Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  Charlie in his Confederate uniform (courtesy Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia)

  Fortunately for Mary, the ecclesiastical machinery of the Presbyterian Church moved slowly, and it was the end of summer before Robert’s presbytery met to approve his call to Atlanta. In the meantime, with the season of miasmas and fevers approaching, Mary gladly accepted the invitation to spend the summer in Walthourville with Mary Sharpe and Robert. There she threw herself into long days of work and worry, as supplies became increasingly short and the needs of the people at Montevideo, Arcadia, and Indianola pressed heavily upon her. But in the evenings, when she had retired to her room alone, she poured out her grief in her journal, and she read and reread the letters of condolence that had been sent to her. Her brothers, who called Charles “brother,” wrote long, loving letters. John had written of Charles: “I loved him more than any man on earth; he came very near to my own father. I know that I have lost my best male friend—my ever kind faithful brother, on whom I have leaned with filial confidence from early youth to the present time.” Henry Hart had written in a similar vein, and George Howe too, as Charles’s closest ministerial friend. But perhaps the most unusual of all the letters Mary received was one addressed to John from Joseph Williams, a free black preacher in Athens. He wrote that he had seen in a paper an announcement of “the death of my dear old worthy friend Dr. C. C. Jones.” “I have known the Dr. for thirty odd years,” wrote the black preacher, “but I shall see him no more untill we meet in the final assemaly there I hope to see mis mary not as his widow but as the sister of Christ.”3

  Joe in his Confederate uniform (Joseph Jones Collection, Tulane University Manuscript Department)

  While Mary was spending the summer with Mary Sharpe and Robert, Joe and Charlie were in the midst of the war. The previous fall Joe had received an appointment as a surgeon in the Confederate Army with the rank of major. And to his great surprise and delight, the surgeon general of the Confederacy assigned him to investigate the diseases that were rampant in the country’s hospitals and prisons. Professionally, it was an important assignment, but he quickly learned that war was not glorious but horrifying. “We know but little of war,” he wrote, “when we view it from the battle field covered with glory, and rendered attractive by deeds of valor.” Rather, the true nature of war could be seen in the hospitals, where the “victories of disease exceed ten fold those of the sword.” Joe quickly encountered traumatic tetanus, typhoid, and pneumonia among the wounded, and above all he found the wounded suffering with a gangrene that ate away their flesh. Using the observational skills he had first learned in the little museum at Maybank, he meticulously recorded his exposure to the horror of rotting flesh: “When I plunged my lancet into this elevated purplish and greenish putrid-looking mass, it encountered no resistance; the integuments and tissues appeared to be completely dissolved, and a dark greenish and purplish, horribly offensive matter, mixed with numerous bubbles of air, poured out in large quantity.”

  The Reverend John Jones (courtesy Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia)

  Later in the war, he went to Andersonville, the infamous Confederate prison in south Georgia where ten thousand Union solders died during the first seven months of its establishment. There Joe found Dunwody serving as a guard among the wretched, having secured, through the efforts of his father, John Jones, what he had hoped was a less dangerous assignment than the battlefields of Virginia. Joe was moved deeply at Andersonville by the suffering of the prisoners, who were dying like flies. In the filth of the crowded stockade, they had little chance in the south Georgia heat to escape from deadly attacks of diarrhea, dysentery, scurvy, and gangrene. Joe threw himself into his investigations, and for days in an unventilated room he performed “post-mortem examinations of the thoroughly poisoned and rapidly decomposing bodies” of Union soldiers. When Joe finally left the hellhole, he sent meticulous reports to the surgeon general in hopes that there might be some relief from the suffering. But none came until Union troops swept through Georgia, and then Joe’s reports would come back to haunt him. As for Dunwody, he later tried to explain what had happened at the stockade he had guarded: “Andersonville was no worse than northern prisons. There was suffering at Andersonville; there was also suffering at Johnson’s Island; there were hardships in all prisons.” But Joe, as long as he lived, would remember how

  the haggard, distressed countenance of these miserable, complaining, dejected living skeletons crying for medicine and food, and cursing their government for its brutality in refusing to exchange prisoners, and the ghastly corpses with their glazed eyeballs, staring up into vacant space, with the flies swarming down their open and grinning mouths, and amongst the sick and dying formed a picture of helpless, hopeless misery which it would be impossible to portray by words or by the brush.4

  Dunwody Jones (courtesy Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia)

  Charlie on his part was busy with the defense of the coast, dashing here and there trying to check on the readiness of widely scattered forces. In late August 1863 he was ordered to South Carolina to take command of light artillery and to resist any attack that might come to the islands south of Charleston. He had six batteries of four guns each under his command and about six hundred men ready to move quickly to any place threatened by enemy forces. The Federals, after throwing the full weight of a sustained naval attack against Charleston and its surrounding forts, were unable to take the city.5

  Sketch by Joe of gangrenous foot (Joseph Jones Collection, Tulane University Manuscript Department)

