The Free State of Jones opens in theaters in May 2016. The protagonist of the film is a poor white yeoman farmer in Mississippi, played by Matthew McConaughey, who, never liking secession, rebels against forced conscription and the plundering of his community's poor white farmers by scions of the aristocratic planter class. Recall, the family of Jeff Davis, so-called president of the CSA, were Mississippi aristo planters.
The film isn't based on the book that reads best and is most interesting about Newt Knight, his Mississippi rebellion against the CSA, the history of his first, white, family, and his second, black family, before, during and after the CSA lost the War of Southern Rebellion. The best book is The State of Jones: The Small Southern County that Seceded from the Confederacy (2010) by Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer. The people and events of this book describe clearly in microcosm everything that was wrong with the antebellum south, planter society and slavery, and why the secessionists, being who they were, could never have ever won a war against the North.*
Instead, the film based on the other, earlier book, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War (2001) by Victoria E. Bynum, a collateral (white) descendant of Newton Knight. It's more about herself than it is about Newt and his community.
Nevermind, this film should be, and from trailer, looks to be, a winner.
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* I mentioned some of the problems between these two books here.
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