Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  34. TS to CCJ, 23 December 1850, JTU; CCJ to MSJ, 26 November 1850, JTU; MJ to CCJ, 13 January 1852, JTU; CCJ to MSJM, 6 December 1862, JTU. For slave ownership of guns in the low country, see Robert Ascher and Charles H. Fairbanks, “Excavation of a Slave Cabin: Georgia, U.S.A.,” Historical Archaeology 5 (1971): 3–17.

  35. For slave utilization of wild foods in the low country, see Josephine A. Beoku-Betts, “‘She Make Funny Flat Cake She Call Saraka’: Gullah Women and Food Practices under Slavery” in Hudson, Working Toward Freedom, 211–231; Kiple and King, Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora, 79–95; Elizabeth J. Reitz, Tyson Gibbs, and Ted A. Rathbun, “Archaeological Evidence for Subsistence on Coastal Plantations,” in The Archaeology of Slavery and Plantation Life, ed. Teresa A. Singleton (Orlando, 1985), 163–187; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 134–143.

  36. MJ to CCJ, 30 May 1851, JTU. This Titus had come to Carlawter in 1847 from the Retreat. He had been among the slaves Mary had inherited from her mother, but he had been kept at the Retreat until after Joseph Jones’s death. MJ to CCJ, 30 May 1851, JTU; Charles Edward Maxwell to MJ, 25 May 1851, JTU.

  37. For the continuing claims of “culturalists” that “clay eating was essentially a cultural trait or habit passed along from generation to generation,” see Kiple and King, Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora, 119–122.

  38. See Roswell King, Jr., “Letter to the Editor,” Southern Agriculturalist 1 (December 1828): 525–527. John LeConte, “Observations on Geophagy,” Southern Medical and Surgical Journal 1 (1845): 427–444. MJ to CCJ, 30 May 1851, JTU; Charles Edward Maxwell to MJ, 25 May 1851, JTU. For a discussion of pica or geophagy, see Kiple and King, Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora, 113, 119–123.

  39. CCJ to TS, 8 April 1851, JTU. For the corn and rice patches of those who lived in the settlements, see EM to CCJ and MJ, 19 April 1850, JTU; Irwin Rahn to CCJ, 3 November 1851, JTU; CCJ to MJ, 17 June 1851, JTU; Andrew [Lawton] to CCJ, 9 October 1852, JTU.

  40. Cato Jones to CCJ, 3 September 1852, JTU; TS to CCJ, 27 September 1852, JTU.

  41. Phoebe and Cassius Jones to Mr. Delion [Frederick Ransom Lyons], 17 March 1857, JTU. See “Statistics of Montevideo—drawn up by JJ,” in CPB, n.p. See also Fogel, “The Population Question,” in Without Consent or Contract, 114–153; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 92–101. Cf. William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slaveryin the American Rice Swamps (New York, 1996), 235–247, for the dismal record of infant mortality on other low-country plantations.

  24. ARCADIA II

  1. Irwin Rahn to CCJ, 3 November 1851, JTU. See also plat of Arcadia drawn by W. Hughes, 25 August 1856, CJUG.

  2. See Schedule of Tax Returns for 1847–1854 for Arcadia, Maybank, and Montevideo, CPB, 59–84.

  3. CCJ to MJ, 13 January 1852, JTU.

  4. Will of John Bohum Girardeau, 11 November 1800, Will Record 1790–1823, PCLC; Will of Andrew Maybank, 13 January 1834, Will Record, 1824–1850, PCLC; MPB, 10.

  5. CPB, 76.

  6. Ibid., 63–78.

  7. Ibid., 18–84.

  8. Ibid., 68–69; CCJ, “Return of Members” 1846, JTU.

  9. See Irwin Rahn to CCJ, 15 July 1851, 11 August 1851, 1 September 1851, 23 September 1851; CCJ to MJ, 13 January 1852, JTU. “Minutes of the Session, Midway Congregational Church,” 14 February 1852, PHSM; CPB, 69.

