Free The State of Jones by Sally Jenkins

as much as fifteen miles. No one traveled without a gun, in case they met with a predator or wild game for the table.
    The social milieu was raw as the landscape, one of hardship,faith, whiskey, bare-knuckle fighting, hunting, and farming. Albert and Mason Knight were typical of the homesteaders who predominated in Jones County, scratching at the earth on hardscrabble farms of fifty acres or so. They bent their faces to the earth, built a home and raised crops with their own hands, and took pride in that self-sufficiency. They ate what they grew and used the rest for sale or barter. While rich planters owned purebred horses and four or five eight-oxen teams, yeomen were lucky if they owned a couple of mules and oxen and a single horse.
    Albert raised hogs and planted corn, sweet potatoes, greens, and whatever else took root in order to feed his large family. He harvested fewer bushels of corn in one year than the livestock on a large plantation consumed in a month. The produce from their few acres of cotton, which they hoed themselves, was used to make homespun, or was sold for supplies.
    Albert and Mason Knight’s home sat atop a grassy rise near the Leaf River, a one-room cabin of square-hewn logs with a drop-roof gallery across the front and a kitchen connected by a breezeway. Large oaks shaded it, and in the back, a creek flowed almost at the doorstep; Albert named it Mason Creek for his wife, who deserved something in her honor. Their dozen children were born virtually every other year from 1821 to 1850; Newton was their eighth. The children slept in a heap of bodies in the loft of the cabin, the interior of which was of peeled logs, mud chinked and patched with pine board and clouded with wood smoke from the enormous clay-and-stick chimney, the hearth of which was so large that all of the children could crowd around it.
    The Knights’ nearest neighbors were three of Albert’s younger brothers, William, James, and Benjamin, who by 1840 had established adjoining farms. Also nearby was William Reddoch, who operated a small ferry across the Leaf River, essentially a flat boat with oars and a pull-rope.
    Despite the sparse population, there was no lack of company on his family’s spread, which teemed with children and animals. Thepigs outnumbered the humans by six to one in Jones County. In 1850, there were just 1,890 white citizens, but there were 2,539 milk cows, 4,324 other cattle, and more than anything, there were hogs, 12,686 of them. The razorbacks free-ranged in the swamps, where they fattened themselves on acorns, beech mast, tender pine roots, chinquapins, lily roots, and crawfish. There was always pork on the table, along with an unvarying diet of sweet potatoes, of which Newton must have gotten heartily sick; Jones Countians raised 32,615 bushels of them that year.
    Newton received his education from his mother, or from the itinerant schoolmasters who passed through annually and taught for two or three months at a time, charging by the head. Passels of youngsters crowded into a log hut, studying a
Blue Back Speller
or McGuffey’s reader, or
Dilworth’s Spelling-Book
, which taught them how to construct a short sentence like: “No man may put off the law of God.” The teacher kept order with a hickory rod about as long as a boy.
    In the evenings, the family regularly read their Bible and occasionally recited a few lines from Shakespeare or Lord Byron, who were among the most popular authors of the era and read by all classes. Newton may have even tried reading
The Columbian Orator
, the popular elocution manual designed for young boys, which taught Frederick Douglass how to turn words into weapons. But if he did, he either didn’t get very far or failed to learn the art of elocution. He was never a wordsmith; for him the gun would always be mightier than the mouth.
    On Saturdays, Newton hunted with his brothers and cousins. He stalked deer and hung the carcasses in the chimney to dry. He kept an eye on the