Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  Poor Hannah is no more. When such a faithful servant is removed from the family we must all feel. Her afflictions were long, and although they appeared simple yet to her they were truly afflictions, and she sometimes talked to me of religion in such a manner as led me to think she had hope, notwithstanding her insanity at times. None can tell but we shall see her happy. Let us look at our own hearts Sister, that we improve our talents and seek to be found ready when Jesus calls. And that we do not abuse our high privileges and experience on death that all our good things were bestowed in this life and find those over whom we now rule occupying loftier seats in heaven. Our souls are the same. God is no respecter of persons.22

  Being away from home was allowing Charles to see Liberty County from the vantage point of New England’s rocky landscape rather than across the marshes and rivers of the low country. The distance provided a new perspective on those who lived in the settlements while at the same time the distance made him homesick for those whom he loved. Far from home and often lonely, he remembered the fragility of life, the suddenness with which loved ones could be lost, and he increasingly began to think of heaven as home, as the place where there would be no more sorrows or separations. “It is a constant and happy reflection with me,” he wrote sister Betsy, “that I shall one day meet my dear sisters in heaven where we shall never more part, never more feel affliction and pain, never go out from the presence of the Lamb.”23

  Such a vision of home would include Old Jupiter and Hannah and the other saints from the settlements, not as servants but as co-worshippers at the throne of the Lamb and perhaps as those who would have the best seats at the heavenly banquet. Throughout the rest of his life this vision of heaven provided him, no less than the New England landscape, a place from which to view Liberty County and a spot from which to understand its social arrangements and both its beauty and its deep sorrows. But Charles believed there was a mission to be accomplished for such an inclusive heavenly home to be enjoyed. “To realize this felicity, this eternal happiness,” he wrote, “I feel there is much to be done, for we are by nature carnal, opposed to God. We have to watch our corrupt and unholy hearts.”24 He would spend years peering into his “corrupt and unholy heart” seeking to discover the sins and illusions that kept him from doing the will of God, and he would give himself to a mission that he believed was necessary to bring together all the sons and daughters of Liberty County into such a heavenly home. But what he would see only in glimpses now and then were the ways in which his hopes for a heavenly home, his bright utopia visions, were rooted not only in a vibrant religious tradition but also in the dark soil of his native country and the deep assumptions of white planters.

  In the late spring of 1827, having completed his work at Phillips and passed his entrance exams for Andover, Charles returned to Liberty County for his first visit in two years. In Savannah he saw sister Susan and Audley and their Laura, who was already a precocious two-year-old, and her little brother Charles Edward Maxwell, who had been born while Charles was away. At the Retreat he rode down the sandy road under the avenue of oaks to a happy reunion with his uncle Joseph and his growing family, and with his Aunt Eliza and her children. He was particularly glad to see Mary Jones and Mary Robarts—“my two pretty cousins” he called them—and to learn from them the news of the county.25 Jack and Sylvia were there, as usual, to greet him, and Phoebe too, as Mary’s maid. In the evenings, Charles had the chance to see Driver Pulaski when he came up from the fields for his nightly meetings with Joseph and to learn from him about those in the settlement. And there was an opportunity to go with Joseph to Carlawter and see Charles’s nurse, Rosetta—she and Sam now had four children—and to talk with Lizzy, who brought back so many memories of old Liberty Hall and of Charles’s mother, Susannah. Lizzy and Robinson had had their eighth child—Adam—while Charles was away, and all the children were strong and healthy, a testimony to their resistance to the fevers that struck the whites so violently. Cato was eighteen and was already showing the qualities that would make him a leader in the settlement. As for Jupiter, he was now sixty-seven and was showing his age. His brother Hamlet was soon to follow him as the driver at Carlawter, and like his brother, and their father, Jupiter, before them, he soon was to announce the dawning of each new day with a blast from the conch-shell horn.26

