Workers Vanguard No. 1093
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29 July 2016
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Guns, Guts and Glory-Free State of Jones: A Movie Review
The Civil War and Reconstruction constituted the Second American Revolution. The war was a conflict between two social systems: Northern industrial capitalism and Southern slavery. The Union Army, which included 200,000 black troops who helped turn the tide of war, crushed the slave system. During Radical Reconstruction, black and white radicals of the Republican Party, protected by Union soldiers, sought to fulfill the promise of racial equality in the South. However, the victorious Northern bourgeoisie, in pursuit of its class interests, betrayed Reconstruction by making common cause with the vanquished Southern landholders. The defeat of Reconstruction has left a lasting imprint on American society: the black population was consolidated as an oppressed race-color caste, the majority of which is forcibly segregated at the bottom of society.
The movie tells the remarkable story of Newton Knight, an antislavery, pro-Union white farmer in Jones County, Mississippi. During the Civil War, Knight deserted the Confederate Army and led an integrated militia of escaped slaves and other white deserters that fought fierce battles against the Confederacy. They eventually raised the Union flag in Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s home state, and declared Jones County and the surrounding area a free state.
As the movie unfolds, it tracks the evolution of Knight’s consciousness—from a disillusioned Confederate soldier to a defender of poor farmers, to a skilled and resourceful guerrilla war leader, to a militant defender of black rights during Reconstruction. To avoid conscription, Knight reluctantly enlisted in the Confederate Army, and chose to serve as a battlefield orderly attending to wounded soldiers rather than fire his rifle at Union troops. When the Confederate Congress passed the “Twenty Negro Law,” which exempted planters who owned 20 or more slaves from military service, Knight and his friend Jasper Collins were infuriated. The film shows Collins declaring that this law “makes it a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” as he threw down his weapon and left the Confederate Army for good. Newton soon followed Collins out of the Southern military, turning his back to the Confederacy and his guns against it.
Knight returned to a home ravaged by the Confederacy’s hated “tax-in-kind” seizures that left small farmers and their families destitute and near starvation. Appalled by these conditions, Knight decided to intercede on behalf of his neighbors, arming and training them to confront Confederate soldiers. In one scene, a mother and her young daughters, all armed under Knight’s leadership, successfully barred tax agents from pillaging their farm.
For those efforts, Knight was pursued by the authorities and their bloodhounds, and he found refuge among a group of runaway slaves living deep in the swamps of Piney Woods. He was led to them by Rachel (portrayed by Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a domestic slave who provided the group with food and information on Confederate moves. She eventually became Knight’s lover, and later they lived together as husband and wife. Soon Knight was joined by other deserters, among them Jasper Collins.
As its ranks swelled, the band of deserters and runaway slaves organized themselves into a guerrilla force, elected Knight their captain and vowed to do what they could to aid the Union. They ambushed Southern troops, destroyed railroads, burned bridges and raided plantations and food warehouses. In one powerful scene, armed men and women, black and white, avenge the execution of their comrades at the hands of Confederate officials by using the funeral as a cover to launch a surprise attack on Confederate soldiers. The film powerfully shows the important role that arms have long played in the struggle for black rights—and the rights of all the oppressed.
In the spring of 1864, the Knight militia chased the Confederate forces out of Jones County and raised the federal flag over the county courthouse in Ellisville. The film shows Knight enunciating a series of principles in declaring the Free State of Jones, including: “Every man is a man—If you walk on two legs, you’re a man” and “No man ought to stay poor so another man can get rich.”
By 1876, Knight had retreated to his farm on the Jasper County border. He and Rachel had five children together. Knight also fathered nine children with his first (white) wife, Serena, and the two families lived on the same farm. He deeded Rachel 160 acres of land to secure her independence. Newton Knight died in 1922 at the age of 84. Defying segregation laws, he instructed that he should be buried next to Rachel. His gravestone, with an emblem of his beloved shotgun, reads: “He Lived For Others.”
