DWELLING PLACE
DWELLING PLACE
A Plantation Epic
Erskine Clarke
Yale University Press
New Haven & London
Published with assistance from the Griffith Foundation.
Copyright © 2005 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be
reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that
copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by
reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Designed by Nancy Ovedovitz and set in Electra type by
Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clarke, Erskine, 1941–
Dwelling place: a plantation epic/Erskine Clarke.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-300-10867-2 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Plantation life—Georgia—Liberty County—History—19th century. 2. Jones, Charles Colcock, 1804–1863—Family. 3. Plantation owners—Georgia—Liberty County—Biography. 4. Whites—Georgia—Liberty County—Biography. 5. Jones, Lizzy—Family. 6. Slaves—Georgia—Liberty County—Biography. 7. African Americans—Georgia—Liberty County—Biography. 8. Liberty County (Ga.)—Biography. 9. Liberty County (Ga.)—Race relations. 10. Liberty County (Ga.)—
Social life and customs—19th century. I. Title.
F292.L6C58 2005
305.896′0730758733′09034—dc22 2005003958
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Nancy, Legare, and Elizabeth
CONTENTS
Preface
ONE Liberdirty Hall
TWO Riceboro
THREE Sunbury
FOUR The Retreat
FIVE Carlawter
SIX Savannah
SEVEN Scattered Places
EIGHT Princeton
NINE Solitude
TEN Montevideo and Maybank
ELEVEN The Stations
TWELVE The Mallard Place
THIRTEEN The Arbors
FOURTEEN Columbia
FIFTEEN Carlawter II
SIXTEEN South Hampton
SEVENTEEN Midway
EIGHTEEN Maybank
NINETEEN Arcadia
TWENTY The Retreat II
TWENTY-ONE Columbia II
TWENTY-TWO Philadelphia
TWENTY-THREE Carlawter III
TWENTY-FOUR Arcadia II
TWENTY-FIVE Maybank II
TWENTY-SIX Slave Market
TWENTY-SEVEN Patience’s Kitchen
TWENTY-EIGHT Montevideo
TWENTY-NINE The Retreat III
THIRTY Southern Zion
THIRTY-ONE Indianola
THIRTY-TWO The Refuge
THIRTY-THREE The Promised Land
List of Principal Characters
Genealogical Charts
List of Plantations
Notes
Index of Names
General Index
PREFACE
Dwelling Place is a history of two peoples living together on the Georgia coast from 1805 to 1869. It is a single narrative because their lives were linked and interwoven in innumerable and often intimate ways and because this coastal land shaped all who lived along its rivers, by its swamps, and on its islands and sandy hills, even as those who lived there shaped the land itself. Yet Dwelling Place is also two histories—one of whites and one of blacks, one of owners and one of slaves. For in spite of all of their closeness and all the ways their lives were bound together on this particular part of the Georgia coast, there was a great divide between those who were owned and those who owned. So great was the distance between them and so different was their experience that Dwelling Place is necessarily two histories of one place and one time.
One history centers on the family of Charles Colcock Jones, who came to be known among whites as the Apostle to the Negro Slaves. The other history focuses on the family of Lizzy Jones, the matriarch of one of the most influential and widely connected families of the Gullah-speaking slave community of Liberty County, Georgia. Both families were part of dense networks of relatives and friends who constituted significant parts of each family’s history. Both families, in all their own diversity and peculiarities, saw the landscape of Liberty County and understood the stories of the people who lived on its land from very different places and in very different ways.
Dwelling Place is an attempt to tell these two histories in a single narrative, because each history was dependent on the other and cannot be understood apart from the other. One history is of a white family’s love for one another and of their love for the beauty of a low-country home. Their story is marked by the bitter irony of good intentions gone astray and of benevolent impulses becoming ideological supports for deep oppression. The other history is of a particular African-American family’s resistance to the degradations of slavery. Their story is marked by the varied strategies of its members—not only open resistance to slavery but also acculturation and relentless negotiations—as they sought to ease the burdens of slavery and to move toward a new future for themselves and their family. Because the study explores the lives of specific individuals and families over an extended period of time, it is a composite biography: the lives of owners and owned are seen overlapping one another and being layered together in complex and interdependent ways, even as they are both located within larger social and cultural contexts.
The narrative begins in 1805 at Liberty Hall plantation, three months after the birth of Charles Colcock Jones and a short time before the birth of Lizzy Jones’s second son, Cato. It ends in 1869, when the entire region appeared strangely and, for the blacks, wonderfully changed. The story follows the histories of these two families, and their dense networks of relatives and friends, through a period of immense social, cultural, and technological transformations. These transformations, and the comings and goings of plantation life for more than sixty years, are seen and experienced from above in Dwelling Place through the eyes of ruling whites and are seen and experienced from below through the eyes of resourceful slaves and freed people who struggled first against the bitter burden of slavery and then against its legacy of a powerful racism.
