Moon Dog Night, A Confederate Soldier in Virginia

The following month, Confederate Maj. Amos McLemore arrived in Ellisville and began hunting them down with soldiers and hounds. By October, he had captured more than deserters, and exchanged threatening messages with Newt Knight, who was back on his ruined farm on the Jasper County border. Soon afterward, there was a mass meeting of deserters from four Piney Woods counties. They organized themselves into a company called the Jones County Scouts and unanimously elected Knight as their captain.

Welborn, their former commanding officer in the Seventh Mississippi, later recalled. In March , Lt. Wirt Thompson reported that they were now a thousand strong and flying the U. That spring was the high-water mark of the rebellion against the Rebels. Polk ordered two battle-hardened regiments into southeast Mississippi, under the command of Piney Woods native Col.

With hanging ropes and packs of vicious, manhunting dogs, they subdued the surrounding counties and then moved into the Free State of Jones. They were deep in the swamps, being supplied with food and information by local sympathizers and slaves, most notably Rachel. After Lowry left, proclaiming victory, Knight and his men emerged from their hide-outs, and once again, began threatening Confederate officials and agents, burning bridges and destroying railroads to thwart the Rebel Army, and raiding food supplies intended for the troops.

Three months later, the Confederacy fell. In , the filmmaker Gary Ross was at Universal Studios, discussing possible projects, when a development executive gave him a brief, one-page treatment about Newton Knight and the Free State of Jones. Ross was instantly intrigued, both by the character and the revelation of Unionism in Mississippi, the most deeply Southern state of all.

The first thing he did was take a canoe trip down the Leaf River, to get a feel for the area. Then he started reading, beginning with the five now six books about Newton Knight.

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That led into broader reading about other pockets of Unionism in the South. Then he started into Reconstruction. He was giving me no quarter. Ross worked his way slowly and carefully through the books, and went back with more questions. Foner answered none of them, just gave him another reading list.

Ross read those books too, and went back again with burning questions. You ought to think about studying this. I tell people this movie is my academic midlife crisis. In Hollywood, he says, the executives were extremely supportive of his research, and the script that he finally wrestled out of it, but they balked at financing the film.

So I went and did Hunger Games, but always keeping an eye on this. Matthew McConaughey thought the Free State of Jones script was the most exciting Civil War story he had ever read, and knew immediately that he wanted to play Newt Knight. He did so deliberately, and to the hell with the consequences. I really kind of marveled at him. The third act of the film takes place in Mississippi after the Civil War. There was a phase during early Reconstruction when blacks could vote, and black officials were elected for the first time.

Then former Confederates violently took back control of the state and implemented a kind of second slavery for African-Americans. Once again disenfranchised, and terrorized by the Klan, they were exploited through sharecropping and legally segregated.

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He was hired by the Reconstruction government to free black children from white masters who were refusing to emancipate them. His commitment to these issues never waned. Much as Ross wanted to shoot the movie in Jones County, there were irresistible tax incentives to film across the border in Louisiana, and some breathtaking cypress swamps where various cast members were infested with the tiny mites known as chiggers.

Nevertheless, Ross and McConaughey spent a lot of time in Jones County, persuading many county residents to appear in the film. On the website of Jones County Rosin Heels, the local chapter of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, an announcement warned that the film will portray Newt Knight as a civil rights activist and a hero. Then the writer inadvertently slips into the present tense: Doug Jefcoate was listed as camp commander.

I found him listed as a veterinarian in Laurel, and called up, saying I was interested in his opinions on Newt Knight. Come to the animal hospital tomorrow. The receptionist led me into a small examining room and closed both its doors. I stood there for a few long minutes, with a shiny steel table and, on the wall, a Bible quotation.

Then Jefcoate walked in, a middle-aged man with sandy hair, glasses and a faraway smile. He was carrying two huge, leather-bound volumes of his family genealogy. He gave me ten minutes on his family tree, and when I interrupted to ask about the Rosin Heels and Newt Knight, he stopped, looked puzzled, and began to chuckle. He laughed uproariously, then settled down and gave me his thoughts. Cox, an animated year-old radio and television announcer with a long white beard, welcomed me into a small office crammed with video equipment and Confederate memorabilia. All he had so far was the credits Executive Producer Carl Ford and the introductory banjo music.

And like all poor, white, ignorant trash, he was in it for himself. Some people are far too enamored of the idea that he was Martin Luther King, and these are the same people who believe the War Between the States was about slavery, when nothing could be further from the truth. There seemed no point in arguing with him, and it was almost impossible to get a word in, so I sat there scribbling as he launched into a long monologue that defended slavery and the first incarnation of the Klan, burrowed deep into obscure Civil War battle minutiae, denied all charges of racism, and kept circling back to denounce Newt Knight and the simpering fools who tried to project their liberal agendas on him.

Joseph Hosey is a Jones County forester and wild mushroom harvester who was hired as an extra for the movie and ended up playing a core member of the Knight Company. Scruffy and rail-thin with piercing blue eyes and a full beard, he looks like he subsists on Confederate Army rations and the occasional squirrel.

A few years later, there was a vote on it, and the names were changed back. Thank God, because that would have sucked. Like his grandfather before him, Hosey is a great admirer of Newt Knight. It made me really wish my grandfather was still alive, because we were always saying someone should make a movie about Newt. I ask him what he admires most about Knight. Newt Knight gives me something in my heritage, as a white Southerner, that I can feel proud about. After Reconstruction, with the former Confederates back in charge, the Klan after him, and Jim Crow segregation laws being passed, Knight retreated from public life to his homestead on the Jasper County border, which he shared with Rachel until her death in , and continued to share with her children and grandchildren.

