Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  After the service, the coffin was carried to the waiting cemetery. Already in 1805 the Midway graveyard had received the bodies of many who had succumbed to the fevers and miasmas of a swampy and mosquito-infested land. White monuments to the dead caught the sunlight beneath great oaks with thick, heavy branches reaching down toward the ground. Among the most recently erected monuments was one over the body of Gildersleeve’s wife, with an inscription that read in part:

  She, who in Jesus sleeps beneath this tomb,

  Had Rachel’s face and Leah’s fruitful womb.

  Abigal’s wisdom, Lydia’s faithful heart,

  And Martha’s care, with Mary’s better part.24

  Close by, a grave had been opened toward the central part of the cemetery and into it the casket was lowered. After a brief prayer, the grave was filled—perhaps by Jupiter and a few of the men from Liberty Hall. Joseph Jones ordered a white marble slab to mark the spot and had inscribed upon it

  Sacred to the memory of John Jones Esquire

  He was Born in Sunbury, Georgia November 25, 1772 and departed this life the 28th March 1805 aged 32 years 4 months and 3 days.

  Midway Congregational Church (author’s collection)

  He was a Dutiful son, an affectionate Husband, a Tender Parent, a fond Brother, a Sincere Friend, a Humane Master, a true Respecter of Religion, and a generous Benefactor to the Poor—

  Yes we must follow soon, we’ll glad obey

  When a few Suns have Roll’d their cares away

  Tir’d with Vain life we’ll close the willing Eye

  ‘Tis the great birthright of mankind to die

  Blest be the bark that wafts us to that Shore

  Where death’s divided Friends shall part no more.25

  For Jupiter and Lizzy and those who lived in the settlement at Liberty Hall, the sorrows of “death’s divided Friends” were to come before the grave, as they soon faced a dividing of another sort at a slave sale.

  2

  RICEBORO

  Already before the long walk back from Midway to Liberty Hall, there had been, no doubt, talk in the settlement. Lizzy and the others knew only too well that when a master died, trouble was waiting. Lizzy’s previous experience was a familiar part of life in the low country for the black men and women who tilled the fields and harvested the crops and who did the cooking and washing at the plantation house. When her owner John Girardeau had died, not only were Lizzy, her brother Cassius, her sister Willoughby, and five others willed to Girardeau’s sister Susannah, but other slaves, together with land and livestock, were willed to other relatives. Tom, Fanny, Abram, Solomon, Jain, and Old Flora had gone to sister Elizabeth Maybank, while Girardeau’s niece and nephew had received Harry, Nancy, July, Tenah, Clara, Alphonso, and a young child of Nancy’s. Girardeau’s wife, Elizabeth, had been left, in addition to lands, all twenty-five of Girardeau’s “remaining negroes and stock of horses and cattle, sheep and hogs.” John Girardeau’s death had thus spelled the breakup of the settlement at his Cedar Grove plantation, and if he had been careful not to divide parents and children, he had arbitrarily divided a network of family and friends who had been living and working together.1

  In the days that followed John Jones’s death, the knowledge of such divisions—and even more bitter ones—must have been discussed around evening fires as they were poked and stirred in the settlement at Liberty Hall. What partings would follow their master’s death? Would families be divided? Would friends be sold away? Would those who had lived out their lives as John Jones’s slaves have to move from familiar places and answer to other, perhaps more difficult, masters? A new, more intense uncertainty about the future must have entered the world of the settlement and no doubt could be felt up and down the little road with its smoky cabins.2

  In spite of such uncertainties, life followed its familiar patterns at Liberty Hall. Days began with Old Jupiter blowing his conch-shell horn and assigning tasks, and days ended with supper and talk around evening fires. And every morning Lizzy left the settlement and went to the kitchen of the plantation house. There she prepared meals and, with the house servants Adam, Molly, and Brutus, she swept and cleaned and washed when there was time between her labors in the kitchen.3

