Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  Still, they could not deny that Columbia had many advantages, especially for their children. Charles wrote John Jones that Joe was “getting on tolerably well in his studies. Rather young, but we could not do better.” He was continuing his collections “of minerals, fossil remains, etc, and has some rare specimens. General Cocke brought him some sharks’ teeth from his marl pits in Greene Co. Alabama and other things. He has a great passion for these things.” Moreover, Joe “made the acquaintance of the greatest naturalist in town, Dr. Gibbs, who has the finest private collection of curious remains of one kind and another” that Charles had ever seen. Dr. Richard Brumby, the professor of chemistry and mineralogy at the college, told Charles that he should let Joe “have his way” and that he would “take special pains with him.” But Charles worried that Joe’s “partiality for these studies may interfere with more solid acquirements.”27

  While Charles and Mary were making their adjustments to Columbia, their thoughts constantly turned toward their low-country home and toward those who lived in the settlements. They worried about the care the people were receiving. Charles wrote Thomas Shepard that he had always gotten “good supplies for the people, without being extravagant. You must use your judgment in the matter. Six yards to the grown and in proportion to the children. I think about 500 or 550 yards will be sufficient. Have the clothing shipped to you to Rice-boro, and you can then take it to Montevideo, and give out your cloth and shoes there—and then send to Mr. Rahn, for Arcadia—and to Col. Maxwell—at May-bank for Maybank.” 28

  And there were concerns for individuals, especially those who were old. “I do not know if Tony wears flannel,” Charles wrote Shepard of the old man who had become the gardener at Montevideo and who suffered from arthritis. “If he does not, let him have a couple of flannel shirts to wear next to his body. The old man will find benefit from them in his pains. He likes a little Tobacco at times.” And there was Mom Clarissa—she had been old in 1833, when Charles had bought her from the Maybank estate to keep her at her island home, and she was still spending her days in the settlement by the marsh. “Old Mom Clarissa is fond of tobacco,” Charles reminded William Maxwell and added, “when you think of it and it is convenient do get it for her.” And young mothers were congratulated. When Phoebe gave birth shortly after Charles and Mary had left for Columbia, they sent word to her: “Tell Phoebe we all wish her joy.” “Jane,” Charles reported, “is laughing all the time” about the birth of her little sister. Young mothers, Charles instructed Shepard, should have “everything you deem necessary for them.”29

  Charles worried constantly about adequate food for those in the settlement, for he evidently sensed that with absent owners the people were most vulnerable in regard to provisions. He instructed Shepard to “kill a Beef for the people from time to time, of some kind, as the stock will allow.” And a month later he wrote again: “Give the people beef from the stock as often as you can. Make use of everything in the Garden in the vegetable way that you fancy, and whenever you want an extra stew for the people, kill a lamb. I must leave every thing to your judgment and discretion and feel assured that you will do what is right.”30

  In almost every letter home there were special messages for those in the settlement. “I beg Brother,” he wrote his sister Betsy, “to let Andrew and the people at Maybank know how we are and that we send Howdy for them all by name and Jack, Marcia, and John and Jane send howdy to all.” “Please tell Patience and Andrew and all the people at Maybank howdy for us. Our servants are all well and send howdys.” And when his old nurse Rosetta was grieving over her husband Sam’s removal to Marietta, he sent word: “Tell Rosetta her mistress and myself will not forget our engagements,” meaning apparently their agreement to let Sam stay at Carlawter during the two weeks at Christmas and during the month of January.31

  When Shepard had taken over the management of Montevideo, he had decided almost immediately that the slough that separated Carlawter from the Montevideo tract needed to be drained and its rich river bottomland converted into rice fields. It would be a huge task and take several years to complete. Cato had primary responsibility for overseeing the work, but he received important help from Dr. Harry, the carpenter and root doctor at the Mallard Place. Dr. Harry knew all about how canals were to be dug, dikes built, and gates constructed to regulate the flow of water. He was no longer a young man, but he came over to Carlawter and spent weeks with Cato, giving him and Porter instructions about ditches and dams. Later Charles wrote Shepard:

  Thank my old friend Dr. Harry for me—specially. And when you collect my money on my account, I wish you to remunerate him for his pains in coming over to Carlawter last fall, and directing and aiding Cato in laying out the ditches and dams in the rice field below the buildings. Do not forget this. Give what you and he may think right. The old man has been a good neighbor to me.

