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Jones County is a county located in the U.S. state of Mississippi. As of the 2010 census, the population was 67,761.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/28/28067.html )〕 Its county seats are Laurel and Ellisville.〔(【引用サイトリンク】accessdate=2011-06-07 )〕 Jones County is part of the Laurel, MS Micropolitan Statistical Area. ==History== Less than a decade after Mississippi became the country's 20th state, settlers carved out a 700-square mile of pine forests and streams for a new county in 1826. They named it Jones County after John Paul Jones, the early American Naval hero who rose from humble Scottish origin to military success during the American Revolution.〔(Jones County Mississippi Official Site )〕 Ellisville, the county seat, was named for Powhatan Ellis, a member of the Mississippi Legislature who claimed to be a direct descendant of Pocahontas. During the economic hard times in the 1830s and 1840s, there was an exodus of population from South Mississippi, principally to Texas, and the slogan "GTT" ("Gone to Texas") came into currency. 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.〔( Kelly Jr., James R. Newton Knight and the Legend of the Free State of Jones. Mississippi History Now. Mississippi Historical Society. )〕 What followed was a period of anti-confederate rebellion that resulted in what has come to be known as the Free State of Jones. No fewer than 4 books, numerous articles, one novel and a film based on that novel have been inspired by the events in Jones County during the American Civil War. As Mississippi debated the secession question, the inhabitants of Jones County voted overwhelmingly for the anti-secessionist John Hathorne Powell, Jr. In comparison to the pro-secessionist J.M. Bayliss, who received 24 votes, Powell received 374.〔Leverett, Rudy H., Legend of the Free State of Jones, University Press of Mississippi, 1984, pages 38-41.〕 However, at the Secession Convention, Powell voted for secession. Legend has it that, for his vote, he was burned in effigy in Ellisville, the county seat.〔Leverett, Rudy H., Legend of the Free State of Jones, University Press of Mississippi, 1984, pages 38-41.〕 The reality is more complicated, for the only votes possible at the Secession Convention were for immediate secession, on the one hand, or a more cautious, co-operative approach to secession among several Southern states, on the other. Powell almost certainly voted for the more conservative approach to secession—the only position realistically available to him that was consistent with the anti-secessionist views of his constituency.〔Leverett, Rudy H., Legend of the Free State of Jones, University Press of Mississippi, 1984.〕 During the American Civil War, Jones County and neighboring counties, especially Covington County to its west, became a haven for Confederate deserters.〔 A number of factors prompted desertions. The lack of food and supplies was demoralizing while reports of poor conditions back home made the men fear for their families' survival. Small farms deteriorated from neglect or were despoiled by the Confederate tax-in-kind agents who took excessive amounts of yeoman farmers’ goods. Many were also outraged over the Confederate government's passing of the Twenty Negro Law, allowing wealthy plantation owners to avoid military service if they owned twenty slaves or more.〔 On October 13, 1863, a band of deserters from Jones County and adjacent counties organized to protect the area from Confederate authorities and the crippling tax collections.〔("The State of Jones" co-authored with Sally Jenkins, New York: Doubleday, 2009, page 378 )〕 The company, led by Newt Knight, fought fourteen skirmishes with Confederate forces. They also raided Paulding, capturing five wagonloads of corn that had been collected for tax from area farms, which they distributed back among the local population.〔Leverett, Rudy H., ''Legend of the Free State of Jones'', University Press of Mississippi, 1984, page 64.〕 The company harassed Confederate officials, with reports of deaths among numerous tax collectors, conscript officers, and other officials in 1864.〔 The governor was then informed by the Jones County court clerk that deserters had made tax collections in the county impossible.〔Leverett, Rudy H., ''Legend of the Free State of Jones'', University Press of Mississippi, 1984, page 112.〕 By the spring of 1864, the Confederate government in the county had been effectively overthrown.〔 The American flag was raised over the courthouse in Ellisville, and General William T. Sherman received a letter from a local group declaring its independence from the Confederacy.〔 In July 1864, the Natchez Courier reported that Jones County had seceded from the Confederacy.〔Leverett, Rudy H., ''Legend of the Free State of Jones'', University Press of Mississippi, 1984, page 17-29.〕 The legend of Newt Knight and his “company” soon became lore. His son Thomas J. Knight wrote an account of his father that painted a Robin Hood-like character, protecting poor white farmers from the abuses of tax agents.〔(Thomas J. "Thos. J. Knight’s Story of His Father, Newton Knight" )〕 A subsequent book was written by another relative, Ethel Knight, entitled Echo of the Black Horn. This piece of family history was highly critical of Knight, branding him a traitor to the Confederacy and castigating him for a mixed-race relationship with a former slave named Rachel, with whom he would have children and next to whose body Newt Knight is currently buried.