Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  Charles resumed his missionary labors shortly after his return to Liberty County in December 1838. He immediately drew up a “regular plan of instruction and operations for the Winter and Spring.” At Midway, where a religious stirring was beginning at the Mallard and other nearby plantations, he began a “series of Historical and Biographical Discourses.” Beginning with the call of Abraham, he sought to “make the people acquainted with the most remarkable of God’s dealings with the Church and the world” and with “the lives of eminent Saints,” always “keeping the Saviour prominently in view as the great sight, the hope and foundation of acceptance with God.” At the North Newport Baptist Church, where in earlier years he had conducted a series on the “principal portions of the Gospel,” he began a series of “Expository Lectures on the Book of Acts.” At Pleasant Grove, near South Hampton, he began a doctrinal series and moved systematically, week after week, through the doctrines of the fall, depravity, atonement, election, regeneration, and perseverance, “together with such purely practical subjects as were suggested in the progress of the series.” Do not think it strange, he said in his report to the association, that such doctrines should be present to “untutored minds.” The doctrines were themselves an essential part of “Divine truth” and were accessible to all. Instructors, whose grasp of theology was more than a superficial acquaintance with its nomenclature, could lead the people into these deep waters, “depending upon the self-evidencing power of the truth itself,” and upon the “Holy Spirit, who has immediate access to the understanding and affections of mankind.”8

  As Charles went about his teaching, preaching, and visiting in the settlements during the winter and spring of 1839, religious stirrings began to spread. A number of young people, who had been attending the Sabbath schools established by the association around the county, began to show signs of conversion and were beginning to be inquirers for membership at Midway, at North Newport, and at Pleasant Grove. And the stirrings were not limited to the youth or to those who lived in the settlements but were also beginning to be felt among older people and among those who lived in the plantation houses of the county. At this point, however, Charles’s intensive work was interrupted in late spring. Not only was the season of dangerous miasmas approaching, but Charles was also elected by his presbytery to go to the meeting of the Presbyterian General Assembly in Philadelphia. Charles and Mary decided that rather than go to Maybank for the sickly season, they would take the family north for the meeting of the assembly and for an extended vacation. Mary’s brother John Jones, who was graduating from the seminary in Columbia, agreed to come home to his father’s new summer home in Walthourville and to spend the summer and early fall as the missionary in Charles’s place.9

  Charles and Mary left Savannah for Philadelphia in the brig Philura. Sailing with them, in addition to their three children, were Mary’s seventeen-year-old half-sister Evelyn Jones, who hoped the travel would improve her health. They all hoped that the salty air and sea breezes would provide a relaxing time, but the voyage turned out to be a miserable experience for all. The little sailing ship had to struggle through stormy weather, and for eight days they were all seasick and longing for some solid, immovable ground under their feet.10

  In Philadelphia, Charles attended the meeting of the Old School Presbyterian General Assembly and noted that the recently expelled New School Assembly was nothing but “an abolitionist body.” After the assembly, the family took the train to Harrisburg through what Charles called “the finest farming country I have ever seen.” Then they crowded onto a canal boat with “a miserably wicked and ill mannerly set” as the family traveled to visit friends at the village of Wilkes-Barre. They spent a week in Princeton, where Charles preached at the college and in the town, and everywhere they went people asked him about his work and about the conditions of the slaves in the south. They were in New York for the Fourth of July celebration—a great rowdy affair that left twenty or thirty dead. The Joneses, with the “respectable part of citizens,” stayed at home and left the wild celebrations to the “lower orders, the Irish, Dutch, Negroes, sailors etc.”

  The pastor of the city’s old Brick Presbyterian Church, Gardiner Spring, asked Charles to speak one Sabbath evening and “give to his people some account of the religious instruction of the Negroes, in the South.” Charles happily agreed, but soon after he had commenced speaking, “a man began to speak aloud and become unruly.” Evelyn Jones was frightened and thought “they would have an abolition mob,” but as the man “would not behave himself, they turned him out in short order, neck and heels.” Charles thought his unruly behavior an indication that the abolitionists were “going down among the lower classes of society” and that the “respectable keep clear of them.”11

  They left the city and followed the trail of the respectable to Saratoga Springs, where they saw friends from the South and a great fashionable crowd “from all parts of the world.” From Saratoga Springs they went to Niagara Falls—a fatiguing journey by train and stage—and then to Montreal and Boston and out to Andover, where they spent several weeks visiting old friends and recuperating from their travels.12

