By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  Each ship had arrived carrying its own bitter history. The Mary, constructed in Philadelphia, had left Liverpool, England, in 1802 and had cruised the coast of West Central Africa flying the flag of Great Britain and buying slaves before setting her sails for Georgia. Her captain had taken on board and stored beneath the Mary’s deck 310 men, women, and children drawn from the kingdoms and tribes of a great interior region of West Africa. In late 1803, after months on the open Atlantic, he had sailed up the Savannah and unloaded 279 slaves for the city’s slave market. In this manner, for almost half a century, the ships had been arriving one by one at the Savannah wharfs to disgorge from wretched holds those who—in their work and in their bodies—were to create in the coming years much of the wealth of the land.5

  The last international slaver to sail boldly up the river had been the Flora—a sleek sailing ship that had arrived at a Savannah wharf in October 1807, flying the US flag. Its captain had purchased 267 slaves from the Vili kingdom of Loango, north of the Congo River, and had disembarked 201 of them in Savannah. Some of the missing 66 may have been sold in a Caribbean market, but some no doubt had succumbed to dysentery or dehydration, to the trauma and brutality of the Middle Passage. The dead, and perhaps even the dying, would have simply been tossed overboard.6

  The importation of slaves into Savannah had come to an end two months after the arrival of the Flora. The US Constitution had declared that the importation of slaves “shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year 1808”; and in 1807, Congress had passed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, to go into effect on January 1, 1808. The federal legislation was largely effective in stopping an open trade in Savannah, and while slavers occasionally glided cautiously into some isolated tidal river along the Georgia coast to unload their illegal cargoes, none would be so reckless as to sail directly to a Savannah wharf. Whatever the motives behind the congressional action in 1807, and the motives were no doubt many, the law was a boon to those who already owned slaves and who watched both the number of their slaves and the value of their slaves grow in the years that followed.7

  Paul had been only six when the Flora sailed into Savannah Harbor. But although new slaves were no longer arriving on the banks of the river, slaves were still pushing and pulling carts up the steep dray-ways to the city, still working the rice and cotton fields, still being sold in slave markets, and still having their lives pushed, pulled, and managed to suit the needs and whims of whites. Now, in December 1832, Paul had learned alarming news, most likely from his sister, Charlotte, who lived in Savannah and worked as a domestic servant for the Bayard family—their owners, Jane and Margaret Bayard, had both become engaged. A handsome young South Carolinian, John Leighton Wilson, had shown up in Savannah and suddenly proposed to Jane, and she had accepted. And James Eckard, a Philadelphia lawyer and seminary student at Princeton, had arrived in Savannah at about the same time and had quickly proposed to Margaret, and she, too, had accepted. Such news must have been deeply troubling for those who lived on Hutchinson Island, because the marriage of an owner—especially a woman owner, and most particularly two women owners—meant, all too often, the breakup of a slave settlement and slave families. For even a marriage, even a happy event in the lives of white slave owners, could have devastating effects on the lives of black slaves.8

  Paul’s family, like the other families living on Hutchinson Island, had been shaped and reshaped for generations by the choices and vagaries of their owners’ lives. Paul’s parents, Charles and Mary, had been owned by Major General Lachlan McIntosh. McIntosh, as the commander of the Western Department of the Continental Army, had endured the bitter winter at Valley Forge with George Washington and his troops. McIntosh’s family had originally come to Georgia with other Scottish Highlanders, settling south of Savannah at the mouth of the rich and muddy Altamaha River. In 1739, the Scots had signed an antislavery petition seeking to keep the young colony of Georgia free of the slaves who were increasing so rapidly in neighboring South Carolina. Again in 1775, on the eve of the American Revolution, McIntosh had led his fellow Scots in declaring their “disapprobation and abhorrence of the unnatural practice of Slavery in America.” But when the allure of wealth created by slaves, especially from the burgeoning trade in rice—Carolina Gold, it was called—when that allure overcame the antislavery sentiments in Georgia, the Scots had laid aside their reservations and had soon become wealthy planters and slave owners.9

  The old General died in 1806, and in the division of his estate, his daughter Esther McIntosh received some of his slaves, together with lands scattered along the Georgia coast. These selected slaves, willed to her and her heirs forever, became upon Esther’s death in 1822 the property of her young daughters, Jane and Margaret. With them came the children of the slave women and any future issue and increase of the females. In this way, the sisters had become the owners of thirty-nine slaves who lived in the Bayard settlement on Hutchinson Island as well as the owners of much rich and productive land scattered along the coast of Georgia, from Savannah to Cumberland Island far to the south.10

  With such a history, Paul surely pondered and perhaps stayed awake at night wondering about and worrying about the engagements of these two young white women. What would the engagements mean for those who lived in the island settlement? Families would almost certainly be divided. Which sister would get which slaves and what land would go to which sister? Where would Paul and the others live? Would they be scattered, friend from friend, husband from wife, children from parents, and carried to distant places? Such were the harsh questions faced by all who lived in the Bayard settlement, and Paul knew that the answers would largely be determined by two unknown white men. These men, as the sisters’ new husbands, would soon assume responsibility for their wives’ property, and for the lives and destinies of those who were called Bayard slaves.11

  Nicholas Bayard, Jane and Margaret’s older half-brother, had become the trustee of the property in 1822, after their mother’s death. The girls’ father had died a short time before their mother, and Nicholas had already taken responsibility for managing the estate, of which he also owned a share. When their father had died, Margaret had only been eleven years old, and Jane had been fourteen.12

  One of the first things Nicholas did was to make Paul an apprentice to the carpenter Jack. Slave carpenters—especially good ones—were valuable, not only for what they would bring on the slave market but also because they were in much demand in a young city. Young Paul had to carry much lumber and make many cypress shingles and saw many pine and oak boards, always watching Jack at his work and listening to his instructions, before he finally received his own carpenter’s tools in 1830. There were hammers and saws, augers, gimlets, and chisels. And there were planes for different work—a jackplane, a fore plane, and a joiner plane—and he had to know which one to use when. Jack taught him how to use each tool, and he taught him that much of the work of a carpenter was solving problems—you had to be able to look at a task and figure out how to do it and do it right. What was to be the pitch of a roof, or how was a joist to be connected to a beam, or how were window frames to be measured and built, or floorboards tightly laid? It took time to learn such a trade, and it took a good teacher to teach it, and Paul spent the time, and he was fortunate to have in Jack a good teacher.13

  Paul’s work meant that he had to move around Savannah and learn its streets and handsome squares, its rhythms of work, and its rules and secrets. In spite of restrictive legislation, blacks moved freely through the city, running errands for owners, driving wagons and pushing carts, selling fruit and vegetables brought in from the countryside, or hawking fish or shrimp or crabs caught in a creek, or oysters gathered on a muddy bank. Some slaves were allowed by their owners to hire themselves out for work—to clean privies or work in a garden or wash and iron—paying their owners most of the wages for their labors. Most slaves lived in quarters behind their owners’ houses, in a kind of compound that it was hoped would restrict
their movements. But the boundaries of the compounds were generally porous, and little alleys ran off the straight streets and connected the quarters to city life. With care and knowledge of the ways of whites, and especially of the police who walked the streets, a slave could sneak out at night and visit other quarters or go to a waterfront tavern to mingle with white sailors from distant places, and drink a little rum, and do a little carousing. In all of this, Paul learned that slaves had to be careful. They had to anticipate white anger and white discipline and learn strategies for avoiding and resisting white power. The slave markets of the city were constant reminders that whites could sell any slaves they considered unruly or troublesome—and sell them to some slave trader on his way out of the city, perhaps heading to the new cotton country being opened up in Alabama or Mississippi. And the jail and the workhouse and the whipping post—they, too, had their lessons to teach about caution and dangers. Some of the Bayard slaves had spent time in the jail, and no doubt Paul had heard from them that it was a wretched place and that he should use every available strategy to stay out of it.14

