During the American Civil War, an unusual army assembled in Jones County, Mississippi. Their opponent was not the Union Army but the Confederate authorities. Many of them were poor farmers who were outraged when the Confederacy passed the Twenty Negro Law, allowing wealthy plantation owners to avoid military service if they owned twenty or more slaves. While they fought in terrible battles, tax-in-kind agents were raiding their farms, drafting their young sons into the army, and taking excessive amounts of livestock and food supplies, leaving families destitute. The deserters hid out in a swamp and made raids to protect the farms. They eventually fought the Confederate army itself.

This movie is based on those true events. Writer and director Gary Ross (Seabiscuit) has created a website that annotates three dozen topics and scenes from the film. He explains: "We felt it was important in an historical movie, especially a movie about such a crucial time in history, for the audience to know what was true and what was fictionalized, even if it was based on underlying source material. In this site you will be able to navigate through the entire movie, click the areas that interest you, and see a brief explanation of the historical facts that informed the screenplay."

Key to this story is the rebels' leader, Newton Knight. Matthew McConaughey gives an intense and riveting performance as this charismatic farmer, battlefield nurse, and deserter turned Robin Hood and guerilla freedom-fighter. He is a selfless man who at least three times in the story risks his life to save others. With the authorities on his trail after he protects a widow's farm, he flees into the swamp where a group of escaped slaves have set up a camp. An ever-growing group of angry Southern farmers soon join them.

Knight is a zealous leader fueled by righteous indignation against the rich plantation owners. He reminds his followers that they don't have to fight for the Confederacy just so the rich can stay rich. To the former slaves, he affirms that nobody can own a child of God. He gives everybody reasons to hope that things can be different, including Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a domestic slave from the nearby plantation who brings news and supplies to the swamp; knight helps her learn to read.

Unlike Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who preached nonviolence a century later, Knight and his black right-hand man, Moses (Mahershala Ali), are firm believers in guns as the tools of justified armed insurrection. When they are unable to connect up with the Union Army, they declare that the three counties under their control are a free state. Knight declares its foundational principle that "Every man is a man."

The end of the Civil War seems to bring peace and the fighters, including the freed slaves, return to farming. But the Reconstruction era means a different kind of violence. Knight and his friends now face the wrath of the plantation owners, who find new ways to enslave blacks, and the Ku Klux Klan, who begin burning homes and hanging blacks.

After the war, Knight lives with Rachel and they begin a family. His white wife (Keri Russell), who had fled to Georgia during the war, returns with his son, and Knight and Rachel have her stay with them. (This is also based on fact.) Knight continues to show his strength in the face of death, disaster and constant danger.

Ross succeeds in making this freedom fighter into a memorable hero. Less successful is a second storyline peppered throughout the film set 85 years later. Knight and Rachel's great-grandson is standing trial for having married a white woman when he is 1/8th negro, thus breaking Mississippi's laws against interracial marriage.

Free State of Jones shows a side of the Civil War in the South that has not been seen in films before, and it takes us through Reconstruction, a period rarely depicted. It gives us an anti-slavery hero who is not a savior of the blacks but their friend and ally, respecting their dignity and contributions. But perhaps most important, in this year when racism is rampant throughout the United States, it reminds us of the terrible legacy of slavery and cautions us that it can raise its insidious head when we are no longer expecting it. (The plantation owner's practice of "apprenticeship" being but one example). Finally, it reminds us that wars are too often fought by poor people to protect a status quo that benefits only the rich.