NEWTON KNIGHT
(Newt Knight)
Knight led a band of whites and blacks who fought off the Confederate Troops sent to Jones County of Missisippi, to eleminate the Free State of Jones which tehy had set up, and seceded from the Confederacy. They had infuriated teh Confederate Government becasue it was an interracial community with a great deal of intermarriage and no discrimination agaisnt Blacks and they welcomed runaway slaves and white deserters from the Confederate Army.
Newton Knight was an American farmer, soldier and Southern Unionist in Mississippi, best known as the leader of the Knight Company, a band of Confederate army deserters who resisted the Confederacy during the Civil War. Local legends tell of Knight and his men forming the "Free State of Jones" in the area in and around Jones County, Mississippi, at the height of the war. The nature and extent of the Knight Company's opposition to the Confederate government is disputed among historians. After the war, Knight joined the Republican Party and served in Mississippi's Reconstruction government as a deputy US Marshal.
