The Robarts, with the children, moved between the plantation and Greensboro. Charles and Susan began school, and as a six-year-old Charles gave his “first public address” in the little village. During their second year in Greensboro, Charles fell while running and broke a rib on a rock. An abscess formed and injured his lung in a way that was to trouble him all his life. Twelve-year-old Rosetta was his nurse, staying with him from morning until night during his recovery. She had her own ideas about what was needed for his recovery and she would “conceal bread and bacon in her dress and give it to him to eat at night, contrary to the Dr.’s orders.”34 But Rosetta was not entirely preoccupied by her care for young Charles. She was beginning to notice Sam, a young man who was a domestic servant in the Robarts household and who was proving himself to be a favorite of blacks and whites alike.
For Lizzy, being in Greensboro meant that she was able to be with Robinson, who had returned to Greensboro with the Robartses. In late May 1811 the couple had their third son and named him Cassius after Lizzy’s brother. It was not unusual for African Americans to name a son after an uncle, especially one on the mother’s side, but Cassius represented, like his brother Cato, another classical Roman name, and in a strange way he too came to embody—at least for his white owners—some of the characteristics of his ancient namesake. The Roman Cassius had led the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar, and Shakespeare had marked him as a duplicitous figure having “a lean and hungry look.” The low-country Cassius would always be in the shadow of his older brother Cato, and while Cato was known for his reliability, Cassius came to be suspect, a person who required close watching not only by whites but also by those in the settlements who came to admire him.35
The twice-widowed Eliza Robarts became thrice widowed in September 1813. Perhaps after David Robarts’s death she had had enough of marrying and burying husbands. Or perhaps prospective husbands did not want to run the risk of marrying a woman, however attractive and well connected, who already had buried three husbands before her twenty-eighth birthday. At any rate, she never married again. She now had three children of her own—Joseph had been born in 1811 and Louisa in September 1813, a few days before her father’s death. With these young children and her eight-year-old Mary she once again returned to Liberty County, to her home in Sunbury, and to the protection of her brother Joseph. Her nephew Charles and niece Susan went with her. They went to their Uncle Joseph’s Retreat plantation, where they at last found some stability and a place they might learn to call home. Returning with them were Rosetta, Lizzy and Robinson and their children, and all the Robarts slaves.36
4
THE RETREAT
The Retreat plantation lay south and east of Riceboro and ran from sandy ground to the swampy banks of the South Newport River. Purchased by the first John Jones before the Revolution, its plantation house, little more than a lodge, had been used as a retreat, a kind of getaway from nearby Rice Hope. Following his mother’s death in 1798, Joseph Jones had turned the Retreat into his winter residence. He had torn down the little retreat house, had built in its place his own fine home, and had incorporated into the plantation the lands of Rice Hope. In this way the old plantation house at Rice Hope had quickly fallen into disuse and into the rapid decay that came to all coastal buildings not rigorously maintained.1
Encompassing more than 3,100 acres, the Retreat had rich cotton and rice lands and included in its unimproved sections parts of both Bulltown and Rice Hope swamps. With the labors of his growing slave population and with his own inexhaustible energy, Joseph had turned the Retreat into the primary source of his wealth. But he was more than a successful planter, a skilled manager of slaves, and a knowledgeable agriculturist—he was also a careful and shrewd capitalist. Like other wealthy planters in the low country, he invested where he saw opportunity. And what he saw in Liberty County and up and down the Georgia coast during the early decades of the nineteenth century were planters in need of cash. So he lent money to his neighbors and to all who could mortgage slaves or land. He functioned as a kind of informal banker before there was an extensive banking system, and the interest and the foreclosures furnished a steady income that supplemented the wealth that flowed from the Retreat. These financial resources provided the economic foundation for his role as the young patriarch and guardian of his extended family.2
Late in the fall of 1813, Joseph traveled to Greensboro to bring Charles and Susan home to the Retreat. With them came Rosetta and Lizzy, with Lymus, Cato, and Cassius. They came back down the Sunbury Road until they reached Midway, with its meetinghouse and cemetery. There they most likely stopped and walked in the cemetery. Beside the graves of their parents, Charles and Susan would have been able to see the fresh earth that covered the grave of their brother John.3 He had been a quiet boy who had never seemed close to the family after his father’s death, and now at age fifteen he had been buried beside his mother, father, and stepmother under the Midway oaks. Later a tombstone would be erected over his grave with a simple inscription from the Gospel of John:
For God so loved the world, that he
Gave his only begotten Son, that
Whosoever believed in him, should
Not perish, but have everlasting life.4
