreciate so much, came over and scolded him, saying, "You put out a right-wing paper." Emmerich doesn't dispute the description, but sidesteps in paragraph quoted below.

Here are Emmerich's concluding paragraphs, picking up on the comment from the lady at the party, who had mentioned that his grandfather was "progressive":

I didn't know school pictures had one wing or the other, but her point was wrong anyway. My grandfather, Oliver Emmerich, was a Reagan Republican. He just didn't believe in subjugating blacks. Therefore, he was assumed to be liberal in all other matters. Indeed, back then everything was race and the battle. There was such a sense of purpose and camaraderie. The race issue defined the politics of all those who lived through it.

But I didn't live through it and my politics are not defined by it. There was a classic moment when Leroy Clemmons, head of the Neshoba County NAACP, told the crowd to lighten up and stop the gloom and doom. Clemmons, who is my age, said his grown children don't think racially and view the NAACP as somewhat racist. Ah, yes, as William Faulkner said, the past is never dead. It's not even past. To be sure, as Gov. Winter said, we must get over the problem of racial 'nuances.' We are far from a color-blind society. Let's just not forget the huge gap between nuance and dynamite, and what great progress that gap underscores.

Now, I don't know anything about Emmerich's grandfather. But I have a pretty hard time swallowing the idea that anyone who would have identified themselves as a "Reagan Republican" in the 1980s had any sympathy at all for the civil rights movement at that point in their lives. Especially in Mississippi. It fact, it's darn near unimaginable. People do change their perspectives on things. But what this article asks us to believe is that a guy who was hardline conservative in his politics was also somehow sympathetic tothe civil rights movement and to protecting minority rights.

Again, I don't know the particulars. But how many times in my life have I heard whites who were adults in the 1950s and 1960s described as never mistreating blacks, always treated them fairly, yadda, yadda. If all the whites who are described as being so eminently fair-minded really were like that, then you would pretty much have to assume that segregation never existed. Heck, maybe all the slaves really were happy and content and loyal to their masters. In fact, I was talking about this the other day with my friend from the Pleiades...

Given how Emmerich framed his article, I suspect his statement, "We are far from a color-blind society," is just conservative code-speak. For some reason, many Republicans today are fixated on making some kind of mirror-image arguments to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. So conservative critics of affirmative action - which was orginally put in place in the form we know it today by the Nixon administration as a conservative, pro-business way of enforcing anti-discrimination laws - like to say they want a "color-blind" society, meaning they want to get rid of all this affirmative action and anti-discrimination laws. If everyone is "color-blind," you see, then when a company has 900 qualified minority applicants and 100 white applicants for 50 jobs, and they hire 50 whites, no one should criticize them for that, because if we're "color-blind" we won't notice the races of the job applicants.

I have a hard time with this kind of doubletalk. But it seems to be chronic among today's conservative Republicans. And, in part, that a legacy of the dishonest manipulation of history that the Lost Cause dogma represents.

(See the Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month post 2005 for links to all this year's posts.)

Update:

The NAACP is racist? I guess if you think FOX News is real news, that Rush Limbaugh is a national treasure and that Clarence Thomas is a brilliant legal thinker, you could convince yourself that the NAACP is a "racist" organization. But this a classic rightwing practice: try to find some black person to quote what would sound extreme coming from a white person. Emmerich didn't mention whether he had asked that speaker about space aliens visiting from the Pleiades. But I should note that Emmerich doesn't quote Leroy Clemmons directly, so he may have been saying something entirely different about his kids' attitudes. My point is more what he chose to highlight in his article.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2005

Confederate "Heritage" Month - April 23: Newt Knight and The Free State of Jones

One of my favorite stories from the Civil War is about the Free State of Jones, a county in Mississippi that supposedly seceded from the Confederacy and established a pro-Union opposition government led by a local man named Newt Knight.

Here is the account given in a Mississippi history high school text, Mississipppi: Conflict & Change (1974), James Loewen and Charles Sallis, editors. (Charles Sallis was one of my undergraduate history professors.)

According to some sources, the citizens of Jones County met in the Ellisville courthouse and declared themselves independent of the Confederacy. They named their county "The Free State of Jones." Other sources state that the "Free State of Jones" was an exaggeration. They claim that the revolt involved only a minority of the white citizens of the county.

The revolt was led by Newt Knight. He was a farmer and shoemaker and a Unionist who refused to serve in the Confederate army until he was drafted. Then he refused to fight and served as a hospital orderly. He went home when he heard of the abuses of the cavalry and the provisions of the "Twenty-Negro Law."

He organized a company of militia who united to protect each other's cornfields and to raid Confederate stores for arms and food. They tried to join the Union forces, but failed. Although two different Confederate forces hunted them in the spring of 1864, they survived and even voted openly in elections.

