Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  The meeting was held in the Depository on Chalmers Street. As Charles, McWhir, and Clay walked down the short cobblestone street in the center of the city, they passed the Ryan Slave Market, a grim, jail-like building. That day there was within its confines a “likely” group of black men, women, and children being offered for sale. Among them were “Four prime Fellows, field hands and good axemen;” “2 Women, field hands, mother and daughter, very likely;” “a young woman, seamstress and ladies’ maid, with her son, 6 years old;” “a colored girl, 17 years old;” “2 single girls, 9 and 12 years old;” “a single Boy, 10 years old;” and “an elderly woman, good cook, washer and ironer.” Perhaps some of them saw the three Georgians as they walked to their meeting.6

  Those who gathered at the Depository also composed a “likely” group, but of a different sort. Presiding was U.S. Senator Daniel Huger, a Unionist who had opposed John C. Calhoun during the Nullification Controversy of the 1830s. With Huger was Joel Poinsett, a former congressman and another Unionist. Educated in England, Poinsett had had a distinguished diplomatic career, had traveled through Russia and South America, and had brought back from Mexico the flower that would bear his name—the poinsettia.7

  Charles and his Georgia friends could see, however, that Unionists were by no means the only political leaders who had come to the meeting. Robert Barnwell Rhett, the “fire-eater,” had come to the city from his James Island plantation. He was to be elected to the Senate after Calhoun’s death, and was to earn the dubious distinction of being the “Father of the Secession.” The brilliant young lawyer C. G. Memminger also arrived. Memminger’s political star was only beginning to rise; at its zenith he would become secretary of the treasury for the Confederate States of America. With them was Charles’s friend Robert Barnwell, president of South Carolina College, later to serve as a Confederate senator.8

  In addition to these political figures, the Georgians saw what looked like a gathering of Charleston’s exclusive St. Cecilia Society—Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Daniel Ravenel, Charles Lowndes, Thomas Pinckney Alston, Grimké Drayton, and Drayton Grimké. They were all wealthy planters, owners of many slaves and many plantations, whose families had long been prominent in the state and had provided leading patriots during the Revolution.9

  Among those walking into the meeting room were some of the state’s most influential clergy. The Episcopal bishop Steven Elliott arrived with the Reverend William Barnwell, the pastor of St. Peters Episcopal Church in Charleston. Both were longtime friends with Charles, and Elliott had stayed at Montevideo on more than one occasion. William Capers, the Methodist minister whom Charles had met years earlier in Columbia, hurried into the room. He had only recently returned from Louisville, Kentucky, where he had been a vigorous participant in the organizing convention of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. In informal discussions, he could tell how southern Methodists had formed their own church because of their differences with northern Methodists over slavery. As the primary organizer of the Methodist mission to slaves in South Carolina, Capers knew more than anyone in the state about the religious instruction of slaves. Richard Fuller, an influential Baptist minister from Beaufort, came into the gathering having also just arrived in Charleston—he had come straight from the first meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. Like the Methodists, the Baptists had divided over slavery. Thomas Smyth from Second Presbyterian and Benjamin Gildersleeve, the editor of the Charleston Observer, represented, together with Charles and McWhir, the Presbyterian clergy.10

  So it was a distinguished group that gathered, and Charles must have found it a remarkable group in light of his visit to the city in 1835.

  They met for three days as the slave sales went on down the street at the Ryan Slave Market. Robert Barnwell Rhett, Daniel Ravenel, Robert Barnwell, and Senator Huger led an animated discussion. Was religious instruction of slaves in the best interest of the South? If so, what were the best means of providing it? Thomas Grimké reported on his personal practices as a master—he was a model of paternalistic benevolence much like Thomas Clay at Richmond-on-Ogeechee. Rhett told how he was developing piety and good order among his James Island slaves. And reports were read from other planters about how they were providing religious instruction to their slaves.11

  On the second night, Charles delivered an address “in a very full, clear, and impressive manner.” Gildersleeve, reporting on the address, noted that “no individual in the country [is] better acquainted with the subject in its history, its details and its practical bearings than he,” and that his “opinions have more weight” than those of anyone else “with the entire Christian Community of every denomination.” As if to confirm Gildersleeve’s judgment, Charles was asked the next day to write the report of the proceedings. He was given the letters that had been gathered from different planters, and with his notes and other materials he returned to Liberty, where he compiled a seventy-one-page pamphlet on the proceedings and the reports of planters. Meanwhile the sales continued on Chalmers Street as “prime fellows,” “likely women,” “colored girls,” and black children—all objects of white benevolence from down the street—were brought forward, examined, sold, and led away.12

  The report that Charles wrote, and which was signed by Huger and other Charleston members of a “standing committee,” was a rehearsal of familiar themes for Charles. At the heart of the report was the insistence that religious instruction of slaves was both a duty of white southern Christians and an effort that was in the long-term best interests of the South and the nation. The sure results of such efforts were clear: good and obedient slaves, kind and pious masters.