The Myth of “White Skin Privilege”
Free State of Jones has generated a fair amount of criticism, notably from some liberal black commentators who have screeched against its portrayal of Knight as a “white savior.” In a June 27 article, New York Times columnist Charles Blow claimed that the movie “centers on the ally instead of the enslaved.” Blow willfully distorts the fact that it was the runaway slaves who saved Knight, not the other way around. They sheltered him, tended to his wounds and taught him how to survive in the swamps.
Blow claims that the film “purges” slavery “of too much of its barbarism.” Yet much of the power of the film is precisely that it portrays slaves not just as tortured victims of a barbaric system—though that reality is omnipresent—but also as members of an organized force in rebellion against their oppressors. Newton Knight was not a fiction. He was a historical figure, and the movie accurately tells his story based on historical research, particularly Victoria Bynum’s The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (2001).
In fact, the film punctures many of the myths that have long been promoted to bury the true history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Under the racist ideology of the “lost cause,” the South supposedly fought for home and independence, while the North fought for the Union—with slavery all but written out of the account. Reconstruction was deemed the worst period in U.S. history, born of a vindictive North that forced military rule on the South and imposed “Negro domination.”
As Gary Ross, the director of Free State of Jones, points out on the film’s website, popular depictions of Reconstruction are captured by movies like Birth of a Nation (1915), “a racist film that misleads, rewrites, and obscures the truth about Reconstruction.” Similarly, Gone with the Wind (1939) mourns the destruction of the “Southern way of life” in the wake of the war. In reality, the “lost cause” of the Civil War was slavery, as Confederate leaders openly proclaimed at the time.
Yet today, Knight’s race rankles in an age in which “white skin privilege,” the lie that all white people benefit from black oppression, has become common currency on college campuses and in liberal milieus. This idea denies that class divisions exist within the white population and that racial oppression serves to deepen the exploitation of all workers. The horrific conditions of life—rotten schools and dilapidated housing, widespread unemployment and low-wage jobs, no health care—that blacks and immigrant workers have long endured are now increasingly faced by the working class as a whole. The mythology of “white skin privilege” is born of despair that rejects integrated class and social struggle to beat back the attacks of the capitalist rulers, or, at best, cannot even conceive of it.
In a hostile review in The Atlantic (28 June), Vann Newkirk wrote: “The film’s ideas about race and its main character Knight are textbook examples of how not to have conversations about white privilege, ‘allyship,’ and black struggle.” Newkirk charges that the film sidesteps “the racial politics of a mixed-race insurgency in the South” and portrays the escaped slaves as being “impossibly trusting” of Knight. In fact, the film does not shy away from depicting the race prejudice of some of the militia’s white members—and of Knight’s struggle with them, notwithstanding the liberal lie that racial divisions are fixed and unalterable. Whether consciously or not, the film reflects the vitally important reality that united struggle by the oppressed tends to break down racial, ethnic and other divisions.
Reconstruction: A Promise Betrayed
While overwhelmingly accurate, Free State of Jones does have at least one serious inaccuracy. After raising the Union flag in Ellisville, the film shows Knight sending one of his men to Union general William T. Sherman to appeal for aid, but only getting 100 rifles. Feeling abandoned, Knight then addresses his supporters, telling them, “we’re kinda our own country,” and issues the decree establishing the Free State of Jones. Actually, there is evidence that Sherman forwarded the support request up the chain of command and that there were several attempts by Union commanders to send aid, including 400 rifles, but they were captured by Confederate forces. As Knight himself explained in a 1921 interview, “The Federals sent a company to recruit us. That company was waylaid by some Confederates near Rocky Creek. It surrendered.”