〔(Ethel. "The Echo of the Black Horn." pages 69, 261, 321, 327 )〕 The novel Tap Roots by James H. Street, loosely based on the Jones County rebellion, was published in 1942. A film version was made by Universal Pictures in 1948. This was a very loose fictionalization that used the Jones County rebellion as a basis for allegory. Rudy H. Leverett's book The Legend of the Free State of Jones (University of Mississippi Press, 1984, reprinted 2009) was the first to take a scholarly look at events in Jones County before and during the Civil War. Leverett showed that Jones County never seceded from the Confederacy. Victoria E. Bynum, Professor Emerita at Texas State University, was the next person to turn a scholarly eye on Jones County and the secession legend. Bynum, whose father was born in Jones County, became interested in researching the Civil War uprising after learning of its alleged secession from the Confederacy. Her book emphasizes the cultural, geographic, economic, and kinship roots of the anti-Confederate outrage that plunged the county into a bloody inner civil war between 1863 and 1865. Bynum takes this history beyond the Civil War, however, examining the interracial relationship between Newton Knight and Rachel Knight, a former slave, and by tracing its legacy into the twentieth century.〔''The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War'' by Victoria E. Bynum, Professor of History at Texas State University, published by Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.〕 Bynum also details the Confederate reaction to Knight: an expedition of Col. Robert Lowry into the area to root them out. She documents Confederate concern including a warning from Daniel P. Logan that the deserter bands were "openly boasting of their being in communication with the Yankees", and were assembling in the area of Honey Island. Bynum writes: According to Newt Knight, during this period his company continually sought connections with the Union Army. He recounted how Jasper Collins had traveled without success to Memphis and Vicksburg to seek the company’s recruitment into the Union Army. Newt also recalled that “Johnny Rebs busted up the party they sent to swear us in,” explaining that a company of Union forces sent to recruit men of the Knight Company was waylaid by Confederate forces at Rocky Creek. After that, he said, “I sent a courier to the federal commander at New Orleans. He sent us 400 rifles. The Confederates captured them.” Newt concluded that “we’ll all die guerrillas, I reckon. Never could break through the rebels to join the Union Army.”〔Bynum, Free State of Jones, pp. 115, 117〕 A more recent account 〔("The State of Jones" )〕 by Sally Jenkins (sports columnist for the Washington Post) and John Stauffer (chair of the Program in the History of the American Civilization and professor of English and of African and African American studies at Harvard University), expands marginally on Leverett's and Bynum's research. The authors contribute additional research to emphasize the extent to which, they contend, Knight ended Confederate control of Jones County during the war and continued to express anti-racist pro-unionist sympathies during Reconstruction. Stauffer and Jenkins point to post-war incidents that they argue indicate Knight’s struggle did not end in 1865. He rescued an African American child from a forced “apprenticeship” in the immediate aftermath of the war. In March 1875, he accepted a commission by Governor Adelbert Ames to the 1st Mississippi Regiment of Infantry in Jasper County, which by that point in Reconstruction was an all black unit, defending African Americans from Klan violence. Perhaps most significantly, Stauffer and Jenkins point to the fact that Newt chose to be buried in an all black cemetery (in direct violation of Mississippi law at the time). Leverett's book is less sympathetic to Knight and argues that the Jones County rebellion was overstated and that Knight's actions were not representative of Jones County residents whose overwhelming loyalty was to the Confederacy.〔(FactFinder". United States Census Bureau. Retrieved 2008-01-31 )〕 Leverett points out that while "few of these people had any real stake in the great economic and political issues that precipitated the war and that most of them opposed the political policy of secession (the South from the Union ), the threat of coercion of the South by the North galvanized the loyalties of Jones Countians to their region and their way of life (Confederacy. ) And for most of them, that loyalty never wavered." One such man was Leverett's great grandfather, Amos McLemore, who until the war was a Jones County schoolteacher, pastor, and of a family established in the South for nearly two hundred years. McLemore took charge as Major of the Rosin Heels, "the second () among eight raised in the area that consisted of all, or significant numbers of Jones County men.〔Leverett, Rudy H., ''Legend of the Free State of Jones'', University Press of Mississippi, 1984, pages 65-68.〕 In spite of pre-War opposition to secession and the number of "transient deserters" in the county, Leverett asserts that the activities of such formerly anti-secessionist individuals as McLemore along with the facts "that virtually every able-bodied man in the county was on active duty in organizations such as those commanded by McLemore ... and that the Union raiding party entering the county in June of 1863 was captured by civilians, and the Union prisoners had to be protected from the local citizens"—among other facts—present undeniable evidence that the citizens of Jones County were loyal to the Confederacy.〔 Major McLemore was killed by Newt Knight in October 1863 when McLemore was dispatched temporarily from the front to Jones County to round up deserters who had returned there.〔 Knight remains an elusive figure and the rebellion in Jones County has been characterized as everything from some local skirmishes to a full-fledged war of independence. Film director Gary Ross is currently developing a movie titled ''The Free State of Jones''. He has optioned both the Bynum and Stauffer/Jenkins books with a US release date set for 11th of March 2016 〔http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1124037/?ref_=tt_rec_tt〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Jones County, Mississippi」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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