  Charles was eager to see his sister Betsy and “brother” William. They were in many ways like parents to him, and Orange Grove had been, like the Retreat, a place of stability in his life. But the couple had been through difficult times while Charles was away. Maxwell, who daily drank more than his share of liquor, was a hard worker and one of the most respected men in the county, but he was no Joseph Jones, skillfully expanding his acres and slaves. Maxwell was too impulsive—years earlier he had knocked a man off a horse and whipped him for insulting him and refusing to leave Orange Grove—and while he came from a prominent low-country family, he had the rough edge of a man who worked in the fields beside his slaves and who chewed tobacco and cussed when needed. There had been, however, some bad years and he had gone in debt. A hurricane in 1824, one of the worst ever known on the Georgia coast, had ruined his crops and damaged his plantation, and he was a long time recovering. Joseph had lent him money, but William was still unable to pay his debts, and in 1826 he had had to sell Orange Grove and buy a smaller place, Laurel View, not far from Sunbury.27 Charles had written him: “Would that your affairs would have enabled you to keep Orange Grove. It is as snug, pleasant, retired place with just the body of land you wanted.” But to Charles it was also more. “I look upon it with a great deal of affection, and if it is again visited I shall not fail to attach to every spot its appropriate incident to linger about the fields and the settlement where I have experienced so much delight.” The loss of Orange Grove evidently reminded Charles of his orphaned youth and produced in him a “pleasing melancholy” as he remembered “old Liberty Hall.”28

  By the time Charles returned for his visit in 1827, William had been elected sheriff and had had a good year with his crops at Laurel View. So the visit was a happy one, and all the family was able to gather in Sunbury at the old Jones place and at the Robarts home down the street. There were other young people there that summer, and many parties, but Charles began to give special attention to his cousin Mary Jones. He teased her and called her “Her Highness” because of her strong-willed ways and—perhaps to the disappointment of his cousin Mary Robarts—he began to regard Mary Jones as more than a cousin. As his time approached for his return to New England, they agreed to correspond, which was a kind of mutual acknowledgment that their interest in each other was entering a new phase.29

  Charles left for Andover in the middle of the summer, and Mary remained in Sunbury until the first autumn frost made it safe to return to the Retreat. He wrote her from Andover shortly after he arrived and sent her copies of music by Haydn and Handel that he had secured from Lowell Mason, who had left Savannah and was now living in Boston. “I very frequently wish to spend an hour with you at the piano” Charles wrote, and then added, “or on horseback—pianos and horses and ladies are scarce articles on Andover Hill.” And she wrote him about life in Sunbury, which she described as “this delectable spot,” and of visits with her friend Julia Maxwell King, who had come up from St. Simons with her little girl Mary.30

  Knowing her cousin well, Mary Jones wrote that he was perhaps interested in how she was using her time. “The day,” she said, “principally in reading, and a little work, but I have grown a very lazy girl of late; my evenings in idleness or something nearly akin to it, conversing with some of our refined village beaux, of whose literary and scientific character we are equally advised.” And Charles wrote of his theological studies and of long, disciplined walks in the New England countryside, and how his visit home had been of “great benefit … giving me a renewed interest in Georgia as the extensive and interesting field of my future labours.”31

  The most important event for both of them that fa
ll was a spiritual crisis in Mary’s life. As a nineteen-year-old, she had been a pious believer and a regular churchgoer all her life, but she had never had a conversion experience. That fall, after much internal struggle, she became convinced not only of her sins but also of God’s grace and forgiveness for her personally. She wrote that there had been

  an aching void within, a seeking after that rest which alone can satisfy a sin sick soul. I felt the awful responsibility of being an accountable, immortal creature, and my every day practices but served to convince me of the impossibility of acceptance with a holy and just Almighty. My very feeling and action was in direct opposition to his pure commands, so how should I stand before his great tribunal? But God in his mercy presented a bleeding saviour with the full assurance that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish but have life everlasting. The view itself was life. And I trust, I am now enabled to exclaim, “Thou Lord art my God!” to rejoice in Christ Jesus as my friend, and through his kind mediation, approach the Great Jehovah as my father, to lean on Him for strength sufficient to subdue the evil suggestions of my depraved self, and resist the thousand temptations of an ensnaring world.32

  Mary was writing her cousin a detailed description of a conversion experience, and in the years ahead she and Charles hoped, prayed, and worked for similar experiences and convictions for all those who lived down the sandy roads of Liberty County.