  Joseph Jones took over the management of Liberty Hall as the administrator of his brother’s estate. His own plantation, the Retreat, was not far away—it had been a part of Rice Hope—and Joseph was in the process of building it into one of the great plantations of the Georgia coast. If his brother John had thought of himself as something of an English gentleman, a southern Cavalier with expensive tastes for imported goods, Joseph had no such illusions. To be sure, he knew himself to be a gentleman, even an aristocrat, but he was all business. His grandson, decades later, remembered him as “a gentleman of large wealth, and a most successful planter. Just, honorable, charitable to the widow and orphan, he was a man of imperious will, of great personal courage, quick in quarrel, impatient of restraint, intolerant of opposition, and of mark in the community.” Born a few months after his father had been struck down by the British cannonball to his chest, Joseph had had his own share of sorrows. The year before his brother died, Joseph had lost his wife, Mary Maybank, and had buried her beside three of their four children: Mary Eliza had lived eleven months, Susanna Maria had lived fourteen months, and Martha Eliza had succumbed to the miasmas of the low country after only eleven months. These little ones and their mother lay in the family cemetery that could be seen from his bedroom window at the Retreat. Such great losses had left him with a tender heart toward the “widow and orphan” and for his own surviving child, Joseph, but his was a tenderness set within theaus-tere code of a patriarch. He expected obedience and discipline even as he offered protection and guardianship to Susannah Jones and her fatherless children.4

  Joseph hired an overseer for Liberty Hall, a Mr. Warnock, a small farmer from the piney woods section of the county, where the soil was poor and the harvests were small. Warnock visited the plantation every few days, and for the first time in his life Jupiter had to work with a stranger, with someone other than a member of the Jones family. Warnock would review with him the assignment of tasks and the schedule of plantation work, and when someone in the settlement was sick, he would prescribe the treatment—concoctions of various sorts from barks and roots gathered in the woods and swamps and from powders and pills purchased in Savannah. But Joseph Jones was not a planter who would leave an overseer completely to his own judgments and ways—especially an overseer from the piney woods. So on a regular basis Joseph visited Liberty Hall, keeping careful notes in a neat hand of all the expenses, and turning his great energy toward the management of his brother’s estate.5

  Yet in spite of the managerial skill of Joseph, the work of Warnock and Jupiter, and the labors of those in the settlement, all was not well at Liberty Hall. By the winter of 1807, Jupiter and Lizzy and the others who lived in the settlement knew that trouble was brewing. The plantation had not yet recovered from a great hurricane that had come sweeping up from the Caribbean in August 1804. A deadly storm, it had sent a wall of water with a tidal surge over a nearby plantation on Moss Island. The Ashmores, friends of the Joneses, had lost three children, one swept from Mrs. Ashmore’s arms, and only the parents and one slave had been washed ashore alive on the banks of the South Newport River. Liberty Hall had not been spared as the storm lashed inland, ruining the rice and the cotton and destroying most of the year’s labor. Such destruction had meant that provisions were scarce throughout 1805 and even into 1806 and 1807. Joseph Jones had to order expensive supplies—including wagonloads of corn—to be sent to the people in the settlement. In addition, plantation houses and buildings had to be repaired, and the summer home in Sunbury on the coast had to be largely rebuilt by the plantation carpenter Jacob and his apprentice Sandy. All of these expenses, together with the loss of the crops and income in 1805, had put great strains on the estate and on the plantation’s ability to sustain itself. Those who ate t
heir suppers in the settlement knew that times were difficult, for they could hear the wagons rumbling down the plantation avenue to unload at the corn house, and the provisions available for their own cook pots were limited. But what was not clearly known in the settlement was the extent of John Jones’s indebtedness. While they had been laboring in the fields, he had been speculating in land and slaves.6

  As the son of a Revolutionary War hero, John Jones had served in the state legislature and then had followed his friend and brother-in-law Colonel Daniel Stewart in the more lucrative office of county sheriff. Both offices had provided him with opportunities to learn a business that was a passion for many Georgians—the buying and selling of land and slaves. A young Liberty County woman later wrote of planters in the county, “Here generally speaking, it really appears as if to ‘make cotton to buy Negroes, and buy Negroes to make cotton’ is the dearest wish of their hearts, the sole employment of their noblest faculties. But this is human nature!”7

  Jones had been elected to the legislature in 1796 as a part of a reform effort in response to the great Yazoo fraud that had involved millions of acres of land in the central and western part of the state. What he had seen in the legislature was what he knew from Liberty County: that fortunes could be made from the buying and selling of land.8 When he was elected sheriff in 1798, his work had been not so much to apprehend criminals as to oversee the auction of property for back taxes, for the settlement of debts, or for the division of estates. In Liberty County, such property included slaves as well as real estate. The Savannah papers carried his advertisements for the auctions. Typical was one from July 1798:

  SHERIFF’S SALES

  On the first Tuesday in August next will be sold, at Riceboro, between the hours of X and III o’clock, by public outcry,

  The following PROPERTY, viz.

  All that valuable and well known Rice Plantation, or Tract of Land, in the county of Liberty, in three separate tracts….

  600 Acres, in the said county of Liberty, in two surveys, lying on Goshen swamp….

  That handsome Situation on Colonel’s Island where John Mitchel, Sen., Esq. now resides….

  Also the following Negroes, viz. Sambo, Saul, Wally, Pegg, Rose, and Jacob; the fellow Jacob is a carpenter, and has been run away upwards of two years, is still out, and will be sold as he runs….

  Two Negroes, viz. Nelly, a young wench, and Prince, a small boy, seized and taken under and by virtue of an execution as the property of the Estate of William Bacon. John Jones, S.L.C.9

  And so the ads had run, three or four times a year with different real estate and different slaves all listed over the name of John Jones as sheriff of Liberty County.10

  In the midst of his work as sheriff and his managing of Liberty Hall, Jones had plunged into his own buying and selling of real estate and slaves. During the decade before his death, he had bought all over Liberty County small tracts of several hundred acres and large tracts of several thousands. Some land had been secured from the state through claims of headrights. Other land had been purchased directly from owners. Sometimes, when a parcel was being auctioned at a sheriff’s sale, Jones had had a friend purchase it, and then he would buy it from the friend. And he sold land: three large tracts in 1799 to Charles Ash for $2,500, and in 1803 a nineteen hundred–acre plantation to James Heath for $2,800.11

  Jones had not been so vigorous in his buying and selling of slaves. To be sure, he had bought Abram, Ben, and Jim from Captain Forester; and Lucy, July, and Sanco had been bought and sold within one year; and Fanny and her children Elvira and Marcus had been purchased in the slave market in Savannah. But the settlement at Liberty Hall had been fairly stable, with most of those who lived there going back, like Jupiter, to slave purchases Jones’s father had made before the Revolution.

  But the stability of the slave community at Liberty Hall had become increasingly vulnerable. To maintain his cavalier ways and to finance his speculations, Jones had borrowed money from other planters and from merchants in Sunbury and Savannah. Security was demanded, and Jones had begun to mortgage, in addition to his lands, those who lived in the settlement. As pressures increased, he had mortgaged not only those men and women he had bought but also those whom he had inherited from his father and mother: Sunbury, October, November, December, May, and April had been mortgaged. Jacob and Sandy, the valuable plantation carpenters, had been mortgaged. Even Old Jupiter and his son Hamlet had been mortgaged. Jones had paid back many of the debts, and the mortgages had been canceled, but it had all been a juggling act that collapsed when he was no longer there to keep all the buying, selling, and borrowing in the air.12

  By the spring of 1808, Joseph Jones’s business acumen was no longer able to keep the creditors away. As more debts became due and as taxes on the estate mounted, it became clear to him that some dramatic action was needed to satisfy the debts, to preserve Liberty Hall, and to provide some security for the young widowand her children. The answer to the crisis was in the settlement—the men, women, and children who daily heard Jupiter blow his conch-shell horn calling them out of their cabins to the work of the plantation.

