Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  At North Newport Baptist Church the twelve whites who were members soon left to join other congregations. And black preachers began to be called to lead the congregation where Charles had so often preached and where Paris, the driver at South Hampton, had been the lead watchman. In the years ahead, the North Newport congregation, together with Midway Presbyterian and the other black congregations of the county, were to become centers of African-American life.25

  These black congregations were not new institutions that suddenly arose with emancipation; rather, they were communities of faith that already had long histories in 1865. Much of their history had been open for whites to see at Midway and North Newport, at Sunbury and Pleasant Grove. But much of their history had also been secret, rooted in the bush arbors and in little gatherings around settlement fires. Their history included the work of earlier black preachers—Toney Stevens and Sharper, Jack Salturs and Mingo—and of such black religious leaders as Paris the driver at South Hampton, who had once thrown an intruding dog out of the church window, and Major the leading watchman at Midway, and Bess the church “Mother” who started the Female Prayer Service at the Mallard Place. But the histories of these communities of faith also included the work of Charles Colcock Jones, the white preacher and pastor, who for years preached and taught on the Sabbath and who, during the evenings of the week, after the people’s work was done, visited in the settlements. In the years ahead, there would be signs that some of the Gullah people of Liberty County had internalized at a deep level what they had learned from this white preacher. He had sought to touch their hearts and their minds, to shape their religious feelings and imaginations, and to inculcate an evangelical faith and worldview. And some had responded positively, for they found good news in what he taught. But there would be signs, too, that others rejected and dismissed his teaching and preaching as nothing more than the self-serving and empty words of a slave owner. In any case, the Gullah people had now been “spiritually emancipated,” and their religious life and decisions would reflect a new context of freedom.26

  In perhaps unexpected ways, the new schools for the freed people helped to reinforce much of what Charles had taught during the years of his work for the “religious instruction of the Negro.” Almost as soon as freedom arrived, African Americans began to establish schools with help from Northern denominations and the federal government’s Freedmen’s Bureau. And many of the places where they established schools were the old stations where Charles had first gathered slaves for worship and instruction. A little primary school was started at Hutchinson Station, where Charles had taught his catechism and the hymns of an evangelical faith. Others schools were started in the churches at Midway, North Newport, and Pleasant Grove, and there was also a little school at Lodebar plantation, where Charles had been a regular visitor. But of all the schools, none was to be more influential than Dorchester Academy, established across the road from Acadia.27

  New England Congregationalists, proud of Midway’s history and the fame of Charles’s work, were determined to build a fine academy for the freed people. Led by the Reverend Floyd Snelson, a black Congregational missionary, the academy was established on eighty-seven acres—enough land for a farm where the students could raise the food they ate and also livestock for help with the school’s expenses. For the next seventy years, Dorchester Academy was to be the single most important institution in the Gullah community of Liberty County.28

  While all of the schools sought to help their students prepare for a life of freedom, the teachers and curriculum at Dorchester sought with particular intensity to overcome “the corrupting and degrading” influences of slavery. The hope was that the academy would instill Calvinistic virtues into the Gullah people as the necessary foundation for their new freedom. Teachers wanted their students to internalize a new personal discipline, and they tried to instill—down into the psychic depths of their students—the virtues of modesty, industry, sobriety, self-control, and godliness. Such concerns were not distant from Charles’s efforts through the Liberty County Association for the Religious Instruction of Slaves, or from the efforts of the coterie of white teachers who had taught for years in the Sunday Schools scattered around the county. But unlike Charles’s classes and those taught by white planting families, the academy nurtured a democratic spirit and a love of liberty and encouraged an admiration for the history of the Gullah people who had been traveling a long road together.29

  While Patience and Porter and other freed people were working to make a new life for themselves in Liberty County, many of the white families were giving up any hope for the old community that had been built around the Midway congregation. Few of those who had moved to southwest Georgia for new lands and safety showed an interest in returning to the coast. The rice economy had largely collapsed during the war, and the river plantations close to Midway had lost much of their economic viability with the reluctance of freed people to work in the rice fields. How many freed people, after all, wanted to wade into the mire of a rice field in July to chop weeds for a white land owner when they could hope to own their own land and grow a little cotton, corn, and peas?30

  Almost as soon as the war was over, Charlie began to seek buyers for Arcadia, Montevideo, and Maybank. But no one was interested in purchasing the plantations. The land seemed of little value with no substantial labor force to work it. Mary had no objections to selling Arcadia; she even thought it a good idea, and apparently she was willing to sell a burned and desolated Maybank. But Montevideo was another matter. After months of struggling to reestablish a working plantation at Montevideo, Mary wrote Mary Sharpe: “I sometimes feel I must sink under the various perplexities of this situation, and know that if God should withdraw the hope and confidence which I trust He permits me to entertain in His infinite wisdom and special guidance, that I should be truly desolate and miserable.” Yet in the face of “severe losses” and “sad reverses,” Mary was trying to cling to her plantation home. “I have tried to live here,” she wrote, “that I might protect and not sacrifice this our home from any feeling of loneliness or isolation, or from motives of ease and deliverance from care.” She had, she mused, “labored to preserve it as my only home, and what might in God’s providence be a home to my dear children. And even now I am not willing, if I can prevent it, to have it sacrificed.”31

  Even Mary could see, however, that there was little chance that her children would ever return to Montevideo or would ever want to take up their residence in a part of the country increasingly dominated by its black population. A few months after the end of the war, Charlie had announced that he was going to New York, of all places, to practice law. He had accepted an invitation to be a co-partner with his old Savannah law partner John Ward. Both men had extensive contacts in the North, and they intended to focus on representing the legal interests of southerners. Charlie wrote his mother: “The prospects for success, under God, appear flattering.” It seemed strange for a Confederate army officer and defender of the Southern cause to move so quickly and with such apparent ease to the Yankee metropolis. But Charlie had spent years in the North studying at Princeton and Harvard, and in spite of his years of fighting Yankees, he felt no great cultural divide. Like many other southerners, he was able to come back into the Union and think of himself as an American patriot. After all, he thought that the South had been fighting to preserve the true nature of the old American Republic. Besides, he had a pragmatic approach: he knew that money could be made in New York, while Savannah was impoverished.32

  Among the advantages Charlie found in the city was the opportunity to indulge his old passion for history and archaeology that had been first nurtured in the little school and museum at Maybank. In the evenings, after busy days in his law office, he would write about the history of his native state and about the aboriginal people who had once lived by the marshes and rivers of Georgia. New York University later awarded him the honorary degree of doctor of laws for his efforts. In 1877 Charlie and his family returned t
o the South and took up residence in a fine antebellum mansion near Augusta. But he remembered with pleasure his time in New York. “My eyes were opened,” he wrote his daughter Mary Ruth in 1888, “my ideas enlarged, and aspirations elevated. I will always be glad of this northern residence at this special epoch in my life. The good results linger with me to the present time, and the associations then formed are even now pleasurable and profitable.”33

  Mary was glad for Charlie’s growing success in New York, but what was most difficult for her was the removal of her “darling baby,” Mary Ruth. The child had been a great comfort to Mary during the hard days of the war, especially after Charles’s death. When Ruthie left to join her father and her stepmother, Mary had written in her journal that the little girl had been a “Sweet Comforter in hours of widow’d woe,” had won her grieving grandmother “back to life,” and had made Mary feel “that one sweet living tie still bound me here.”34

  The greatest pain for Mary, however, came not simply with the separation from Ruthie but with the growing alienation she felt from Eva Jones, who was herself uneasy with the role of a stepmother. Eva would call herself an “ugly stepmother” and “wicked stepmother,” and then after such self-depreciation, she would quickly say how much love and attention she was giving Ruthie and how she was showering gifts of dolls and other toys upon the child. Publicly, all remained proper and pleasant between Mary and her daughter-in-law, but Eva left the city the day after Mary came for her one visit to New York, and Mary discreetly wrote Mary Sharpe, after what she considered a serious slight from Eva: “There are wounds in life very painful.”35

  Shortly after Charlie moved to New York, Mary Sharpe and her family moved to New Orleans, where Robert had accepted a call to become the pastor of the Prytania Street Presbyterian Church. Central Church in Atlanta had vigorously resisted the loss of their pastor, but the presbytery had approved the call, and the family had moved to the booming southern city in 1866. New Orleans had not suffered the devastations of Atlanta or the economic depression of Savannah, and the call was in every way a most attractive one for Robert. The church was large and influential, away from the old French Quarters and in the “American” part of the city, and the salary was substantial—especially for an impoverished family. But the move was hard for Mary, alone in Liberty County, in spite of her thinking that Robert must try to follow God’s will in the matter. As Robert was considering the move, Mary had written Mary Sharpe: “I shall feel if you go to New Orleans that I shall hardly ever see you, if I am spared to live longer in Liberty.” And Laura had written Mary Sharpe from Flemington: “If you go to New Orleans, Aunt Mary’s children will be scattered, and it will require time to journey from one to the other.”36

  As the Mallards were preparing for their move to New Orleans, Joe was accepting a position in the medical school at the University of Nashville. Immediately after the war, he had been summoned to Washington to testify in the trial of Henry Wirz, the commander of the Confederate prison at Andersonville. Joe felt that his reports about the wretched conditions at Andersonville were distorted in the trial, and he was outraged that the court ignored what he regarded as the federal government’s role in the horrors of Andersonville, for Washington had refused to exchange prisoners as the exhausted Confederacy had stumbled toward utter collapse. The conviction and execution of Wirz—the only Confederate officer executed for war crimes—left Joe dejected and bitter. The call to the professorship in Nashville, however, revived his spirits. He stayed there two years before accepting another call, this one to the University of Louisiana (later Tulane University) in New Orleans. There, near his sister’s family, he was to build his reputation as one of the nation’s leading authorities on tropical diseases.37

  In this way, Mary found herself increasingly isolated at Montevideo and distant from those whom she loved. But it was not only those who moved away who left her struggling alone at her beloved home.

  William Maxwell came to stay at Montevideo. He was a comfort to Mary, and she to him. She poured on him all the attention she had given Charles as his health had declined, and she gave him all the affection she had given Ruthie when the child came motherless to Montevideo. William was now in his eighties, and Mary’s kind attentions helped to ease the aches and pains of his old age. Once again, as so often in the past, they would sit on the piazza and have tea and talk as afternoon shadows lengthened and the sounds of approaching night drifted up from the river. Looking across the lawn, the two old friends could see egrets flying homeward, their white plumage reflected in the dark river waters until they finally disappeared in the evening light.

  In late spring 1866 Mary told William that she was going to New York for a visit with Charlie and his family and to see her precious Ruthie. As they sat together on the piazza, “his eyes filled with tears and his lips quivered as he said, ‘Mary, I am afraid I shall never see you again.’” And he said to her, “When you come back you will shed a silent tear over my grave.” He felt sad not only at Mary’s leaving but also at his leaving Montevideo, although he was going to stay with dear friends.38 It came as no surprise, then, a few months later for Mary to receive a letter in New York from Laura:

  My beloved Aunt,

  My heart fails me when I think of the pain you will feel on the reception of the sad bereavement which is pressing like lead upon my heart. Dear Uncle William was called to his heavenly home yesterday the 20th at one o’clock.

  William had spent some time on Colonel’s Island with Audley and Kate King after Mary had left—Audley had rebuilt at Woodville a simple but adequate cottage. The island was filled with many memories and so many associations for William, but as he felt his weakness growing, he was eager to go to Dorchester, to the home of his closest friend, Abial Winn, where dear Betsy had died. Not long after he arrived at the Winns’, he fell ill with a fever. Julia King came, as did other friends. He died, wrote Laura, where he wanted to die, “under the roof where dear Aunty breathed her last ten years and one month ago.”39

  So when Mary returned to Montevideo in the fall of 1866, she returned to a home that was empty. Moreover, she returned to a shattered community that was struggling to find its way into the future. Friends would come for a visit, trying to reestablish old patterns of hospitality—Julia King was never far away at South Hampton, but times were hard for the Kings, and Julia was grieving the death of her son Willie, killed in battle three days before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. Eliza Clay came for a visit. Her new home was a simple affair at Richmond-on-Ogeechee, and she and her extended family were depending much on the hunting prowess of the young men in the family, who, when they had time, brought home deer and wild turkeys shot in the river swamps and ducks shot at dawn over old rice fields. Sister Susan would come with Laura and the children from Flemington—they all loved Montevideo and were devoted to Mary. But the underlying economic and social structures that had supported such practices of hospitality and that had been the basis for the community at Midway, those structures had largely collapsed. And with their collapse came the end of the Midway congregation.40

  Trouble had been brewing at Midway for years. Not only had white members been moving out of the county, they had also been moving for some time to the little summer villages in the county and establishing permanent homes there. So daughter churches had been established—Walthourville Presbyterian, Dorchester Presbyterian, and Flemington Presbyterian. By 1867 only a few families remained close enough to Midway to attend regularly, and they were having great difficulty providing the necessary support for the life of the church. In the fall of 1867, David Buttolph accepted a call to become the pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Marietta. It was a devastating blow to the congregation and the community.

  People came from far and wide for the last communion service in the old church. The long thin table was once again stretched across the front of the sanctuary, and the Midway families came in turn to sit at the table and receive the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper fro
m their pastor. Mary wrote in her journal that it was an occasion of deep solemnity as they all realized that for the first time in its history Midway would be “without the living teacher.” Even during the “first Revolution” arrangements had been made “at least for a pastoral ministration of the word.” Now, however, “the wants and depressions and positive poverty are so great that this church and people have not the means to support the Gospel. This greatest of all their calamities, a destruction of the word of life, is thus laid upon them.” Mary wondered to herself whether the future was only one of desolation. She did not flinch but asked herself: “Will God yet arise for our Zion or are the great purposes of Jehovah accomplished in and through us! Has Christ’s mission through and by this church been fulfilled and must it now sit solitary and alone—or are we thus rebuked for pride and selfsufficiency?”41

  Shortly before she pondered these questions, Mary had written Mary Sharpe in New Orleans: “I feel my child that I cannot live away from you. I want you to write me fully and freely.”42 The decision made, Mary began preparations to leave Montevideo for the same city where Phoebe and her family had disappeared into a slave market. Cattle and sheep were sold, as was the little cotton and corn that had been harvested. A caretaker was secured for the next year, and Mary’s plans were explained to those living at Carlawter. Boxes were packed, trunks filled, and carpets rolled up for the long trip. And then one night, in the midst of all of this preparation, Mary rose and threw “wide the closed shutters of my chamber window” that she “might look upon my beautiful earthly home.” The moon was full, and countless stars lit the winter night and illumined a world that was fast receding into the chambers of Mary’s memory and heart. “Nature below,” she wrote in her journal, “is in perfect repose.”