  Mary’s spiritual crisis, however, was not over. She struggled to understand the implications of such an experience and the continuing conflicts she felt in her heart. Charles, now that he was a first-year theology student in New England, did not hesitate to give her advice about how to probe her feelings and search her own heart. You must, he wrote, deal not in generalizations but in “particulars.” Generalizations about what was good and what was evil got no one anywhere. What was needed was a focus on concrete, particular deeds and specific situations. (He would later be dismissive of those who would generalize about slavery, who would say from a distance that it was evil and not look at the particular, concrete realities as he saw them in the settlements of Liberty County.) Charles encouraged Mary to look at her particular actions, to trace those actions to “the particular feeling which originated them, and again this feeling to its cause.” In this way, he wrote, “you will presently separate what states of feeling are holy and what unholy in your mind, and what situations as to external circumstances are favourable or unfavourable to the proper cultivation of your heart.” Above all, he cautioned her not to trust her own heart. “If you do not now, you will very soon know, that it is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked and nothing short of the sovereign grace of God can subdue it.” For this reason the Bible must be her constant companion and guide, helping her to see through the deceptions and illusions of her heart to the realities of her life and of God’s judgment and grace. But above all, he warned her not to depend on the excitement of religious experiences “for evidences of your conversion or Christian Character, but depend upon the simple and effectual rule which our Saviour gives—’If you love me you will keep my commandments.’ This is your proof of conversion and Christian character now and forever.”33

  Charles was spelling out for Mary his understanding of the human psyche and the reason a Christian life is a life of struggle, introspection, and action. Here, in his advice to his cousin, he was identifying his basic assumptions about life that were to guide him as he moved among the plantation houses and settlements of Liberty County in the years to come. But how different were those assumptions from those being worked out by another theological student down the road from Andover at Harvard Divinity School? Ralph Waldo Emerson was also to be an advocate for introspection, for a careful look at the human heart. But his cry became, “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Rather than being suspicious of one’s own thoughts and feelings, wondering about the external circumstances shaping them, Emerson confidently encouraged self-reliant Americans to “believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men.”34

  It was not perhaps surprising that one who had grown up in Liberty County—with its settlements and with its manners that hid so much—was more suspicious of the human heart than one who walked the bright and confident streets of Cambridge and Concord. Beyond the theological tradition in which he stood, Charles knew that there were good reasons for whites to deceive themselves, to hide the power and violence that were the foundations for life at the Retreat and Carlawter, in Riceboro and Sunbury. Taking his own advice, he began to wonder what his actions should be in regard to human slavery—and not just any slavery, but the slavery of the settlements in Liberty County; and not just any settlements, but the particular settlement at Carlawter. And what, he wondered, were the feelings that were guiding his thinking and shapingthe choices he would make? And what were the external circumstances that influenced his feelings, that nurtured them and gave them their power? During his remaining years as a theological student in the north, he pondered these questions as he thought about the home he loved in Liberty County and about Lizzy and Rosetta, about Cato and Cassius and the others who lived at Carlawter and whose labors paid for his privileges and theological education. How was he to keep Christ’s commandments in regard to them?

  In the late spring of 1829, Charles returned to Liberty County for his second visit in four years. He found his sister Susan a widow and young Laura and Charles Edward fatherless. Audley Maxwell had died the previous December, and Susan and the children had moved in with sister Betsy and William Maxwell at Laurel View. Charles grieved with his sister and her children, and worried that Audley had never had a conversion experience.35 And he talked with Betsy and William Maxwell about their loss of Orange Grove and their new home at Laurel View and William’s work as sheriff. But most of his attention was focused on his cousin Mary Jones. They took long walks together down the avenue of the Retreat, going under the outstretched limbs of the oaks to the road that led to Colonel Law’s place. They rode horseback over land that they both loved at a time of the year when the wild jasmine filled the woods with its sweet yellow trumpets and the Cherokee rose climbed and tumbled along the roadside with its white blossoms shining against the deep green foliage of the low country. And in the midst of all their friends and relatives at the Retreat, they took refuge and found some privacy, even from Phoebe, in Mary’s garret room with its books and chairs and neat desk. In all these places they talked and dreamed together about the future until one night in middle May, after others had retired for the evening, they sat together on the sofa in the drawing room of the Retreat. There Charles asked Mary to marry him and she accepted. They embraced and knelt to “implore God’s blessing” upon their “future union.”36

  Charles and Mary needed, however, not only God’s blessings, but also Joseph’s, and he had made clear on more than one occasion that he disapproved of cousins marrying. Later that night Charles wrote his uncle a note:

  My Dear Uncle,

  I can no longer conceal what perhaps you have already discovered—namely, my attachment to Cousin Mary. You may be surprised that I entertain more than what ought to exist between those so nearly connected by blood relationship, but it is nevertheless true. I was attached to her previous to my residence at the north and I beg you will permit me to pay my addresses to her. You have always, my dear Uncle, exercised the supervision of a Father over me in all my affairs, and in this matter, as still holding this relation, I look up to you for your candid feelings, and for your direction. I know the family connection existing between Cousin Mary and myself makes the matter more delicate. It is nearer than I ever expected to approach in any matrimonial relation and therefore beg your opinion and direction.

  from your affectionate nephew

  Charles C. Jones37

  Sometime during the next few days Charles and his Uncle Joseph had a long conversation, and Joseph gave his blessings to the proposed marriage. Mary, who had not said anyth
ing to her father, left with Charles for Sunbury and a visit to General Stewart, who was dangerously ill. From Sunbury she wrote Joseph at the Retreat:

  Sunbury

  My dear Father,

  Having learned from undoubted sources your perfect acquiescence in relation to an event, the most important, I requested Mother to tender you my sincere thanks for your kindness, and inform you of my sentiments respecting that subject. Notwithstanding this I still feel it the dictate of duty and affection thus explicitly to acquaint you, my dearest and only earthly parent with my decision, which is, with your entire approbation hereafter to consider Cousin Charles as my more than relative.

  Your ever affectionate

  daughter,

  M. Jones38

  Joseph responded three days later:

  Retreat May 30th, 1829

  My dear Daughter,

  I have perused your note on the Important subject you wrote, and can assure you it meets with my cordial approbation.

  Tis true that I have repeatedly said that cousins ought not to marry; yet this kind of objection ought not with a parent to be insuperable. You and Charles are both old enough to judge correctly in these matters and both members of the same church.

  Should it please God to have you at some future and suitable time united in the Holy bonds of matrimony, your Happiness will much depend upon a Reciprocity of Temper in yielding to each other’s weakness for poor Human nature will be frail and subject to err and when this is the case, I hope from discretion and good sense you both possess proper allowance will be made.

  Wishing you all the Happiness you can desire both Temporal and Spiritual yr ever affectionate Father,

  Jos. Jones39

  And so the match was made. The young couple had only ten days together before Charles’s departure for the North. They found General Stewart dying at his home near Sunbury. Charles and the old general had made their profession of faith together before the Midway congregation seven years earlier, and now Charles stood by the general’s bed, reminded him of Christ’s gracious promises, and watched his father’s hunting friend and brother-in-law close his eyes in death. Charles wanted to write the obituary, but his remaining time at home was too short. He and Mary paid a quick visit to Betsy and William Maxwell at Laurel View, and then at Midway Church they said their good-byes as Charles got on the stagecoach for Savannah.40