The story of Newt Knight and Jones County was picked up by journalists in the North and South, and became a source of great embarrassment. The Southern states had seceded from the Union; now they were in the position of denying the right of a county to secede from the Confederacy!

Newton Knight is one of my all-time heroes. I don't know exactly what he personally thought about Andrew Jackson. But he was a true Jacksonian democrat. I considered naming this blog for Newt Knight instead of Old Hickory.

Except for the part implying that the county tried formally to secede from the Confederacy, the story as the Loewen and Sallis text relates it is substantially true. Pro-Confederate sources naturally tried hard to downplay the whole thing. Because in the Lost Cause confabluation of history, white Southerners were united behind their new nation in a sectional battle that had nothing to do with slavery or rights for black people, no sirree, nothing at all to do with those things.

The "Twenty-Negro" law to which the quotation above refers was a law that exempted anyone who owned twenty or more human beings as property to be exempt from Confederate military conscription. This caused a great deal of anger among ordinary whites because of the blatant class nature of the law. The war was being fought at huge costs to preserve the planters' slave system, but the very planters who stood to benefit the most from achieving that goal were exempt from fighting for their new "country."

At least a couple of more recent book-length studies of this story have appeared: Legend of the Free State of Jones (1984) by Rudy Leverett and The Free State of Jones: Missisissippi's Longest Civil War (2001) by Victoria Bynum.

There was also a novel by James Street called Tap Roots (1943) based on the Free State of Jones, which was made into a 1948 movie of the same name starring Van Heflin, Susan Hayward and Boris Karloff. At least in the movie version, the county was rather bizarrely renamed to "Lebanon."

I haven't read Street's novel, and the movie was interesting to me as an historical-cultural artifact. But I don't recall it as being very good when I saw it on TV once ten years or more ago. Victoria Bynum's book is by far better researched (and considerably longer) than Leverett's. Leverett, as the title of his book might imply, wound up pretty much dismissing the notion that Knight's band was anything much more than a bunch of Confederate deserters and criminals. Leverett was also a direct descendant of Confederate Major Amos McLemore, who was assassinated, very likely by Knight himself, when he was in charge of a group of Confederate troops sent to suppress Kight's pro-Union guerrillas in Jones County. Major McLemore is said to still haunt the house where he was killed.

Leverett's book is in line with the Lost Cause version of the war, particularly in denying any (Union-)patriotic or ideological motive to Knight's resistance movement. Bynum's account,however, makes a much better attempt to cut through the Lost Cause mythmaking - I'm not sure Leverett made any such attempt - and shows that, though a wide variety of motives drove Confederate deserters and other supporters to Knight's band, political sympathy for the Union was definitely among them. Writing about Knight himself, Bynum says:

Like other soldiers, Newt became increasingly frustrated with the Confederacy as personal hardships collided with political policies. As his hatred for the Confederate Army grew, frequent contact with the rnilitantly pro-Union Collins family strengthened his political and ideological opposition to the Confederacy. Economic distress, fears of death, and resentment of those who benefited from exemptions encouraged Newt and other men less ideologically driven than the Collinses to turn their backs on the army.

The following attempt by Bynum to provide a reality-based description of Newt's motives won't satisfy anyone who's looking for a comic-book version of the story. But I'm a big Newt fan, and it doesn't diminish my admiration for him or for his pro-American-atriotic actions:

Judging from extant records and people's memories, it appears that Newt gradually developed a unionist stance born of personal experiences during the war that in turn stimulated his growing political consciousness. His own memories of the war, shared in 1921 with journalist Meigs Frost of the New Orleans Item, suggest as much. Newt told Frost that he and his men felt justified in deserting the Confederate Army because the majority of Jones County's voters had opposed secession. On December 20, 1860, he explained, the county's cooperationist candidate, John H. Powell (father-in-law of Jasper Collins), defeated the pro-secession candidate, merchant-slaveholder John M. Baylis, to become a delegate to the Mississippi state convention. Powell then betrayed his antisecessionist constituents. On January 9, 1861, after swift defeat of several ordinances that offered alternatives to secession, he joined the overwhelming majority of delegates and voted to secede from the Union. "Then next thing we knew," said Newt, "they were conscripting us. The rebels passed a law conscripting everybody between 18 and 35". They just came around with a squad of soldiers [and] took you." But, he maintained, "if they had a right to conscript me whenI didn't want to fight the Union, I had a right to quit when I got ready." To Newt's way of thinking, support for the Confederacy was entirely voluntary because the delegate Powell had failed to honor his constituents' position on secession [i.e. opposed to secession].

Newt's words do not clearly describe a unionist, although they suggest that he was a staunch believer in representative government and individual liberty (consistent with his father's and grandfather's resistance to evangelical discipline). Ben Sumrall's description of his grandfather Riley Collins, however, left no doubt of Collins's unionism. In the aftermath of secession, according to Sumrall, he "called a meeting at old Union church in Jones County where he made a great speech" condemning the "injustice" of secession. Collins urged the men of Jones to "not fight against the union," said Sumrall, "but if they had to fight [to] stay at home and fight for a cause in which they believed."