  But the old man refused any compensation for his efforts, apparently out of respect for Charles. So Charles wrote back:

  Please return Dr. Harry my sincere thanks for his trouble last Fall: it was my desire that he should be compensated, but as he refuses, I must take it as an act of pure friendship. Tell him and his wife howdy for me. It will be a pleasant day to me when I shall be permitted to return to Liberty and see all my black friends again.32

  But of course, all was not peace, harmony, and friendship between blacks and whites in Liberty County. The removals out of the low country were beginning to undermine the old stability that had marked much of the region. Under stable conditions, much of the resistance to slavery had focused on the development of a distinctive Gullah community and on strategies to ameliorate the harsh conditions of slavery. The task system, the right to marry persons from other plantations, Saturday night visits to the “wife house,” and the ownership of personal property—all of these had been important victories for those who lived in the settlement in their long struggle toward freedom. But with the removals intensifying the vulnerability of the community, direct acts of sabotage and resistance became more frequent, and the response of the whites had been swift. Not long before her family left the low country for Marietta, Eliza Robarts wrote John Jones that four runaways had camped on a hammock in the Medway swamp in back of the Mallard Place. “The gentlemen from Dorchester went after them,” she wrote, “and found them camped with several of Capt. Mallard’s sheep they had stolen. One of the Negroes raised his gun to shoot; Dr. Delegal shot him dead.” The others escaped into the swamp. During the coming years, there would be increasing reports of runaways and of barns and even plantation houses being burned.33

  Open resistance began to find its way even to Carlawter and Maybank. When Charles and Mary had been preparing to leave for Columbia, they had moved Phoebe to Maybank, while Cassius was required to stay at Carlawter and to visit Maybank only on Saturday nights and Sundays. This was a repeat of the strategy Charles had employed in 1837, when he had sent Phoebe to work at South Hampton. He did not want them together to encourage one another in “mischief.” After Phoebe’s baby was born, however, in late November 1848, she had been given permission to stay at Montevideo for three months. When the time came for her to return to Maybank, Cassius and his younger brother Daniel evidently protested to Shepard in an angry manner. Shepard had responded with some substantial punishment—perhaps by a whipping or by taking away Saturday visitation rights for a period of time. Charles wrote Shepard after having received a report about the matter: “Cassius has naturally a bad temper though it does not show itself often, and your decision both with him and Daniel will have a good effect. We will have crosses with the best—the only thing we must look to is to be prompt and decided.” In contrast to Cassius and Daniel, their older brother Cato continued as a model of a faithful and responsible servant. “Tell Cato,” Charles wrote in the same letter to Shepard, “I will write him shortly, and that it gives his mistress and myself great pleasure to learn that he is getting on well and gives you good satisfaction.” But Cassius’s anger and resist
ance were not easily suppressed. Three months later he took “French leave” and, as Cato reported to Charles, simply failed to return to Carlawter after a weekend visit to Maybank. Cassius evidently pleaded illness as the reason for his remaining with Phoebe and for his delay in returning to Carlawter. Shortly after this Phoebe was sent to South Hampton, as she had been earlier, this time to work for Julia King and to stay out of trouble at Carlawter.34