Any history, of course, involves not only intense research and analysis but also an act of imagination as the “facts” of research are arranged and interpreted in the mind of the historian. This is true of a history of the whites of Liberty County who left behind an extensive collection of letters and documents. An act of imagination is required to enter their world even with all the richness of their written record, for their nineteenth-century plantation world is distant from the largely urban world of the twenty-first century. The distance is perhaps most clearly felt at those points when we ask, “How could they believe that?” or “How could they do that?”
If an act of imagination is required to enter the well-documented white world of nineteenth-century Liberty County, much more imagination is needed to enter the world of Liberty County slaves. Their written records are few and their voices have been for generations largely suppressed. Yet their story has its witnesses, and the witnesses tell of slave life, of the work that slaves did, and of the community Liberty County slaves built. Some of these witnesses are found in the land itself, as archaeologists have dug in slave settlements or as dams and dik
es of old rice fields have appeared on aerial photographs. Other witnesses come from studies of other slave communities and from the history of the institution of slavery itself. A few critically important witnesses are found in slave letters and in slave narratives from Liberty County. Most of the witnesses, however, for the family of Lizzy Jones and its network of relations and friends, come in the letters and in the plantation and court documents of white owners. This white testimony must be approached with special care. But with care, and with collaboration from other sources, an imaginative leap can be made to read what James C. Scott in Domination and the Arts of Resistance calls the “hidden transcripts” of the slave settlements in order to tell the story of a slave family and how they saw and experienced a time and place shared with other slaves and with the whites of Liberty County.
“The final presentation of one’s research,” writes Rhys Isaac in The Transformation of Virginia, “should not be primarily a record of the researcher’s labors, but a persuasive reconstruction of the experiences of past actors.” This is the intent of Dwelling Place. What was life like for the white Jones family and their white neighbors on low-country plantations during these years? What was life like for the black Jones family and its dense network of neighbors in the slave settlements of Liberty County during these same years? And how were the lives of both whites and blacks linked and interwoven by the power of slavery and by the responses of particular men and women to that power?
I am grateful to many people for their help in the completion of this study—too many people, I am afraid, to name them all. Gratitude, however, demands that I thank publicly those who provided special assistance. Leon C. Miller, manuscripts librarian, Tulane University, and Wilbur E. Meneray, assistant dean for special collections, Tulane, encouraged me through their professional help and many kindnesses. Tim Browning, director of the library, Columbia Theological Seminary, provided the funding for the microfilming of the Charles Colcock Jones Collection at Tulane and thereby saved me many pleasant but time-consuming trips to New Orleans. Gail DeLoach, the senior archivist at the Georgia Department of Archives and History, was helpful in many ways, but especially with the securing of photographs. Mandi Johnson of the Georgia Historical Society, Savannah, provided much appreciated guidance. Bill Bynum of the Presbyterian Historical Society, Montreat, North Carolina, went out of his way to be helpful. Todd Crumley helped find and photocopy materials from the special collections at Duke University. Doug Minnerly, Richard Floyd, Kyle Henderson, Hunter Camp, and Amy Lehr helped to photocopy several thousand documents from microfilm. Richard Blake checked names, edited the genealogical charts, and prepared the indexes of persons with his usual grace and attention to detail. Bonnie Shoemaker provided assistance in securing documents and ordering materials. Her efficient and cheerful ways as an administrative assistant freed me from numerous responsibilities.
A number of people in Liberty County offered me generous assistance. Over many years the staff in the superior court and in the probate court helped me sort through documents and solve troubling mysteries. Bill Cox, president of the Liberty County Historical Society, shared with me his knowledge of Liberty County history and provided microfilm of the Lambert Foundation documents. Molene Herbert Chambless Burke helped me unravel some of the history of the Baptist Churches in the county. Tom Mueller of the First Presbyterian Church, Hines-ville, introduced me to people familiar with the history of the region. Colonel George Rogers of Colonel’s Island spent an afternoon with me discussing the island and its history. Joann Clark of the Midway Museum showed me a number of documents in the museum’s collection and introduced me to people who helped with specific questions. In adjacent Bryan County, David Long showed me every kindness and shared with me his enthusiasm for low-country history.