  The village of Riceboro, the county seat, was located on the main road between Savannah and Darien, several miles south of the Midway meetinghouse and just south of the bridge over the North Newport River. Another road left the village and ran west along the edge of the swamps and marshes that marked the headwaters of the North Newport and from there to the sand hills in the interior of the county. These roads provided ready access to the village and along them came wagons and carts, buggies and carriages, and at night, not a few slaves. A wharf had been built on the river’s edge, and to it came a variety of ships that sailed the inland waters along the South Carolina and Georgia coast—schooners with their two masts rigged fore-and-aft; square-stern sloops with single sails; and an occasional brig with its square-sail rig—all of them weaving their way slowly up the river. They carried to the village the products of a wider world bought and sold in Savannah—crockery from England, coarse Osnaburg cloth from Germany, tobacco from Virginia, and rum from the West Indies. The ships took with them as they headed back downstream the products of the plantations: barrels of rice, tightly packed bales of cotton, some timber, and when they were available, butter and eggs, smoked hams and cured beef. So the little boro, isolated as it was along the swampy waters of the North Newport, was nevertheless part of an interdependent transatlantic economy that was largely fueled by slaves like Lizzy and Old Jupiter.13

  The Riceboro Inn accommodated travelers on the stagecoach and those who had business at the little courthouse. Several stores were also here. They sold hardware and cloth, seeds and medicines, lard and candles, and whatever the owners thought might be needed in a hurry on the surrounding plantations. Their products were generally more expensive than what was offered in Savannah, but they had the advantage of being close to their markets and ready when needed.14 Of all the products the shopkeepers sold, none invited more attention than their barrels of rum. Like his neighbors, John Jones had bought rum here to give out in the settlement during seasons of hard labor and on special occasions such as Christmas and the Fourth of July. Rum had the advantage, it was believed by planters, of being both a reward for weary laborers and a tonic for their health. The problem was that rum was also an invitation to trouble, to laziness, to dissipated behavior, and, on occasion, to flight. What infuriated planters was the willingness of the village shopkeepers to sell rum directly to slaves.15

  The boro, as it was called by those who lived nearby, was like a magnet set in the midst of plantations, irresistibly drawing toit the inhabitants of scattered slave settlements. On Saturday afternoons, after tasks were completed, those slaves with passes from their owners could go to the boro to buy a little tobacco for their pipes, to sell a bushel of corn or some eggs, or to trade a shoat for a basket woven from palmetto fronds and sweet grass during evening hours. The boro was a place to visit, and except for church, it was the prima
ry place in the county where slaves from different plantations could gather without arousing too much suspicion. But nighttime visits were another matter. Those who were bold could slip out of the settlements and make their way to the boro for some rum and illicit pleasures. Patrols of armed planters tried to stop them, but they were employed only sporadically, and planters frequently complained of their inefficiency. What was worse, the shopkeepers, travelers, and sailors all too often aided and abetted those who had stolen away—indeed, complained the planters, sometimes joined with them in drinking and carousing—thereby corrupting the slaves and undermining discipline by being too familiar with them.16

  As a trusted driver, Jupiter went to Riceboro regularly with a pass, sometimes to get the mail and often to buy something needed on the plantation. He was aware that the village was more than simply a place for slaves to sell their goods on a Saturday afternoon or for some to visit under cover of darkness. He had seen the whipping post by the courthouse and heard the cries of those being punished by order of the court. Indeed, his master, John Jones, during his tenure as sheriff had been responsible for seeing that the orders of the court were carried out and that the jailer used the whip as instructed by the judges, so that many a slave bore the long, thick scars of the whipping post.17

  Jupiter was also inescapably aware that Riceboro was a slave market. The little boro had no grand marketplace for such a business but simply two unremarkable spots that served as the places for the selling and buying of slaves. One was by the bridge, near the wharf, where traders could stand and offer the sons and daughters of Africa for purchase. The other was in front of the courthouse in the sandy yard shaded by live oaks and their long grieving wisps of Spanish moss. Here the sheriff would gather those to be auctioned, and so it was to this spot, under the oaks and before the courthouse, that Old Jupiter and the others from Liberty Hall were brought in April 1808.18