  As Paul moved around the city, going from one job to the next, he could see that along parts of the waterfront, and in certain other, largely rundown neighborhoods, free blacks lived. They were only a small part of the black population of Savannah—and an even smaller part when the population of the surrounding county was included—but they played an important role in the city’s life. Among them were carpenters and butchers, seamstresses and washerwomen, and a few shopkeepers, fishermen, nurses, and cooks. They lived in a kind of twilight zone between freedom and slavery, with many restrictions on their lives. Their status provided some freedom, but because they were people of color, whites regarded them as almost slaves. Unlike Paul and those who lived in the Bayard settlement, they could have legal marriages, but only if they married another freed person. If a woman was free, her children were born free; but if a free father had a child by a slave woman, the child was born into slavery. Free people could own property and keep for themselves what they earned by the sweat of their own brows, but they were subject to many of the same harsh punishments as slaves.15

  Mixed up among the slave and the free were runaways, slaves who had made their own break for freedom and were living by their wits, hiding out in the shantytown below the bluff that ran along the river, or in some back street, pretending to be employed by their owners. When one young woman from the settlement on Hutchinson Island disappeared for a time in 1823, Nicholas hired a slave catcher, and she was quickly captured. She had been attempting to hide in the city, but hiding was not easy and the risks were high in a city full of spies who made their living catching slaves on the run for freedom.16

  During the years of Paul’s apprenticeship, the religious life of Savannah’s black community was increasingly dominated by First African Baptist Church and Second African Baptist. Andrew Marshall, the pastor of First African, was the preeminent leader of the city’s slave and free black community. For Paul, as for other blacks in Savannah, Marshall was a source of encouragement and hope. During his long ministry (1826–1856), Marshall baptized some 3,800 blacks, welcomed into First African’s membership more than 4,000, and married some 2,000 black men and women. He and Henry Cunningham at Second African taught and preached a Protestant Christianity that had emerged from a radical wing of the Reformation. It had been deeply shaped by the revival fires that first swept across colonial America in the Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century, and that had burst out again in a Second Great Awakening at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This Protestant Christianity, with its roots in a European Baptist tradition, had been adopted and transformed by African and African American converts into good news for slaves.

  Paul and other blacks in the city no doubt began going to the churches for many reasons, but certainly among these reasons was that they heard in the churches an offer of hope in what appeared a hopeless situation. In sermons and Sunday schools, in river baptisms and communion services, the present order of masters and slaves did not appear eternal but passing and contingent. In the churches—circumspect as the pastors had to be—singing, praying, worshiping congregations were able to imagine an alternative to the present system of slavery. “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” so popular among singing Baptists, white and black, would have brought hope. But so, too, would the spiritual “There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole.” And, when the time was right: “Go down Moses, way down in Egypt’s land; tell old Pharaoh, to let my people go!” “God,” proclaimed Andrew Marshall in a sermon, “would deal impartially with ‘the poor and the rich, the black man and the white.’” Years later, as an old man not far from death, he reflected on the glory of his redemption in Christ and declared to his congregation: “Our skins are dark, but our souls are washed white in the blood of the Lamb. . . . How many of those to whom we are subject in the flesh have recognized our common Master in heaven, and they are our masters no longer? They are fellow-heirs with us of the grace of life.”17

  This city—Savannah with all of its distinctiveness—had become home for Paul. Savannah, a particular place with its flowing river and social arrangements, was the primary environment in which he had grown up, and it continued to provide the conditions for his development as an African American man. Here, and at the settlement across the river, he was learning his way in the world—how to think about himself, how to carry himself, how to act with other blacks, and how to act before whites. And here he was also learning how to see Savannah and understand it in ways that were fundamentally different from the ways in which Nicholas and his young sisters and other whites saw the city. He knew that this city was a place of deep oppression, and consequently, he had begun to discover, as the years passed, that Savannah was not home for him. In spite of deep memories of the city and its shaping influence on his life, he was beginning to long for another home and another homeland where he could be a free man.18

