Interesting stuff. A group of "Southern Yankees" as they called themselves. While it's easy for Southerners now to look at the story and call them flat out traitors. If you see what they were indeed fighting against and for, it's hard to call them that.

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Soon after the election of Abraham Lincoln as United States president in November 1860, slave-owning planters led Mississippi to join South Carolina and secede from the Union in January 1861. Other southern states would follow suit. Mississippi’s Declaration of Secession reflected the planters’ interests in the first sentence: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery ….” However, the yeoman farmers and cattle herders of Jones County had little use for a war over a “state’s right” to maintain the institution of slavery. By 1860, slaves made up only 12 percent of the total population in Jones County, the smallest percentage of any county in the state.

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April 1861 the American Civil War began. Many Mississippians, including Newt Knight, were opposed to secession and war. They viewed the rebellious Confederate government as the invading body. But the state was swept up in war-fever, and those who opposed the new Confederate government were labeled cowards or traitors. All across Mississippi, the opponents of the Confederacy were often persecuted in what witnesses described as “… a reign of terror … Many are forced into the army, instant death being the penalty in case of refusal, thus constraining us to bear arms against our country ….” Under these circumstances, Knight reluctantly enlisted in the Confederate Army in the early fall of 1861.

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May 13, 1862, Newt Knight enlisted as a private with his friends and neighbors into Company F of the Seventh Battalion, Mississippi Infantry in Jasper County. They enlisted together so they could avoid being drafted away to serve with strangers.

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the Confederate Congress had passed the infamous “Twenty-Negro Law,” which allowed planters who owned twenty or more slaves to be exempt from fighting. Newt’s friend and comrade, Private Jasper Collins, was furious: “This law … makes it a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” Collins threw down his weapon and left the Confederate Army for good.

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Newt was shocked by the condition of the people on the home front. With so many men away fighting the war, the farms were run-down and crops had failed for lack of labor. The women of Jones, Jasper, and Smith counties were struggling to feed their hungry children. Even worse, the Confederate authorities had imposed the hated “tax-in-kind” system in which tax collectors took what they wanted for use by the Confederate armies. They took meat from the smokehouses. They took horses, hogs, chickens, and corn. They took cloth the women had saved to make clothes for the children. Confederate Colonel William N. Brown reported that the corrupt Confederate tax officials had “done more to demoralize Jones County than the whole Yankee army.”

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Newton Knight quickly organized a company of approximately 125 men from Jones, Jasper, Covington, and Smith counties to defend themselves against the Confederates.

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The Natchez Courier reported in its July 12, 1864, edition that Jones County had seceded from the Confederacy. A few days after his destructive Meridian campaign in February 1864, Union General Sherman wrote that he had received “a declaration of independence” from a group of local citizens who opposed the Confederacy.

whole story here

Interesting to me. A lot of people (n this board especially) romanticize the South. We forget that the middle class and soldiers families were being shite on so that the plantation class could survive. Interesting to see how many confederate families starved because of crooked Confederate tax officials. It's easy to see why the Free State of Jones was declared.

I know most won't care to learn about this and shrug it off as abolitionist history, but these are the tales from the war that are important.
I wonder how well the movie will convey this story. It's always been an interesting tale for me.