The set battle scenes (including civilians employing a battery against trained troops) provide an emotionally gratifying and crowd-pleasing symbol of the triumph of enthusiastic victory over tyranny. Hollywood” provides a useful corrective, and I would urge everybody who liked the movie to read Bynum’s book. The page dedicated to Free State of Jones at “ History vs. This fact, in part, explains the mixed reviews.Ī movie is not a documentary, of course. Bynum’s superb historical account The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), and aims to be much more truthful than Hollywood’s first attempt at the subject in 1948, Tap Roots.įree State of Jones directly confronts the issues of class and race that Tap Roots downplayed or avoided. “Captain” Knight held that title for his role as the leader of guerilla forces that successfully made parts of southern Mississippi a no-go zone for Confederate tax gatherers and conscript officers. Newton Knight worked on medical duties at the front until his disgust with the war inspired his desertion and return home. The movie offers a fictionalized version of the revolt of poor Southerners against the Confederacy in Jones County, Mississippi. Responses to the Free State of Jones by Gary Ross, and starring Matthew McConaughey, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Mahershala Ali demonstrate that such denials of experience can last a long time. In hindsight, there’s no real issue as to whether the power structure of the people were correct, though some feel obligated to pretend otherwise. By the end, most Americans actually doubted this.

In that conflict, the government, both political parties, the military, the media, the universities, the corporations, and the entire power structure insisted that the triumph of a Vietnamese effort to control of their own country would start toppling dominoes that would end in Anytown, U.S.A. After all, as a child of the Cold War, my own closest brush with toting a gun to war came during Vietnam. I can feel a certain sympathy for people who get hoodwinked into fighting for a Lost Cause that could never be worthy of the blood and treasure spent on its behalf.

Author of 10 books, including most recently Free Labor The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class, published in 2015 by the University of Illinois Press and Free Spirits: Spiritualism, Republicanism, Radicalism published in 2016 by University of Illinois Press. Mark Lause is a Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati.

Price's Lost Campaign by Mark A. Lause