The American Civil War did not solely pit the North against the South. Political opposition to the Lincoln administration in the Northern states was widespread enough to make the president doubt his chances for reelection in 1864. It included a sizable contingent of “Copperheads” who openly or clandestinely opposed the war. In the Confederate states, hundreds of thousands of African-Americans broke free from slavery’s bonds to welcome and aid Yankee armies, with many black men donning Union uniforms. More than 100,000 Southern white men, many of them from the Appalachian highlands, proved their loyalty to the United States by joining Northern forces.

One hotbed of Southern loyalists — staunch Confederates called them Tories — was in the Piney Woods region of southeastern Mississippi, centering in Jones County. There, Unionists banded in quasi-military companies to wage war against the Confederacy, attacking military personnel and infrastructure targets before disappearing into hideaways in the forests and swamps.

Their insurrection within a rebellion grew so bold as to draw retaliation from the Confederate authorities, who dispatched a sizable force from the army to quell the uprising. Unionists were hunted down and shot or hanged, but the opposition was never entirely crushed, and by the end of the war the loyalists remained largely in control of the region.

The State of Jones relates the Unionists’ struggle through the story of their leader, Newton Knight. An opponent of secession, a yeoman farmer who resented the aristocratic, slave-owning fire-eaters who dominated Mississippi politically, twice an unwilling, conscripted Confederate soldier and twice a deserter, Knight proved to be a gifted and wily commander of the loyalist guerrilla band. Unlike almost all white Mississippians, Knight was an abolitionist who wound up siring two large families, one with his white wife and one with a former slave named Rachel.

Co-authors Sally Jenkins, a journalist for the Washington Post, and John Stauffer, a professor at Harvard, relate Newt Knight’s story in suitably dramatic and often flamboyant fashion. They carry the story into the postwar era of impoverished and benighted Mississippi, the years of failed Reconstruction, black codes and Jim Crow, lynch mobs and the Ku Klux Klan, to the 1920s, when the elderly Knight sat on his front porch, rifle at the ready, staring over the fields to the road, waiting for his unrelenting enemies to appear.

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