I'd have to say that Bynum seems to be a tad finicky when she says the opinion Newt expressed and that she quotes "do not clearly describe a unionist." He opposed secession. He opposed being required to fight for the Confederacy. Or to use his own words, "I didn't want to fight the Union." He justified desertion from the Confederate Army because most of the local voters had opposed secession.

How much more Unionist did someone need to be to deserve the name? We're talking about a guy who fought against the Confederacy, and justified his actions in the name of loyalty to the Union. Compared to a lot of the mealy-mouth politicians who passed themselves off as anti-secession because they wanted to wait a few weeks longer until the Lincoln government rejected a number of impossible conditions they posed, Newt Knight had the American flag branded on his heart.

But overall, Bynum's account is very fair to Newt. She also includes Newt Knight's postwar story, in which he lived in a mixed black-and-white settlement in a county adjoining Jones. Not only was he a staunch Republican politically in the postwar period - in those days the Republicans were the champions of equal rights for blacks - but his living arrangements showed he didn't share the common racial attitudes of Mississippi whites, either. Newt had both white and mixed-race (black and white) descendents. The mixed-race members of the homestead where Newt and his neighbors lived became known as "white Negroes" or, to some white, "Knight's Negroes." Apparently, a couple of Newt's white descendants married a couple of his mixed-blood descendents who were rather closer blood relations than might be thought proper for spouses. (Some of those stories about Mississippi are true.)

Bynum gives a detailed account of the intricacies of Newt's kinship relations in this period. And Davis' descendents were involved in race-related controversies throughout the segregation period. One of his decendents was convicted in 1948 of "miscegenation" because he married a white woman. In this instance, the state supreme court overturned the conviction not on any constitutional grounds but because they found the state had not established that the man had "one-eighth or more of Negro (or Mongolian) blood."

How did Newt and his pro-American band of resisters look to the Lost Cause advocates? A very hostile account of his story was published in 1951 by Ethel Knight, a grandniece of Newt's, under the title Echo of the Black Horn. Bynum desribes Ethel as an "avid segregationist who insisted that the South was in the midst of a holy war" in 1951, even before the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. Bynum's account of Ethel's book illustrates the way that devotion to the segregation system was strongly connected with the dishonest, ideological Lost Cause version of event related to the Civil War:

In spite of a growing number of historical works during the 1940s and 1950s that subjected the Myth of the Lost Cause to withering criticisms, she zealously asserted all of its chief tenets. Publishing The Echo of the Black Horn in the same year as C. Vann Woodward's pathbreaking Origins of the New South, Ethel successfully packaged the Free State of Jones in a straitjacket of Lost Cause sentimentality and indignation reminiscent of the publications of the Mississippi Historical Society.

Ethel's version of the Free State of Jones became the story primarily of one man: Newt Knight, a traitor not only to the Lost Cause but also to his own race. She even gained Tom Knight's [Newt's son by his white wife]endorsement of her version of his father's life by cleverly showcasing his bitter denunciation of his father's interracial relations in bold letters on the book's dust jacket. With God's help, Tom proclaimed, he had lived down "the disgrace and shame that my father heaped upon me when he went to the Niggers!" Since Tom was "soon to die," he authorized Ethel "to tell it all, the whole truth about my father." The cover of Ethel's book assured readers that even old Tom agreed that the truth must be told.

Although Tom Knight wasn't as open-minded on the racial issue as his father - and perhaps he was also embarassed by the marriage choices of his brother and sister (which raised that question about blood relations) - Bynum tells us that Tom's own book about his father, The Life and Activities of Captain Newton Knight and His Company and the "Free State of Jones County" (1935; revised 1946), "portrayed 'Captain Newt' as a principled Robin Hood who had defied the Confederacy and created the Free State of Jones in order to protect the community's women and children from its depredations." Now that's a Southern heritage of which any patriotic American son could be proud!

Certainly for any Jacksonian democrat, Newt Knight is one of the unmistakable good guys of American history.

See the Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month post 2005 for links to all this year's posts.)

