[The following is in regards to Newton Knight, a Confederate deserter in the American Civil War who returned to Jones County in Mississippi and fought a guerrilla war against the Confederacy.]
As Tom Knight tells the story, Newton had just attended Sunday services near his home with Tom and one of his younger brothers when some local toughs accosted them. Tom doesn’t say whether the “younger brother” in question was white or black [Newton Knight had many children with both his white wife and a former slave named Rachel], but given that the incident took place late in Newton’s life, it almost certainly concerned a mixed-race son. One of the toughs had a dispute with the young Knight boy over some hogs. As the knights left church, the antagonist approached the boy and feigned friendliness, saying to him, “I want to talk with you a minute.” He walked the boy to a corner of the churchyard, where he began to curse him and then struck him from behind with a pine limb.
With that, the rest of the Knights charged across the yard. A melee ensued, as men windmilled their fists at one another and rolled on the ground. As they churned in the dust, the attacker lashed out with a boot and caught Newton squarely in the shin, peeling off some of his skin.
Newton didn’t utter a cry. Instead he reacted silently. There was a glitter of metal and an almost imperceptible wave of his hand, and an instant later the man was gurgling from his throat and covered in his own blood. Newton sheathed his knife, the fight over. Newton said, “He would learn him that it was Newt Knight he was kicking.”
Newton has slashed the man’s throat – if he’d have cut an eighth of an inch deeper, the man would have been dead. As it was, he wounded the victim so badly a doctor had to be summoned to stop the bleeding, and the man would be in bed or a month.
”So my father said it looked to him like it was a free for all fight and he was old and had been crippled up and he just did not feel like being kicked about by anyone and especially by a big young man,” Tom Knight related.
Source:
Jenkins, Sally, and John Stauffer. “The Family Tree.” The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded from the Confederacy. Anchor Books, 2010. 301-2. Print.
Further Reading:
If you enjoy this type of content, please consider donating to my Patreon!
No comments, yet...