He lived the self-sufficient life of a yeoman Piney Woods farmer, doted on his swelling ranks of children and grandchildren, and withdrew completely from white society.

He gave that single long interview in , revealing a laconic sense of humor and a strong sense of right and wrong, and he died the following year, in February He was 84 years old. So Hosey drove up to the locked gate, and then swiped up the relevant photographs on his phone. Even in death, he defied them.

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The two sisters sitting across the table were gently amused. They had seen this many times before. It was, in fact, the normal reaction when they tried to explain their family tree to outsiders. After many decades of living in the outside world, they are back in Soso, Mississippi, dealing with prejudice from all directions.

The worst of it comes from within their extended family. For simplification, she said that there were three basic groups. The White Knights are descended from Newt and Serena, are often pro-Confederate, and proud of their pure white bloodlines. In , one of them, Ethel Knight, published a vitriolic indictment of Newt as a traitor to the Confederacy. The White Negroes a. After Rachel died, Newt and Georgeanne had children. And he kept trying to marry out the color, so we would all keep getting lighter-skinned. We have to tell our young people, do not date in the Soso area.

There were dead horses and horsemen near the road and in the woods.

Jackson was around 90 yards from the front line. Jackson would have cut an especially dark figure because he was wearing a long, black India-rubber raincoat. The roadbed had, over the years, cut into the earth so that it ran a few yards below the level of the surrounding terrain; that road embankment essentially served as additional protection.

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Still, one staffer was killed and another wounded; the others escaped untouched—except, of course, for Jackson. The circumstances had been ripe for disaster: Those questions have been debated and discussed for years. The story has been recounted and analyzed in letters, books and scholarly articles—some of them more reliable than others.

Years later, as the legend of Stonewall Jackson grew, people wanted to track down the exact location where Jackson was wounded. But there was considerable disagreement and uncertainty. Eyewitness and second-hand accounts varied. In June , admirers erected a more formal monument just 20 feet away. It is only a few rods from the exact spot wherever that was. Eventually, the Mountain Road vanished. At least one account from —only 40 years after the battle—suggests the ever-encroaching forest had swallowed the road by then. Traces of the road were further obscured when the visitor center was built in As recently as the mids, historians differed on the exact place where Jackson was shot.

The issue was finally put to rest when a team of historians, led by Robert K. Krick and armed with dozens of pieces of documentary evidence, mapped and measured the entire area. Today, a newly installed wayside sign stands across the road from the spot. The Mountain Road underwent restoration in , making it more visible to visitors who can now walk part of its length.

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And when visitors emerge from the canopy of trees that arches over the road, they will stand on the spot where Jackson was mortally wounded. Even so, what they see provides an incomplete picture of what really happened. First of all, modern visitors cannot truly appreciate the nature of the Wilderness. Recent development has cleared away most of the forest, creating the impression of far more open space than actually existed in Housing developments, gas stations and shopping centers—not to mention the widened Route 3—belie the once-wild nature of the area and obscure some of the key areas on the battlefield.

What forest remains has had years to mature. The trees are much taller, and the high canopy casts heavy shadows, choking out all but the most shade-loving plants. There are fewer ground-level plants than in , so the brush is far less dense. Standing at the spot where Jackson was wounded, one might think he was exposed and vulnerable.

From the Bullock Road, it would seem Jackson and his party were emerging from a tunnel of trees into an open area.

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In the moonlight, the horsemen would still be little more than silhouettes—easily mistaken for Federal cavalry. But in May , the line of sight from Bullock Road to Jackson was impenetrable. The only open view was directly down the Mountain Road itself. That means six to eight men at most—the men standing at the intersection of the Mountain Road and the Bullock Road—had a clear shot at the approaching horsemen. Mountain Road did rise slightly as it neared the Bullock Road from the spot where Jackson was wounded, but postwar photographs indicate that, overall, the ground was fairly level.

That means the North Carolinians would have been looking slightly downhill into the cut of Mountain Road with no intervening mound of dirt. But Mountain Road itself poses the greatest challenge to trying to imagine the events of that night. It is nearly impossible to get a clear sense of road conditions when Jackson was wounded—for starters, the battlefield closes at dusk and hiking after dark is prohibited. The high canopy of the modern forest does blot out most of the light from even a full moon, but the openness underneath belies the claustrophobic thickness that pressed in on Jackson and his men from the roadsides.

As the Confederate wave advanced and battle raged nearby, areas of the battlefield remained silent. Such silence is impossible to find today. With any battle, walking the ground can help to better understand what happened and why—and Chancellorsville offers many such opportunities. It just needs to be coaxed out. Bonaventure University, is author of Chancellorsville: They are co-founders of Emerging Civil War, a website for the next generation of Civil War historians, and co-authors of several books.

That was a fine and scholarly report. I am of the view that men shape history and that had Jackson been at Gettysburg, the history of our nation may well have changed. With what result only the Lord knows, but changed.

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As former history teacher, i commend you on very fine work. Thank you again Mr. Gentlemen, your remark that hill went unscathed, puzzles me. I am using gen. I thoroughly enjoyed this narrative. Your email address will not be published. The wooded area where Stonewall Jackson was shot is not as dense today as it was in