Following are comments to the original AOL Journals post. As of 10/31/08, AOL plans to consign all their AOL Journals to cyber-netherland:

This entry has 14 comments: (Add your own)

#14 Comment from strawberrypope Email strawberrypope10/5/08 2:34 PM

I am a decendent of Andy Knight. I grew up in Soso, Ms, and learned of my connection to Newt Knight years ago. I presently live in SC. Today a visiting minister, Dr. Carolyn Knight spoke at my church. She spoke of a book about John Knight. I knew of Newt Knight and the books "Echo of the Black Horn" and "The Free State of Jones". You never know who you're going to run in to that's a part of your Knight family-Black or White. I attend the reunions in Soso, and I have visited the cemetery of my ancestors. I have enjoyed reading all of the comments. strawberrypope@aol.com

#13 Comment from samarafreemark Email samarafreemark5/23/08 6:06 PM

Hello,My name is Samara. I'm a journalist for National Public Radio, and I'm working on a story about the Free State of Jones. I'm trying to get in touch with descendants of people who lived in the county in the 1860s, especially people descended from the Kinghts.If any descendants are out there, please contact me. You can email me at samara@radiodiaries.org, or call me at 212-533-5247.Thanks so much!All the best,Samara

#12 Comment from sctthadaway Email sctthadaway5/18/08 3:34 AM

I am a Greatxxx Grandson of Newt Knight. My Aunt wrote, Echo of the Blackhorn and cleary, this is one of my favorite stories. I am blown away to see so many people on the web relaying the story. Dickie Knight is also in my family tree but I honestly can't remember how.

#11 Comment from glcollins77 Email glcollins779/7/06 6:47 PM

I'm Gaston L Collins III, my g-g-g-grandfather was Jasper Collins - first liuetenant in Knight's Company. Jasper was sent (by Newt) to Vicksburg to meet with Union Gen. Hudson from Memphis. He returned with orders and instructions related to have been sworn in to the Union Army. Knight, Jasper Collins, Welborns, Sumralls, and others played key roles in battles against the Confederacy.In an interview with the New South newspaper in 1904 (mostly about Jasper being the oldest living Native of Jones County) Jasper Collins claims there is no truth to the story that Jones County seceeded from the Confederacy.Many historians of this story would have people believe that this group of men were deserters because they were afraid to fight. Which isn't the case at all... Jasper Collins goes on to say that many of the soldiers that served with himself and Newt served valiantly with the confederacy until the "twenty negroes" law was passed and many grew more opposed to the war.According to census reports, my entire Collins pedigree, including Jasper, never owned a single slave. Jasper married into a semi-wealthy slaveholding family (John H. Powell - mentioned above), but his family never owned any. His father-in-law, John H. Powell was elected to vote against a secession from the Union. John voted against it first and soon after voted for ithe secession of MS from the Union. I believe he was hanged by the people of Jones County when he returned home - more proof on top of what I've mentioned that the Knights, Collins, Wellborns, Sumralls and other so-called "deserters" were on the right side of the war and history.It wasn't (and still isn't) popular to believe that the confederacy was on the wrong side of history and human rights. Many people were disgraced by Newt Knight, Jasper Collins and the others because to many people, it's still the same old South. Many beliefs remain the same as they always have.Gaston L Col

#10 Comment from norcott466 Email norcott4661/26/06 10:52 PM

Newton Knight is my second great grand-father,I have a copy of the family "Knight", as well as a signed copy of prof Bynums book I was at the book signing at Texas State University, and a signrd copy of " the echo of the Black Horn by Ethel Knight. I also have researched this with my brother, and we have our family tree with The Knights and the Welborns. Please feel free to e-mail me at norcott466@yahoo.com or aol im at norcott466

#9 Comment from ajonesdal123 Email ajonesdal12312/21/05 1:48 AM

I visited Ovett in 2001 and met with the game warden there who told me about the caves. I always thought they were not real but it confirms that what my grandfather said was true.

#8 Comment from ajonesdal123 Email ajonesdal12312/21/05 1:44 AM

I would like to get any information or names of men who were part of Newt Knight's Company. My family owned no slaves and as I understand they helped the underground railroad before the Civil War. Anyone with information about the group, please contact me.

#7 Comment from ajonesdal123 Email ajonesdal12312/21/05 1:18 AM

My grandfather always told us that his father brought clothing, food, shoes and other necessities to his father and a group of "deserters" living in a cave on the Leif River in Mississippi. My grandfather was born in Ovett, Mississippi. My aunt, his daughter said she had his father's desertion papers from the Confederacy. My great-great grandfather was a shoemaker from Alabama. His surname was Jones.

#6 Comment from rhndwal Email rhndwal10/9/05 6:02 PM

I am Newton Knights 39 year old great-great grandaughter from Mississippi. When I was growing up my grandfather would not even say the word night because he hated his grandfather so much. My grandpa a a little boy when Newton died.

#5 Comment from mmusgro Email mmusgro7/7/05 10:08 AM

I recently began interviewing family members in an effort to trace my roots and Newt Knight was one of the first names mentioned to me. I grew up in Jones County and recently visited. In fact, it was during my last visit that I decided to start this research. I'm not sure yet what -- if any -- the connection is. But it should definitely be interesting.

#4 Comment from bknightinc Email bknightinc6/28/05 1:21 PM

It's Ironic to be surfing the WEB and see this article about my GreatX4 Grandfather Capt. Newton Knight. On July 15-17 in SOSO, Ms our family is have our Reunion. We will go clean the Cemetary where Newt is and fellowship with the other (white Knight negro) family members along with the Booth family which my grandfather Oree Knight married Eddress Booth. We have all the books and help extensively with the Bynum Book. Keep the Legacy Alive!