  Everywhere that they went Charles sought to learn what he could about the abolitionist movement. He wanted to “make some acquaintance, as intimate as possible, with the publications, the general spirit and design, the standing and influence of those persons who of late years, have been so violently assailing the character, and the domestic institutions of the South.” He visited bookstores and “the principal Depositories” of the abolitionists, read Garrison’s Liberator and other newspapers and periodicals, and “inquired particularly of individuals, in private and in public station, concerning the whole movement.” His conclusions confirmed his previous impressions: “the good sense and Christian feeling of the Free States, were far from being perverted; or from having any serious impression made upon them, in favor of modern abolition doctrines.” With such conclusions, Charles and the family turned toward home and arrived safely at Montevideo in October 1839.13

  While the family had been away, the religious stirrings that had begun the previous winter had prospered under the leadership of John Jones. The young seminary graduate had followed the pattern set by his brother-in-law Charles and had been busy preaching, teaching, and visiting in the settlements. The number of inquirers, those preparing for church membership, had grown steadily, and throughout the county there was a new attentiveness to religion and much “conversation on practical piety.”14

  Charles took up his missionary work immediately, throwing himself into a busy round of preaching and teaching and visiting in more settlements than ever before. John, who moved in with them at Montevideo, continued to work with Charles and to be a part of the efforts to encourage the revival fires that appeared to be breaking out in the county. As more inquirers began to press for church membership, Charles decided that a new strategy was needed to avoid excitement and “bodily exercises” taking the place of true repentance and conversion. What was needed, he thought, was for the watchmen to play a more central and organized role in assessing the readiness of those who came for church membership and in encouraging and disciplining those who were members. He consequently organized a regular watchmen’s meeting for Midway and one for the North Newport Baptist Church.

  By 1840 the office of watchman had been an important, but rather informal, office in the churches of the county for several decades. Working with Sharper and the other early preachers, the watchmen had reported to the white session at Midway or to the white preacher at North Newport on cases needing discipline; they also had been leaders of worship, especially with the prayers before services. But they did not meet as a group at any of the churches, as did a board of deacons or a session, and this is what Charles decided was needed. The approval of the white members was secured, and the watchmen evidently responded favorably to the proposal.15

  On 8 March 1840, twenty-nine men from twenty-three plantations gathered for the first meeting
of the Midway watchmen. Six of them, including the preacher Toney Stevens, were named selectmen to act as a kind of executive committee for the watchmen. Among them was Pompey, from the settlement at the Mallard Place, and Charles, the blacksmith on the plantation of Sara Howe’s brother George Washington Walthour. (When the North Newport watchmen met, Paris, the driver for Roswell King, was the first among equals—there being no official black preacher—and Cato was numbered among the watchmen.) Charles explained that the purpose of the meeting was to “receive reports of the state of religion from the different plantations under their care” and for the watchmen to consult about the “best means for the support and prosperity of religion.” The meetings would allow them to encourage one another and to give advice to one another “in cases of difficulty,” to report poor members “that may need some assistance,” and to pray together “for a blessing on the church.” Central to their task was “to receive reports of cases of discipline.” When they were able, they were to dispose of such cases, and when disciplinary cases called for action by the white session or congregation, then they were to prepare all the facts in the case for a formal presentation.16

  Charles conducted the watchmen’s meetings as he would a meeting of a white session—parliamentary rules of order were followed, and in cases of discipline careful procedures were observed in regard to witnesses and evidence and the rights of the accused. Such practices, he believed, were important for nurturing black leaders for the church and helping them learn the orderly ways of church government. As such, the meetings were aimed at acculturating the black leadership into the virtues and practices Charles believed were necessary for self-government. The practices of self-government—even on the limited basis that was allowed in the watchmen’s meetings—could be, Charles believed, a way for the black leadership to begin to internalize the disciplines required on the long road to freedom.

  Toney Stevens and the watchmen no doubt met such efforts with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the meetings provided opportunities for them to gather as a group, to organize themselves, to make decisions as leaders of a community, and to grow in self-confidence—all important opportunities for an oppressed people who lived in a society structured to teach them subservience and the need for white governance. At least in this area, limited though it was, there was some space for public leadership and self-government. Moreover, their work could help to bring some order to their community threatened constantly by the disorders of slavery.

  On the other hand, the meetings must have seemed one more tool of white control—a way of co-opting the black leaders into white ways of doing things. Cooperation with the white missionary meant, after all, cooperating with the oppressor, for, as it was said of Charles, “his people have to work as well as we.”17 Perhaps most significant, the watchmen’s meetings, with Charles presiding, could be seen as subversive of the informal authority structures that had emerged in the Gullah community.

  Apparently Toney and the watchmen decided for the art of the possible and sought to use the meetings and the work of the watchmen for their own purposes. By organizing as a group, they carved out visible, public space within Liberty County for black leadership, for decision making about the issues in the community, and for formal procedures for settling disputes among themselves. Much of this had been done before by the white session at Midway or by the little coterie of white members at the Baptist churches. With the watchmen’s meetings, black leadership in the county had a new role and a new visibility.

