![]() ![]() In 1861, the vote in Jones County was overwhelmingly for the anti-secession candidate. It also had no sympathy for the slave owners. Jones County contained some of the poorest soil and poorest farmers in the state. It was a land of rich, slave-owning aristocrats, 500,000 enslaved people, and poor white farmers. Mississippi, a land of large plantations and small farms, was the largest cotton-producing state in the South - cotton produced by the backbreaking forced labor of enslaved Africans. In 1921, Knight, aged 84 and living in obscurity, called on Meigs Frost, a reporter for the New Orleans Item, to tell his story and “get the true facts about Jones County during the war.” His life story was recorded in “The State of Jones” by Sally Jefferson and John Stauffer. ![]() There is no better example than Knight, the leader of a guerilla group that fought the Confederacy and declared the “Free State of Jones” in Jones County, Miss. But there was also significant opposition to the Confederacy from poor whites in every slave state. ![]() Sherman during his historic march through Georgia in 1864.īy far the greatest opposition to slavery came from the enslaved themselves, who always had escape in mind, aided both the Union army and Confederate deserters, fought for the right to fight the Confederacy, and heroically struggled for their freedom at every turn. The First Alabama Cavalry was an anti-slavery pro-Union cavalry, mostly white but also Black, about 2,000 in total, whose members fought the Confederacy and eventually were escorts for Gen. Newton Knight was a poor white farmer who fought the Confederacy with all his might. ![]()
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