By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  The Bayards, Hodges, and Henrys were all Presbyterians, and many of the men—including Uncle Andrew—were Presbyterian elders. A few, like Charles Hodge, were Presbyterian ministers. They believed that their religious life had at its heart a deep personal devotion to Christ and to his continuing ministry in the world through the church. Their Calvinist piety was both warm and disciplined. During the week, each family had morning and evening prayers as well as daily devotionals and Bible reading at their breakfast tables. These disciplined practices were part of the rhythm of life in their households, nurturing the hearts and minds of family members. They were all strict Sabbatarians. Sunday was the Lord’s Day when they refrained from all work—not as a burdensome law but as a gift in the midst of the continuing work and rush of the world around them. The Sabbath, they thought, served as a reminder that in all of life they were utterly dependent upon God’s grace and love and not on their own labors or willpower. They believed that Sabbath rest, when they joined with others in worshiping God as their Creator and Redeemer, was a foretaste of heaven. On the Sabbath, they heard God’s Word read and interpreted in long, carefully prepared sermons intended to inform the mind and touch the heart. They sang praises to God with hymns—both old and new—whose words and music penetrated to the deepest parts of their self-understanding. And at the communion table they felt themselves united in the Body of Christ with believers around the world and across the ages. These daily and Sabbath practices of their Calvinist faith nurtured in Margaret and Jane—together with their cousins—a deep sense of privilege and of the responsibilities that flow from a gratitude rooted in God’s grace. Disciplined work and a life spent seeking to do God’s will was, they believed, a faithful response to God’s love and the sacrifices of Jesus, whom they called their precious Redeemer.11

  For the Bayard men, the spirituality nurtured by such practices of their faith meant a commitment to philanthropy and a concern for the public good. They became directors of the House of Refuge for juvenile delinquents, of the Magdalene Society for the “fallen women of the Philadelphia,” of the Sunday School Union, and of the College of New Jersey (Princeton). They contributed liberally to their churches and to education societies. And they sought, perhaps above all, to be responsible in their vocations—in their callings—as bankers, merchants, and physicians, as professors and politicians, and in the ordinary comings and goings of their lives. They believed that the ordinary, everyday work of their lives—and not some sheltered holy place—was the great arena for the practice of their Christian faith. Much to the frequent irritation or amusement of their neighbors, they thought of themselves as the chosen means of bringing learning, culture, and sophisticated religion to a waiting world.12

  If, however, they thought that their Christian faith and Presbyterian practices informed and fueled their everyday work and commitments, they were less well aware of the ways their religious life and philanthropic activities were shaped by their work as bankers, merchants, and physicians, as professors and politicians. Their orderly worship, their disciplined devotional life, their interpretation of the Bible and of their responsibilities as Christians were all, in one way or another, deeply influenced by the character of their work and by the comfortable and affluent homes in which they lived. To be sure, they believed that they made decisions—decisions that mattered. Not all bankers, after all, knelt and prayed morning and evening, or read the Bible daily with their families, or supported philanthropic causes. And certainly many around them—“worldly people,” they called them—did not keep the Sabbath as they kept the Sabbath. These Bayards, Hodges, and Henrys believed that they had, within the circumstances and contingencies of their lives, the freedom to make real choices. But they also believed at some deep level of their self-understanding—or at least it was what they confessed—that their freedom was not unlimited, and that the mysterious providence of God directed their lives and the course of human history. In the coming years, these complex and even contradictory ideas about human freedom would shape their thinking about the black slaves who, like Paul and his family, labored in the cities and fields of the American South.13

  For the Bayard, Hodge, and Henry women, the practices of the faith also had to do with their ordinary everyday lives. But their daily lives, their vocations, were focused on the home and family and led to no public engagements in philanthropy or vocations outside the home. The world of these women—even these affluent white women—offered them no directorships of benevolent societies, much less jobs in banking or politics. What the world of these women offered were busy homes where dinners were ordered, guests welcomed, and children loved and disciplined. To be sure, the women could reach out from this place, from within this restricted arena, to the world around them in Christian discipleship—they could be faithful members of congregations and could support philanthropic societies with their prayers and contributions. But their vocation was above all the creation of a Christian environment in their homes where the language that was used, the manners that were practiced, and the order that was maintained contributed to a deepening love for Christ.14

  Margaret and Jane internalized this world of affluent Philadelphia Presbyterians. It helped to shape the way they saw themselves and carried themselves as privileged young white women. It influenced their temperaments, dispositions, and postures. It provided many of the deep assumptions that they carried for the rest of their lives. Yet their Philadelphia home also began to nurture within them, even in their youth, a restlessness to break out and go beyond the boundaries assigned to women. Precisely because they felt deep religious stirrings as young women, they wanted to respond with their whole lives and not some restricted, assigned roles. They began to consider themselves—no less than their uncles and male cousins—among those chosen to go beyond the home and to help bring Christian love, learning, and salvation to a waiting world.15

  AFTER FIVE YEARS in Philadelphia, Margaret and Jane returned to Savannah in 1827 and to the home of their brother, Nicholas. Jane was now twenty and ready to move into the social world of Savannah. Margaret, at seventeen, was not far behind. All around them were reminders of the life they had known before their parents’ deaths—the elegant home where they had lived with their mother and father and the sights and sounds of the city with its parks and gardens and busy markets. And everywhere, from the moment they stepped once again onto a Savannah wharf, they were surrounded by black men and women who were moving about—hauling and cleaning; butchering, selling, and building; sweating in the hot sun and always keeping an eye on whites.16

  The sisters arrived in Savannah about the same time that Paul and the other Bayard slaves were returning to the city from their sojourn on General’s Island. Jane and Margaret most likely did not know most of those who were returning—before their parents died, the sisters would have had few opportunities or little reason to know field hands and laborers on Hutchinson Island. But the domestics who worked in the Bayard home were another story. The sisters found Jack the butler at his post still carrying himself erect, still practicing his old-fashioned good manners—they called him House Jack to distinguish him from Jack the Carpenter, Paul’s mentor. Paul’s sister, Charlotte, who had been Jane’s personal servant for years when they were both little girls, was waiting to take up her responsibilities with her returning mistress. And Suzanne, who had looked after Margaret as a little girl, now had a seventeen-year-old mistress.17

  Jane and Margaret, as young women who had been living in Philadelphia, were now able to look around them and see Savannah with new eyes. There was, of course, still much that they could not see and much that they could not understand. But they inescapably knew that Savannah was different from Philadelphia. For one thing, blacks were everywhere, and their presence made Savannah look different, sound different, and move in different rhythms from what they had known in the North. After five years away, the world of Savannah was more visible in all its distinctiveness, and they now began to notice and to pay attention to what had
before seemed only ordinary. This meant that Jane and Margaret began to look at, to actually see, the black slaves who were all around them—including those who lived on Hutchinson Island and whose labors provided most of the comforts the sisters enjoyed. And with their looking and their noticing, they began to have questions about slavery and about their ownership of slaves.18

  They met John, the new driver—the “boss man” who was in charge of directing the work on the island and distributing rations to the people in the settlement. A religious man held in great confidence by whites, he crossed the river weekly and came to the Bayard home to confer with Nicholas. And Paul came as well to bring his wages, and Jane and Margaret had opportunities to meet the young carpenter so recently returned from General’s Island. They met Paul’s father, Charles, who brought his porter’s wages, and Paul’s mother, Mary, who came to the house to report what vegetables and how many eggs had been brought from the island and sold in the Ellis Street market. They watched Nicholas talk with them, and saw him collect wages from those hired out, as well as the money from the market, and they knew he wrote it all down carefully, banker like, in the estate account book.19

