The Free State of Jones and the Challenge of Reconstruction History

Last updated on: June 27, 2016 at 10:05 am by Guest Contributor

The Free State of Jones and the Challenge of Reconstruction History 2016-06-27T10:05:00-05:00 Guest Contributor

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

by Michael J. Steudeman

The Free State of Jones is really two movies. The first is a tightly-told story of a rebellion-within-a-rebellion led by Newton Knight during the Civil War. This movie has a familiar story arc, tracing one man’s journey from war defector to the leader of a de facto sovereign territory in Mississippi. Spanning only three years, this story happens in an easily-imagined geographic space, including Ellisville and its surrounding farms, plantations, and swamp.

The second movie is a punctuated set of vignettes, loosely structured around Knight’s life during Reconstruction. While the first movie covers three years of history, the second covers twelve in less than half the cinematic time. The sense of location is lost, as characters are uprooted and relocated. Events happen months, even years, apart, clarified with lengthy subtitles. The nearly 60 percent of reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes who have panned the movie concur that its effort to capture Reconstruction loses a sense of narrative coherence. It feels like a historian’s top-ten list of what “everyone should know about Reconstruction.” The Union Leagues, the Freedmen’s Bureau schools, the 15th Amendment, the immediate disfranchisement of black voters, the violence and intimidation of the Klan—each of these gets its moment. But only a moment. Once The Free State of Jones moves past 1865, reviewers complain, it becomes didactic, a series of incidents rather than a story.

These discrepancies reflect the chasm that divides Americans’ understanding of the Civil War from the tumultuous twelve years that followed. The first history is taught in middle and high school, and it sticks, as the binary narratives of war often do. To mark transitions during the Civil War narrative, the film follows the Ken Burns technique of pan-and-scanning over historical images of battlefields and Lincoln—as if to cue the viewer’s recollection, to say, “Remember? You learned this in school.” This device largely stops during the second half of the movie, likely in part because the most devastating moments of Reconstruction happened in the dark of night and were not caught by Matthew Brady’s camera.

The Reconstruction segments cannot rely on the images in many viewers’ heads, either, because they simply aren’t there. Little time is spent on these stories in school, let alone in popular culture. When Reconstruction is taught, it still remains insidiously inflected by the false narratives of the Southern “Lost Cause.” The narrative flaws that haunt The Free State of Jones are the very things that make the era difficult to teach. The period was a drawn-out series of often-anticlimactic power struggles, not a series of consequential battles. The Freedpeople and Unionists were displaced, through a protracted campaign of intimidation and murder. The politics were complicated. The hopes brought by the Union victory were slowly smothered over many years, not in a day. How does one capture all of this in a movie—or in just half of a movie—without moving so rapidly that the story is lost?

I suspect Gary Ross struggled with these problems during the decade he spent crafting the screenplay for The Free State of Jones. From its earliest announcement, through the trailers, and into its online descriptions, every indicator suggested that Free State of Jones would be a Civil War movie. The allure of the story for Ross, and undoubtedly to the film’s financiers, was Newton Knight’s saga during the war. Reading Ross’s commentary on the movie, though, it’s clear that he gradually discovered that the broad sweep of Reconstruction was just as important to capture. Like the historians he consulted, he kept encountering potent anecdotes of resilience and injustice, of black empowerment, of hopes inflamed and extinguished. This, he rightly recognized, is a story everyone should know.

Like so many historians before him, Ross discovered that it’s a difficult story to tell outside the pages of a 700-page book. Ideally, The Free State of Jones would have been a multiple-season HBO series. Entire episodes could have been spent highlighting the racial tensions between the white defectors and runaway slaves in Knight’s camp. Instead of one tussle over a black man eating some rotisserie pork, the complex, rapidly-changing dynamics around race could have been treated with the nuance they deserved. During Reconstruction, the trauma of lost promises could have been treated in more than a one-scene discussion of Andrew Johnson’s policy of restoration. This didn’t happen.

Nonetheless, for the future of Reconstruction Era history-telling, The Free State of Jones leaves room for hope. It is heartening that critical reviewers have called the film a “noble failure.” If the effort is noble, that means more will try. When they do, they can borrow one strategy of Ross’s that, I’d argue, did work well: a strategy of building composite characters to express the gravity of historical change. One example is Lieutenant Barbour, a recurring antagonist of Knight’s who quickly assumes a role as a prominent judge right after the war. Built from several different people the real-life Knight encountered, this character illustrated the frustrating speed with which racist, slavocratic business-as-usual resumed the moment war ended. A more powerful composite character is Moses Washington (played by Mahershala Ali), a fictional escaped slave with a storyline drawn together from the known histories of thousands of freedpeople in the postbellum South. At times a more “real” character than even Knight, Moses emerged as the chief protagonist of the Reconstruction Era portion of the movie, elucidating the crucial role black men and women played in fighting for their own rights and liberties after the war.

When the war ended, The Free State of Jones was no longer about Knight or his rebellion. It became about his efforts to assist freedpeople in a struggle that was, too often, entirely their own. Knight became a lonely ally in someone else’s story. The story of Moses—and the many real people he represented—needs to be told on its own terms. Hopefully, other filmmakers will see the vast potential in Ross’s effort and follow his lead.

Michael J. Steudeman is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Rhetoric
at the University of Memphis.

Donate to the Work of R3

Like the work we do at Rhetoric Race and Religion? Please consider helping us continue to do this work. All donations are tax-deductible through Gifts of Life Ministries/G’Life Outreach, a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization, and our fiscal sponsor. Any donation helps. Just click here to support our work.

Previous Post

June 20, 2016

Writing Only for Myself: The Dissent of Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Next Post

July 7, 2016 Hear My Prayer: A Lament for Blackness

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Amy Steele Andre E. Johnson Book Reviews/Series Brian Foulks Call for Chapters Carol Howard Merritt Classes Conferences Contributors Crystal St.Marie Lewis Daniel White Hodge Earle Fisher Eulogy Fredrick Robinson Guest Contributions Henry McNeal Turner Institutes Interviews Joseph Boston Katherine Whitfield Kimberly Peeler-Ringer Lectures/Roundtables Natalie Bullock Brown R3 Book Series R3 Contributor Rashad Grove Readers Reflections Symposiums Teaching Traci Ellis Travis Harris Uncategorized Video

Select a Month June 2020 February 2020 December 2019 November 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 October 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz