By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  In Savannah, the staff of the Georgia Historical Society was always helpful as I explored the society’s rich collection of materials on the Georgia Lowcountry. I am especially grateful to Stan Deaton and Christy Crisp, whom I now regard as friends. I spent much time while in Savannah observing the character of the Savannah River and visiting Hutchinson Island, where the Bayard slave settlement had been located. Paul Pressly, director of the Ossabaw Island Education Alliance, invited me to participate in its 2008 symposium on “African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee.” This wonderful gathering allowed me to be in conversations about the Lowcountry with Phil Morgan, Betty Wood, and Allison Dorsey. Paul Pressly also invited me to join in a consultation, 2009–2010, with the Ossabaw Island Foundation about the people who had once lived and worked on Ossabaw as slaves and then as freed people. The consultation meetings, held on the island, involved not only vigorous discussions about African American life in the Lowcountry, but also the experience of moving around an island landscape. All of the consultants brought insights from their various disciplines, but particularly important for my work were the contributions by Nichole Greene, curator of the Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston; George McDaniel, director of Drayton Hall Plantation, Charleston; and Emory Campbell, chair of the Gullah-Geechee Commission with the National Park Service. I spent several days at Hog Hammock, Sapelo Island, in conversation with Cornelia Bailey discussing African American life in the Lowcountry and listening to traditional island stories. Buddy Sullivan of the University of Georgia’s Research Center on Sapelo provided much information about the history and environment of the area around Darien. He was particularly helpful in regard to both Fair Hope Plantation where Jane Bayard Wilson spent much time and General’s Island where Paul Sansay and other Bayard slaves once lived.

  I spent time on the inland waterways of the Lowcountry with Townsend Warren, Joe Dobbs, and Danny Bacot, who readily shared their knowledge of tides, marshes, and saltwater creeks. Joe Dobbs and Paul Pressly described for me their experience of the Savannah River with its changing moods. Some years earlier I spent time on Lowcountry rivers with the crabber Buddy Smith, whose knowledge of old rice fields and of all the living creatures that swim in Lowcountry waters or fly above them or walk beside them left me astonished. For almost fifty years I have floated, from time to time, Lowcountry rivers in canoes or bateaus or kayaks with various friends. During these float trips I have tried to be a good observer of the world of cypress-stained rivers and swamps.

  In South Carolina, Archie and Anna Chandler provided wonderful hospitality and opened the archives of the Mt. Zion Presbyterian Church for me. They took me for my first visit to the site of Leighton Wilson’s home, pointed out where they remembered the remains of the slave settlement by Boggy Gully, and drove me to various old home places along the Black River. Robert and Jerry Law invited Nancy and me to dinner in their beautiful antebellum home in Bishopville, SC, talked with us about the history of the Mt. Zion church, and provided me with a map showing the locations of plantation homes along the Black River. Sally Wilson, Bill Holmes, and Dick Dabbs of the Salem Black River Presbyterian Church welcomed me and talked with me about the history of the congregation. The Reverend Ella Busby and the Reverend Frank Colcough gathered a group of older members of the Good Will Presbyterian Church who had attended the Good Will School, Sumter County, South Carolina. They spoke of African American memories of the Black River region and about their experiences as students during the 1920s and 1930s at the Good Will school. Particularly memorable were their stories of school life with its discipline and high standards, and of old-time root doctors who knew how to heal a cut or cure a stomachache, and of ghosts and hags who were said to linger about swamps and dark corners. Mary Crockett of the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources canoed the Black River with me and my colleague Lee Carroll and talked about the river’s natural and social history.

  Mary Jo Fairchild of the South Carolina Historical Society, Steve Engerrand of the Georgia Archives, Iris Bierlein and Damon Talbot of the Maryland Historical Society, Ron Vinson of the Presbyterian Heritage Center, and Harry Miller of the Wisconsin Historical Society all went out of their way to provide me with needed materials.

  John Ellington, a linguist who spent years translating portions of the Bible into various Bantu languages, discussed with me the challenges of translation. Justo Gonzalez and Carlos Cardoza-Orlandi, historians of Christian missions, asked hard questions about the Wilsons and their colleagues and encouraged me in my efforts to understand early Protestant missions in West Africa.

  I have been privileged to work directly with several people at Basic Books. Katy O’Donnell was both cheerful and ready to offer help along the way, as was Alex Littlefield. Rachel King organized a production schedule that took into account my schedule. Kathy Streckfus was careful with many details as copyeditor and saved me from much embarrassment.

  I am deeply grateful to Lara Heimert, publisher at Basic Books. She enthusiastically received the proposal for this book and she took upon herself in 2012 the demanding task of line editing the manuscript. No one has done more to encourage me in my work as a historian than Lara Heimert—first when she was at Yale University Press and now at Basic Books. I can only say that I am deeply indebted to her and that I have learned much from her.

  Because this book was eight years in the making, my family has had to persevere as I have disappeared most mornings into the nineteenth century. This perseverance has been especially true of my wife Nancy. While going about her own busy life—so full of generosity, love, and vitality—she has been a genuine partner in the writing of this book.

  The book is dedicated to my sister and brother-in-law: Judy and Will Hair. Over many years they have welcomed Nancy and me, our children, and now our grandchildren, into their home and lives. They have been as a couple models of faithfulness to one another, and they, together with their children and grandchildren, have taught us much about the amazing gift of a life lived together in joy and gratitude.

  NOTES

  The following abbreviations have been used in the notes.

  Individuals and Institutions

  BVRJ Benjamin Van Rensselaer James

  JB Jane Bayard until marriage

  JBR John Browne Russwurm

  JBW Jane Bayard Wilson

  JH Dr. John Hall

  JHBL John Hazlehurst Boneval Latrobe

  JLW John Leighton Wilson

  MEW Martha Elmira Wilson

  MMW Mary Margaret Wilson

  RA Rufus Anderson

  SEW Samuel Ervin Wilson

  SSW Sarah Susanna Wilson

  WW William Walker

  WTW William Thomas Wilson

  Document Sources

  ABCFM American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions papers, Houghton

  Library, Harvard University, microfilm copies at Columbia Theological

  Seminary, Decatur, Georgia

  CCR Chatham County Records, Savannah, Georgia

  CO Charleston Observer

  CTS John Leighton Wilson Papers, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia

  GHS Georgia Historical Society, Savannah

  GLD Georgia Legislative Documents, Georgia State Archives, Atlanta

  MGAPCUS Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of the United States

  MSCS Maryland State Colonization Papers, Maryland Historical Society, microfilm

  copies at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia

  MZPC Archives of Mt. Zion Presbyterian Church, St. Charles, South Carolina

  PCCC Probate Court, Chatham County, Georgia

  PCSC Probate Court, Sumter County, South Carolina

  PHS Records of the Board of Foreign Missions, Presbyterian Church in the United

  States of America, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia

  SCCC Office of the Clerk of Superior Court, Chatham County, Georgia

/>   SCHS South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston

  SCL South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia

  SCSC Office of the Clerk of Superior Court, Sumter County, South Carolina

  WHS Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison

  WWD William Walker Diary, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison

  Chapter One: A Slave’s World

  1. For Paul and the slave settlement on Hutchinson Island, see Estate of N. S. Bayard in account with N. J. Bayard, Administrator, 1822–1838, SCCC.

  2. For the history of Savannah, see Walter J. Fraser, Jr., Savannah in the Old South (Athens, GA, 2003); Betty Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia (Athens, GA, 1995), 78–163; Whittington B. Johnson, Black Savannah, 1788–1864 (Fayetteville, AR, 1996); and especially, for the Civil War era, Jacqueline Jones, Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War (New York, 2008).

  3. For Paul as a carpenter, see Estate of N. S. Bayard, 16 January 1830, 6 April 1831, SCCC. For the Savannah River, see Francis Harper, ed., The Travels of William Bartram: Naturalist Edition (Athens, GA, 1998), 19–22; J. T. Henderson, The Commonwealth of Georgia: The Country; the People; the Productions (Atlanta, 1885), 174–177; Thomas L. Stokes, The Savannah (New York, 1951); Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work, 77–79.

  4. For Charles as Paul’s father, see Inventory of Slaves, Estate of N. S. Bayard, 1822, PCCC. For Charles as porter, see Estate of N. S. Bayard, 18 January 1826, 15 January 1827, SCCC.

  5. For slave ships arriving in Savannah and for the Mary, see Voyages Database, 2009, Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, www.slavevoyages.org (accessed 1 September 2010). Although the Georgia legislature outlawed slave imports in 1798, the law was largely ignored, as the Mary’s arrival made clear. More than 9,000 slaves were landed in Georgia, almost all in Savannah, during the first few years of the new century. See James A. McMillin, The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783–1810 (Columbia, SC, 2004), 48.

  6. For the Flora, see Voyages Database. For the transatlantic “Middle Passage,” see Colin A. Palmer, “The Middle Passage,” in Captive Passage: The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Making of the Americas, Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC, 2002), 53–75.

  7. For the congressional action ending the legal importation of slaves into the United States, see Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade (New York, 1997), 499–502. There is a rapidly growing literature on the international slave trade. For an overview, see David Eltis, “A Brief Overview of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade,” Voyages Database. For the US transatlantic slave trade and the numbers illegally arriving in the United States after 1808, see David Eltis, “The U.S. Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1644–1867: An Assessment,” Civil War History 54 (2008): 347–380.

  8. For Charlotte as Paul’s sister, see Inventory of Slaves, Estate of N. S. Bayard, 1822, PCCC. For Charlotte as a domestic, see Estate of N. S. Bayard, 2 January 1837, SCCC; Emigrant Roll, Schooner Columbia, 15 May 1838, MSCS. For Charlotte as JB’s personal servant, see JLW to JB, 21 June 1833, 11 July 1833, CTS. For the role of domestic slaves as conveyors of information to slave communities, see Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), 328–365.

  9. For quotations and the Scots’ antislavery petition, see Harvey H. Jackson, “The Darien Anti-slavery Petition of 1739 and the Georgia Plan,” William and Mary Quarterly 34, no. 4 (1977): 618–631. For McIntosh, see Harvey H. Jackson, Lachlan McIntosh and the Politics of Revolutionary Georgia (Athens, GA, 2003 [1979]), esp. 6–9. For the opening of the transatlantic slave trade to Georgia, see Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730–1775 (Athens, GA, 1984), 98–104.

  10. Lachlan McIntosh, Account Book, 1799–1812, GHS; Lachlan McIntosh, Letters and Papers, GHS; Lachlan McIntosh, Memorandum Book, GHS; Inventory of Slaves, Estate of N. S. Bayard, 1822, PCCC. For McIntosh land, see Buddy Sullivan, Early Days on the Georgia Tidewater: The Story of McIntosh County and Sapelo (Darien, GA, 2001), 760. For McIntosh County lands, see also Estate of N. S. Bayard, 11 November 1823, 10 November 1825, 24 January 1831, SCCC, and 28 March 1823, Savannah Republican Gazette. For Cumberland Island, see Estate of N. S. Bayard, 21 March 1822, SCCC. For Lottery Hall Plantation on the Ogeechee River, see Estate of N. S. Bayard, 18 June 1816, SCCC.

  11. For marriage contracts and the role of husbands in regard to a wife’s property, see Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (Oxford, 1996), 79–81. For examples of slave divisions at the marriage of a slave owner’s daughter, see Erskine Clarke, Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (New Haven, CT, 2005), 100, 378–382.

  12. For obituary of the girls’ father, Nicholas Serle Bayard, see Savannah Republican Gazette, 30 October 1821.

  13. For Paul receiving carpenter’s tools, see Estate of N. S. Bayard, 16 January 1830, SCCC. For slave carpenters, see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 84–85, 168; Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998), 214–218, 227–228, 349; Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work, 47, 105.

  14. For slaves moving freely around the city, see Johnson, Black Savannah, 55–83; Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work, 80–95; Jones, Saving Savannah, 87–88. For slaves hiring themselves out, see Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 352–353; Johnson, Black Savannah, 100–121; Fraser, Savannah in the Old South, 94–96, 144, 286–287. For slave housing, see Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820–1860 (Oxford, 1964), 58–62; Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work, 129–131. For the punishment and jailing of Bayard slaves, see Estate of N. S. Bayard, 3 April 1823, 16 March 1824, 12 June 1826. For slave jails and punishments in Savannah, see Johnson, Black Savannah, 50–53; Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work, 113, 117–118; Fraser, Savannah in the Old South, 203–205.

  15. For free blacks in Savannah, see Index of Free People of Color, Chatham County, 1817–1839, GHS; Wade, Slavery in the Cities, 249–252; Johnson, Black Savannah, 85–132, 185; Jones, Saving Savannah, 47–49.

  16. For a Bayard runaway, see Estate of N. S. Bayard, 3 March 1823. For examples of runaways in Savannah, see Savannah Republican, 18 July 1816, 3 January 1820, and Clarke, Dwelling Place, 347–348. On runaways generally, see John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York, 1999); John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York, 1972), 104–131.

  17. Quotations: Charles Lyell, A Second Visit to North America, vol. 2 (London, 1849), 3; James M. Simms, The First Colored Baptist Church in North America (Philadelphia, 1888), 247. For Andrew Marshall and First African Baptist Church, see Emmanuel King Love, History of the First African Baptist Church, from Its Organization, January 20th 1788, to July 1, 1888 (Savannah, 1888), 7–34; Simms, The First Colored Baptist Church, 76–106; Whittington B. Johnson, “Andrew C. Marshall: A Black Religious Leader of Antebellum Savannah,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 69 (1985); Johnson, Black Savannah, 11. For Protestant Christianity and slave religion as found at First African, see Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (Oxford, 1978), 189–193; Vincent L. Wimbush, “The Bible and African Americans: An Outline of an Interpretative History,” in Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, ed. Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis, 1991), 81–97; Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998), 80–148; Janet Duitsman Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South (Columbia, SC, 1999), 103–123.

  18. For the ways in which social spaces influence dispositions while individual agency is maintained, see the work of Pierre Bourdieu, especially In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, M. Adamson, trans. (Cambridge, UK, 1994).

  19. For General’s
Island, see Sullivan, Early Days on the Georgia Tidewater, 760.

  20. Estate of N. S. Bayard, 15 February 1825, 10 November 1825, 3 January 1826.

  21. For the passage down the coast to Darien and for the character of the landscape, see Charles Lyell, A Second Visit to North America, vol. 1 (London, 1849), 307–351. For intercoastal water schooners and their coastal trade, see William C. Fleetwood, Tidecraft: The Boats of South Carolina, Georgia and Northeastern Florida, 1750–1950 (Camden, SC, 1995).

  22. Quotation: Fanny Kemble Wister, Fanny: The American Kemble (Tallahassee, FL, 1972), 164. For map and description of General’s Island, see Malcolm Bell, Jr., Major Butler’s Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family (Athens, GA, 1987), 117–120. For the general environment, both physical and social, see William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (Athens, GA, 2000).

  23. The most comprehensive treatment of the black culture of the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry is Morgan, Slave Counterpoint. See also Philip Morgan, ed., African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee (Athens, GA, 2010); Margaret Creel, “A Peculiar People”: Slave Religion and Community-Culture Among the Gullahs (New York, 1988); William S. Pollitzeer, The Gullah People and Their African Heritage (Athens, GA, 1999); and Dusinberre, Them Dark Days. For the population of McIntosh County, see Sullivan, Early Days on the Georgia Tidewater, 782.

  24. For the survival of the mentioned African words and phrases and for the development of Gullah language and its role as a bearer of culture, see Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 560–580. See also Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (Boston, 1992), 20–22; Michael Montgomery, Essays in the Development of Gullah Language and Culture (Athens, GA, 1994); Frederic G. Cassidy, “The Place of Gullah,” American Speech 55 (1980): 3–16; Lorenzo Dow Turner, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (Chicago, 1949). I have used “Gullah” for the African Americans of the Lowcountry of both South Carolina and Georgia, rather than the term “Gullah-Geechee,” which is often used today. The name “Geechee,” from the Ogeechee River, refers to African Americans from the Georgia Lowcountry. Since “Gullah” was used in the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth by both blacks and whites to refer to Lowcountry African Americans in both states, I have simply avoided an anachronism by using “Gullah” rather than “Gullah-Geechee.” For an example of the use of “Gullah”—or “Golla”—by blacks in the Georgia Lowcountry to refer to themselves, see Georgia Writers Project, Savannah Unit, Works Projects Administration, [Mary Granger], Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes (Savannah, GA, 1940), 113.