The travelers turned south on the Savannah-Darien road. Several miles south of Riceboro, Joseph led them off the public highway into an avenue of oaks that ran northeast and provided the initial approach to the Retreat plantation house. The heavy limbs of the oaks reached across the sandy avenue toward one another as if to enclose into Joseph’s world all who came beneath them. Coming out from under the oaks, the travelers entered an open area. Going through a gate, they could see roads leading off the avenue in straight lines to cotton and rice fields, neatly dividing the fields and making easy passage for heavy-laden ox carts. They passed through another gate and came to a lawn where sheep grazed. At the far end of the lawn stood the plantation house surrounded by its own fence that enclosed the yard and the house. Joseph had laid out the whole approach to the house, and it was intended to reveal not only his wealth but also his way of seeing the world and giving order to it. The oaks through which he had cut the avenue and the gates he had erected all served as thresholds to pass as they entered the Retreat and the patriarchy of its owner.5
The two-and-a-half-story plantation house faced south, was built high off the ground, and was supported by white tabby columns. This familiar low-country style, allowing for a free flow of air and an opportunity to catch any breeze, was thought to be healthier than a house built low on the ground, where the miasmas from the swamps and rice fields might more easily settle. Its height and character also announced, no less than the avenue leading to it, that Joseph was a wealthy planter, a person of authority to be respected and obeyed.6
A broad stairway led up to a piazza that stretched across the front and provided, with an equally broad piazza on the back, a popular place for sitting and visiting. A wide hallway, with its polished heart-of-pine floor, cut through the center of the house from the front door to the back, with only the stairs to the upper floors blocking part of the way. At the front entrance, on each side of the hallway, were parlors. One, more spacious and handsomely furnished, was often called simply “the drawing room.” Both rooms had brick fireplaces and marble jams. Off from these parlors were wings, smaller rooms—including Joseph’s plantation office—with their own slanting roofs. A large dining room held a handsome table long enough for many to be seated and served. Other rooms divided the house into spacious accommodations for many occupants. Garrets on the top half-floor had dormer widows looking out toward the avenue and space for a quiet study or getaway. Various outbuildings, including the kitchen and the cabins for domestic servants, were scattered around the backyard. Beyond them, in an unobstructed line from the back of the house, was the family cemetery.7
The horses stopped before the gate to the yard. The household, hearing their approach, had gathered to greet the travelers. Sarah Jones, the mistr
ess of the Retreat, was here with her year-old baby, Hannah Sharp. Standing beside her mother was Mary Jones, now five years old, with her eleven-year-old stepbrother, Joseph Maybank Jones. Every year since her marriage to Joseph, Sarah had given birth to a child. David had been born in 1807 and buried in the Retreat cemetery three months later. Mary had been born the next year. Then had come “a fine babe (a girl) ½ after 12 o’clock” in November 1809. “The little spark took leave of this transitory life in three hours after its birth,” wrote her father, and was added to the growing number in the cemetery. Susannah, named after her parents’ recently departed sister-in-law, Susannah Girardeau Jones, had been born on “Saturday night 8 o’clock on the 2nd February 1811.” She had “died in Sunbury on the 8th of October 1812 aged one year eight months and six days.” Hannah Sharp had been born two months later on “Friday 18th December 1812 4 o’clock p.m.” When the travelers arrived at the Retreat in late 1813, Sarah was once again pregnant. Weakened by one pregnancy after another, she must have been able to provide those in her womb only limited nourishment even as her sorrows increased with each new burial. Her sad trips to the cemetery at the Retreat evidently nurtured her sympathies for those who suffered, and she became known and long remembered for “her unvarying kindness to the poor and needy, which to their dying day embalmed her memory in their hearts.”8
Standing behind Sarah and the children were the household servants. Sylvia was here, for it was her custom to greet all who came to the front gate. And Jack was here as well. With Sylvia, he was responsible for the running of the household. She had oversight of the kitchen and the preparation of food, in addition to special responsibilities as the Momma of young Mary and little Hannah. Jack served as the butler and majordomo at the Retreat, giving instructions to the other domestic servants. Living with him in the cabin behind the plantation house was the four-year-old Phoebe. During her few remaining years of childhood, she was to have as playmates at the Retreat young Cato and Cassius, who were now arriving from Greensboro.9
When Lizzy and Rosetta were led to their quarters in the settlement, they found many they knew. Following Susannah Jones’s death, Joseph, acting as the executor of her estate, had sold Liberty Hall and most of its furniture and had brought to the Retreat all those who still lived in its settlement. Old Jupiter and his wife, Silvey, were gone, buried in the slave cemetery at Rice Hope, but their sons Jupiter and Hamlet were here. Hamlet’s wife, Phillis, had died, and Hamlet had taken as his new wife the handsome young Elvira, who had been born in Africa. Their first child, Syphax, was only an infant when Lizzy and Rosetta came to the Retreat in 1813. He later learned from his mother and his grandmother Fanny stories of Africa and their distant homeland. And from his father, Hamlet, he learned about an African-American, specifically Gullah, tradition that reached back through his grandfather Jupiter and his grandmother Silvey to a time before the Revolution. This tradition was still evolving, and Syphax became a part of its future as African Americans were creating out of many languages and cultures, both African and European, a distinct low-country culture. Syphax learned from this African-American tradition the skills of an important trade and strategies for survival and resistance in the land that was to be his home.10