  In May 1849 Mary came down with rheumatic fever. Vigorous treatment by the doctors in Columbia freed her from the fever but left her very weak. Charles, who had to provide most of the care for Mary, felt his isolation from his extended family. “I think as much as in any sickness since our marriage,” Charles wrote Betsy, “I felt we were alone here, for in our sickness and afflictions you and Brother and aunt and our kind cousins have always been with us. But now I had to be all alone—day and night.” As Mary showed signs of improvement, the decision was made for her to go to Marietta, where the summers were milder and she could have the attention of her brother John and Aunt Eliza and their families. She traveled by train through Augusta and Atlanta, but the trip was exhausting, and she soon had a relapse. John sent Charles an urgent message that he must come as quickly as possible; his “presence was indispensable,” for, said John, “his sister was very sick.” Charles, taking Mary Sharpe with him, went “as fast as steam” could take them and found that the fever had returned with a vengeance. It was obvious that Mary needed sustained rest for a full recovery, so the decision was made to spend the summer in Marietta. In July, Mr. Rogers brought Charlie and Joe over in the carriage. They took six and a half days to travel the 238 miles between Columbia and Marietta—“good travel,” Charles thought, “on the rough up-country roads.”35

  While her Marietta relatives showed her every kindness, Mary’s illness made her long for her low-country home and for the familiar touch of Patience and Phoebe. “The greatest personal privation I have had to endure,” she wrote Betsy at the end of the summer, “has been the want of either Patience or Phoebe—tell them I am never [going to be], if life is spared us, without both of them again.” And she sent a special message to Patience: “Tell Patience I have often remembered what a good servant and attentive nurse she was to me in 1840, and often as I lie down weary and in pain, I say ‘Oh! If I only had Patience here to rub me all over.’ “36

  The summer in Marietta gave Charles an opportunity to make a careful evaluation of the up-country and gave him hints of the rapid expansion of people all across the nation. “The people look generally healthy and hard working,” he wrote Shepard. “The population of the state is up here.” “This is a pleasant climate,” he wrote Betsy, “cool nights, no mosquitoes—said to be healthy. The whole population carried away with buying and selling, trading lands and speculation.” He traveled with John through much of the old Cherokee country and saw how the trains were transforming the land, and he came to realize as never before the great need for home missionaries among the rapidly growing population. And perhaps as he looked out of the train windows at the Etowah River Valley or saw the ancient sites of the Cherokee nation, he may have remembered his days in Washington, his encounter with the attorney general, and his discussions with John Ross and the Cherokee delegation. And perhaps he remembered how he had not raised his voice in defense of Ross and his beleaguered people once he had returned to Georgia.37

  Charles and Mary returned to Columbia from Marietta in the carriage with Charlie, Joe, and Mary Sharpe. Their route took them first to Roswell, where they spent a few days with friends admiring their fine mansions. From Roswell they took the winding north Georgia roads that skirted the mountains. They crossed the Savannah River on a ferry, rode to Greenville, and turned east to Columbia. The journey, while exhausting, gave them all a better understanding of the up-country, of its dusty roads, red clay hills, and cotton farms.38

  The new academic year in Columbia turned out to be not only memorable but also a turning point for the Jones family. Charles’s classes went well and there was a large entering class at the seminary. But Charles did not feel at ease in Columbia nor a part of the circle of intellectuals connected with the college and the seminary. He spent almost two years in Columbia before being invited to be a contributing editor of the scholarly Southern Presbyterian Review with Thorn-well, Howe, Palmer, and Smyth, and he felt slighted by the delay. He was obviously respected and admired by his colleagues, but their respect was for Charles’s labors as a missionary and not for his intellectual life. Thornwell, Palmer, and others in their circle were seeking to develop a theology that was guided by natural law, commonsense realism, and Protestant scholastic traditions. They were seeking a theology that avoided what they regarded as the dangerous extremes in American life—an extreme individualism and an extreme organicism. What they were advocating was a theology and philosophy of a via media, a middle way, which would serve as both an ideological prop for slavery and a conservative utopian vision for the future of the South. Charles read little philosophy and was not conversant with recent developments in theology—it would have been surprising, after all, if he had been reading German theologians or philosophers while he made his rounds to the stations and settlements of Liberty County. So he felt increasingly isolated from the interests and concerns of his colleagues.39