  By November 1863 Charlie was able to take leave from his command for a few days to go to Augusta and marry a young woman whom he described to his mother as “absolutely attractive in every particular,” with a “heart as pure and tender and full of affection as dwells in woman’s breast.” Eva Berrien Eve was the cousin of Charlie’s first wife, Ruth Berrien Whitehead, and Ruth had not been dead long before Eva had begun to show kind attention to Charlie. She had been to school in Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., had been a seventeen-year-old bridesmaid in Ruth and Charlie’s wedding, and moved in the highest social circles in Georgia. Living a “life of cultivated leisure” in Augusta, “indulging her taste for art and books,” she—and her mother—had evidently seen in Charlie the grieving widower a most promising prospect for a husband. When Charles had attended the meeting of the Presbyterian General Assembly in Augusta in 1861, a few months after Ruth’s death, he had written Charlie that “Mrs. and Miss Eve” had called on him twice, and then the week following he had been invited “to dine at Mrs. Eve’s—one I never saw nor knew before! And putting one thing with another, I could not divine the intent of these attentions.” The intent of the attentions, as Charles had known only too well, was not the father but the son. At any rate, two years after Ruth’s death, Charlie was speaking of “my dear Eva.” He had little resistance to her charms, for although he had been through deep waters and much sorrow, her flirting and fawning appealed to him.6

  Eva was ten years younger than Charlie, and she was a “southern belle” of the most saccharine type. Shortly after their marriage, she wrote Mary Sharpe a silly letter—that of an educated but immature young woman. She had received, she wrote, letters from her brother Edgeworth:

  happy gleesome letters, written in the offhand nonchalant spirit of a gay boy cavalier. I wish you knew “our Edge”—the merriest young captain in Virginia, and you see I don’t think you are such a “sober old lady”—fie, my new sister and my only one—as you suppose—you are Charlie’s sister and I feel as though I know you—and if my pen grows jubilant and runs off into dives small extravagancies which it sometimes will do, when I am trying to look as grave and proper as Charlie does himself when he puts on his “company manners”—why, at least kindly remember I am not responsible for such a wayward pen!7

  Mary Sharpe left no indication of what she thought of such a letter, written
as it was in the middle of a brutal war. But surely she must have sensed that Charlie’s marriage to Eva pointed to a fundamental shift in values for part of the Jones family. Sentimentality and nostalgia would increasingly mark Charlie and Eva’s life together, just as a Calvinistic piety had marked the marriage of Charles and Mary. To be sure, Charlie would be responsible and highly disciplined in his work, and Eva would in time leave behind her immature and silly ways. But their sense of duty and the ethical standards that governed their lives would be cut loose from the religious commitments that had been nurtured in Charles and Mary and that had informed their way of seeing the world and their place in it. For Charlie and Eva, such religious commitments would be largely replaced by a comfortable Victorian respectability.8

  While the war raged and the Jones clan sought to make their way dutifully through these heart-shaking times, the people at Indianola, Arcadia, and Car-lawter watched and waited and thought about what was happening around them as they went about their work and their lives.

  By the summer of 1863 Cato was essentially running Montevideo by himself with his small workforce. A neighboring planter had been secured as an overseer, but he was old and in poor health, and his supervision was minimal. So Cato was making decisions about what to plant, when to plant, and how much to plant. When Mary rode over occasionally to check on the crops and the people, Cato would faithfully give her his report. But on one visit, when she counted the cattle, she noted that there was “quite a discrepancy” between Cato’s account and what Charles had recorded before his death. She instructed him to have the pastures thoroughly searched and all cattle brought up to the cow pen and recounted, but she apparently did not suspect that Cato might have requisitioned some of the cattle for one of his barbeques in the woods.9

  Stepney, for his part, was making regular trips between Liberty County and the new Jones plantation in Burke County. He had been made the driver for Indianola and sent off with the first group that had left by train in the fall of 1862. When he returned for the first time three months later, his father, Old Robin, “laid his hands upon him and sobbed aloud,” having feared that he would never see his son again. But Stepney was learning much about travel and distance that would later serve him well; he was also learning how to negotiate and buy supplies for the people under his care, and that too would later serve him well.10

  Stepney’s sister Patience was busy making Arcadia her new home. She was happy to be with Daddy Robin, and Porter was doing most of his work using Arcadia as a base. She had her cooking to do when Mary was at Arcadia, but when Mary went to Walthourville for the summer of 1863, Patience was left behind to do various domestic chores and to help look after the house at Arcadia. She had lost some of her energy after the death of her daughter Beck and Beck’s infant child from the measles, and then several of her adult children had been among those sent to Indianola. Even Patience’s long years of faithful service and her careful watch over her children had not been enough to keep her family from being separated when there was a threat of Federal gunboats coming up the North Newport. Patience would have several long bouts of illness during the coming winter—perhaps her losses made her more vulnerable. But both her body and spirit had reserves of strength, and she would soon be up again, ready to face a new day.11

  In early September 1863, Robert Mallard left Liberty County for Atlanta to assume his duties as the new pastor of Central Presbyterian Church and to make preparations for his family to join him. He quickly became involved not only in the work of his new pastorate but also in work among refugees and the wounded.