  The importance of the Charleston meeting, however, far exceeded the familiar positions advocated in its report. Charles realized that the gathering itself and the character of its participants meant that Charleston, the old center of opposition to religious instruction, had been largely won to the cause he had so long advocated. He found the meeting and the reports gathered “truly astonishing.” The religious instruction of the slaves, rather than being seen as a threat to the white South, now appeared to the most conservative elements of southern society to be a religious duty and a necessary strategy for the future development of a southern homeland. Behind such a shift were religious and cultural changes that had been at work across the South. Evangelical Protestantism was becoming ever more deeply embedded in southern society, providing a worldview and a language that would be powerful ideological weapons for whites in the defense of the South and its peculiar institution. Charles may have realized, as he reviewed his notes of the meeting and put together the report, that during the coming years the primary advocates for the religious instruction of slaves would be increasingly located not in the hinterland of Liberty County but in the Capital of the South. In such a setting the cause’s ideological functions could be more fully claimed and utilized. So even as Charles was being praised in Charleston, he could feel a shift in the character of his work in Liberty County. He was no longer a pioneer in a suspect enterprise but the respected leader of a cause that had been adopted by the South’s most suspicious and influential establishment.13

  For three years following the Charleston meeting, Charles continued his missionary work, and his reputation continued to grow among whites, South and North, so that some whites began to refer to him as “The Apostle to the Negro Slave.” But Charles had apparently begun to think of himself in different terms. As he had visited in the settlements year after year, as he had taught and preached, baptized and married, comforted the sick, and buried the dead, he had slowly come to think of himself more as a parish minister than as a missionary. “I have long since settled it in my mind,” he told Liberty County planters in 1845, “that the place of the Minister is with the people of his charge: and wherever they can and are willing to meet with him, there should he be, and quietly and naturally adapt himself to circumstances.” Over the years Charles had made a strenuous effort to be “with the people of his charge” in a way th
at would allow him to know them well and for them to know him and, he hoped, to trust him as one who was genuinely concerned for their welfare. When he had first started his work, after his years of study in the North, he had felt more like a missionary in an alien place. Liberty County had been his home, but he had had a keen sense of the distance that separated him from those who lived in the settlements, and he had known that he had much to learn about the life and ways of the settlements. By 1845, however, the settlements had become more familiar and the roads to the settlements well known and well traveled. Charles felt that he had become a pastor who knew his people by name and who could see around him the signs of his ministerial labors.14

  Over the years of his work the preaching stations and Sunday schools had evolved from experiments to established institutions. Neat buildings had been built at the stations—the trustees of the Lambert Estate had been generous in contributing funds, and the Presbyterians had built a little meeting house at Pleasant Grove for its growing Sunday school. By 1845 the Sunday schools—at Walthourville and Sunbury, at Midway and North Newport, at Jonesville, Gravel Hill, Pleasant Grove, and Colonel’s Island—had been faithfully sustained for years by planters and their families, who taught weekly classes for their black students. It had not been unusual for five hundred to six hundred, sometimes seven hundred students to be in the schools on a given Sabbath. And because most of the students had been children, growing numbers of the slave population could recite the Lord’s Prayer, knew the Ten Commandments and the Apostles Creed, and could answer the questions of the catechism. Moreover, the Sunday schools had helped to prepare many for membership in the churches of the county, as had Toney Stevens and the watchmen at Midway and North Newport. So Charles watched gratefully as the number of inquirers, of those seeking admission to the church, grew steadily and the church rolls expanded.15

  A census was taken in the county in 1845, and Charles thought the time was right for a careful study of the black membership in the churches. In 1846 he visited a “large majority” of the plantations (in all but the piney woods sections of the county) in order “to obtain on the plantations from the drivers, watchmen, or owners, an accurate return of all the Negroes who now are, or have been, in membership with our churches.” He visited or made inquiries at 125 plantations, of all sizes. He found 41 plantations on which whites resided only part of the year and 60 “upon which no white persons reside at all the year around.” As a consequence, he noted, “entire neighbourhoods of plantations” in the heart of the county “are wholly abandoned, not having a resident white person upon them from May to November; nor is there in the whole District one regularly organized and active Patrol.” Under such circumstances, Charles thought, “the people, if they were so disposed, have ample opportunity of doing evil, and our surprise should be, not that there are here and there transgressors, but that the wicked and unprincipled among them do not indulge themselves more frequently.” Charles thought that there was “unquestionably an influence for good resting upon the people,” and that the planters “should be grateful for it, and pray and labour that it may continue and be of the right kind.”16

  As he had made his rounds to the different plantations, Charles found one of the “influences for good” came from the character of the drivers in the county. He was able to identify seventy drivers who were members of the different churches, with sixty of them being in good standing. Among them were many of the watchmen and leaders in the churches, including Paris from South Hampton, Cato from Montevideo, Pompey from the Mallard Place, Plenty James from old Liberty Hall, Caesar from the George Howe plantation, and Peter from the LeConte’s Woodmanston. They, with other drivers, constituted a powerful and influential group within the largely isolated Gullah community. Because drivers held so much power in the settlements, and because they were “exposed to peculiar and strong temptations and have great opportunities of leading improper lives,” there should be, said Charles, much gratitude that they are “in so remarkable a manner brought into connection with the churches, and under the restraints of Christian profession and principle.”17

  In conducting his church census, Charles wrote down—and Laura copied in a neat hand—the name of each plantation canvassed and the name of each church member on the plantation and the name of the church where that member belonged. What he found was as follows:

  Sunbury Baptist 161

  North Newport Baptist 543

  Midway Congregational 377

  Pleasant Grove Presbyterian 31

  Hinesville and Mount Olivet Methodist 21

  Congregations outside the county 6

  Fema les 693

  Males 446

  Charles noted that one denomination usually “took the lead” on a plantation and followed the leadership of owners and drivers. Members were influenced as well by “convenience.” (Most of the church members at the Retreat belonged to the nearby North Newport, while most of the church members from the Mallard Place, which was next to Midway, were Congregationalists.) In all the churches membership required not only an extended period as an “inquirer” but also an examination by church officers to judge a person’s Christian convictions—did a candidate put all of his or her trust in Jesus Christ and his righteousness? Was a candidate’s conversion reflected in changed behavior? Many more people came to church than belonged to church. Only those who had passed through this process became full members who could come to the Lord’s Table for communion.18 The tax returns for 1844 indicated that there were 4,212 slaves in the district of the county being studied. The church membership was 1,139, which, Charles noted, “embraces about one-fourth of the whole number. A very large proportion indeed, and a majority of the adult population.” Charles thought few if any regions of the South could claim as church members such a high proportion of its slave population. Even the white population of Liberty County, famous for its Puritan traditions and piety, could not claim such a high percentage of church membership.19

  Charles believed that church membership, and the conversion experience that was claimed in church membership, was a gift of God as God’s Spirit worked in a person’s heart and the person made a decision for Christ. But he also thought that certain social factors had contributed to the growth of the churches in Liberty County. No doubt thinking of restless whites pushing toward new frontiers and of what he had seen in the Charleston slave markets, Charles named the stability of the Liberty County population as a positive force for the religious life of the people. Stability provided an opportunity for people—white and black—to nurture their sense of being at home, as well as time to improve their physical surroundings. But home for Charles was also a spiritual and moral resource. For to be genuinely “at home” required, Charles thought, the cultivation of commitments and affections not to abstract ideals but to particular places and to living and breathing human beings. The planters of Liberty County had largely resisted the restlessness of their time, and because Liberty County was their home they had supported and encouraged the religious instruction of the people. And because the people in the settlements had roots in the county and had improving living circumstances, there was, Charles thought, the necessary peace and order needed for the cultivation of their spiritual and moral lives. So Charles concluded: “The moral improvement of every people depends much upon their being in a good degree stationary.”20

  Another positive social factor, Charles thought, in the building up of the churches was the prosperity of Liberty County planters. With their regular incomes, they “are consequently able to do more for their people.” The “comfort” of the people had improved when prosperous planters had made “some suitable return to those through whose instrumentality” the planters had acquired their wealth. As Charles had made his rounds to the different plantations, he had found that the cabins, the food, and the clothes of the slaves had improved. Slaves now had more opportunities than earlier to till their own gardens, raise their own pigs, sell their eggs and baskets, and make a little money
for themselves. More owned their own horses and cows, and some—such as Cassius at Montevideo—even owned their own buggies. Moreover, planters were beginning to see that it was in their own interest to promote the interests and circumstances of their slaves. “The people have something to live for,” said Charles, “something to hope for and something to enjoy.” Charles observed that on the plantations where the living conditions of the people improved, there was “a greater elevation of character.” And he noted that the physical condition of those who lived in the settlements was “an outward evidence of our interest in their spiritual state which others will immediately inquire into and judge us by.”21

  So Charles looked around him in Liberty County, and he saw good things had happened during the years of his ministry. He was not one, however, to overlook difficulties, or to evaluate and not warn. There was much work to do for the religious instruction of those who lived in the settlements, many difficulties had to be faced, and many of the attitudes and practices of the planters had to change. And among the difficulties that he saw, none was more pressing than this: those who lived in the settlements all represented money to the planters. They are, Charles told his friends and neighbors, “in the language of scripture, ‘your money.’ They are the source, the means of your wealth; by their labour do you obtain the necessaries, the conveniences and comforts of life. The increase of them is the general standard of your worldly prosperity; without them, you would be comparatively poor. They are consequently sought after and desired as property, and when possessed, must be so taken care of and managed as to be made profitable.” The consequences, Charles thought, were clear: