Free State Of Jones [DVD] [2016]

good movie worth a watch another truth about war

The American Civil War (1861-65) was fought over the principle of authority. Authority for the North was the national or federal government. There was no authority higher than it. The South objected violently to this, maintaining that proper authority lay with local governments at the state level. Capitals in individual states knew better how to administer their affairs than did the federal government. Oversight and interference from Washington, D.C. was unnecessary and unwelcome.This was the political battlefield. But of course politics is just another name for economics, and that was what the war was really about — money and the power it wields in shaping politics.The North was industrial or becoming industrial and continued to industrialise. The South remained largely rural and agrarian. New Orleans, its biggest city, had a population of about 168,000 in 1860. Charleston’s was only 40,000, Richmond and Atlanta even less at 38,000 each. Many cities in the North — New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston (all with populations over 170,000) — were larger than it. There was no notion of GDP in 1860, but had there been there’s no doubt the GDP of the North would have been greater than that of the South. Best estimates say the disparity was about 2-1 in favour of the North. The Southern economy was almost one-dimensional, relying overwhelmingly on cotton as an export. The North was far more diversified.Slavery was an issue, but not in the romantic moral way it’s often framed and still seen by some. It was an economic issue, not a moral one (though many wished it had been the latter). Slavery was the engine that drove the Southern economy. The North of course knew this. Thus winning the war for the North also meant stripping the South of its workforce. Lincoln only turned the emancipation of the slaves into a moral issue when it suited him politically, keeping morale for the war high by justifying pursuit of the war morally. If the abolition of slavery had been the Northern cause, the North could have enunciated it from the start. It wasn’t so it didn’t. Only later did emancipation become ammunition in the Northern arsenal. Slaves in the South were thankful for Lincoln’s famous Emancipation Proclamation but suspicious of its motives, and they were right to be, as terrible events for them after the war would prove. The South was defeated, or would be, but Jim Crow was not. When all else fails, blame the victims. In the South’s dire hour of need its black slaves failed Dixie. The masters who had faithfully looked after them for generations were not appreciated, the blacks amounting to nothing more than cowards and traitors. And yet — strange fact — black Southern troops, trained to fight, were sent into action in March 1865 because there weren’t enough white soldiers to carry on fighting. Thus desperate and on its knees, the South turned to its slaves to help free it from Northern tyranny, an irony breathtaking in its stupendous audacity. I am not a psychiatrist but if I were I might easily declare the patient truly, definitively insane.Very briefly, background from the eminent American historian, James M. McPherson:“The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states. When Abraham Lincoln won election in 1860…, pledging to keep slavery out of the territories, seven slaves states in the deep South seceded and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America. The incoming Lincoln administration and most of the Northern people refused to recognise the legitimacy of secession. They feared that it would discredit democracy and create a fatal precedent that would eventually fragment the no-longer United States into several small, squabbling countries.”Simply and accurately put. The North fought for unity, the South for what it saw as its freedom. The two sides could not agree. The South fired the first shots. The war was on.Newton Knight (1837-1922) was a yeoman farmer from southern Mississippi. He owned some acreage inherited from his family. He tilled the soil but owned no slaves. He was a Calvinist, devoutly religious, but liberal in his application of what he saw as truths in the Bible. We’re all children of God, he thought and said. As such, ownership of others is invalid, not possible. A man can own a horse, a dog, some land and a house, but he cannot own another man, a child of God who is equal in His eyes. It was plain, clear, written. Slavery and segregation were evils in the world, so the perpetrators of them were also evil. Newt’s war would not be against the North. His enemies were closer to home: the rich slave-holding plantation owners and crooked politicians who supported them. He would wage it with a vengeance, as any crusader does, and in the process he became a legend — deserter from the Confederate Army, outlaw, rebel among the Dixie rebels, enforcer, Robin Hood. His private war with the South would lead to the temporary unofficial creation of a new country inside the United States of America — the Free State of Jones, its handwritten Constitution honouring the equality of all God’s children regardless of colour, gender or creed.His battle with the South began in October 1862 when he walked away from the war. He was a medic at the Second Battle of Corinth, a Union victory fought in northern Mississippi near the Tennessee border. He’d seen enough: poor white boys, farmers from the South, dying in their hundreds to keep rich slave and plantation owners rich back home. It made no sense, Biblical or otherwise. So he fled to take up arms against the real enemy in his homeland. He would fight for the poor farmers in Jones County whose farms had been ransacked for food, grain and livestock by the army, for clothing and blankets, and for any other supplies that might help the Confederate Army continue to wage war. Who was left behind to defend such goods? Women and children, that’s who. When word of this reached Newt he went back home to arm Jones County against its oppressors.The soil in the county is rough and thin, not the best for farming. It’s gravelly and stony. Crops such as corn have to be tended well to grow. This part of Mississippi is also swampy. Life was not easy for yeoman farmers, foresters, and other men who lived off the land. From it they scratched what they could.In all, there were at least 14 documented skirmishes between Newt and the Confederate Army, though not all are shown in the film. His group was made up of army deserters and runaway slaves. There were also women in it, including Rachel, a house slave he would later marry in common law fashion, defying the race laws of Mississippi, living with her and their five children on their remote property near the swamps, shotgun always by his side. Nobody messed with Newton Knight. That was the word and the word was respected. He had magical powers. He was some sort of voodoo man. Such was the folk wisdom, allowing the racists to leave him alone in peace.The madness of race is the falsity, cruelty and perversity of an idea. That’s all it is — an idea, a cultural invention, a folktale, a grand misunderstanding, a vast superstition, a great stupidity with no basis in fact, in actuality, in scientific proof; a destructive idea that divides, that gives legitimacy to hatred and exclusion, to inequality and injustice; a disgraceful thing that only humans could dream up, as all other animals in the kingdom have better sense than man.It began in tribalism, in Them and Us. Our group is good, theirs bad. Ours is normal, theirs not. Our customs make sense, theirs don’t. Our sounds, our language, establish the word, their gibberish does not. Our god is true, theirs false. All made worse, of course, when colour, skin tint, is thrown in — proof positive of the Other in the tribal mind. Man the beast armed with dangerous ideas.In the South it got particularly bad: lynchings, segregation laws, voter harassment, the U.S. Constitution spat upon. For some (Jim Crow, the KKK) the war never ended, the myth of the Lost Cause perpetuated, the one that insists the Old South was honourable, noble, just.It has taken years to deconstruct and demolish that myth, though abuse persists, and not only in the South. Education works slowly and old bad habits die hard. Facts aren’t facts for some, only what they want them to be, science dead in the minds of millions.Newton Knight was a man of stubborn, righteous pride and principle. He saw race and segregation for what it was — hokum, a political and social construct. He hated the secessionists and the landowning, slave-holding hypocrites who lived off the toil and sweat of others and called themselves aristocratic. He supported the Union because he believed in unity, not divisiveness. He represented goodness because he practiced charity, compassion, generosity, equality and justice. There was no Lost Cause because it never existed. It was all an invention, a fabrication, a ruse of the rich over the poor, of master over slave. The old antebellum South was built, sustained and eventually morally bankrupted by this myth. Losing the war was the best thing that could have happened to the South but many Southerners could not see past the myth. Newton Knight could. He was never duped. He was always his own man because he had the toughness and courage to be it.This film pays fine homage to him and that courage — a courage, not incidentally, that now resides on the right side of history. His story needed to be told, so let us give thanks for this beautiful film.

