I read the movie plot. Non-sense, it is all based on Bynum's attempt to write a history that shows Newt Knight as someone noble. After reading the reviews...it is 2.5 hours of boredom. Nobody cares about the history of reconstruction, especially a history that promotes an idea that reconstruction was won by the Democrats and how the poor Republicans were mistreated.

1. How do you promote the idea that the South was conquered by a massive Union Army led by freed slaves and helped by the mighty pro-Unionist Southerners in 1865 and then by 1875 ex-slave owning Southerners were once again in power, controlling the governments and terrorizing the freed ex-slaves? It makes no sense.

2. Didn't a large number of white Southerners die during the War? Was not the economy totally destroyed, every major city (except for a handful) destroyed? Was not every railroad destroyed? It takes money to control a government and to run a political movement to suppress over 5,000,000 African Americans, many armed and were veterans of the war, where did this money come from? Only two or three ex-Confederate states by 1880 had a white population much larger than the black so how did the ex-Confederate Democrats, many wounded and broken take over the conquered South from the Unionist Republicans and ex-slaves only 10 years after the war? Who provided the money and man power to overthrow the Federal Government and the U.S. Army occupiers in 1875? The answer is nobody..because it did not happen that way.

The problem with this popular narrative (para. 1) is the time line. The power struggle over who would run the post-war South was not settled until about 1892-93 when for the first time since before the Civil War (1859) the federal government and most of the Southern State governments were totally run by the Democratic Party. The old slaver owners were all but dead, and Confederate veterans were being placed in veterans homes. This is when African American Republicans in the South were abandoned by their Northern brethren in the North and lawlessness (mob rule) ran through the country at a much higher rate than previous. The Democrats who ran the South from 1892 to the 1970s were a different breed. They took money from Northern interest to run the South as one large share cropping nation. Sold the land for pennies, gave away the resources, and kept unions out (look up the coal miners wars of this period). Newt Knight was a forgotten old bushwhacker by this time, living out his days in the Mississippi back woods. Just read the papers of the time...its all there.