The Knight Company numbered 125 aided by Black and White locals, including a slave named Rachel. In protest, Knight gathered his so-called “Knight Company” to defend Jones County farmers from the Confederacy in 1863. Knight and other Jones County farmers saw this, coupled with high taxes as an attack on poor farmers. The Confederate government passed what was known as the “Twenty Negro Law,” which meant farmers who owned more than 20 slaves could avoid the draft. According to accounts, Knight did this to avoid the death penalty should he have openly refused to fight. Knight did enlisted willingly into the Confederate Army although he would have been drafted anyway in 1861. Knight, much like many others in Jones County, didn’t support the Confederacy and its desire to secede from the Union during The Civil War.
Newton Knight, a farmer and former soldier, led a group of fighters in an attempt to secede from the Confederacy and went on to form the first mixed-race community in Mississippi.īorn in November 1837, Knight was a grandchild of one of the largest slave-owners in Jones County, Miss., though Knight’s father and Knight never owned slaves, which some historians say may have been due to the farmer’s Primitive Baptist church upbringing. As the debate around the Confederate Flag rages across Southern states in America, the little-known tale of an anti-slavery and anti-Confederacy rebellion led by a white man is coming to light.
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