Charles, Mary, and Mary Sharpe arrived in Philadelphia in early October 1850. With them were Susan, Laura, and Charles Edward—he had graduated from Princeton and was now a student at the Medical College of the University of Pennsylvania, and his mother and sister had decided to join the family in Philadelphia at least for the winter.12 Charlie and Joe had already been busy for some weeks with their studies at Princeton. Those in Philadelphia stayed at the American Hotel across from the Old State House, a noisy place whose commotion was particularly annoying to Mary, accustomed as she was to the quiet sounds of the river at Montevideo and the marsh wind at Maybank. And from home there came a letter from brother John in Marietta:
It does appear so strange to think of you moving so far off from your Southern home. But I do believe you are highly blessed in being permitted to make an honorable and dutiful move out of a slave country, particularly on account of your children. I am becoming less and less attached to that Domestic Institution. What will be the end of the slave question? Much excitement prevails in Georgia about the admission of California into the Union.13
While searching for some more permanent accommodations, Charles also began to investigate more carefully the character of the work he had undertaken. The size, scope, and challenge of the work impressed him. The nation was rapidly expanding, the frontier was leaping westward, and everywhere there was a need for new churches to bring the light of the Gospel and the orderly ways of a democratic society.14
Charles’s early experience in a Savannah counting house now served him well. Such training, together with Charles’s orderly and disciplined ways, soon led him to discover irregularities in the board’s finances and organization. So during the coming months he spent long hours at his desk not only engaged in a voluminous correspondence with missionaries scattered across the country but also putting in order the work of the Philadelphia office. Such long hours at a desk soon began to take their toll on his health.15
In early May 1851, Charles left Philadelphia for a meeting of the Presbyterian General Assembly being held in St. Louis. It was his first trip to the American West, and what he saw along the way filled him with wonder and provided him with a personal experience of the size, energy, and wealth of the country. From Philadelphia he traveled to Pittsburgh—a two-day trip by train and canal boat. Pittsburgh he found to be a “City of Smoke, full of iron furnaces and factories, and every fire made with bituminous coal.” Charles thought the city “altogether unlike the East…. Things are done with a rush,” he remarked, and “the people are pushing, and every man seems very independent of his neighbor.”16
Charles Colcock Jones (1808–1863) (Charles Colcock Jones Papers, Tulane University Manuscript Department)
In Pittsburgh he boarded the steam packet Cincinnati for his trip down the Ohio River. He found the river to be beautiful, and he admired the villages along its banks and the fertile farms that stretched away to the horizon. The steamer itself was a technological wonder—powerfully churning through the water and as comfortable as a floating hotel. At Louisville he went ashore and found it a “Southern city,” an “agreeable” one. He sent a telegraph to Mary—another technological miracle; later he exclaimed: “Oh, these telegraphic wires! The wonder and comfort of the age!” Then boarding another steam packet, he was on to St. Louis.17
In St. Louis he found John waiting for him, having come from Marietta by way of Nashville. Charles wrote Mary that they rushed into each other’s arms, “the gladdest fellows you ever saw.” Charles made his report to the assembly, using a large map of the country to illustrate the importance of his subject. The report was received enthusiastically, and Charles was paid what he called “very high and extravagant compliments.” Later he was nominated for a professorship at Princeton seminary, a nomination he turned down.18
Mary Jones (1808–1869) (courtesy Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia)
As for St. Louis itself, its growth and vitality astonished him—already almost ninety thousand inhabitants, more than the size of Charleston and Savannah combined! And when he thought of the size of the country with its broad and beautiful rivers stretching thousands of miles, he was amazed. Still, he thought “the great West” a more pleasant place to visit than live. “So much mixture of people from all places,” he wrote Charlie and Joe, “so much driving, speculating, selfishness; a world of strangers, a world of changes; moving, pushing, sickening, dying.” But he had to admit: “Many like its ideas of greatness, its excitements, its adventures, its creations and annihilations.”19
Charles left St. Louis on May 27. He and John traveled by steam packets down the Mississippi and then up the Ohio and Cumberland rivers to Nashville. From there they took the stage and crossed the Cumberland Mountains to Chattanooga, then took a train to Marietta. After visiting family and friends in the little village, and making a quick trip to Columbia and Augusta, he was at Montevideo on June 17. I am, he wrote Mary, in “our old and quiet and happy home!”20
Happy reunions with relatives and friends quickly followed Charles’s arrival, and those who lived in the settlements seemed genuinely glad to see him. But there was disturbing news about Betsy when Charles arrived home. She had been troubled by a mole on her arm and had finally decided to have it removed. Charles Edward, home from Philadelphia, helped with the operation. She was recovering nicely, but the size of the mole was a cause of some concern.21
Charles left Montevideo after a stay of two days and hurried to Maybank. Early the next day, as the morning wind brought the sweet smells of a low-country island, and the sun turned the marsh grass to gold, he went upstairs to his old study and wrote Mary:
Not a sound about the house. Perfect quiet within. But the whole world without is filled with the melody and notes of a hundred birds. Their voices are not silent a second of time. They seem to have entered in and taken possession more perfectly than when we were here. The calmness, the quiet is delightful. The lot looks so grown, so fresh and green. The house all open, so clean and pleasant from top to bottom. Everything just as you left it, and all reminding me of my love, my sweet Mary. If I look out on the flowers and smell their fragrance, she planted and trained them with her own hands; if I look at the trees and the garden with its fruits, its oranges and figs and pomegranates, its pears and peaches and plums and apples, they were all set out under her eye and pruned and fostered by her care; if I walk in the piazza, in imagination she is at my side, and we are leaning in the cool breeze upon the shaded banister, sharing our thoughts and our love together. In the parlor, in the passage, in our chamber, her image is before me. There is not a part of the dwelling—no, not a single part of it—which does not furnish some scene of affection, some moments of love between us. Oh, if you were here, you would know how my heart beats towards you, my own, my dearest Mary! Then my children are associated with all around me too. If you were all here, would I not be a happy husband and a happy father?22
Within two weeks Charles was back at his desk in Philadelphia listening to the sounds of the city rumble past his window as he worked on the accumulated stack of mail on his desk. But he was soon alone once again. Mary Sharpe had been seriously ill with a fever while he was away, and her parents decided that she needed the therapeutic waters of some resort. Consequently, while Charles remained at his desk, Mary and Mary Sharpe, escorted by Charlie, left in mid-July for Saratoga, New York. They were as amazed by New York City as Charles had been by Pittsburgh and St. Louis. “Surely civilization with its mighty, transforming power has been abroad in the land,” wrote Charlie as he gazed upon Manhattan. And before they boarded their Hudson River steamer, they saw crowds of new immigrants—mostly German and Dutch—in their traditional dress. “Taking them all in all,” Charlie thought that “they presented as singular and curious an appearance as one could well imagine.” So the travels of the family during the spring and summer of 1851, even while reminding them of home by a river and a Sea Island marsh, showed them much about the great change
s that were transforming the nation.23
Charles had returned to his Philadelphia desk with a new sense of the importance of domestic missions and the urgency of his work on behalf of the church. Nevertheless, he and Mary were happy when his responsibilities required that he attend a meeting of the Synod of Georgia the following November. They quickly decided that Mary would accompany him, that they would go to Liberty County after the synod meeting, and that when Charles returned to Philadelphia, Mary would remain at Montevideo for most of the winter. She was clearly unhappy in Philadelphia and often miserable. “All,” she wrote that year, “is so cold and desolate and cheerless in this land of strangers; not a generous or even a polite emotion seems to move the hearts of those around me.”24
They left Philadelphia in mid-November and were in Marietta a week later, having traveled by train and ship. They were amazed at how quickly and easily they made such a long trip—and it could have taken less time had they not stopped in Charleston, where Charles preached for Thomas Smyth and talked to John Adger about his work among the slaves of the city.25
In Marietta they had a happy reunion with John Jones and his family and with Aunt Eliza and all her tribe. The Presbyterian Church in Marietta was flourishing under John’s leadership; its membership had almost doubled the previous year, and the congregation included what Charles called “some excellent low-country families.” John’s own family now included little Mary Elizabeth, a beautiful and vivacious two-year-old, who was the delight of her parents. Dunwody, however, was giving his parents increasing concern. John had written earlier: “He often shows a strong spirit and a disobedient one.” Later he wrote: “Dunwody is hearty, but wayward and gives us much anxiety.” And still later John confessed: “He is rather a hard boy and gives us many painful feelings. He was so long an only child that he has become selfish.” Dunwody had been for some time showing clear signs of becoming a rebellious “preacher’s kid.” But Dunwody, in addition to his rejection of his parents’ piety, apparently had some learning disorder that made him a poor and restless student. He was destined to live under the long shadow of his father’s affable ways and to depend upon his father’s influence to open doors for him later in life—even doors that would lead to the most wretched of work.26
Charles and Mary hurried to Liberty County after the synod meeting. They wanted to attend the wedding of Mary’s brother James Newton Jones, but when they arrived Mary was too exhausted from the trip to go to the wedding—per-haps her wish to avoid her stepmother added to her fatigue. At any rate, Charles went “to represent our branch of the family at the wedding.”27
It had been six years since Mary King had broken her engagement in such a scandalous manner with James Newton. She admired but did not love him, she had told her mother Julia that summer of 1845. In 1849 she had married Dr. Charlton Henry Wells, a handsome young physician, a graduate of Dartmouth and the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. He was, Mary reported to Mary Sharpe after James Newton’s wedding, “a most gentlemanly and amiable person, and I doubt not an excellent M.D.” And he had in Mary King a wife who was devoted to him and who, said Sarah Howe, “loved him with the most uncontrolled affection.”28
James Newton, bruised by the broken engagement in 1845, had been left reluctant to risk such rejection and embarrassment again. After his father’s death in 1846, he had given himself to the responsibilities of managing the Retreat and seeing after his mother and younger brothers and sisters. He had quickly become, wrote John Jones, “an excellent guardian and manager.” In time his success restored his confidence and he began to court Sarah Norman, the daughter of a neighboring planter. She was kind and gentle, clearheaded and forthright, and apparently a beauty, for James Newton had become one of the most eligible bachelors in the county.29 Their wedding was held in her parents’ home in Walthourville. Charles wrote Mary Sharpe a detailed account. There were, he said, three bridesmaids and three groomsmen.