The movie also gives short shrift to the period of Reconstruction, though it contains scenes, some of them unique in Hollywood cinematography, that powerfully evoke the post-Civil War reality in the South. We see a plantation owner cynically pronouncing an oath of allegiance to the Union and then getting back his land. The scene refers to the period of Presidential Reconstruction immediately after the Civil War. That period began when Vice President Andrew Johnson, a virulent racist, assumed the presidency following the assassination of Lincoln in April 1865. Later that year, the 13th Amendment was ratified, abolishing slavery. However, Johnson carried out a policy of conciliation toward the South, amnestying leaders of the defeated Confederacy and returning them to power.
Meanwhile, many Southern states enacted Black Codes that all but re-enslaved blacks. They included forced labor contracts, which specified that black “servants” who quit their jobs would be arrested and returned to their “masters,” and vagrancy laws under which blacks could be arrested and “hired out” to white employers if they couldn’t prove they had a job. Another source of labor for white employers was provided by “apprenticeship” laws whereby black children could be forcibly assigned to employers.
Knight continued his fight during Reconstruction. In 1872 he was appointed deputy U.S. marshal for the Southern District, and in 1875 he became a colonel of the First Regiment Infantry of Jasper County, an otherwise all-black regiment. He was also assigned to rescue black children held by planters as virtual slaves. One scene shows Knight paying a plantation owner in order to free a black child who had been kidnapped and consigned to “apprenticeship.” In reality, the freeing of “apprentices” was often more forceful than depicted in the film.
In 1866, Congress passed the 14th Amendment, which defined citizenship for the first time in U.S. history and granted it to the former slaves. By the following year, Congress had taken control of Reconstruction, overriding Johnson’s repeated vetoes and even impeaching him (though falling short of removing him from office by one vote). Radical Republicans in Congress carried out what became known as Radical Reconstruction—or “Military Reconstruction,” as it is termed in the movie. That brief, tumultuous and extraordinary period was the most democratic and racially egalitarian in American history. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and ’68 placed the Southern states under military rule and imposed manhood suffrage without regard to race. The right of all male citizens to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” was formalized nationally in 1870 with passage of the 15th Amendment.
The former slaves voted enthusiastically at rates as high as 90 percent, sending 14 representatives to the House and two to the Senate (both from Mississippi). P.B.S. Pinchback, a black man, briefly served as governor of Louisiana. Nearly 700 black men sat in various state legislatures, and hundreds of others served in local posts, including as judges. For the first time, a public education system for black people as well as impoverished whites was established in the South, although the schools were largely segregated by race. Union Leagues organized the vote and self-defense against racist terror. They offered education in citizenship and protection in numbers.
What made these achievements possible were the federal troops, many of them black, stationed in the South to suppress resistance by the former slavocracy, which was organized in the Democratic Party and its Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist auxiliaries. But while Radical Reconstruction provided unprecedented political rights for the former slaves, it did not address the fundamental question of land. Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens fought to break up the landed estates of the former slavocracy, and to redistribute the land to the freedmen and to landless whites, underlining that this would cement a political alliance between blacks and poor whites.
But the American bourgeoisie was not interested in a thoroughgoing social reconstruction of the South. Whatever their views on political rights for black people, the vast majority of Republicans adamantly opposed land confiscation. The bourgeoisie’s aim was not to create a class of independent black yeomen farmers but to get the black agricultural workforce back to toiling for the landowners.
The refusal to distribute land to the freedmen drove many back onto the plantations as sharecroppers and tenant farmers, where they were tied to the land through contracts and loans and forced into permanent debt peonage. The movie evokes that reality with a scene of former slaves toiling on a plantation under conditions of gang labor, not far removed from slavery.
As calls for “reconciliation” with the former Confederacy grew louder, the Northern bourgeoisie began a gradual retreat from Reconstruction. Laws disenfranchising former Confederate leaders were repealed. Quickly, the states fell under Democratic Party control. Scenes in Free State show KKK nightriders sowing terror and burning down a black church. Another scene shows a march of a mostly black Union League contingent on election day to cast their votes. The armed contingent forces local officials to accept their Republican ballots, which are then not included in the vote tally. The unstated background to that scene was the “Mississippi Plan,” an open campaign of terror by the Democratic Party and its murderous auxiliaries that effectively destroyed the Republican Party in the South.
