Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  Those who walked out of the service and those who angrily confronted Charles afterward were taking a risk—they were engaging in a dangerous and amazing display of open resistance to a powerful white slaveholder. Perhaps because Charles was preaching at the stand, in space they considered to be theirs and had been theirs since Mingo had first preached there years earlier, perhaps for this reason they had the freedom for open dissent. Or perhaps their freedom was rooted in the voluntary character of the service itself—they did not have to be there if they did not want to be, nor did they have to listen or accept if they did not wish to listen to or accept what Charles had to say. Such a spiritual freedom was certainly fundamental to Charles’s theology. Or perhaps at some level they respected Charles and trusted him with their anger and open resistance in spite of what he had said. Those who remained, he noted, “seemed to remain more from personal respect to the Preacher, than from any liking to his doctrine.” Whatever the sources of such open resistance, what was clear even to Charles was that the resistance was a challenge to the theological presuppositions and paternalistic assumptions that informed his work. His understanding of the Bible, his authority as an interpreter of its texts, was being called into question. Even the authority of the Apostle Paul seemed to be challenged, for they said the story of the returned runaway was “not the Gospel.” An alternative theological perspective—a Gospel that did not support slavery and its oppression—was being claimed by those who walked out of the stand and by those who rejected and denounced what Charles had said.50

  Charles had not attempted to answer the criticism, but had gone about his work “as though nothing had happened.” In a short while most of the displeased slaves were back at the station listening once again to him. Two years later he reassured the association that “with an increase of knowledge they will hear such preaching now.” But he never preached on Onesimus again. And he realized that some slaves continued to object to him as a preacher because he was a slaveholder and “his people have to work as well as we.” The whole experience was an important lesson for him, and he warned others who might try to preach to slaves that it was inexpedient and unfair to dwell on the duties of slaves. The experience revealed to him something of the hidden life and perspectives of the settlements and something about how far he could go as a white preacher. Duties could be mentioned, but not too often. Christian ethics generally applied, he later said, would meet most of the needs of a Christian people without “harping” on the duties of slaves to masters.51

  12

  THE MALLARD PLACE

  In late March 1833 Charles left home on his horse Shannon for a presbytery meeting in St. Marys, about a hundred miles south of Riceboro on the GeorgiaFlorida line. The presbytery, the regional church court of Presbyterian ministers and lay elders, was a required meeting for Charles as a minister, but it was also an opportunity for him to discuss his work with other ministers and with planters who would be attending the meeting as elders.1

  As Charles left Riceboro he met the Reverend James McDonald, a Baptist missionary of the Sunbury Association who was going to Darien for a revival meeting. As they rode along together, Charles had an opportunity to talk with McDonald about his work and about the Baptist churches in the area, all of which were overwhelmingly black. Charles was developing a close working relationship with the Baptist ministers of the low country, especially Samuel S. Law, who was the white pastor of the North Newport Baptist Church. Law’s salary was largely paid by the wealthy planter George Washington Walthour, one of the few whites who was a member of the congregation, but the black membership was large and influential in the settlements. Young Cato from Carlawter was a member—as were many from the settlement at the nearby Retreat—and Cato was quickly becoming a leading member of the congregation.2

  When they arrived in Darien, Charles met Nathaniel Pratt, the local Presbyterian minister. They rode together to Pratt’s new home on the Ridge, an elevated area outside of Darien overlooking the marshes and creeks of the Altamaha estuary. Pratt was a graduate of Yale College and Princeton Theological Seminary and was married to Catherine King, a sister of Roswell, William, and Barrington. The Pratts, like Charles and Mary, were in the process of developing their home and had laid out gardens and fruit trees. They already had an organ in the parlor—it had cost a handsome $400—and Pratt had a study in a neat cottage designed specifically for his books and desk. Charles thought that with Pratt’s “attention and northern taste” they would soon have a comfortable home. Pratt was to become one of Charles’s closest friends, and in a few years he and Catherine named a son Charles Jones Pratt.3

  Charles and Pratt intended to ride horseback to St. Marys, but crossing the Altamaha was treacherous. The previous day rising waters had almost drowned several people trying to get across the muddy, surging river on a little flat-bottom ferry, so the two ministers decided to hire a sailboat to take them the seventy miles to St. Marys. Sailing out of Darien the next day, Charles found the inter-coastal waters a delight, and their passage south gave him an opportunity to see the large plantations on St. Simons and Jekyll, two of the great Sea Islands of the Georgia coast.4