#3 Comment from tyrasmomkc Email tyrasmomkc6/14/05 6:19 PM

I am an African-American descendant of Newton Knight and I am proud of his stance against the confederacy and his progressive ideas on love and race. Through research I have met many of my distant cousins, white and black. I've had the opportunity to speak with author Vicky Bynum and be mentioned in her forward. I can recall being a child visiting the "country" as we called it, and seeing a picture of an older white man embossed in a plate. I remember asking my great-aunt why she had that picture on her mantle. It was then I learned of the various bloods that ran through my veins. Amazingly, I have learned that not only were we separated by race, Black Knights/White Knights, we were also separated by religion, Baptist/Seven Day Adventist. I am surprised and please that Newton's ideologically. May his ideas live on...K. Carter

#2 Comment from goldclaw83 Email goldclaw835/14/05 10:48 AM

In my research of my Family Tree, I discovered that my gg-grandfather (John C. Holifield who was known as Cow John was a soldier in the 8th Mississippi(the Ellisville Invincibles) as well as most of my other relatives that served the Confederacy---Anyway I looked up the roster of men that served in that unit and saw the name Knewt Knight---So I believe that my ancestor knew ole Knewt---It said the unit was involved in several engagements with the yankees---I am not sure if Knewt took up arms against the union soldiers or when he deserted back to Jones County and hid in the Bluffs along the Leaf River---I always look at ole Knewt as the "Jonh Brown"(the abolitionist that was taken at Harper's Ferry ,Virginia by Robert E. Lee) of Jones County---The mixed children that he had --I think lived around SoSo and were called the Knight Niggers---These were the stories I heard from my Grandmother who was born in Ellisville----I think Knewt Knight was a traitor to the South myself-----for the simple reason that all my ancestors fought for the Confederacy and didn't own slaves---My email address is GOLDCLAW83@aol.com---If anyone wants to share some info with me,I will be glad to communicate with them----Van C. Lowe

#1 Comment from chadfhs Email chadfhs4/25/05 10:25 PM

Growing up in Jones County the story of Newt Knight was one that often was not celebrated. Jones County was embarrased by the fact that they seperated themselves from the confederacy. Within the last fifteen years though, Jones County has seemed to celebrate its past and advertise the famous slogan "Free State of Jones!"C.Wells

Tags: confederate heritage month 2005, mississippi, newton knight

Confederate "Heritage" Month - April 14: John Brown and Harper's Ferry

Get up, get up, my hardy sons,
From this time forth we are
No longer men, but pikes and guns
In God's advancing war.

And if we live, we free the slave,
And if we die, we die.
But God has digged His saints a grave
Beyond the western sky.

- from "John Brown's Prayer" in John Brown's Body (1928) by Stephen Vincent Benét

John Brown's raid on the federal armory at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 was a startling event for the whole country. The Slave Power recoiled in horror, their endless terror of "servile insurrection" having been thrown into convulsive spasms. The public in the free states wound up viewing Brown as a martyr to the antislavery cause, not least because of the dubious trial in Virginia which rushed him to the gallows.

A 1999 PBS American Experience program on John Brown caught his heavily religious nature in their title: John Brown's Holy War. The Web site for that program says of him:

He has been called a saint, a fanatic, and a cold-blooded murderer. The debate over his memory, his motives, about the true nature of the man, continues to stir passionate debate. It is said that John Brown was the spark that started the Civil War. Truly, he marked the end of compromise over the issue of slavery, and it was not long after his death that John Brown's war became the nation's war.

John Brown was born into a deeply religious family in Torrington, Connecticut, in 1800. Led by a father who was vehemently opposed to slavery, the family moved to northern Ohio when John was five, to a district that would become known for its antislavery views. ...

Brown was found guilty of murder, treason, and of inciting slave insurrection. On Dec. 2, 1859, he was hanged. It was a turning point for America, for with his death all hope of a peaceful end to the slavery issue died as well.

Brown was not unusual among abolitionists in being religious. The movement had avery strong Protestant religious orientation. I say Protestant religious orientation, because the Catholic Church of that time, which was becoming more important before the Civil War because of massive Irish immigration, was supportive of slavery. Pope Pius IX had been terrified by the European democratic revolutions of 1848 and emphasized social and political conservatism thereafter. Catholic leaders in America supported him in this stance and viewed abolitionism as something liked the feared "Red Republicanism" of Europe.

But Brown was unusual in that his religion took an austere and militant form, and gave him an intense conviction that he was called upon to fight for the destruction of slavery, an institution that he understood to be a vicious wrong against humanity and therefore a particularly sinful affront to God. Brown - and his father before him - was a "conductor" on the Underground Railroad helping slaves flee their masters. This kind of action fit well with his religious outlook. As the writer Russell Banks put it, "This is action, this is a means by which he can do the Lord's work in a hands-on, active, meaningful way. It's not just simply standing around and stamping your feet in rage; he puts his rage to work."