  IN JANUARY 1825, early in Paul’s apprenticeship, Nicholas decided to move most of those who worked the Bayard land on Hutchinson Island to a rice-growing plantation that had been part of General McIntosh’s estate. General’s Island, some sixty-five miles south of Savannah, lay near the mouth of the great Altamaha River close to the little village of Darien. The island and the county in which it was located—McIntosh—were named for the old General, but the McIntosh plantation on the river island, in spite of its rich alluvial land and abundant water, had never been fully developed. Nicholas was a banker and not a planter by practice or inclination. He had, however, a keen eye for profits, and he knew that a rice plantation, properly managed, could yield rich rewards for its owner.19

  After making careful arrangements, Nicholas had all who were being sent south gather with their possessions at the Savannah customhouse. Among them were Jack and Paul—the carpenter and his young apprentice—who were to repair and enlarge the old slave settlement and work on the trunks and gates that regulated the flow of water into the rice fields. Nicholas paid for their clearance at the customhouse and no doubt gave them words of instruction and encouragement. Then he saw them settled on board a little coastal schooner that sailed the inland waters between the mainland and the sea islands that lined the Georgia coast.20

  For young Paul, it must have begun at least as a great adventure—they cleared the customhouse, moved slowly down the river toward Tybee Island, and then, before reaching the open Atlantic, they turned south onto broad inland waters. The schooner sailed close to Ossabaw Island, home to several plantations and many slaves. St. Catherine’s Island came slowly into view with its slave settlement of white tabby houses. Massive sea-island oaks, gnarled and twisted, soared over dense thickets of myrtle, saw palmetto, and razor-sharp yucca. To a traveler on a passing boat, such island scenes presented contrasting images that seemed to overwhelm the senses—a landscape enchanting yet threatening, inviting yet seemingly impenetrable. Off to the right on the mainland, Paul could make out in the dista
nce the little village of Sunbury where the Medway River’s dark waters emptied into St. Catherine’s Sound.

  The schooner was entering a region of great isolated plantations. Ospreys and eagles cruised the waters. Marshes stretched out to the horizon while creeks and small rivers wound their way reluctantly toward the Atlantic. The travelers sailed past Blackbeard and Sapelo Islands where palmettos ran to the water’s edge and brightly colored crabs and innumerable seabirds fed along rich mudbanks. The air became heavy with the fragrance of the marsh and an occasional porpoise moved gracefully through the water hunting shrimp and mullet. They entered Doboy Sound and ran up the Rockdedundy River, an arm of the Altamaha, gliding silently past Catfish Creek until the village of Darien appeared, and finally General’s Island.21

  It was a miserable place—flat, hot, and buggy: just the kind of place where rice could thrive in tepid waters. Here the Altamaha River had formed islands of river swamps by dividing into several channels. Through years of slave labor, the islands had been banked and the swamps drained and plantations created. Fanny Kemble Butler, the English actress and a reluctant plantation mistress, described neighboring Butler’s Island as “quite the most amphibious piece of creation that I have yet had the happiness of beholding. It would be difficult to define it truly by either the name of land or water, for ’tis neither liquid nor solid but a kind of mud floating on the bosom of the Altamaha.” The product, she wrote, of “this delectable spot is rice—oranges, negroes, fleas, mosquitoes, various beautiful evergreens, sundry sort of snakes, alligators and bull rushes enough to have made cradles not for Moses alone but the whole Israelitish host besides.” Such was the landscape of General’s Island, not so different in fact from Hutchinson Island, but Darien was no Savannah, and the isolation of the island was palpable. Yet such isolation, together with similar isolated places up and down the Georgia and South Carolina coast, had provided the landscape for the development of a distinctive culture and speech among the slaves of this Lowcountry region.22