  Arriving in St. Marys after two days of sailing, they went to the home of Pratt’s brother the Reverend Horace Pratt. His home, a Greek Revival mansion, was not, Charles would later write, “a clerical house, but the very contrary.” Pratt’s wife, Jane Wood Pratt, he found “a modest, and somewhat reserved woman in her manners, not at all handsome, but very intelligent and pious.” She was also, like increasing numbers of pious women in the South, interested in the religious instruction of slaves. Charles already knew that in Liberty County most of the teachers of slaves were white women, and he was pleased to have an opportunity to discuss with Mrs. Pratt her own work in St. Marys and in the little school-house she had in back of their home. She was in the midst of writing “Scripture Sketches for Colored Persons,” which was soon published in the Charleston Observer. The sketches were of biblical slaves and were intended to show “that servants are not forgotten in that holy book.” The stories of these slaves were in the Bible, she said, to show slaves how to follow the model of faithful servants and how to avoid the paths of unfaithful ones. She wrote of the faithful Eliezer and the unfaithful Ziba; the faithful Obadiah and the unfaithful Gehazi; and, of course, there was Onesimus, who “robbed his master and ran away” and was an example, she wrote, of “a wicked and unprofitable servant.”5

  Charles did not know when he sat in the elegant parlor of the Pratt mansion, but he was soon to take public issue with one Mrs. Pratt’s sketches—that of Hagar, the slave of Abraham with whom Abraham committed adultery. The problem was that Mrs. Pratt did not include in her sketch that “the mischief did not begin with Hagar, but with her Mistress first and her Master second.” Slaves today, Charles would write in the Charleston Observer, are exposed to the same abuse. Any preacher to slaves, he said, must tell the whole truth else the slaves will come and say: “Why did you not speak of Master and Mistress too, and shew their evil deeds?” But when the truth was told, Charles said, and Abraham’s and Sarah’s abuse of Hagar was recounted, he had found that her story “was one of great power” among the slaves. To his horror, years later Charles was to find such truth telling about the sexual abuse of a young slave woman to be necessary in his own household.6

  The presbytery meeting the next day was largely devoted to the issue of the religious instruction of slaves. Charles delivered an address “On the Moral and Religious Condition of our Coloured Population” in which he reviewed once again what he regarded as the degraded condition of the slaves and their great need for owners who would attend to both their religious and physical welfare.7 What was most gratifying for him, however, was an address by the wealthy planter Thomas S. Clay.

  Clay was a “tall, dignified, handsome, refined, polite, and most engaging” man, and his plantation, Richmond-on-Ogeechee, was home to some two hundred slaves. An elder at the Bryan Neck Presbyterian Church a few miles s
outh of Savannah, Clay had come to the presbytery meeting to present a “Detail of a Plan for the Moral Improvement of Negroes on Plantations.”8

  Clay began his address by referring to the importance of preaching in the churches and teaching in the Sabbath schools. But what immediately caught the attention of Charles was Clay’s insistence on evening meetings on the plantations, where the “resident planter and his family” would gather “his people” together shortly after sundown “in a well lighted room, appropriated to the purpose, with comfortable seats.” Then there would be hymns and Bible reading, a short lesson on one of the parables or on a biblical character, and evening prayers. Such services, held every weekday, would demonstrate the planter’s interest “in the well being of his servants,” would have an influence on both the whites and blacks gathered together, and would keep the slaves from roaming abroad at night to the injury of their health and morals. Already, said Clay, four or five large plantations in his neighborhood were having these evening services, and the plantations were becoming model communities.9

  Clay then turned to the planter’s responsibility for the physical welfare and comfort of his slaves. “Our physical habits,” he said, have “a vast influence” on our moral habits; the two cannot be entirely separated, for “Man is a physical as well as a moral being, and this fact must always be kept in view” in the planter’s efforts to elevate the character of the slave. Clay reminded the presbytery that the “Gospel … commands us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and shelter the houseless, as well as preach to the poor.” Slaves needed, he said, nourishing food, adequate clothes, care when they were sick, and housing that allowed for some privacy and cleanliness. Slave marriages needed to be encouraged and honored, and slave husbands needed to be restrained from striking their wives, a right, Clay said, the husbands regard as inalienable. In this way, and in great detail, he outlined the responsibilities of benevolent planters for their slaves.10

  Charles listened carefully to what Clay had to say—it was all precisely to the point, Charles thought, and coming from a layman, and especially from a successful and wealthy planter, the address was noteworthy and would encourage other planters to consider their responsibilities for their slaves. Much encouraged himself, Charles returned to Liberty County after the presbytery meeting ready to take up the work not only of preaching and teaching but also of visiting in the settlements and talking with planters about their responsibilities.

  Shortly after his return home, Charles wrote Thomas Mallard, one of the members of the Association for the Religious Instruction of Slaves and a deacon and selectman at Midway Church:

  Dear Mr. Mallard:

  If it is agreeable and convenient, I will preach for your people on Wednesday evening next.

  Respectfully And Truly,

  Your Friend,

  C.C.J.11

  Mallard agreed to Charles’s proposal and sent to the settlement an announcement of the meeting. At the appointed time, those who had been laboring in the fields and in the barns and kitchen of the plantation made their way to the meeting place.