The fate of Reconstruction was finally sealed in the Compromise of 1877. In exchange for Republican Rutherford Hayes getting the presidency, the few hundred federal troops remaining in the South were pulled out. Some of those troops were dispatched to wage war on Native Americans. Others were sent to repress the Great Rail Strike of 1877, the first nationwide strike in the country. While the Compromise of 1877 was the culmination of a process of treachery by the bourgeoisie, it did represent a decisive statement by the federal government that it would no longer intervene on behalf of black people in the South.
The post-Reconstruction period, cynically called “Redemption” by racists, was marked by a political counterrevolution aimed at black people and enforced by race terror. Black people continued to tenaciously and courageously fight for their rights. But, abandoned by the capitalist rulers, they could not stem the reversal of their hard-won rights. Within one to two decades, Southern states expanded the convict lease system and instituted rigid Jim Crow segregation, enforced through lynch law and given legal sanction with the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision. (See “Defeat of Reconstruction and the Betrayal of Black Freedom,” WV Nos. 1039 and 1040, 7 and 21 February 2014).
For Multiracial Class Struggle
The story of Newton Knight’s militia puts the lie to the claims of a unified Southern white populace and loyal slaves resisting the “invading Yankees.” The farmers of Jones County were not alone in their opposition to the Confederacy. While most Southern whites supported slavery, only a quarter or so were slave owners. Many white farmers, forced to fight for a system in which they had no stake, turned against the Confederacy, especially in opposition to the seizure of their crops and livestock to support the war. Fully one-eighth of all Confederate troops deserted during the course of the war.
Counties in western Virginia seceded in 1861 from the Confederacy and joined the Union in 1863 as a separate state, West Virginia. In East Tennessee, Unionists declared the state’s secession null and void, and some 31,000 white Tennesseans joined the Union Army. The First Alabama Cavalry, a thousand-strong regiment, was the headquarters escort during Sherman’s march to the sea. They were among the more than 100,000 white Southerners who served in the Union Army. Meanwhile, with every Union advance, countless slaves escaped the plantations, depriving the Confederacy of its labor force.
The Civil War was the last great, progressive act of American capitalism, when, for a short time, the interests of the bourgeoisie coincided with those of black people in the fight against slavery. To further the consolidation of industrial capitalism, the North was compelled to destroy the system of chattel slavery, which had become an obstacle to capitalist expansion. Slavery was smashed, but its legacy of racial oppression lives on as the bedrock of American capitalism.
The legacy of slavery is invoked in scenes threaded throughout Free State of Jones that fast-forward to the 1948 trial and conviction of Knight and Rachel’s great-grandson, Davis Knight. He was accused of “miscegenation,” the racists’ term for interracial marriage and sex. Two years before his trial, Davis had married a white woman. Based on the “one drop of black blood” rule, “anti-miscegenation” laws were enacted throughout Southern states during the Jim Crow era. They remained on the books until 1967 when, at the height of the civil rights movement, the Supreme Court invalidated them in the landmark Loving v. Virginia decision.
Karl Marx spoke the great truth about America when he wrote, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” The central enduring feature of American capitalism is the structural oppression of the black population. Obscuring the fundamental class division between the capitalists who own the means of production and the working class who must sell their labor power to survive, racism and white supremacy have served to bind white workers to their capitalist exploiters based on the illusion of a commonality of interest based on skin color.
But black or white, native-born or immigrant—the whole of the working class has a common interest in combating black oppression and sweeping away the capitalist order. The key is to bring that understanding to the proletariat. The road to black liberation lies in the struggle to forge a revolutionary workers party that will lead the multiracial working class in the fight for socialist revolution, a third American revolution in which black workers are slated to play a leading role.
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