I am particularly grateful to those who traveled with me over parts of the low country. Buddy Smith, a crabber, spent a day with me in his boat as we explored the North Newport River. He has an amazing knowledge of the river’s life and moods and of hunting, fishing, and crabbing in the low country. Townsend Warren provided much lore about shrimping and crabbing. Chris Hartbarger kayaked with me through the Medway marshes and walked with me around the remaining ruins of Maybank plantation. Ezekiel Walthour drove me around parts of the county, pointed out the locations of a number of plantations, and arranged for me to interview members of the African-American community in the county, including Mrs. LeCounte Baggs, who knew as a child Gilbert Lawson, Jr. My conversation with her was an unexpected gift. An unknown driver of a pickup truck pointed out the way through the woods to the cemetery of the Retreat plantation. Ken Speir walked with me over much of the former South Hampton plantation, showed me where the old plantation house was located, and introduced me to Kip Kirby, plantation manager, Hampton Island, who kindly showed other areas of the former Roswell King plantation. Laura Devendorf talked with me about the history and geography of the area around Sunbury and showed me over the grounds of Palmyra and Springfield plantations. Van Martin recalled what he remembered as a boy horseback riding over the lands of Montevideo plantation.
EdLoring, whose dissertationin 1976 wason Charles Colcock Jones, was a frequent conversation partner as I labored over nine years on the work of this book. Walter Brueggemann, Dan Carter, and Joe Harvard read substantial parts of the narrative and gave me their welcomed judgments. Marcia Riggs, as a womanist and ethicist, was of particular help as I attempted to understand the struggles of African-American women. She read a number of chapters and provided important bibliographic resources. Griselda Lartey spoke with me about older people as storytellers in her native Ghana. All who know Robert Manson Myers’s monumental The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War will immediately recognize my indebtedness to his astonishing scholarship. Peggy Hargis shared her research on the freed people of Liberty County and helped me identify the family names of former slaves.
The Griffith Foundation provided generous financial support for my many trips to Liberty County and assistance in the publication for which I am most grateful. Columbia Theological Seminary provided generous sabbatical leaves for my work on this project and much encouragement through Presidents Doug Oldenburg and Laura Mendenhall and Deans James Hudnut-Beumler and Cameron Murchison. Larisa Heimert, publisher, Yale University Press, has the remarkable gift of encouraging authors while easing anxieties. Dan Heaton, senior manuscript editor, dealt gracefully with my errors while delighting me with his humor.
Constant and sustaining encouragement came from my wife, Nancy, and our daughters, Legare and Elizabeth. They, even more than friends, listened to my relentless telling and retelling of parts of this narrative. Dwelling Place is gratefully dedicated to them.
Georgia Based on Wm. G. Bonner's Pocket Map of the State of Georgia (1848)
Liberty County
1
LIBERTY HALL
Early on a March morning in 1805, as the first hints of dawn touched the Sea Islands and the marshlands south of Savannah, Old Jupiter rose, went out of his cabin, and with a blast from his conch-shell horn announced a new day. The sound filled the early-morning silence of the slave quarters at Liberty Hall plantation and called out the men and women who lived there. Lizzy threw off her blanket and slipped her Osnaburg dress over her shift. Lifting her two-year-old son Lymus to her hip, she hurried toward the kitchen, an outbuilding behind the plantation house. Quickly she stirred into flame the banked coals in the fireplace and began the preparation of a simple breakfast for John Jones. Neither she, nor Jupiter, nor John Jones, nor anyone else on the plantation knew that this day was to bring a crisis for all whose lives were so closely intertwined at Liberty Hall.1
Jones was up by the time Lizzy reached the kitchen. He too had heard the sound of Jupiter’s horn in the slave quarters, and he had slipped out of bed, leaving his young wife, Susannah, and their three-month-old son, Charles Col-cock, sleeping quietly. Jones dressed in his hunting clothes, moved down the hall past the rooms of his othe
r children—daughters Betsy and Susan and son John—and descended the wide plantation stairs. Going into his study, he removed from a cabinet an expensive English-made gun. It had been his first, a gift when he was only twelve. “Old Mrs. Goldsmith,” his mother had written from Governor Houstoun’s home in Savannah, “has made you a present of a handsome silver mounted Gun, which she begs you’ll keep for her sake.”2 Over the years he had used it to hunt the ducks that flew into rice fields at dawn and, loading it with buckshot, to hunt the deer that lived in the woods and swamps that surrounded his plantation home.
Making his way toward the kitchen, Jones could see the slave settlement and fires glowing through the mist of the low-country morning. Sixty-two men, women, and children lived in the cabins that lined both sides of a sandy ribbon of a road. Those who were preparing to go to the fields stood outside around fires warming themselves. Here in the open, in communal yards, they spent most of their time when they were not working or sleeping. In earlier years most low-country slaves had lived in dormitories or mud-walled huts, but gradually rude cabins clustered in quarters or settlements such as those at Liberty Hall had become the norm. They provided some privacy and the possibility for the development of some family life, but they were smoky and dark, had little or no furniture, and were poor places to visit and talk. Except when it was raining or unusually cold, the better place to gather in the mornings and evenings was outside around the fires.3
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