  Standing in the parlor of the Mallard plantation house, Charles looked around a large but unpretentious room papered in a pattern of curious figures. Light from candles and the wide fireplace danced off the room’s two windows and revealed the faces of the Mallard slaves. Charles looked at them and they looked back at him. What was he to make of them and they of him?12

  Major and Pompey knew Charles best. Major was a watchman, a kind of deacon fortheblack members of Midway, and among the watchmen he was the most influential. When there was trouble in the settlements among members of the congregation, he often went with Sharper to mediate feuds between husbands and wives or conflicts between neighbors. And Major had had his own sorrows, for a few years earlier his wife had been carried by her owner to Burke County. The session at Midway, after making inquiries, determined that there was little likelihood that she would be returned to the county or to her husband. She must be treated as dead, they decided, and Major had been given permission to remarry.13

  Pompey was also a watchman, but he was better known as the driver at the Mallard plantation and as a man of great energy. He was only thirty when Charles arrived for the evening meeting, but he was already making a name for himself as a man of some property. He later reported that Thomas Mallard had allowed him to plant “all the land I could work,” and that “I used to hire men to work for me sometime.”14

  Among those crowding into the parlor was Bess. She had been converted shortly after Charles had begun his missionary work and was soon to join the Midway congregation. Although a young woman when Charles first visited the plantation, she became a “mother” of the church, a female leader of the black members of the Midway congregation, and she soon started a Female Prayer Service for the women in the Mallard settlement. Over time Charles came to think of her as an “old & sincere friend.”15

  Harry Stevens came up from the settlement for the meeting. Most people called him “Dr. Harry” because of his knowledge of herbs, roots, and barks that could ease a bruise or heal a wound or rid a child of worms. He was, however, a carpenter by trade, reportedly the best in the county. Moreover, he was in a way a kind of civil engineer, a person who knew how dikes should be constructed to hold back the river waters when they rose suddenly and how trunks should be built to properly drain a rice field. And on top of all of this, he was a good church member respected by blacks and whites alike. He was married and had a family at the Charlton Hines plantation toward the interior of the county.16

  And there were others who came into the parlor or stood in the hall or outside on the piazza. Charles could see Maum Willoughby, the cook, whose husband Dublin lived on another plantation. She would laugh and say to the Mallard children that before greeting Dublin on a Saturday afternoon as he came to his “wife house,” she “always looked to see what he had brought in his bag for the family.” And there was Grace, who was married to Billy on Mr. Walthour’s place and was always having trouble with him. And there was “Daddy Jack,” who had been married for no more than a month before he and his wife “had divided blankets.” He had returned to his bachelorhood and would at night “rake aside the fire coals and then spread his blanket upon the ashes of the hearth.”17

  And so they gathered around the parlor not as unnamed slaves, the sons and daughters of the dark earth who were to labor for a time for named white masters before returning unnamed and unknown to the earth. Rather they gathered as men and women with names and distinct personalities and particular histories and a shared human hope that they would not be forgotten—Major and Pompey, Bess and Maum Willoughby, Dr. Harry and Daddy Jack. These particular men and women, with others in the settlement, were the ones who came to hear what Charles had to say to them, and they were the ones who would determine in their own minds and in their conversations together what he was about and how they would respond to him and to his message.18

  Charles looked back at the faces before him, saw signs of fatigue from the day’s labor in the fields or the kitchen, and thought that while the Sabbath services accomplished much, “the people absolutely required more.” They needed, he thought, to be visited and instructed where they lived. They needed, just as their white owners needed, their minister to perform the duties of a pastor. But as he looked around, Charles also knew that he needed to visit them if he were going to know the actual “extent of his field,” its destitutions, and the moral and religious condition of the people. Such visitation would allow his sermons to have a “more direct and personal application,” his pastoral relationships a “more familiar and intimate” quality, and his influence a “more extended and powerful” authority. Above all, however, he hoped his visits would convince them that he was sincere and wanted to be their friend and pastor.19

  Because the meeting was held on a weekday night, only slaves from the Mallard plantation were allowed to attend. Jones thought this an important rule in order to maintain the support of plant
ers. He never gave “any notice whatever to the Negroes on other plantations, or on the Sabbath, that meetings will be held during the week on such and such plantations.” Such a rule helped to ensure order among the slaves and avoided the appearance of a dangerous nighttime meeting. “It is a household affair altogether,” he later wrote, “and the people are little disposed to embrace such an assembly for bad purposes. If any of them wish to do evil on the plantation, they can choose another night and another occasion just as conveniently.” Twelve years after this first meeting at the Mallard plantation, Charles could report to the planters of Liberty County that of “some hundreds of meetings held on plantations at night, there never has occurred a single instance of riot, of theft, or unruly conduct, within my own knowledge, nor have I ever heard a complaint of any such thing.”20