Between late 1863 and mid-1864, an armed band of Confederate deserters battled Confederate cavalry in the Piney Woods region of Jones County, Mississippi. Calling themselves the Knight Company after their captain, Newton Knight, and aided by women, slaves, and children who spied on the Confederacy and provided food and shelter, they set up headquarters in the swamps of the Leaf River. There, legend has it, they declared the Free State of Jones. The story of the Jones County rebellion is well known among Mississippians, and debate over whether the county actually seceded from the state during the war has smoldered for more than a century. Adding further controversy to the legend is the story of Newt Knight's interracial romance with his wartime accomplice, Rachel, a slave. Newt and Rachel's relationship resulted in the growth of a mixed-race community that endured long after the Civil War had ended. The ambiguous racial identity of their descendants confounded the rules of segregated Mississippi, as vividly evidenced by the 1948 miscegenation trial of great-grandson Davis Knight. In this book, Victoria Bynum pierces through the haze of romantic legend, Lost Cause rhetoric, popular memory, and gossip that has long shrouded the story of the Free State of Jones. Relying on exhaustive research in a wide range of sources, she traces the origins and legacy of the Jones County uprising from the American Revolution to the modern civil rights movement. In bridging the gap between the legendary and the real Free State of Jones, Bynum shows how the legend -- what was told, what was embellished, and what was left out -- reveals a great deal about the South's transition from slavery to segregation; the racial, gender, and class politics of the period; and the contingent nature of history and memory.

Introduction: Sacred wars : race and the ongoing battle over the Free State of Jones -- Part one: The origins of Mississippi's Piney Woods people ; Jones County's Carolina connection: class and race in revolutionary America ; The quest for land: yeoman Republicans on the southwestern frontier ; Piney Woods patriarchs: class relations and the growth of slavery ; Antebellum life on the Leaf River: gender, violence, and religious strife -- Part two: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the struggle for power. The inner Civil War: birth of the Free State of Jones ; The Free State turned upside down: Colonel Lowry's Confederate raid on Jones County ; Reconstruction and redemption: the politics of race, class, and manhood in Jones County ; Defiance and domination: "white Negroes" in the Piney Woods New South ; Epilogue: the Free State of Jones revisited: Davis Knight's miscegenation trial -- Appendixes: Selected descendants of the Knight family ; Selected descendants of the Coleman family ; Selected descendants of the Welborn family ; Selected descendants of the Bynum family ; Selected descendants of the Collins family ; Selected descendants of the Sumrall family ; Selected descendants of the Welch family ; Selected descendants of the Valentine family ; The "white Negro" community, 1880-1920.