The Free State of Jones and the Echo of the Black Horn: Two Sides of the Life and Activities of Captain Newt Knight

Recollections of the man who led a revolt and established a liberated county in Confederate Mississippi—the subject of the Matthew McConaughey film. A man of deep convictions, Captain Newt Knight disagreed with the values of the South and was accused of deserting the Confederate army. He was a believer in doing what was just. During the Civil War, he formed his own band of deserters who would rebel against the Confederacy and support the Union. In the spring of 1864, the government in Jones County was effectively overthrown, and the county was dubbed “The Free State of Jones.” Eventually, Knight would establish a mixed race town for both whites and former slaves to inhabit together. This volume merges two rare books on the subject; Thomas Jefferson Knight’s The Life and Activities of Captain Newt Knight and Ethel Knight’s The Echo at the Black Horn. Each paints a singular portrait of this elusive historical figure. Was he a Civil War-era Robin Hood or a manipulative cult leader? Both books surely have fictitious elements determined by the authors’ biases, and historian Jim Kelly provides a foreword that helps examine the importance of each position on Newt Knight’s role in the conflict and what his motivations truly were.