Portrayal of women and children in Jones County revolt against the Confederacy
I am curious about the portrayal of children and women in the movie Free State of Jones - how accurate it is? No doubt they had an impact, but I am not sure they took part in real battles and fight against the Confederacy armies. Their actions as feeding, hiding and sheltering deserters in swamps is quite true, but taking part in a combat, reloading cannons and shooting rifle seems to me just heroic overstatement. At moment a little search did not brought me closer to viable source the way film portrays women and children among the revolt - to me it seems simply an exaggeration?
Best Answer
I don't know anything about the specific case of Jones County.
As for loading cannons, I don't see much difference except in the amount of labor between loading cannons and loading rifles. In the days before breech loading rifles and repeaters it was common for non combatants to load muzzle-loading muskets and hand them to shooters, instead of having the shooters waste time loading.
For example, I once read about a family attacked by Comanches in Texas about 1840. A 12 year old boy shot the muskets while his parents and siblings loaded them for him.
Loading a cannon would be harder work, but I guess many women would be as strong as John Cook, a bugler in the 4th US Artillery. At the battle of Antietam he was fifteen years old and about five feet tall and weighed about 100 pounds. He did the work of several men loading and firing a cannon by himself until General Gibbon came along and did part of the work.
19th Century American society believed that combat was men's work. The only legal enlistments in armies, for example, were those of men - and boys if musicians. It is currently believed that a few hundred women disguised themselves as men and enlisted in the Civil War.
It seems to me that it would take unusual circumstances for more than a few Jones County women and children to fight the Rebels. Unless there was some special circumstance in the Jones County situation women and children should have been only a very small part of the Jones County fighters.
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How historically accurate is the movie Free State of Jones?
Despite the film's real-life basis and its director's extensive research, Free State Of Jones isn't entirely historically accurate. One major deviation from reality the movie made was in its inclusion of fictional characters.What principles are declared in The Free State of Jones?
You was willin' to get killed for 'em.\u201d After the Knight Company defends the town of Ellisville from Confederate forces, Knight lowers the old battle flag and raises the Stars and Stripes, declaring a \u201cFree State of Jones\u201d and enumerating such principles as \u201cNo man ought to stay poor so another man can get rich\u201d and \u201c ...Is Moses Washington a real person?
Moses Washington (died 1865) was the leader of a group of runaway slaves who helped to form the Free State of Jones in 1862. Washington led several slaves into the swamps of Jones County, Mississippi, where they were joined by Confederate deserter Newton Knight.What time period is Free State of Jones?
It takes place in 1948, when Davis Knight (played by Brian Lee Franklin), the great-grandson of Newton and Rachel, who looks like a white man, is prosecuted in a Mississippi court for his marriage to a white woman, because, under state law, his ancestry renders him officially black.The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Anti-Confederate Insurgency In the Heart of the Civil War
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