  The watchmen met monthly, generally after a Sunday service, and heard reports and conducted their business. Sometimes there were differences to be settled between church members. Pompey, at the Mallard Place, had a falling out with Peter, the driver at the Quarterman Baker plantation. Toney, Charles the blacksmith for the Walthour plantations, and Joshua, another selectman, met with them, and the two men were reconciled. A few months later, Peter was in another dispute, this time with the driver Paris from a Walthour plantation. Another committee was appointed, and the men were reconciled. Such cases took some of the watchmen’s time, but the great focus of their work was on trying to stabilize marriages and family life within the radical disorders imposed by slavery. In turning to this task, the watchmen did not have the formal participation of slave women who, like white women, were not allowed to assume any office in the church.18

  Traditions of marriage and family rooted in the different cultures and nations of Africa had been assaulted by the tearing of men and women out of their homelands, by the living conditions and housing patterns in the settlements, by the early ratio of many men to few women, and by the harsh and often arbitrary decisions of whites in the buying, selling, and moving of slaves. In the eighteenth century as a Gullah community had begun to be created generation by generation, new patterns of marriage and family life had slowly begun to emerge as men and women struggled to create the Gullah-speaking African-American family. By 1840 the results could be seen at Carlawter and Maybank, at the Retreat and the Mallard Place and the other settlements of the low country.19

  Some couples, like Andrew and Mary Ann at Maybank, lived together in the same settlement and raised their children together under the same roof. Other couples—such as Rosetta and Sam, and Cato and Betsy—lived out their lives separated during the week and were together only when the husband came to the “wife house” on Saturday nights, yet they managed to remain faithful to one another and to create families of significant strength and cohesion. Some, like Phoebe and Cassius, evidently worked out a way to remain together as a married couple even as the husband had acknowledged wives and children at other plantations; other couples in similar situations accused each other of infidelity and declared that they were no longer married. Still others—like Old Jupiter at the slave sale in Riceboro in 1808—had to face the bitter humiliations of not being able to protect a spouse or children from the power of whites, or they had to endure the trauma of separation when a spouse or children were sold away or removed. All of them had to find a way to negotiate their lives and relationships in a system in which the state did not recognize slave marriages.

  For the state, the primary relationship of black men and women was with a master or a mistress, not a husband or wife. Owners needed the freedom to control their slave property according to their own economic interests. The recognition of slave marriages would have limited that control and would have left owners open to the charge that they were frequently “putting asunder” what “God had joined together.” The churches, on the other hand, had begun to insist on the sanctity of slave marriages. To be sure, no white member of Midway was ever disciplined for “putting asunder” what “God had joined together” in the marriage of blacks—that would have presented a crisis to the system of slavery and would have challenged owners’ absolute control over their slaves. But by the nineteenth century, Midway and other churches in the low country were seeking to impose church discipline on black members as a way of supporting the marriages of those who had no protection under state law. The tensions created by attempting to uphold marriage within a system that worked directly against it could be seen in the records of Midway. Time and again, the session had to decide what to do when a spouse was removed or sold away. And over and over again, the session had to decide that a spouse must be treated as dead because it was unlikely that a husband or wife would ever be returned to the county. Under such circumstances, the one remaining was said by the Midway session to be free to marry again.20

  The work of the watchmen was in large part to try to uphold slave marriages under these constant attacks and to find ways to strengthen the families of the settlements. Month by month Toney and the watchmen heard reports of men and women, church members, who were struggling with issues of fidelity. To be a church member required not only a conversion experience and a confession of faith but also a promise to try to live according to the norms and expectations of the Christian community in Liberty County. Much of what the watchmen did was to provide mo
ral guidance for the slave members and structures for reconciliation when there were troubles between husbands and wives. The discipline that the watchmen administered, often invoking the authority of the white session or congregation, had as its purpose the shaping of the character of the community, the reconciliation of those who were alienated from one another, and the restoration to full church membership of those who had been disciplined. Their use of discipline was soon felt at Maybank and the Retreat and among the house servants of Betsy and William Maxwell.

  Sandy Maybank, who was married to Sharper’s daughter Mary Ann at the Retreat, was frequently hired out to do carpentry work on neighboring plantations. While working on the W.Q. Baker plantation, he took up with Mag, and they had a child, Peter. Word of their relationship was reported at the watchmen’s meeting, and after formal charges and the testimony of the watchmen Joshua and July, the case was turned over to the white session, where Sandy was excommunicated. He and Mag had another child, Mary, and he evidently continued to maintain two families for several years. But in time he became convinced of the sin of such a practice, and while he continued to see and support his Baker family, he began to live faithfully with Mary Ann and in this way was received back into the church.21