It was in 1837, after the notorious murder of abolitionist clergyman Elijah Lovejoy in Illinois, that Brown declared in a church memorial service for the slain activist, "Here before God, in the presence of these witnesses, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery."

And he did. In 1855, he arrived in Kansas and began his first violent action in opposition to slavery, fighting as one of the free-state men in the guerrilla war that took place between pro- and antislavery forces in that territory. He was good at it. And his fighting there earned him high regard among the abolitionists.

Frederick Douglass was personally acquainted with John Brown. In his autobiography, he described the man he called "Captain John Brown, whose name has now passed into history, as that of one of the most marked characters and greatest heroes known to American fame," from their first encounter as follows. From the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892 edition), Ch. 8, Douglass describes the plan Brown conceived, a later form of which he was putting into effect in 1859 when he made the Harper's Ferry raid:

About the time I began my enterprise in Rochester I chanced to spend a night and a day under the roof of a man whose character and conversation, and whose objects and aims in life, made a very deep impression upon my mind and heart. His name had been mentioned to me by several prominent colored men, among whom were the Rev. Henry Highland Garnet and J. W. Loguen. In speaking of him their voices would drop to a whisper, and what they said of him made me very eager to see and to know him. Fortunately, I was invited to see him in his own house. At the time to which I now refer this man was a respectable merchant in a populous and thriving city, and our first place of meeting was at his store. This was a substantial brick building on a prominent, busy street. A glance at the interior, as well as at the massive walls without, gave me the impression that the owner must be a man of considerable wealth. My welcome was all that I could have asked. Every member of the family, young and old, seemed glad to see me, and I was made much at home in a very little while. I was, however, a little disappointed with the appearance of the house and its location. After seeing the fine store I was prepared to see a fine residence in an eligible locality, but this conclusion was completely dispelled by actual observation. In fact, the house was neither commodious nor elegant, nor its situation desirable. It was a small wooden building on a back street, in a neighborhood chiefly occupied by laboring men and mechanics; respectable enough, to be sure, but not quite the place, I thought, where one would look for the residence of a flourishing and successful merchant. Plain as was the outside of this man's house, the inside was plainer. Its furniture would have satisfied a Spartan. It would take longer to tell what was not in this house than what was in it. There was an air of plainness about it which almost suggested destitution. My first meal passed under the misnomer of tea, though there was nothing about it resembling the usual significance of that term. It consisted of beef-soup, cabbage, and potatoes--a meal such as a man might relish after following theplow all day or performing a forced march of a dozen miles over a rough road in frosty weather. Innocent of paint, veneering, varnish, or table-cloth, the table announced itself unmistakably of pine and of the plainest workmanship. There was no hired help visible. The mother, daughters, and sons did the serving, and did it well. They were evidently used to it, and had no thought of any impropriety or degradation in being their own servants. It is said that a house in some measure reflects the character of its occupants; this one certainly did. In it there were no disguises, no illusions, no make-believes. Everything implied stern truth, solid purpose, and rigid economy. I was not long in company with the master of this house before I discovered that he was indeed the master of it, and was likely to become mine too if I stayed long enough with him. He fulfilled St. Paul's idea of the head of the family. His wife believed in him, and his children observed him with reverence. Whenever he spoke his words commanded earnest attention. His arguments, which I ventured at some points to oppose, seemed to convince all; his appeals touched all, and his will impressed all. Certainly I never felt myself in the presence of a stronger religious influence than while in this man's house. (my emphasis)

However we might judge his actions based upon it, there seems to be little doubt that Brown's religious convictions and motivations were sincere, and that he indeed saw his mission primarily in religious terms. As Brown described to Douglass his plan to create an armed resistance force on slave territory, Douglass again took note of the seriousness of his religious outlook:

When I suggested that we might convert the slaveholders, he became much excited, and said that could never be, "he knew their proud hearts and that they would never be induced to give up their slaves, until they felt a big stick about their heads." He observed that I might have noticed the simple manner in which he lived, adding that he had adopted this method in order to save money to carry out his purposes. This was said in no boastful tone, for he felt that he had delayed already too long, and had no room to boast either his zeal or his self-denial. Had some men made such display of rigid virtue, I should have rejected it, as affected, false,and hypocritical, but in John Brown, I felt it to be real as iron or granite.