  10. MPB, 4, JTU; CCJj to CCJ and MJ, 11 September 1858, JTU; Will of Audley Maxwell, 27 March 1834, Will Record 1824–1850, PCLC; Abream Scriven to Dinah Jones, 19 September 1858, JTU.

  11. TS to CCJ, 19 July 1852, JTU.

  12. For black-white sexual relations and abuse of black women by whites, see Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), 413–431; John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1972), 81–85; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill, 1988), 325–326, 379–380; Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York, 1989), 181–182.

  13. Rebecca Mallard to RQM, 30 January 1850, JTU.

  14. Robert Manson Myers, ed. The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven, 1972), 1713–1714; Rebecca Mallard to RQM, 5 March 1850, JTU.

  15. CCJ to MJ, 19 April 1830, JTU; James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985), 17–44, and esp. 142–143.

  16. Cf. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998), xxii; and see Margaret Washington Creel, “A Peculiar People”: Slave Religion and Community-Culture Among the Gullahs (New York, 1988), 239–240.

  17. For the larger picture of the movement of slaves westward from the old seaboard, see Fo gel, Without Consent or Contract, 65–72; Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass., 2003). Berlin describes the movement of nearly one million slaves from the seaboard to the interior of the South as a “Second Middle Passage.” For Liberty County, see CCJ, Journal, 20 January 1859, JTU, for recitation of those having moved or moving out of the county by the end of the decade.

  18. See F. N. Boney, “The Emerging Empire State,” in A History of Georgia, ed. Kenneth Coleman (Athens, 1977), 157–162; Buddy Sullivan, Early Days on the Georgia Tidewater: The Story of McIntosh County and Sapelo (Daren, Ga., 2001), 258–259. Seealso, e.g., MSJM to Mary Jones Taylor, 14 December 1857, JTU.

  19. Eliza Robarts to CCJ, 22 January 1859, JTU; CCJ, Journal, 21 December 1859, 6 January 1860, JTU; Plenty Varnadoe to CCJ, 19 August 1859, JTU.

  20. See “Minutes of the Session, Midway Congregational Church,” 1850–1854, PHSM, for the number of persons, black and white, joining Midway. See esp. 19 November 1853, 17 February 1854. CCJ to Irwin Rahn, 12 February 1851, JTU.

  21. CCJ to MJ, 21 June 1851, JTU; “Minutes of the Session, Midway Congregational Church,” 15 May 1852, 14 February 1852, PHSM; MJ to CCJj and JJ, 10 June 1852, CJUG.

  22. “Minutes of the Session, Midway Congregational Church,” 15 May 1852, PHSM; RQM, Plantation Life Before Emancipation (Richmond, 1892).

  23. Rebecca Mallard to RQM, 8 December 1852, JTU. On runaways generally, see John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York, 1999); Blassingame, Slave Community, 104–131. One important source for evaluating runaways in Liberty County over an extended period of time is “Minutes of the Session, Midway Congregational Church,” passim, PHSM. Slaves members were disciplined—suspended or excommunicated—for running away.

  24. MJ to CCJj, 12 March 1852, CJUG; CCJ to CCJj, 21 February 1854, CJUG.

  25. TS to CCJ, 28 June 1852, JTU; Irwin Rahn to CCJ, 2 July 1852, 10 August 1852, JTU; John Stevens, 15 July 1852, JTU. See also, for details of the murder, Savannah Georgian, 21 July 1852; Sullivan, Early Days on the Georgia Tidewater, 238, 808, 813.

  26. For black-on-black violence, see Charles C. Jones, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States (Savannah, 1842), 136; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 471–476. The “Minutes of the Session, Midway Congregational Church,” passim, PHSM, contains numerous accounts of slaves disciplined for fighting, for disputes with other slaves, and for quarreling.

  27. CCJ, Journal, 21 April 1858, JTU; CCJ to CCJj, 18 March 1854, CJUG.

  28. TS to CCJ, 10 June 1852, JTU.

  29. CCJ to TS, 14 June 1852, JTU. Later generations of southern whites would call upon a southern way of life to protect a valued black worker. In a novel by Walker Percy, the Louisiana planter Lancelot pleads to the Klansman J. B. Jenkins, “Yeah, but he’s my nigger, J.B. He’s been working for us for forty years and you know that.” Lancelot (New York, 1977), 99.

  30. See CCJ to TS, 24 March 1849, 16 December 1850, JTU.

  31. Elijah Chapman to CCJ, 17 November 1855, JTU.

  25. MAYBANK II

  1. SJMC to MJ, 16 September 1851, JTU.

  2. Cf. CCJ to MJ, 26 J
anuary 1852, JTU.

  3. Inventory, 25 October 1853, JTU; Packing lists, October 21–24, 1853, JTU.

  4. See notes attached to “Directions” for unpacking of piano, 9 November 1853, JTU; CCJ to Capt. Grovenstine, 9 November 1853, JTU.

  5. CCJ to Sandy Maybank, 15 August 1853, JTU.

  6. See, e.g., CCJ to MJ, 5 November 1838, JTU; Jane LeConte Harden to MJ, [?] May 1848, JTU; Rebecca Eliza Mallard to RQM, 28 March 1848, JTU; CCJ to TS, 20 July 1849, 11 January 1851, JTU; Laura Maxwell to MJ, 25 April 1850, 1 May 1851, JTU.

  7. See CCJ to WM, 2 February 1849, JTU; CCJ to MJ, 21 June 1851, JTU.

  8. CCJ to CCJj, 22 May 1854, CJUG.

  9. Cf., for the role of the ordinary in the imagination, Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 211–233.

  10. John Colcock to CCJ, 25 December 1852, JTU; Audley King to CCJ, 17 October 1853, JTU; CCJ to MSJ, 12 November 1852, JTU. Cf. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998), 334–336.

  11. CCJ to CCJj, 20 April 1854, CJUG.

  12. CCJ to CCJj, 7 August 1854, CJUG; Roswell King to CCJ, 8 October 1851, JTU; MJ to CCJj, 7 August 1854, CJUG; CCJ to CCJj, 6 September 1854, CJUG. King’s “Touch of the Times” is apparently a reference to Laura’s menstrual period.

  13. CCJ to CCJj, 11 September 1854, CJUG; MJ to CCJj, 14 September 1854, CJUG.

  14. MJ to CCJj, 14 September 1854, CJUG; CCJ to CCJj, 11 September 1854, CJUG. See also, CCJ, Journal, 2 June 1860, JTU.

  15. For a history of yellow fever epidemics in the nineteenth-century South, see Margaret Humphreys, Yellow Fever and the South (Baltimore, 1999), 5, 45–76. See also Joseph Ioor Waring, A History of Medicine in South Carolina, 2 vols. (Columbia, S.C., 1964–1967), 1: 48–61, 147–149. MJ to CCJj, 14 September 1854, CJUG; Sarah Howe to CCJ, 31 October 1854, JTU.

  16. Robert Manson Myers, ed. The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven, 1972), 1544.

  17. For a contemporary description of the symptoms of yellow fever, see J. Hume Simons, M.D., Planter’s Guide, Family Book of Medicine: For the Instruction and Use of Planters, Families, Country People, and All Others Who May Be Out of the Reach of Physicians, or Unable to Employ Them (Charleston, S.C., 1848), 82–84. CCJ to CCJj, 9 October 1854, CJUG.

  18. CCJ to CCJj, 9 October 1854, CJUG.

  19. See Frank T. Schnell, Jr., Introduction to Charles C. Jones, Jr., Antiquities of the Southern Indians, Particularly of the Georgia Tribes (1873; rpt. Tuscaloosa, 1999), xviii–xix. James O. Breeden, Joseph Jones, M.D., Scientist of the Old South (Louisville, Ky., 1975), 36.

  20. EM to MJ, 29 July 1853, JTU; Rebecca Eliza Mallard to RQM, 1 December 1854, JTU.

  21. MJ to Laura Maxwell, 19 May 1856, JTU.

  22. MJ to CCJ, 7 May 1851, JTU; MJ to CCJj, 6 March 1856, 25 June 1856, CJUG; SJMC to MJ, 5 April 1856, JTU.

  23. CCJ, “Mrs. Elizabeth Jones Maxwell,” 24 July 1856, CJUG.

  24. Betsy Maxwell’s death and funeral stand in contrast to the Victorian funeral and the sentimental gravestones described by David E. Stannard in The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change (New York, 1977), esp. 167–196.

  26. SLAVE MARKET

  1. Benjamin Allen to CCJ, 19 September 1853, JTU. I have not been able to identify John’s wife.

  2. MJ to CCJ, 26 December 1853, CJUG. For the health of slaves, see Julia Floyd Smith, Slavery and Rice Culture in Low Country Georgia, 1750–1860 (Knoxville, 1985), 113–140; Ted A. Rathbun, “Health and Disease at a South Carolina Plantation: 1840–1870,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 74 (1987): 239–253; Joseph I. Waring, “Colonial Medicine in Georgia and South Carolina,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 59 (1975): 141–159.

  3. CCJ to CCJj, 2 February 1854, CJUG. See also MJ to CCJ, 5 February 1854, JTU.

  4. CCJ to CCJj, 21 February 1854, CJUG.

  5. Ibid. For a comparison to other slave funerals in the low country, see Margaret Washington Creel, “A Peculiar People”: Slave Religion and Community-Culture Among the Gullahs (New York, 1988), 201–202, 313–317; William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (New York, 1996), 227, 277–278.

  6. MJ to CCJj, 31 January 1856, CJUG. See also CCJ to CCJj, 17 January 1856, CJUG.

  7. See John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York, 1999), 125–148. Franklin and Schweninger present Jane as having run away before. I find no evidence of that and believe that they have misread CCJj to CCJ, 1 October 1856, JTU, as printed in The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War, ed. Robert Manson Myers (New Haven, 1972), 240–243.

  8. CCJ to CCJj, 2 October 1856, CJUG. See, for the role of sailors and watermen in helping slaves to escape, David S. Cecelski, The Waterman’s Son: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 2001), esp. 121–151. CCJj to CCJ, 1 October 1856, CJUG.

  9. CCJj to CCJ, 1 October 1856, CJUG.

  10. CCJ to MJ, 23 October 1856, JTU.

  11. CCJj to CCJ, 1 October 1856, CJUG.

  12. Ibid.

  13. CCJ to CCJj, 2 October 1856, CJUG.

  14. There is confusion about the identity of Big Titus in “The Index: The Slaves,” in Myers, Children of Pride, 1845. See TITUS (1826–1865+) in List of Principal Characters: African Americans. The Myers index apparently collapses “Big Titus” and “Little Titus” into one. See CPB, 15, MPB, 10.

  15. CCJj to CCJ, 4 October 1856, CJUG.

  16. CCJ to MJ, 23 October 1856, JTU.

  17. Notes from “Memoranda, October, 1852, Bank Account, etc,” 6 March 1855, JTU. The mortgage, with the State Bank of Georgia, was for $1,500.

  18. MJ to CCJj, 9 October 1856, CJUG.

  19. MJ to John Jones, 30 July 1847, JJUG; CCJ to John Jones, 2 March 1848, JJUG; CCJ to CCJj, 20 April 1854, CJUG; S. S. Barnard to CCJ, 17 September 1857, JTU.

  20. CCJ to CCJj, 1 November 1856, CJUG.

  21. Ibid. Cf. Phoebia and Cash to Mr. Delions [Frederick Ransom Lyons], 17 March 1857, JTU.

  22. “Account of Property belonging to Cassius left to be given away and to be sold as he desired by his former Master,” note written by CCJ and attached to CCJj to CCJ, 20 March 1857, JTU. A piggin was a type of bucket.

  23. CCJ to CCJj, 17 November 1856, 2 October 1856, CJUG.

  24. CCJ to CCJj, 1 November 1856, CJUG.

  25. MJ to CCJj, 20 November 1856, CJUG; CCJ to CCJj, 29 November 1856, CJUG; CCJ to MJ, 10 December 1856, JTU. For the rise in slave prices during the antebellum period, see William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York, 1989), 64.

  26. MJ to CCJ, 10 December 1856, JTU; “Memoranda, October, 1852, Bank Account, etc,” 11 December 1856, 15 December, 1856, JTU; “Settled with Sandy and Porter for their Saturdays from March 10, 1855 to Jan. 10 1857.” See “Bill,” in CCJ, Almanac, 1857, 30 January 1857, JTU. MJ to MSJ, 22 December 1856, JTU.

  27. CCJ to MJ, 18 May 1830, JTU.

  28. See CCJ, “Slavery,” in Southern Presbyterian Review 9 (January 1856): 345–364; and cf. CCJ, Religious Instruction of the Negroes. An Address Delivered before the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, at Augusta, Ga., December 10, 1861 (Richmond, n.d.).

  29. Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon which the Story is Founded (1853; rpt. Port Washington, N.Y., 1968), 127.

  30. CCJ to CCJj, 18 March 1857, and note attached, CJUG.

  31. CCJ to CCJj, 26 March 1857, CJUG. I have been unable to locate the correspondence with Palmer.

  32. See HHJ to CCJ and MJ, 7 April 1851, JTU, for a report of Lyons’s selling whiskey to slaves.

  33. Phoebia and Cash to Mr. Delions [Frederick Ransom Lyons], 17 March 1857, JTU.

  34. Other slaves addressed in the letter were “Aunt Affee,” the widow of Pulaski at the Retreat; Sina, the sis
ter of Cassius; Judith at Carlawter, who was married to Pulaski Jr. at the Retreat, and their two sons Milton and Little Pulaski; Charles, the oxcart driver, husband of Lucy; Phillis and her husband, Niger; and Becky and Miley, the daughters of Patience and Porter.

  35. Cf. Genesis 50:20.

  36. For the New Orleans slave market and the concern to feed slaves well before their sale, see Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 119.

  37. CCJ to CCJj, 26 March 1857, CJUG.

  27. PATIENCE’S KITCHEN

  1. CCJ to Betsy Maxwell, 17 April 1850, JTU; CPB 68; MJ to EM, 30 August 1849, JTU.

  2. Cf. Audre Lorde, “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York, 1984), 145–175, esp. 167.

  3. Cf. James C. Scott, Domination and the Art of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990), 17–44, esp. 35.

  4. MJ to Laura Maxwell, 17 August 1848, JTU. Cf. Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York, 1985), 27–51; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill, 1988), 291–292; Scott, Domination and the Art of Resistance, 17–44. For the Mammy figure, see Patricia Hill Collins, “Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controlling Images,” in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York, 1991), 67–90.

  5. RQM, Plantation Life Before Emancipation (Richmond, 1892), 18; RQM, Montevideo-Maybank: Some Memoirs of a Southern Christian Household in the Olden Time; or, The Family Life of the Rev. Charles Colcock Jones, D.D., of Liberty County, Ga. (Richmond, 1898), 37. For the character of the plantation kitchen with its equipage, see John Michael Vlack, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill, 1993), 43–47. See, for the tradition of African cuisine, Josephine A. Beoku-Betts, “‘She Make Funny Flat Cake She Call Saraka’: Gullah Women and Food Practices Under Slavery,” in Working Toward Freedom: Slave Society and Domestic Economy in the American South, ed. Larry E. Hudson (Rochester, 1994), 211–231. Beoku-Betts emphasizes the ways Gullah women resisted, through their culinary practices, the white social order.