  Jane and Margaret returned to Savannah not only with new eyes but also with hearts that had been nurtured and awakened to deep religious feelings, and those feelings also added to their growing misgivings about slavery. They returned to their family’s pew at the Independent Presbyterian Church, where they had sat as children with their parents. Now they heard the eloquent preaching of Daniel Baker, one of the great preachers of his generation. His preaching was said by a Southern editor to move “thronged assemblies as the trees of the forest are moved before the wind,” and his impassioned appeals were said to touch “the learned and unlearned, cultivated and uncultivated.” Standing in a great mahogany pulpit placed high above white worshipers, Baker preached to a congregation that included some of the most influential and affluent members of the community—Barnards, Bryans, and Cummings; Gordons, Habershams, Stoddards, and Telfairs. And above them all, gathered in the balconies, blacks sat and watched and worshiped.20

  This congregation of blacks and whites not only listened to Baker preach, they also sang hymns together and listened to the soaring music of the church’s great organ being played by Lowell Mason. Mason was a prolific writer of hymn tunes, and his music would become deeply identified with the piety of evangelical Protestantism not only in the United States but also abroad. In the coming years he would compose “Bethany” (“Nearer, My God, to Thee”), “Olivet” (“My Faith Looks Up to Thee”), “Dennis” (“Blest Be the Tie That Binds”), and “Hamburg” (“When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”).21 But it was Mason’s music for a stirring missionary hymn—“From Greenland’s Icy Mountains”—that most deeply touched Jane and Margaret and ignited their imaginations about the future direction of their lives. Composed by Mason in Savannah, the hymn rang out:

  From Greenland’s icy mountains,

  From India’s coral strand;

  Where Afric’s sunny fountains

  Roll down their golden sand:

  From many an ancient river,

  From many a palmy plain,

  They call us to deliver

  Their land from error’s chain.22

  ON THEIR RETURN to Savannah, Jane and Margaret found Nicholas an attentive and affectionate older brother. He looked out for the best interests of his young half-sisters and sought to provide them with a home where they could continue to have nurtured both a high-toned sense of Christian morality and a propriety that reflected their station in life. But his relationship to them, while good, was never particularly close. Affection was there, but it always seemed to be rooted more deeply in duty and responsibility than in the feelings of the heart. The sisters consequently grew closer to one another, drawing on their shared memories of Philadelphia and their continued grief over the death of their parents.

  But the sisters also made new friends. They became especially close to Eliza Clay, who was three years older than Jane. Eliza’s father, a distinguished Savannah judge, had become, after a powerful conversion experience, a Baptist minister and had served as pastor of the First Baptist Church of Boston, Massachusetts. Eliza had spent years in the North and had returned to Georgia only the year before Margaret and Jane returned. An independent spirit—she would remain single all her life—she did not hesitate to break out of roles assigned to affluent white women; nor was she afraid to do work ordinarily reserved for affluent white men. She learned how to manage a large rice plantation, and in the years ahead she gave advice to neighboring planters about the best time to plant, about the sprout flow of waters into rice fields, and about when to have black men and women go down into the miry earth to hoe between long rows of rice. In her willingness to break social expectations, she modeled for the Bayard sisters a certain freedom of spirit and helped to give them courage to explore little-known paths.23

  Particularly important for Jane and Margaret were Eliza Clay’s efforts on behalf of the religious instruction of slaves. The Clay plantation, Richmond-on-Ogeechee, a short distance from Savannah, was one of the most beautiful in the South. There Eliza and her brother, Thomas Savage Clay, were establishing schools where they were teaching their many slaves biblical stories and Protestant hymns. And there, in the evenings after their students had come in from their heavy labor in rice fields, the Clays began to instruct Gullah men and women about family life and about avoiding the enchantments of charms and witches and late night dances. Such instructions soon came under fierce attack from conservative whites, who thought it encouraged insubordination and said that religious instruction of blacks was little more than “casting pearls before swine.” The future governor of South Carolina, Whitemarsh Seabrook—a kind of lingering rationalist of the Jeffersonian sort—would be particularly venomous in his attack on the Clays. But Eliza, like Jane and Margaret, felt her religious convictions drawing her toward some special effort of Christian benevolence, and the schools seemed a kind of home mission work that needed to proceed in spite of the arrogance and impiety of a South Carolina radical.24