The setting of the Retreat—its fields and barns, its smokehouses and clanking cotton gin, its woods, swamps, and riverbank—invited exploration by the eight-year-old Charles. For the next six years, when he was not in school in Sunbury or visiting on Colonel’s Island, the Retreat was his home and its landscape a part of his orphaned heart helping to shape his deepest longings for home. Here he would learn to ride horseback, and, like other planters’ sons, learn to hunt and fish. While the waters of the South Newport were too broad and swift for a young boy in a boat, the winter swamps and rice fields provided a safe place to master the handling of a little flat bottom bateau or one of the dugout canoes of the low country. Bright winter days could be spent quietly paddling a canoe through Bulltown swamp, listening to its sounds and watching for a mink to run along a log, or for an otter to swim quickly away, or for a startled deer to leap from a bushy hammock. As he grew older, he was able to hunt the mallards—or English ducks, as he called them—that came into the rice fields at dawn, or to wait at dusk for wood ducks as they flew to roosting places in the swamp. But Charles never became an avid hunter. He grew to be a fine horseman, and he enjoyed long hikes in later life, but he was to become more of a naturalist, an outdoors-man, and a lover of nature than a sportsman. Not that he objected to shooting ducks or deer—far from it, for throughout his life he continued to hunt occasionally. He saw, after all, too many pigs butchered and too many cows slaughtered as a routine part of plantation life to be sentimental about such matters. But he never relished hunting so much as the quiet of the winter woods and the sights and sounds and fragrances of a low-country spring. So during these formative years, when he was home at the Retreat, he was developing a deep love for nature, for its beauty and its mystery, as he explored the landscape of the low country.11
Of course the landscape of Liberty County and the Retreat was not composed of nature undisturbed by human activity or human habitation. And while Charles was learning about the landscape of his home, he was also learning about its human activity and those who lived on the land. He was especially close to his Uncle Joseph, sometimes calling him “Father.” Joseph, it was later said, “ever sustained to him the relation of a father,” and for Joseph’s “influence and protection and kindness he was accorded the obedience, respect and affection of a son.”12
In the evenings Charles could hear his uncle meeting with Pulaski, his driver, to discuss the day’s work and the plans for the next day. The two men were the same age and had been boys together at Rice Hope, and Pulaski had been from the first the driver at the Retreat. Named after the Polish count killed fighting the British at Savannah, Pulaski led the men and women from the Retreat settlement as they cleared the land and planted it with cotton, rice, and provisions.13
Most dramatic in its impact on the landscape of the Retreat and on the character of its human habitation had been the establishment of rice as a staple crop of the low country. A heavy and bulky commodity, rice had encouraged the development of large plantations throughout the coastal region of South Carolina and Georgia and had played a major role in the emergence of Charleston and Savannah as urban centers capable of handlingthe processing and transportation of the rice. Unlike the tobacco-growing plantations of the Chesapeake region, the plantations of the low country had high starting costs and required substantial numbers of slaves to begin rice production. The task of turning the Retreat into a rice-producing plantation had thus required many slaves to live in its settlement, and the transformation of the low-country landscape into rice fields had been central to the work of Pulaski and those whom he managed.14
The first task for Pulaski and his teams when they had begun their work at the Retreat had been to clear swampland of its virgin timber. Both the Bulltown and the Rice Hope swamps were tributaries of the South Newport, and the soil beneath their slow-moving waters was a mixture of sand, clay, and thick vegetable matter which gave it a very dark color and the name “blue clay.” Deeply buried beneath its surface were stumps of cedar and oak, gum and cypress, all supporting in the rich soil a luxuriant vegetation. Great stands of cypress, sweet and black gum, the water tupelo, and the splendid magnolia grandiflora sent their roots deep into the miry clay. Beneath the tall trees in a thick undergrowth were the palmetto and the laurel, the sweet bay and the vines of smilax and briars of various sorts. All of this had to be cleared acre by acre. First a dam had to be built to hold back the water and a ditch dug to let it run off when needed. Then the undergrowth had to be cleared with hoes and mattocks and the trees cut with crosscut saws and axes. Oxen were used to pull the tree trunks and debris into great piles to be burned, and then the ashes had to be scattered to add their richness to the fertility of the soil. Once the clearing was done and the dams and ditches constru
cted and floodgates properly located, a system was in place for the regular flooding and draining of the rice fields. The dams held back the waters of the inland swamps until needed, then the gates were opened and other dams held the water in the rice fields until it was time to drain them.15
This was the system at the Retreat, built by those who lived in its settlement under the supervision of Pulaski, and it required not only constant work to maintain but also grueling work to utilize. In particular, during the steamy months of the summer, the fields had to be drained and the weeds removed, using a broad hoe as each full hand did his or her daily quarter-acre task. This system of rice production in inland swamps was widely used in the coastal sections of Liberty County in 1813, but a new system that utilized the regular rise and fall of tidal rivers had already come to dominate other areas of the low country. In Liberty County, young Cato, Cassius, and Syphax were part of the generation who were to build new dams, canals, and floodgates, this time along riverbanks, to grow the rice of white planters.16
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