The Story : After surviving the Second Battle of Corinth and being told of the Twenty Negro Law that allows wealthy men to avoid being conscripted into military service, Newton Knight, a battlefield surgeon in the Confederate Army, deserts after his…
The Story : After surviving the Second Battle of Corinth and being told of the Twenty Negro Law that allows wealthy men to avoid being conscripted into military service, Newton Knight, a battlefield surgeon in the Confederate Army, deserts after his nephew Daniel is forced into military service, only to be mortally wounded and then denied medical care while the officers are tended to first. Upon returning home, Knight buries Daniel and reconnects with his wife, Serena. He befriends Rachel, an enslaved woman who has secretly learned to read, after she treats his infant son's illness.
Newton's disenchantment with the Confederacy grows after he learns that Confederate troops have been seizing crops, livestock, and draft animals from his neighbors, even though most are already struggling to feed their families. Newton threatens a Confederate officer, Barbour, at gunpoint; when Confederate militiamen are ordered to arrest him for treason, Newton is bitten by one of their attack dogs while trying to escape. Abolitionist-oriented Aunt Sally, a sympathetic community leader, has her servant George take him into the swamps, where he is put under the protection of runaway slave Moses Washington and his followers.
After the fall of Vicksburg, Confederate deserters flock into Jones County. Newton persuades his neighbors to provide him with weapons and organizes the deserters and slaves into a well-disciplined militia. When the rebels begin ambushing military convoys to take back their property, Barbour and his commanding officer, Col. Hood, order their farms to be torched. Serena is forced to flee with her son as Newton cannot protect them. Hood offers pardons to any rebel who agrees to rejoin the army, but when some of Newton's men abandon him and ask to be pardoned, Hood goes back on his word and sentences them to be hanged.
The rebels, appearing to accept defeat, persuade Hood to let them hold a funeral for the deceased under military guard. Suddenly, marksmen hidden under the church and in the coffins fire on the soldiers as the mourners take pistols from their coats and join in. The soldiers are all killed, and Newton strangles Hood to death with his belt. Barbour escapes, but he and the remaining troops in the county are driven out by the rebels, who declare the establishment of the "Free State of Jones". Swearing allegiance to the United States, the rebels manage to defend their territory against Confederate reinforcements for the remainder of the war.
Newton continues to fight racial inequality after the war. He helps free Moses' son from an "apprenticeship" to Rachel's former master. After Moses is lynched while registering freedmen to vote, Newton is seen participating in a march of voters to the polls while they sing "John Brown's Body". He eventually reconciles with Serena and has a son with Rachel. Since they are unable to legally marry, Newton arranges for Rachel to be deeded a parcel of his land for farming upon his death.
The film ends with Newton's great-grandson, Davis Knight, being arrested under Mississippi's anti-miscegenation laws in 1948. Since he has an eighth of black ancestry, the law considers him to be black, and he therefore has to divorce his white wife, which he refuses to. He is sentenced to five years in prison for refusing to leave the state, but his conviction is thrown out by the Mississippi Supreme Court in 1949, rather than risk the law being declared unconstitutional .
Newton Knight played by McConaughey lived to an Old Age and continued to piss people off.
Posted For educational purposes so everything is cool.