  WHILE SAVANNAH THUS became a home for the Bayard sisters, they began to spend time with relatives near Darien in McIntosh County. Their cousin William McIntosh was a contemporary of their mother’s and became “Uncle William” to them. His plantation, Fair Hope, became, especially for Jane, a place of special memories, a home that evoked for her joy, gratitude, and a deep peace of heart.

  During the six years following her return to Savannah (1827–1833), Jane traveled regularly to Fair Hope, a little north of Darien and General’s Island, for leisurely visits, especially during the balmy months of winter and spring. Margaret went with her sometimes, but Charlotte was Jane’s constant companion as her personal servant. The young mistress and her maid always sailed, like Paul on his journey to General’s Island, on one of the little schooners that ploughed the inland waters, where the sea wind mingled the fragrance of salt and marsh, and an occasional fisherman could be seen in the distance. Each trip made the landscape more familiar—they had time to learn the contours of the sea islands: Ossabaw and St. Catherine’s, Blackbeard and Sapelo. And each trip slowly invited Jane and Charlotte to enter through all of their senses a world of isolated plantations, of rice fields that yielded their crops in season and slave settlements that stretched out in long rows.25

  Each time their schooner arrived in Darien, Jane and Charlotte were only a short distance from General’s Island, where Paul had had his immersion in Gullah life. But the island plantation was rented during these years, and Jane and Charlotte apparently never visited its flat, hot, and buggy settlement on any of their trips. Rather, they met in Darien a McIntosh coachman—he was always waiting for them with a carriage. After he loaded their luggage with care, he would drive them along sandy roads past rice and cotton fields where Gullah men and women were hoeing and plowing, reaping and picking. The carriage rolled through great stretches of barren pine forests and around
cypress swamps before finally turning down the long plantation avenue, where oaks heavy with age and moss reached out to enclose all who traveled this way to Fair Hope house. There, William and Maria McIntosh, together with their children, welcomed Jane into their loving family and Charlotte to the servant quarters.26

  Even more than in Savannah, Jane learned at Fair Hope what it was like to be surrounded by black men, women, and children. Over seventy slaves lived in the McIntosh settlements, and many more populated the surrounding plantations. Daily she would have heard them speaking in their Gullah accents, and daily she would have seen them going about their work in the house or going to and from the rice and cotton fields. In the evenings she would have seen their settlement fires and heard the distant sound of their voices and their preparations for slave suppers. Such scenes would not have seemed alien to her, although she saw them only from the distance of her race and class. Unlike many whites who felt awkward and often threatened or repulsed when in the midst of blacks, Jane felt at ease among the Gullah people, even as they knew they had to keep their eye on her and other whites—and perhaps especially on her, with her growing benevolent sensibilities toward them.27

  As in Savannah, Jane no doubt noticed particular slaves that surrounded her and wondered about them. Perhaps her years in Philadelphia—where she had been largely surrounded by whites—made her attentive to, and curious about, life in the settlements. Or perhaps what she had seen in Savannah led her to look more carefully at those who lived and worked at Fair Hope. Or maybe her growing religious sensibilities led her, on occasion, to walk through the settlement and talk to the women who were fixing supper, or to the men returning from feeding a horse or a mule. Whatever the cause, Jane was beginning to think of slaves as individuals with distinct personalities, with their own sorrows and hopes, anxieties and concerns. And so at Fair Hope she continued to wonder—and to wonder more intensely—about her Christian duty in regard to them and to those she would come to regard as their injured and neglected relatives in their African homeland.28