"These Truths," Jill Lepore's allegory cum history of the United States is a case in point of how we use history for present purposes. Reading Lepore, you soon realize she's not really talking about the past. She's talking about the era of Donald Trump and she's showing us the truth about him and his meaning through stories about our past.
She brings to life Faulkner's famous, "The past is never dead. It's not even past," and as she says, "the study of history unlocks us from the prison of he present."
So it is with "The Free State of Jones" a neglected masterpiece film about Newt Knight and the rebellion in a county in Mississippi during the depths of the Civil War, a story which Southerners today find so distasteful, they cannot even discuss it without spitting.
The life and exploits of Newt Knight expose the lie in the whole myth of the "Lost Cause," which Jim Crow Southerners dreamed up to sanitize the ugly truth that the Civil War, whatever it may have been when it first started, quickly became all about ending slavery and challenging the racism in which slavery was so firmly rooted.
Shelby Foote, and many other Southerners, have tried to argue that Southerners were simply fighting because the Yankees were down in their home states raping and pillaging. These fantasy historians dreamed up an image of the noble Confederates embodied in Robert E. Lee, who was seen not as a savage slaver, but as a taciturn noble aristocrat, too pure to ever harbor even a shred of animosity toward his enemies. And then there was a purely fictional character, who was actually no more fictional than the image of R.E. Lee later prof erred, and then there was
Ashley Wilkes in "Gone with the Wind," the righteous but conflicted, spiritually pure officer in gray and gold, a knight errant of Camelot so noble neither he nor his doomed civilization (based on barbarous slaving) could survive in the coming cold world of heartless Northern industrialization.
In fact, only a small percentage of Southerners, an agrarian society, owned slaves and "The Free State of Jones" begins with a scene in which poor, white farmers, conscripted Confederate soldiers, sit around a campfire, and seethe about the Confederate law exempting slave owners, the "twenty Negro law," which allowed one male in each family exemption from serving in the army for each 20 slaves the family owned. So a family with a father and four sons who owned 100 slaves sent no soldiers to the front, while the poor fought to keep them rich. The soldiers joke maybe they should get together and buy one slave, so they might get a few days reprieve from the fighting.
If the Smithsonian Magazine article about Newt Knight is accurate, Knight sold his fellow Jones County citizens on this idea: the Confederacy was making a rich man's war a poor man's fight, and folks down in Mississippi still hate him for telling this turth and for opposing the Confederacy. What really rankles today's Mississippi neo Confederates is Knight's rejection of racism. A local man says, "I'm not a racist, but I am a segregationist," with perfect aplomb, as if that would make perfect sense to the readers of the Smithsonian Magazine.
The worst offense of Newt Knight was he openly fathered children with a former slave, a half Black woman. The 19th century story interweaves with a 20th century story, in which a descendant of Knight and the former slave is on trial for having sex with a white woman, which given his "drop of Black blood," is illegal in Mississippi, even in 1956.
"Free State" addresses the thinking of the white citizens of Jones County, who called blacks "niggers" even while making common cause with a rebellion against the Confederacy. For the poor whites, having someone below them on the social scale is all they have, but Knight tells them, "We are all someone's nigger. The rich man makes sure of that."
This is a movie which is so relentless and angry it will never replace "Gone with the Wind." There is not enough in it for young women and girls to fantasize about--no beautiful scenes from the balcony, as Ashley in his silk vest, and Melanie in her lovely gown, look out over the fields where happy slaves pick cotton singing "Swing Lo', Sweet Chariot."
But it's a wonderful, important movie, worth the subscription to Netflix.
She brings to life Faulkner's famous, "The past is never dead. It's not even past," and as she says, "the study of history unlocks us from the prison of he present."
So it is with "The Free State of Jones" a neglected masterpiece film about Newt Knight and the rebellion in a county in Mississippi during the depths of the Civil War, a story which Southerners today find so distasteful, they cannot even discuss it without spitting.
The life and exploits of Newt Knight expose the lie in the whole myth of the "Lost Cause," which Jim Crow Southerners dreamed up to sanitize the ugly truth that the Civil War, whatever it may have been when it first started, quickly became all about ending slavery and challenging the racism in which slavery was so firmly rooted.
Shelby Foote, and many other Southerners, have tried to argue that Southerners were simply fighting because the Yankees were down in their home states raping and pillaging. These fantasy historians dreamed up an image of the noble Confederates embodied in Robert E. Lee, who was seen not as a savage slaver, but as a taciturn noble aristocrat, too pure to ever harbor even a shred of animosity toward his enemies. And then there was a purely fictional character, who was actually no more fictional than the image of R.E. Lee later prof erred, and then there was
Ashley Wilkes in "Gone with the Wind," the righteous but conflicted, spiritually pure officer in gray and gold, a knight errant of Camelot so noble neither he nor his doomed civilization (based on barbarous slaving) could survive in the coming cold world of heartless Northern industrialization.
In fact, only a small percentage of Southerners, an agrarian society, owned slaves and "The Free State of Jones" begins with a scene in which poor, white farmers, conscripted Confederate soldiers, sit around a campfire, and seethe about the Confederate law exempting slave owners, the "twenty Negro law," which allowed one male in each family exemption from serving in the army for each 20 slaves the family owned. So a family with a father and four sons who owned 100 slaves sent no soldiers to the front, while the poor fought to keep them rich. The soldiers joke maybe they should get together and buy one slave, so they might get a few days reprieve from the fighting.
If the Smithsonian Magazine article about Newt Knight is accurate, Knight sold his fellow Jones County citizens on this idea: the Confederacy was making a rich man's war a poor man's fight, and folks down in Mississippi still hate him for telling this turth and for opposing the Confederacy. What really rankles today's Mississippi neo Confederates is Knight's rejection of racism. A local man says, "I'm not a racist, but I am a segregationist," with perfect aplomb, as if that would make perfect sense to the readers of the Smithsonian Magazine.
The worst offense of Newt Knight was he openly fathered children with a former slave, a half Black woman. The 19th century story interweaves with a 20th century story, in which a descendant of Knight and the former slave is on trial for having sex with a white woman, which given his "drop of Black blood," is illegal in Mississippi, even in 1956.
"Free State" addresses the thinking of the white citizens of Jones County, who called blacks "niggers" even while making common cause with a rebellion against the Confederacy. For the poor whites, having someone below them on the social scale is all they have, but Knight tells them, "We are all someone's nigger. The rich man makes sure of that."
This is a movie which is so relentless and angry it will never replace "Gone with the Wind." There is not enough in it for young women and girls to fantasize about--no beautiful scenes from the balcony, as Ashley in his silk vest, and Melanie in her lovely gown, look out over the fields where happy slaves pick cotton singing "Swing Lo', Sweet Chariot."
But it's a wonderful, important movie, worth the subscription to Netflix.
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