Douglass was an escaped slave. He had been very active in the abolition movement, both in the US and in England. But this first meeting with John Brown affected his perspective in a basic way:

From this night spent with John Brown in Springfield, Mass., 1847, while I continued to write and speak against slavery, I became all the same less hopeful of its peaceful abolition. My utterances became more and more tinged by the color of this man's strong impressions. Speaking at an anti-slavery convention in Salem, Ohio, I expressed this apprehension that slavery could only be destroyed by blood-shed, when I was suddenly and sharply interrupted by my good old friend Sojourner Truth with the question, "Frederick, is God dead?" "No," I answered, "and because God is not dead slavery can only end in blood." My quaint old sister was of the Garrison school of non-resistants, and was shocked at my sanguinary doctrine, but she too became an advocate of the sword, when the war for the maintenance of the Union was declared.

Douglass' description of Brown's concept is important:

His plan as it then lay in his mind had much to commend it. It did not, as some suppose, contemplate a general rising among the slaves, and a general slaughter of the slave-masters. An insurrection, he thought, would only defeat the object; but his plan did contemplate the creating of an armed force which should act in the very heart of the South. He was not averse to the sheddingof blood, and thought the practice of carrying arms would be a good one for the colored people to adopt, as it would give them a sense of their manhood. No people, he said, could have self-respect, or he respected, who would not fight for their freedom.

Frederick Douglass gave a summary description of Brown's famous raid (Ch. 9):

When the explosive force of this controversy had already weakened the bolts of the American Union; when the agitation of the public mind was at its topmost height; when the two sections were at their extreme points of difference; when, comprehending the perilous situation, such statesmen of the North as William H. Seward sought to allay the rising storm by soft, persuasive speech, and when all hope of compromise had nearly vanished, as if to banisheven the last glimmer of hope for peace between the sections, John Brown came upon the scene. On the night of the 16th of October, 1859, there appeared near the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers a party of nineteen men--fourteen white and five colored. They were not only armed themselves, but they brought with them a large supply of arms for such persons as might join them. These men invaded the town of Harper's Ferry, disarmed the watchman, took possession of the arsenal, rifle factory, armory, and other government property at that place, arrested and made prisoners of nearly all the prominent citizens in the neighborhood, collected about fifty slaves, put bayonets into the hands of such as were able and willing to fight for their liberty, killed three men, proclaimed general emancipation, held the ground more than thirty hours, and were subsequently overpowered and nearly all killed, wounded, or captured by a body of United States troops under command of Col. Robert E. Lee, since famous as the rebel General Lee. Three out of the nineteen invaders were captured while fighting, and one of them was Capt. John Brown, the man who originated, planned, and commanded the expedition. At the time of his capture Capt. Brown was supposed to be mortally wounded, as he had several ugly gashes and bayonet wounds on his head and body, and, apprehending that he might speedily die, or that he might be rescued by his friends, and thus the opportunity to make him a signal example of slaveholding vengeance would be lost, his captors hurried him to Charlestown, 10 miles further within the border of Virginia, placed him in prison strongly guarded by troops, and, before his wounds were healed, he was brought into court, subjected to a nominal trial, convicted of high treason and inciting slaves to insurrection, and was executed. (my emphasis)

An actor named John Wilkes Booth managed to sneak in to watch the military execution. He recalled, "I looked at the traitor with unlimited, undeniable contempt."

Douglass himself was forced to flee New York to refuge in England. Although he had not been directly involved in the Harper's Ferry raid, Virginia's governor attempted to have him extradicted,trying to use theraid as an excuse to put Douglass out of action, as well. Thegovernor may have been guessing, but he wasn't entirely wrong in his suspicions. Brown had consulted extensively with Douglass on his plan.

Douglass described Brown's thwarted plan as a "desperate but sublimely disinterested effort to emancipate the slaves of Maryland and Virginia from their cruel task-masters." He had reservations about the practicality of Brown's plan. But on the justice and morality of it, Douglass had a clear position:

Men who live by robbing their fellow-men of their labor and liberty have forfeited their right to know anything of the thoughts, feelings, or purposes of those whom they rob and plunder. They have by the single act of slaveholding voluntarily placed themselves beyond the laws of justice and honor, and have become only fitted for companionship with thieves and pirates--the common enemies of God and of all mankind. While it shall be considered right to protect one's self against thieves, burglars, robbers, and assassins, and to slay a wild beast in the act of devouring his human prey, it can never be wrong for the imbruted and whip-scarred slaves, or their friends, to hunt, harass, and even strike down the traffickers in human flesh. If anybody is disposed to think less of me on account of this sentiment, or because I may have had a knowledge of what was about to occur [in the Harper's Ferry raid], and did not assume the base and detestable character of an informer, he is a man whose good or bad opinion of me may be equally repugnant and despicable.

In Chapter 10 of his book, Douglass gave a more complete description of his relations to John Brown. And he gives a good description of what Brown intended to do. His plan (in its final version) wasto seize weapons at Harper's Ferry and proceed into the mountains, where he would establish a series of hideouts. From there, he and his men would help slaves escape from their masters, using force when necessary. As Douglass described it, "They were to be well armed, but were to avoid battle or violence, unless compelled by pursuit or in self-defence. In that case, they were to make it as costly as possible to the assailing party, whether that party should be soldiers or citizens," i.e., the white vigilante slave-patrols. He would then get the slaves into the Underground Railroad to spirit them to freedom in Canada. Those who wished to remain and were able to help, he would retain to help in his project.