After suffering considerable disappointments recently, with highly recommended films like Heaven's Gate and Margin Call and holding reservations as to whether the producer of The Hunger Games could really creating anything of worth, I still couldn't resist a feeling of optimism when this DVD dropped through the letter box.As it turned out, I can completely see why so many critics have trashed it. Aside from the photography, which is faultless bar occasional yellowing of the picture- perhaps a DVD issue, it is a film which is preoccupied with social class as the central dynamic of history. From the outset, confederate troops are depicted discussing the Civil War as a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.The central character is Newton Knight, a man cut from the same cloth as John Brown, he of the mouldering body. A Calvinist, egalitarian, abolitionist Unionist, he is driven by the heat of civil war to fight his “own side”- if you accept that the side told you by the powers that be is actually so, and to create the first multi-ethnic community in the US to include African-Americans, a community that persisted in Mississippi long after that war.The film necessarily cuts across both the Southern "Lost Cause" and "Black Nationalist" narratives. The long concealed class antagonisms within the Confederacy are clear for all to see, the real issues of the Civil War laid bare, along with the revolutionary response to them of many citizens of the Confederacy. Based on documented fact, it convincingly dispels the subsequently manufactured nostalgia for a lost southern Eden.One of the slurs thrown most liberally at Free State of Jones by middle class critics of all shades and hues, is that it is yet another "White Saviour" film which depicts the noble, benevolent and intelligent white man generously coming to the rescue of helpless, stupid blacks. It is not possible to arrive at such a view of this film without resort to the most mendacious selective vision. On the contrary, while Newt and other white farmers and deserters are driven to insurrection by the Confederacy itself, in Newt's first contact with a slave, she, his future wife, cures his white child of life threatening fever. Not another Black Saviour film, surely? There is just the inconvenient fact that most of this insurgency, along with its leader, Newton Knight, were white, also that the very nature of slavery requires poor education. It would be one thing to cherry pick an isolated white led insurgency while leaving more numerous slave led insurgencies in the dustbin of untold history, but the fact is that Knight's insurgency, like a good handful of others in the South, had a similar ethnic makeup. In this light, the "White Saviour" criticism is nothing but an appeal to falsify, to black Disneyfy if you like, actual history, to comply with a contemporary political narrative. Show me a single case in which the falsification of history serves a progressive cause?Stemming from middle class critics, luvvies and pseudo academics of the kind that consciously conceal Obama's blatant criminality while feigning outrage at the same in Bush or Trump, this fake progressive narrative is no less racist than the white supremacist one it does not oppose, so much as complement. As great class battles and new, potentially civilisation ending wars loom globally once again, this film lays bare the social essence of a previous one, that the past might inform the present. It is well timed, yet once again the privileged middle class pipes up in the service of big capital! As we see all over Europe and the US, no less in India, the Middle East, actually too many places to mention here, division of the working class along various national, ethnic and religious grounds is the preferred instrument of the oligarchs' rule, the rule of those 60 odd individuals who control more wealth than the poorest half of the world’s population. Free State of Jones shows, as would a factual history of the pre-Stalinist Soviet Union, society does not have to be this way anymore.My only criticism of the film is that the post-Civil War period could and should have been treated in greater detail. Newton Knight's activities in this period are skimmed over all too briefly and parts of the story did not hang together well. The historical record provides more than sufficient material, much of which is simply not mentioned, for a separate film altogether. A deeper investigation of the conflicting social interests at work and how the landowners used racism to reassert their dominance of society and its wealth, is a warning from history of all too contemporary relevance.

This film was OK expected it to better but as the review stats it was alright. Its stayed a lot with the main character. Which spoiled it for me.

Worth watching... should make more about what happens to the children