  And Charlie was soon isolated at South Carolina College. When Professor Brumby, who had been so kind to Joe, changed a class schedule, the whole class had protested, including Charlie, and boycotted his class. But when the faculty said that they must attend, Charlie alone of the regular students, acting as he thought right and “in the face of his whole class walked into Professor Brumby’s recitation room!” The rest of the class was suspended, and Charlie received from the president of the college a respectable dismission. That night the suspended students, whom Charles called “the rebels,” burned their books in front of Professor Brumby’s home and went on a general rampage, parading around the campus with drums and horns, breaking windows and doors, and confirming for Charles and Mary the image of undisciplined Carolina boys. “The class is blotted out of college. Not a man remains,” Charles wrote William and Betsy Maxwell. “What am I to do with my son?” Charles wondered. “He is thrown out of the college by the improper conduct of his class. God has some design in all this which we cannot see into yet.”

  While all this was going on, another crisis was developing in the Jones household. Charlie had been sick earlier in the month with pneumonia, Mary Sharpe was now in bed with it, and Louisa Robarts, who was visiting, was not feeling well. And in the servants’ quarters in the back, both Jack and Marcia were also sick with pneumonia. Jack appeared to be getting better—the doctor had come and bled him, and this seemed to have relieved him. Then he had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. Charles was with him day and night. “Almost every dose of medicine he took,” Charles wrote, “and every spoonful of nourishment he took from my hands.” When his death seemed certain, they asked him the familiar questions addressed to the dying. “He was,” he told Mary, “in God’s sight but a filthy rag,” but “his hope was in Jesus” that “his Saviour was shedding unnumbered mercies all around him.”

  Jack began to say his good-byes. He told Charles that “it was a blessed thing to have a good master and mistress,” and he said “he could not begin to speak of God’s mercies to him.” They told Marcia that Jack was dying. She was lying dangerously sick on a bed not far from her husband. She could not believe Jack was really dying. It must be a turn in the sickness, she said. Charles helped her to her feet, and she “staggered to him and put her hand on his forehead and cheek and said: ‘Jack, you know me?’” “Oh yes, Marcia child,” he responded. And then he gave her “his parting counsel in a most clear and touching manner, and begged her no longer to put off her soul’s salvation.”

  Charles called all the household, white and black, to Jack’s bedside: his grandchildren, John and Jane, Louisa, Joe and Mary Sharpe. “He took them one by one by the hand and charged th
em in the Lord and commended them to God.” Then Charlie came, once the little white boy listening to Jack’s stories about Buh Wolf and Buh Rabbit, Buh Rooster and Buh Fowl-Hawk, and all the other inhabitants of the low country. And Jack said to Charlie, “Oh, my young master, this is my whole heart.” And to Mary he said, knowing how she depended on him, “I am so sorry to leave you; I know how you will miss me.”

  Charles asked him, “Jack, is your mind at rest? Is Christ still precious to you?” “He smiled and raised his hand toward heaven.” In this way he died, and Charles wrote William and Betsy, “It is the loss not only of one of the most faithful and excellent, long-tried servants, but of a devoted, long-tried and affectionate friend—to us and to all our family. Jack was one of the family.” That afternoon when Charles went to dinner, and Jack was not standing in his place by the table as he had for so many years, but was now “lying dead in the servants’ house in the yard,” Charles was overcome by emotion. Then “the tears came full and fast and fell down on the tablecloth,” and he could not see the carving knife he held in his hand. Charles got up, gave his seat at the head of the table to Charlie, and asked Mr. Rogers to ask a blessing. After dinner Charles wrote home to Liberty County to give the news. “Do be kind enough,” he asked William and Betsy, “to let Patience know of her uncle’s death, who loved her as his own child.” Charles wrote a special letter to Cato. He was to tell his wife, Betsy, who was Jack’s youngest daughter, and her brothers and sisters. They had been divided and scattered to different plantations following Joseph’s death. And Sister Susan, who was visiting at South Hampton, told Phoebe of her father’s death. “Mother read your letter to Mom Phoebe,” Laura wrote, “and she was very much affected indeed.”40