Douglass also believed the plan to be basically feasible. He also explained the purpose of Brown's plan, which not to provoke slave insurrections, which the slaveowners with their exaggerated fears and their bad consciences always feared:

Hating slavery as I did, and making its abolition the object of my life, I was ready to welcome any new mode of attack upon the slave system which gave any promise of success. I readily saw that this plan could be made very effective in rendering slave property in Maryland and Virginia valueless by rendering it insecure. Men do not like to buy runaway horses, or to invest their money in a species of property likely to take legs and walk off with itself. In the worse case, too, if the plan should fail, and John Brown should be driven from the mountains, a new fact would be developed by which the nation would be kept awake to the existence of slavery. Hence, I assented to this, John Brown's scheme or plan for running off slaves. (my emphasis)

Douglass explains his own entirely pragmatic concerns about the final plan that Brown put into motion. Douglass thought the raid on Harper's Ferry was a dangerous misjudgment:

To me such a measure would be fatal to running off slaves (as was the original plan), and fatal to all engaged in doing so. It would be an attack upon the federal government, and would array the whole country against us. Captain Brown did most of the talking on the other side of the question. He did not at all object to rousing the nation; it seemed to him that something startling was just what the nation needed. He hadcompletely renounced his old plan [i.e., the old plan did not include the Harper's Ferry raid], and thought that the capture of Harper's Ferry would serve as notice to the slaves that their friends had come, and as a trumpet to rally them to his standard. He described the place as to its means of defense, and how impossible it would be to dislodge him if once in possession. Of course I was no match for him in such matters, but I told him, and these were my words, that all his arguments, and all his descriptions of the place, convinced me that he was going into aperfect steel-trap, and that once in he would never get out alive; that he would be surrounded at once and escape would be impossible. (my emphasis)

Douglass also gives a good brief description of the general atmosphere in which Brown's doomed raid took place:

Slavery seemed to be at the very top of its power; the national government, with all its powers and appliances, was in its hands, and it bade fair to wield them for many years to come. Nobody could then see that in the short space of four years this power would be broken and the slave system destroyed.

Returning to the United States after six months in England and Scotland, Douglass described how the Northern public now viewed John Brown:

Great changes had now taken place in the public mind touching the John Brown raid. Virginia had satisfied her thirst for blood. She had executed all the raiders who had fallen into her hands. She had not given Captain Brown the benefit of a reasonable doubt, but hurried him to the scaffold in panic-stricken haste. She had made herself ridiculous by her fright and despicable by her fury. Emerson's prediction that Brown's gallows would become like the cross was already being fulfilled. The old hero, in the trial hour, had behaved so grandly that men regarded him not as a murderer but as a martyr. All over the North men were singing the John Brown song. His body was in the dust, but his soul was marching on. His defeat was already assuming the form and pressure of victory, and his death was giving new life and power to the principles of justice and liberty. He had spoken great words in the face of death and the champions of slavery. He had quailed before neither. What he had lost by the sword he had more than gained by the truth. Had he wavered, had he retreated or apologized, the case had been different. He did not even ask that the cup of death might pass from him. To his own soul he was right, and neither "principalities nor powers, life nor death, things present nor things to come," could shake his dauntless spirit or move him from his ground. He may not have stooped on his way to the gallows to kiss a little colored child, as it is reported he did, but the act would have been in keeping with the tender heart, as well as with the heroic spirit of the man. Those who looked for confession heard only the voice of rebuke and warning. (my emphasis)

It is noteworthy that Brown's religious disposition, and his ability to express his convictions interms that would resonate with American Protestants, was an important part of his influence, in life and in death.

Douglass observed that the Congressional investigation of the Harper's Ferry raid that had been demanded by Southern members of Congress was cut short:

I have never been able to account satisfactorily for the sudden abandonment of this investigation on any other ground than that the men engaged in it expected soon to be in rebellion themselves, and that, not a rebellion for liberty, like that of John Brown, but a rebellion for slavery, and that they saw that by using their senatorial power in search of rebels they might be whetting a knife for their own throats. (my emphasis)

In his final address to the court that condemned him to death, Brown said:

The court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the LAW OF GOD. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the BIBLE, or at least the NEW TESTAMENT. That teaches me that, "All things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them." It teaches me further to "remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them." I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say I am too young to understand that GOD is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but RIGHT.

Now if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and MINGLE MY BLOOD FURTHER WITH THE BLOOD OF MY CHILDREN, and with the blood of millions in this Slave country, whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments. - I say, LET IT BE DONE.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2005, frederick douglass, john brown