Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  Charles was learning, however, that Savannah, for all of its importance to the Georgia low country, was a small city. In 1820 it numbered only 7,523 residents and had what a later visitor called “a curiously rural and modest aspect” evoked, no doubt, not only by its size but also by its tree-lined streets and shady parks. But it was an energetic city and prided itself on the vigor of its commercial activity. In 1818 the city had sent the steamship Savannah on a pioneer trip to Liverpool, ushering in a new age of transatlantic navigation, and later the city aggressively built railroads into the interior of the state.17 As a clerk in the firm of Nicholas and Neff, Charles was in a good position to watch this entrepreneurial spirit at work, especially in his mentor William Neff, who had extensive business connections in his home state of Pennsylvania. Charles worked hard, became noted for his energy, integrity, and practical gifts, and gained a reputation as an up-and-coming young man in the world of Savannah’s cotton factors and commission merchants.18

  One aspect of Savannah’s life that immediately caught Charles’s attention was its slave population and its African-American community. For blacks as well as for whites, life in the city was different from life on the plantation. To be sure, the burdens and sorrows of slavery remained, but the work of urban slaves and the ways they sought to organize their lives were different from the work and life of those who lived at Carlawter and other plantation settlements. In contrast to Liberty County, where slaves outnumbered whites almost three to one, in Savannah the population was almost evenly divided between blacks and whites. Rather than being isolated at a Carlawter or Lambert, slaves in Savannah were part of a complex urban setting where on a daily basis they could interact with whites— not only with their owners but also with shopkeepers and police, neighbors and strangers.19

  Most visible in the city were the African-American vendors. They reflected in a large way the market activity that took place in little villages like Riceboro. Women came in from the country to sell the produce of their gardens; men hawked the fish and shrimp they had caught in the creeks and inlets; others sold eggs they had gathered or baskets they had made or game they had snared. Some slaves in Savannah were “hired out” by their owners, returning weekly to their masters or mistresses an agreed sum. While often in the self-interest of the owners, such activities left many whites uneasy. Shortly before Charles arrived in Savannah, a letter writer calling himself Anti-Mulatto had railed in the Savannah Republican against “Husksters and Cake-Wenches,” accusing them of monopolizing much of the marketplace, driving up prices, and even of taking up paramours “ white, black or yellow.” The grand jury, in its presentments in 1818, had seen “a great evil” in the “granting of badges to colored and black women, for the purpose of hawking about articles for sale.” Such complaints revealed not only much about the fears and anxieties of whites but also about the ability of African Americans to create some space for themselves in the city and to vigorously pursue their own interests within that space. For they were not simply slaves and victims of white oppression but a people who were responding to slavery with their own strategies and building their own African-American community and culture.20

  One of the peculiarities of Savannah that must have struck Charles when he first came to the city was the way slave-housing patterns were different from what he had known in the country. In Savannah, houses of whites were built close to the streets and slave houses were at the backs of the lots. High walls divided the lots and created compounds that kept whites and blacks in an intense relationship with one another so that urban slaves lived among whites in ways that only a few domestics did on the plantations. Such close contacts meant that urban blacks were generally more acculturated to white ways than their country cousins, that they knew more of a wider world and had more opportunities for learning to read and write than those in the plantation settlements. Close contacts, of course, also meant close supervision and constant calls for services. But urban blacks found ways to slip away at night or when whites were not at home. Sheds and stables provided exits from the compounds, and the lanes that separated Savannah’s neatly laid out blocks provided convenient and hard-to-police routes throughout the city. Like the trails that Cato and Cassius could follow at Carlawter, the lanes of Savannah served as a means of escape and as places for illegal gatherings and illicit activities. By carefully following the lanes, slaves could make their way to another “yard” for visiting, or go to one of the grogshops that catered to blacks, or sneak down below the bluff of the city to the river’s edge, where there were the shanties of those who could hire themselves out in the city.21

  Among those who used the lanes and hid among the city’s black population were runaways. Many came in from the countryside, and others fled a compound to hide in some other part of the city. The Savannah papers carried advertisements for their capture, such as an advertisement that appeared a short time after Cato and Cassius had moved to Carlawter. Ned and Trim had run away from the Mara plantation, which adjoined Carlawter. Their owner, Morgan Mara, advertised that they had forged passes and that with such papers they had a good chance of hiding out in Savannah for an extended period.22

  Charles had known the handful of free blacks in Liberty County who lived in Riceboro or on nearby plantations. But in Savannah, he found a sizable free black population, almost six hundred in 1820, scattered throughout the city and engaged in a variety of occupations. Many of the men were tailors and carpenters; others were painters, bricklayers, butchers, or barbers; still others were shoemakers or harness makers or worked on the boats that plied the waterways. Women were seamstresses and vendors, washerwomen and house servants. But most of them, both men and women, were “slaves without masters,” laborers who toiled in the menial tasks of the city. They all lived in a kind of twilight zone between freedom and slavery, severely restricted in what they could do or how they could dress, but having important privileges denied to slaves—most especially the right to own land and have legal marriages. These free blacks provided a constant reminder that slavery was not the inevitable condition for African Americans. Moreover, they provided important leadership for the African-American community in Savannah and frequently incurred the suspicion and sometimes the wrath of whites for their independence. No free blacks were more conspicuous in this regard than the black preachers of Savannah.23

