However, the story has seen a major revival. In 2016, director Gary Ross released the film The Free State of Jones , starring Matthew McConaughey as Newton Knight. The film brought the story to a global audience, sparking renewed debate among historians.
Using his wartime influence, Knight organized a multiracial community in the swamps. He helped establish a school for both black and white children, a radical act in the 1870s. He built a church where freedmen and poor whites worshipped together. And most controversially, he entered into a common-law marriage with , a former enslaved woman who had escaped from a neighboring plantation and fought alongside his company. They had several children together. free state of jones
Following the Civil War, the defeated South passed “Black Codes” to restrict the freedom of newly emancipated slaves and tried to re-establish white supremacy. Newton Knight refused to accept this. He had fought against the Confederacy, and he intended to build a new society in its place. However, the story has seen a major revival
The Confederacy, already stretched thin by the Union army, sent Lieutenant Colonel Robert Lowry (later Governor of Mississippi) to crush the rebellion. Lowry hanged ten of Knight’s men and terrorized the countryside, but he never captured Newton Knight. The Knight Company, as they called themselves, fought on until the war’s end in 1865. What makes the Free State of Jones truly remarkable is not the rebellion itself, but what came after. Using his wartime influence, Knight organized a multiracial
Furthermore, the story challenges the narrative of the “Lost Cause”—the myth that all white Southerners stood united in a noble, honorable cause. Newton Knight and his band of deserters prove that resistance to slavery and Confederate authority came from within, as well as from without.
After witnessing the brutal futility of the Battle of Corinth and seeing his comrades fall for a cause he despised, Knight deserted. But he did not simply go home to hide. Instead, he became a leader. Knight hid deep in the swamps of the Leaf River, building a fortified encampment. He was soon joined by other deserters—poor white farmers, draft dodgers, and even a few escaped slaves. Together, they formed a guerrilla band that declared Jones County a neutral zone, then a seceded territory from the Confederacy itself. They called it the "Free State of Jones."