The bride and groom looked remarkably well. The bride wore a veil falling from the head but not over the face; high-neck dress of satin (I believe) with a lace deep over it. Very becoming and genteel. Her maids were similarly dressed, with silk bodices; and the whole appearance of the bridal array was in good taste and pleasing to all. The room was crowded. Conceive a room entirely occupied all around with seats, and then as many persons as could be crowded into the center space, and you have an idea of our condition. And everybody engaged in the most animated conversation.
At the appointed time, I. S. K. Axson, the pastor at Midway, performed the wedding service. Then the Liberty County Independent Troop—in which James Newton was an officer—having gathered in the yard, fired salutes, “to the consternation of some of the little children, and the great delight of others.” Some of the young ladies played on the piano and sang; some of the men retired “from the ladies society” to an adjoining room. At eleven o’clock, dinner was served, and was, wrote Charles, “very handsome.” He thought the “whole evening passed off most agreeably,” and he told Mary Sharpe that the wedding was like one “you ordinarily attend in our county.” James Newton seemed especially happy. “He is thought,” said Charles, “to have made a prudent choice.”30
A little more than two weeks after the wedding, Charles was on his way back to his Philadelphia desk. In the meantime, Joe had arrived at Montevideo, and he would remain with his mother during the winter break.31 The separation of the family that winter made Charles and Mary more homesick than ever for their old established ways at Montevideo and Maybank. And James Newton’s wedding evidently stirred memories in them of their own wedding at the Retreat and perhaps of Joseph and other departed ones whose voices and images seemed to be growing more distant as if they were, year by year, floating farther away from home on the dark waters of time. The day after their wedding anniversary, which came shortly after Charles had arrived back in Philadelphia, Mary wrote him:
Yesterday, my dear husband, was our twenty-first wedding day! Can you believe it? Oh, that I had the power to recall all the love and mercy that have crowned those departed years! I seem to have been dwelling in a land of receding shadows, and it is with wonder and astonishment that I stop to review the path by which we have been led. “Surely goodness and mercy have followed us all the days of our life;” and I trust we feel a desire to “dwell in the house of the Lord forever”!
Mary acknowledged that only “Sovereign and Infinite Wisdom” knew how “much longer we shall be spared to each other.” “I have no desire,” she wrote Charles, “to rend the veil which obscures futurity! My husband, my children, my own soul, interests temporal and spiritual—I desire to place all in God’s hand, to be guided and disposed of as His righteous will directs.” Mary evidently felt in their separation—and her increased worries about Charles’s health—the approach of what she had called years earlier “the great separation day.”32
And in Philadelphia on their wedding anniversary, Charles wrote a long love poem to Mary. He recalled their wedding at the old Retreat and declared: “Blest day that made thee mine!” He remembered their life together and called her “Light of my life! My counselor, my aid/My sweet companion, by kind Heaven made.” A month later he wrote John Jones: “I shall have to be set down among the confirmed, incurable lovers. In fact, I want to be confirmed, and don’t want to be cured!” But he too sensed the lengthening shadows gathering over his and Mary’s life together, and he reminded her that “the vale of life, my love, before us lies!”33
Brooding upon the past and contemplating their mortality did not, however, preoccupy Charles and Mary—they were, after all Calvinists, who were concerned about being faithful to the responsibilities immediately before them. “Memory,” Mary wrote, “is the reigning faculty, and I know usurps too much of time and feeling for happiness or usefulness.”34 So each of them gave themselves to the duties and the busy activities of daily life.
Mary turned her considerable energies to the management of their plantations and to the ordinary
details of life in the low country. She ordered new blankets for those in the settlements and instructed Sandy and Porter to repair the back piazza at Montevideo and then to put into good order the cabins at Arcadia. She moved Caesar—one of the younger, single men—into a cabin in the yard at Montevideo to stay with his uncle, old Tony, who was the gardener. “This will be for the comfort of the old man,” she wrote Charles, “and protection of the lot.” And she complained to Irwin Rahn about the small number of hogs being raised at Arcadia and insisted that their numbers be increased in order “to secure bacon to our people.”35
Not only did Mary see after the management of the plantations, she assumed the ministerial role of her husband in his absence. She had, of course, been teaching Sunday school for years, but now she began to lead worship at Maybank and to preach. The Apostle Paul, she wrote Charles, says, “Suffer not a woman to teach.” But she thought such an admonition must not include a woman’s teaching or preaching to “children and servants.” For if Paul meant this, then “we are not accountable for their ignorance or their errors.” A white mistress, Mary apparently reasoned, could teach and preach as long as no white man was present, but if there were only children and black men and women in worship, then that was another matter. Deep racial assumptions set within the hierarchical world of slavery were apparently loosening for Mary long-established gender roles for white women.36
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