  The first and most famous black preacher in the city had been Andrew Bryan. His owner, Jonathan Bryan, had been a neighbor in South Carolina of John Lambert—the one whose will had left Lambert plantation in Liberty County to be used for benevolent purposes. Andrew Bryan had preached at his master’s Brampton Plantation on the Savannah River and, after much bitter opposition, had been successful in winning his freedom and establishing the First African Baptist Church in Savannah. On Andrew Bryan’s death in 1812, the church had fifteen hundred members and had given birth to two other churches. At his funeral Dr. Henry Kollock, pastor of the lofty Independent Presbyterian Church, “bore testimony to his worth,” and five thousand people had gone weeping to Bryan’s grave “singing the songs of Zion.”24

  In 1815 Bryan’s nephew, Andrew Marshall, had become the pastor of the First African Baptist Church. The son of Bryan’s sister and an English overseer, Marshall had been purchased as a young man by Judge Joseph Clay, a leading citizen of the city and a supporter of Andrew Bryan’s work at the church. As a personal servant of Clay, Marshall had traveled to the north and had met famous political and intellectual figures in Boston and other cities. Marshall may have had an influence on his master, for Clay had left his judicial position and the Independent Presbyterian Church in 1807 to become pastor of Boston’s First Baptist Church. Clay’s son Thomas, as well as his daughter Eliza Clay, in time became two of Charles Jones’s closest friends.25

  Having gained his freedom, Andrew Marshall had become a drayman as well as a preacher in Savannah. Marshall had been publicly whipped shortly after Charles had arrived in the city, allegedly for trading with slaves without proper t
ickets. Behind this public humiliation, however, stood the antagonism of white Baptists who did not like Marshall’s independence and, more broadly, the widespread hostility in the white community to black preachers. These preachers, it was feared, were teaching their parishioners to read and to resist white authority. Young Charles took notice of such controversy and later remembered that when prominent whites supported the evangelization of slaves, the work could proceed even in the face of white fears and skepticism.26

  In time, Andrew Marshall himself began to win substantial white support, and in later years was respected by many of Savannah’s whites as well as blacks. With Henry Cunningham, pastor of the Second African Baptist Church, Marshall was an influential leader in the Sunbury Baptist Association, which drew together the African-American Baptist churches of the Georgia low country. Charles did not know it at the time, but in the years ahead he was to become associated with these two black preachers and the Sunbury Association. He came to think of himself as a partner with them in his own efforts to evangelize those who lived in the settlements at the Retreat and Carlawter, at Lambert and Liberty Hall and the other plantations of the Georgia low country.27

  Charles had felt keenly his loss of a formal education when he came to Savannah to learn the wisdom of the countinghouse and the practices and judgments needed for the buying and selling of cotton and rice. And so he took the path of self-improvement followed by many an ambitious young clerk. “Such was his desire for mental cultivation,” it was later written of him, “that the evenings of days of labor and toil were not wasted in idleness or given to pleasure and amusement but faithfully employed in profitably reading the standard works of literature.” Jones gave special attention to history “both ancient and modern” and laid the foundation for his later work as a historian. But his work and studies left him exhausted, and inearly 1822 he became seriously ill and was reduced “to the gates of the grave.” Finally a new physician was consulted, and he suggested a remedy that was successful in “reducing the pulse and controlling the arterial action.” Charles began to improve, but only slowly, and for months he knew the helplessness of a child. During this time he had long hours to think seriously about the condition of his soul and his eternal destiny. Following a period of fervent introspection and prayer, he had a deeply moving religious experience that changed the direction of his life and set him on a course that he had not anticipated. As soon as he had gained enough strength, he applied for membership in the Midway Congregational Church.28

  Susannah Jones had brought Charles to Midway to be baptized as an infant shortly after his father had been killed in 1805.29 For those in the Calvinist tradition of Midway, Charles’s baptism meant that he was a “child of the covenant of grace”—that is, God’s grace was a free gift to him that did not depend on Charles’s knowledge or his will but came simply out of God’s love for him. As an adult, however, Charles had to claim the covenant as his own, for in order to become a communing member of Midway he had to profess his belief that Jesus Christ was his personal savior. Such a claim and profession were not expected to come easily, nor were they to be made lightly. The consequence was that at Midway (and at most U.S. Protestant churches of the early nineteenth century), there were many more people who came to church than there were church members.

  Midway Church had two coordinate branches: the church and the society. The society was composed of “subscribers to the Articles of Incorporation.” Those who were members only of the Midway Society came to church, believed the doctrines of the church, paid rent for their pews, voted on the minister’s salary, and helped to see after the upkeep of the building and cemetery. But since they were not church members, they could not come to the communion table to receive the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper or bring their children for baptism, nor were they under the discipline of the congregation. In order to become a full communing member, a person had to stand before the congregation and profess something like this: “I believe God has touched my heart and made me repent of my sins and has created in me a desire to live the life of a Christian. I believe that Jesus died for my sins and through his death has washed away my guilt. From now on, with God’s help, I promise to try to live as a faithful discipline of Jesus, following his way and seeking to do his will.”30

  Charles stood before the Midway congregation in November 1822 and made his profession of faith. Standing with him to publicly confess their own faith were his sister Susan and his cousin Mary Robarts, both back from Charleston, and Charles’s uncle General Daniel Stewart, as well as thirty others who had felt their hearts strangely warmed and who had come to make their profession before the congregation. Already closely examined by their pastor, the Reverend Murdock Murphy, and by the members of the church, they represented the largest single group of whites that had ever come before the congregation seeking membership. As such, they were part of an evangelical awakening that had been sweeping the country for some years and that was already being called the Second Great Awakening. The movement was bringing great numbers into the Protestant churches, providing them with a widely shared religious experience, and creating within them a vision for a Protestant America that demanded reforms of society. When the seventeen-year-old Charles made his profession before the congregation, he was joining not only Midway but also this larger evangelical movement, with its distinct piety and its strong benevolent impulse.31

  Charles’s religious experience and its resulting piety committed him to a life of intense introspection. To be sure, the Calvinism of Midway required an out-ward focus on God, the high and holy One, who was to be worshiped and adored. Personal religious experiences and turbulent feelings, for all of their importance, were not to be the Christian’s preoccupation or subject of trust, but only God. Yet because the self was always in danger of wandering onto dangerous paths, because it was fashioned out of fallen nature, a sharp eye had to be kept on the inner life. For Charles this meant a steady gaze at his own heart and motives, a disciplined probing of his feelings, and an awareness of the role of sin in his life. In Savannah, Charles had as his mentor and guide for such introspection his close friend Lowell Mason and his wife, Abigail.

  Mason had come from Massachusetts to Savannah in 1813 and, after working as a clerk, had turned to music, his first love, becoming the organist and choir director at the Independent Presbyterian Church. The year Charles joined Midway, Mason published his first tune book, The Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music. An immediate success, the book went through many editions. Over the coming years Mason published more than seventeen hundred hymn tunes, some of which were to become deeply identified with the piety of evangelical Protestantism, not only in the United States but also abroad. Among the best known would be Bethany (“Nearer, My God, to Thee”), Olivet (“My Faith Looks Up to Thee”), Dennis (“Bless Be the Tie That Binds”), and Hamburg (“When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”). Charles boarded with the Masons in Savannah, and Lowell Mason was pleased that he had had “a finger in the pie” when Charles was converted and “made over again.”32

  In the summer of 1824 Charles invited the Masons to go with him for a visit to sister Betsy and her husband, William Maxwell, on Colonel’s Island. The Maxwells’ plantation, Orange Grove, was located at the eastern end of the island at Yellow Bluff and looked out across the marsh to St. Catherine’s Sound. In the distance could be seen St. Catherine’s Island and, to the north, Ossabaw Island. Mason gave Charles for his reading that summer Jonathan Edwards’s great philosophical and theological Treatise on the Freedom of the Will. Charles sat in William Maxwell’s office, hoping for a sea breeze during hot July days, and began poring over the text.33 He began a notebook and carefully copied his reflections on Edwards. Orange Grove must have seemed a strange place to be studying the New Englander, there by the marshes and under the Sea Island oaks, with the roar of the breakers in the distance. But Charles frequently remarked in the future that his study of Edwards that summer had “first taught him to think a
nd reason.”34 In his reading of Edwards, however, he had a different intention that summer than learning to “think and reason”—it was to help him know himself and the role of his own will and the workings of the human mind and heart. And the direction his reflections and introspection were leading him was toward a vocational decision, a response to a calling he believed was from God. That calling, he finally admitted to himself the next year, was to become a minister of the Gospel and an active participant in the evangelical campaign to bring salvation to a lost people.

  7

  SCATTERED PLACES

  While Charles Jones was learning about ledgers and the commission business in the countinghouse of William Neff, his cousin Mary Jones finished her studies at Barsden Bluff and moved in 1823 to Savannah. Joseph Jones wanted his daughter to have the kind of education he had provided for his nieces in Charleston—Mary needed to learn the sophisticated ways of urban life and to be introduced more fully to society even as she completed her formal academic studies at the little Savannah academy of the Presbyterian minister Abiel Carter.1