<v Speaker 1>I'm Jerry Broadway, and this is Anonymous America where we

<v Speaker 1>take a deep dive into American history to find those

<v Speaker 1>little known heroes that did amazing things and then fell

<v Speaker 1>through the cracks. The state of Mississippi seceded from the

<v Speaker 1>Union in January of eighteen sixty one. Now, every school

<v Speaker 1>book you've ever seen agrees on that much. But there's

<v Speaker 1>another story. It's part documented fact, part swamp country legend,

<v Speaker 1>and every bit as unique as the man at the

<v Speaker 1>center of it. That legend says that one county in

<v Speaker 1>the piney woods of South Mississippi turned right around and

<v Speaker 1>seceded from Mississippi. Now, the farmer that led that rebellion.

<v Speaker 1>Inside the rebellion, he never wrote a book, he never

<v Speaker 1>gave a speech worth remembering, spent the last decades of

<v Speaker 1>his life shunned by his neighbors and erased from polite history.

<v Speaker 1>But for two years, during the bloodiest war this country

<v Speaker 1>ever fought, he commanded a swamp to fight an army

<v Speaker 1>and force the Confederacy to invade its own territory just

<v Speaker 1>to try to get him. This is a story of

<v Speaker 1>the poorest county in Mississippi, a hideout they called the

<v Speaker 1>Devil's Den and the man they never.

<v Speaker 2>Caught from Haydad Productions. This is anonymous America.

<v Speaker 1>Jones County sits in the pine belt of southeastern Mississippi,

<v Speaker 1>and back in eighteen sixty it was about as far

<v Speaker 1>from the cotton Kingdom as you could get and still

<v Speaker 1>be in the state. The soil there is sandy and thin.

<v Speaker 1>There were no plantations, no big white columns, no fortunes.

<v Speaker 1>The people there were subsistence farmers, corn hogs, sweet potatoes,

<v Speaker 1>and they had fewer slaves per capita than any county

<v Speaker 1>in the state of Mississippi. And when the secession question

<v Speaker 1>came to a vote, Jones County voted overwhelmingly to stay

<v Speaker 1>in the Union. They sent their delegate to the convention

<v Speaker 1>in Jackson carrying those very instructions, but he cracked under

<v Speaker 1>the pressure and flipped his vote. Now, the farmer who

<v Speaker 1>is the star of our story was a big, rawb

<v Speaker 1>on man with gray eyes who was born around eighteen

<v Speaker 1>twenty nine. His name was Newt Knight. Newton didn't own

<v Speaker 1>any slaves, and he never would. But when the war came,

<v Speaker 1>Newt ended up in a Confederate uniform, just like most

<v Speaker 1>of the young men in Jones County, Mississippi. Some said

<v Speaker 1>he enlisted to avoid something even worse, and he reportedly

<v Speaker 1>served as a hospital orderly rather than carrying a rifle

<v Speaker 1>for the cause. Then, in October of eighteen sixty two,

<v Speaker 1>the Confederate Congress passed the law that changed everything. It

<v Speaker 1>was called the twenty Negro Law, and it said that

<v Speaker 1>any man who owned twenty or more slaves was exempt

<v Speaker 1>from military service. And the men of Jones County, men

<v Speaker 1>who owned nothing but their land and their labor, read

<v Speaker 1>that law and understood exactly what it meant. It was

<v Speaker 1>a rich man's war, but a poor man's fight. That

<v Speaker 1>same fall, Confederate tax agents began sweeping through the county,

<v Speaker 1>seizing crops, livestock, even cloth from the wives and mothers

<v Speaker 1>left behind. Families were going hungry so an army could eat,

<v Speaker 1>and shortly after the Battle of Corinth, Newton Knight walked

<v Speaker 1>away from the Confederate army and headed home. But as

<v Speaker 1>it turns out, deserting the Confederate army in the heart

<v Speaker 1>of the Confederacy was a plan that was in news

<v Speaker 1>that shouldn't surprise anyone. Not easy. In fact, for Newton Night,

<v Speaker 1>it was impossible, and he was caught. Now accounts differ

<v Speaker 1>on what they did to him. Some say he was

<v Speaker 1>put in jail, some say worse. But eventually they put

<v Speaker 1>him back in uniform and sent him right back to

<v Speaker 1>the battlefields. But Newton Knight wasn't having any of it,

<v Speaker 1>so he deserted again, and by the summer of eighteen

<v Speaker 1>sixty three, after the city of Vicksburg fell and thousands

<v Speaker 1>of demoralized Mississippi soldiers were drifting home, he was far

<v Speaker 1>from alone. The piney woods were filling up with men

<v Speaker 1>who had decided they were done dying for the plantation class.

<v Speaker 1>In October of eighteen sixty three, about one hundred and

<v Speaker 1>twenty five of those men gathered and organized themselves into

<v Speaker 1>a company. They elected Newton Knight as their captain. Their

<v Speaker 1>base was a stretch of nearly impenetrable swamp along the

<v Speaker 1>Leaf River that locals called the Devil's Den. It was

<v Speaker 1>a place where a man who knew the water could vanish,

<v Speaker 1>and a man who didn't could die looking for him.