  He spent long hours seeking shelter and food for those who had fled the fighting, and he went day after day into crowded military hospitals seeking to bring some comfort and hope among those who were terribly wounded or were suffering the ravages of some dreadful disease.12

  In November, Robert brought Mary Sharpe and the children to Atlanta. Their departure left Mary feeling lonely and depressed, and she was soon writing Mary Sharpe: “I really feel that I can hardly undertake what I have been doing, for my strength and—what is more, I often fear—my nervous system are failing. Oh, my daughter, the desolation of heart which I feel is beyond expression!” To make matters worse for her, Charlie soon came and took Mary Ruth to Savannah for a short visit with him and “Mama Eva.” The removal of her “darling baby” was, Mary thought, “the entering wedge” that would lead to Mary Ruth’s eventual separation from her, and such thoughts deepened her sadness.13

  Robert and Mary Sharpe brought with them to Atlanta Charles and Lucy, their daughter Tenah, and Kate, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Elsey and Syphax. With them was Charles’s nephew young Abram, whose father, Abram Scriven, had been sold as a part of the Roswell King estate and whose mother, Dinah, lay buried under the oaks and palmettos at Maybank. Tenah’s husband, young Niger, would join them later. He had had to give up his fishing, shrimping, and crabbing when the Federals began to threaten Maybank and its settlement. He and Tenah had married at Christmas 1861—over the protests of Mary Sharpe that it was a “most inconvenient arrangement.” Six weeks after Tenah arrived in Atlanta in 1863, she gave birth to their child Cinda, and Niger was hired out to an Atlanta tannery.14

  As they were all learning to find their way around Atlanta, Mary Sharpe wrote her mother of a remarkable encounter by Charles. He had apparently been sent to run some errand in the city when he met his former brother-in-law, Abram Scriven. Mary Sharpe wrote:

  Do tell Daddy Andrew that Charles has seen Abram, poor Dinah’s former husband. He was working some miles from this place, and Charles met him once when he came in town. He had not heard of Dinah’s death, and said he had never married until pretty recently, for he had always hoped something would turn up and he would be able to go back to Liberty. He sent a great many how-dies to Mom Mary Ann and Daddy Andrew.15

  So Abram learned of Dinah’s death, and he remembered the earlier death of their marriage when he had been sold. Charles no doubt told Abram about his children—Harry, Silvia, and Dublin, who were with their grandparents Old Andrew and Mary Ann at Bonaventure. And perhaps Charles told him that his son Little Abram was in Atlanta.

  Two weeks after the Mallards and their slaves arrived in Atlanta, the Yankees won a victory at Missionary Ridge outside of Chattanooga, and General William T. Sherman began to make plans for his drive toward Georgia’s largest city. During the spring of 1864, Sherman successfully outflanked the Confederate defenses at Dalton, Resaca, Cassville, and Allatoona Pass as he moved steadily toward Atlanta. By early June, Sherman’s troops were poised to attack the Confederate defenses at Kennesaw Mountain, at the edge of Marietta. Eliza Robarts, with her daughters and grandchildren, fled south to a relative’s plantation in the south central part of the state. On their way they stayed a few days with the Mallards in Atlanta. With them were five domestic servants, including “Daddy Sam.” So as the Robartses and Mallards huddled together in Atlanta before the advancing Federal armies, blacks from Liberty County were reunited in the Mallard slave quarters. For a few evenings Sam could sit with his daughter Lucy and his granddaughter Tenah and hold his new great-granddaughter Cinda. And he could ask about Rosetta and how she was bearing up, and about their children and grandchildren who had been sent to Indianola, and about their daughter Fanny, who was married to Gilbert and was still with Rosetta at Montevideo. And no doubt there were some opportunities to talk with hushed voices about the meaning of the war and the rumored promises of freedom for slaves.16

  On 27 June, Sherman sent several Federal divisions against the entrenched Confederates at Kennesaw. In savage fighting in hundred-degree heat, they were beaten back, but Sherman responded by once again outflanking the Confederates, and soon both sides were preparing for the battle of Atlanta. As anxiety and fear of the approaching battle grew, and as the two armies maneuvered in anticipation of an imminent attack, the Mallards prepared to leave the city. They hastily packed all their belongings for shipment to Augusta. But as they were rushin
g to the depot, the little cart in which they were riding broke loose and ran up upon the horse. Startled, the horse began to run, violently rocking the cart and throwing the family out upon the street. Robert and the children escaped serious injury, but Mary Sharpe’s collarbone was dislocated. Robert drew her shoulder back, which “put the bones in position,” and they pressed ahead to the depot. This time when the train whistle blew, the white family was riding with their slaves in a boxcar. Robert opened bedding on the floor of the car and made a pallet for Mary Sharpe and fixed a rocking chair so she could sit down more comfortably. But her pain was intense as the train rocked and lurched toward Augusta.17