The misery of the lives of freedmen is one of the strongest images to take away from this film, their alleged freedom snatched from them.
Even the slaves they lost were returned to them in the form of unpaid sharecroppers. Instead of being lynched like Mussolini, Confederate leaders returned to their lives, their plantations, just like the war had never happened. What other purpose could they possibly serve? To celebrate a defeat? This movie finally points out the obvious: the Confederacy lost the war, but the planter class which owned the Confederacy did their damnedest to win the peace. There were a number of Unionist uprisings in the South during the Civil War (a fact that was carefully expunged from my history textbooks, growing up in the South, maybe to justify all the monuments celebrating the glorious Olde South that lurk around public parks and buildings to intimidate black Southerners - I guess).
Though it, inevitably, changes the story (you'd need a dozen hours to tell it completely), it remains faithful to the spirit of the rebellion and the characters of Newton and Rachel Knight. Bynum's excellent books about the Jones County rebellion and so had been looking forward to the movie.
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