<v Speaker 1>What followed can only be described as open guerrilla warfare

<v Speaker 1>inside the Confederacy. The company ambushed Confederate tax collectors and

<v Speaker 1>drove them out of the county. They raided supply wagons

<v Speaker 1>and gave the corn back of the families it had

<v Speaker 1>been taken from. They fought skirmish after skirmish with the

<v Speaker 1>Confederate cavalry. Legend says that in eighteen sixty four, the

<v Speaker 1>United States flag was flying over the courthouse in Ellisville, Mississippi,

<v Speaker 1>and reports reached Richmond that Jones County was an open rebellion.

<v Speaker 1>Against the rebellion, newspapers began calling it the Free State

<v Speaker 1>of Jones. The Confederacy took it seriously enough to send

<v Speaker 1>a decorated colonel named Robert Lowry with veteran troops and

<v Speaker 1>packs bloodhounds to crush the uprising. Lowry proceeded to hang

<v Speaker 1>ten members of the company, including some men from Newt's

<v Speaker 1>own family, but they never got Newt night. Every time

<v Speaker 1>the news got close, the band slipped back into the swamp.

<v Speaker 1>He survived that time because of a supply line. The

<v Speaker 1>Confederacy never fully understood the women of Jones County and

<v Speaker 1>the slaves of the surrounding farms were bringing food, information,

<v Speaker 1>and warnings into Devil's Den at an enormous personal risk.

<v Speaker 1>Chief among those was a woman named Rachel. Rachel was

<v Speaker 1>a slave on the land that belonged to Newton Knight's grandfather.

<v Speaker 1>Rachel basically kept Newton alive well much too late and

<v Speaker 1>with far too much death and destruction. The Civil War

<v Speaker 1>finally ended. And here's where most stories like this would

<v Speaker 1>just wrap up. Neatley Newton Knights doesn't. During reconstruction, he

<v Speaker 1>was commissioned to distribute food relief to a starving county,

<v Speaker 1>black and white alike. He was empowered to free black

<v Speaker 1>children who had been bound into so called apprenticeships that

<v Speaker 1>were basically slaves by another name. And he personally wrote

<v Speaker 1>out and did it, And then he did the thing

<v Speaker 1>that made his own descendants whisper his name for a century.

<v Speaker 1>He built the life openly with Rachel, the woman who

<v Speaker 1>had run food through the swamp to keep him alive.

<v Speaker 1>They had children together, their families intermarried, and formed a

<v Speaker 1>mixed race farming community near Sos, Mississippi, at a time

<v Speaker 1>and a place where that was not just scandalous, it

<v Speaker 1>was downright dangerous. His white neighbors cut him off completely.

<v Speaker 1>History books either mocked him or just skipped over him.

<v Speaker 1>As late as nineteen forty eight, one of Newton Knight's

<v Speaker 1>great grandsons, was put on trial in Mississippi for the

<v Speaker 1>crime of marrying a white woman. Newton Knight passed away

<v Speaker 1>in February of nineteen twenty two, just a little past

<v Speaker 1>ninety years old. He was buried right next to Rachel

<v Speaker 1>in a final act of defiance of Mississippi law, which

<v Speaker 1>said at that time even cemeteries had to be segregated.

<v Speaker 1>Historians are still arguing about the free state of Jones,

<v Speaker 1>whether the county ever formally declared anything, whether the flag

<v Speaker 1>really flew over that courthouse. What can't be argued is this,

<v Speaker 1>a poor farmer with no education, no wealth, and no

<v Speaker 1>army looked at the most powerful institution in his world

<v Speaker 1>and decided it was wrong about the war and about

<v Speaker 1>something much bigger than the war. And then he spent

<v Speaker 1>the rest of his long life refusing to take it back,

<v Speaker 1>no matter what had cost him. He was called a

<v Speaker 1>trader by the South and forgotten by the North. It

<v Speaker 1>took over one hundred years and a movie starring Matthew

<v Speaker 1>McConaughey for the rest of the country to even learn

<v Speaker 1>he ever existed. But in the piney woods of Jones, County, Mississippi.

<v Speaker 1>They always knew. I was born and raised in Soso, Mississippi,

<v Speaker 1>and I can tell you from personal experience that Newton

<v Speaker 1>Knight's name is still spoken frequently there. He's either praised

<v Speaker 1>or cursed, depending on who you're talking to. There was

<v Speaker 1>even an urban legend told around campfires about Nut's old

<v Speaker 1>house that was still standing and supposedly haunted by his

<v Speaker 1>very angry ghost. You don't become that kind of legend

<v Speaker 1>unless you do something that changes the world right down

<v Speaker 1>to its DNA. And whether you believe he was a

<v Speaker 1>hero or a trader, you have to admit that is

<v Speaker 1>exactly what he did. That's New at Night, and that

<v Speaker 1>is Anonymous America.