Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  During Charles and Mary’s second year in Philadelphia, Mrs. Stowe had published Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly. A firestorm of controversy had followed. Stowe had taken a tradition of sentimental and domestic novels and transformed it into a tool for the most influential antislavery story of the time.59 And while the novel had quickly become immensely popular, it had also come under bitter attacks from southerners who accused its author of “false-witness against thousands and millions of her fellowmen.”60

  In response to these and other charges of distortion and deceit, Mrs. Stowe published in 1853 A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon which the Story is Founded. And among the “original facts and documents” most quoted were the reports and studies of the Reverend Charles C. Jones.61 Mrs. Stowe treated Charles with respect, perhaps remembering his early zeal for reform and his friendship with her sister Catharine. “The Rev. Charles C. Jones” is, she wrote, “a man of the finest feelings of humanity, and for many years an assiduous laborer for the benefit of the slave.” She called him an “earnest and indefatigable laborer for the good of the slave,” and she thought that his Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States “manifests a spirit of sincere and earnest benevolence, and of devotedness to the cause he has undertaken, which cannot be too highly appreciated.” Yet for Mrs. Stowe, Charles’s sincerity and benevolent spirit made his support of slavery all the more deplorable. After declaring that he possessed a “sublime spirit,” a “mind capable of the very highest impulses,” she lamented: “And yet, if we look over his whole writings, we shall see painfully how the moral sense of the finest mind may be perverted by constant familiarity with such a system.” And she declared that while it was a “very painful and unpleasant task to express any qualification or dissent with regard to efforts which have been undertaken in a good spirit, and which have produced, in many respects good results,” she nevertheless had to conclude that it “is not the true and pure gospel system” which Charles had given to the slave. She found that what Charles had taught the slave was that “his master’s authority over him, and property in him, to the full extent of the enactment of slave-law, is recognized and sustained by the tremendous authority of God himself.”62

  Such mining of Charles’s reports for antislavery purposes, and such bitter conclusions as those reached by Olmsted and Stowe, stirred in Charles and Mary a kind of culture shock and a sense of being aliens in an increasingly hostile northern land. And so the decision was made without regret in the fall of 1853 for Charles and Mary to return to Liberty County and to begin the last years of their life together above the dark waters of the North Newport and by the Medway marshes. They would turn their faces south because of Charles’s health and because of the gravitational pull of the low country on their hearts. But they would also go south to home, to the familiar, where there was no sense of dislocation or alienation, where the distance from the North, and the routines of plantation life, would mute what they regarded as the virulent rhetoric of abolitionists. At home, they hoped, the bitter charges of a Harriet Beecher Stowe could be dissipated by the morning wind blowing in from the sea at Maybank and by the night wind coming up from the river at Montevideo.

  23

  CARLAWTER III

  Life in Liberty County had not been frozen in time waiting for Charles and Mary to return to their remembered home. During their five-year absence—from 1848 to 1853—there had been marriages and births, fields planted and harvested, houses built, and barns and homes burned. Sicknesses had struck; death had come to both the young and the old; and black men, women, and children had been bought and sold, divided among heirs, and shifted from plantation to plantation to accommodate the interests and needs of whites.

  At Carlawter, across the old slough that separated the plantation house at Montevideo from the settlement, life had no more stood still during these years than it had at any of the other plantations of the county. For those who gathered in the evenings to talk before open fires, the absence of the white family—for what Mary called years of “nonresidence on this place”—meant an isolation and a degree of independence from white control that most who lived there had never known before under the paternalistic care of their owners. To be sure, Thomas Shepard visited the plantation regularly during these years, but he had several other plantations to look after, and he rarely stayed overnight on the place. And when Charles and Mary came for their occasional visits from Columbia or Philadelphia, the visits were generally short, and the master and mistress often spent much of their time at Maybank. They sent instructions about housing and food, about planting and repairs, about blankets to be distributed and ways to care for the sick. But their instructions were sent from afar or given during a brief visit before they were on their way again to distant homes. In this way those who lived at Carlawter had space and time to nurture their Gullah culture and to assert their independence to a degree that had not been known since the early days of the settlement, when Joseph Jones had first moved Jupiter and Hamlet, Elvira and Lizzy, little Cato and Cassius, and all the others to the recently purchased plantation. But of course the independence during those earlier years had never been complete, and the isolation during Charles and Mary’s sojourn in far places was never so great that the power—and sometimes the wrath—of whites could not be felt.1

  With the removal of Jack to Columbia in 1848 and his death in 1850, Cato became the single most influential figure at Carlawter. He was the one who rose early and announced the new day with a bell (the conch-shell horn of Old Jupiter had been long abandoned) and assigned the tasks for the day. Cato wore hightop boots, tough pants and shirts, and during the cold months a greatcoat that reached almost to his ankles. Over his shoulder he carried his “cotton planter,” the plaited whip that was a sign of his authority. He owned two horses—Jenny and Bunkum—and often rode one as he moved from field to field to supervise the work of the plantation.2

  In the fall of 1850, when Charles and Mary left for Philadelphia, Cato turned to the task of getting in the last of the cotton crop—they had already picked fifteen thousand pounds of cotton by the end of October—and to the work of harvesting the black-eyed peas, corn, and sweet potatoes that would provide much of the food for Carlawter during the coming year. And they had the rice from the old inland swamp fields to harvest; by the first of November the women had gathered the sheaves and, in the erect and elegant manner of their mothers in Africa, carried them on their heads to the stack yard. There they had neatly arranged the rice and its straw before the rice house, where it would soon be threshed and winnowed.3

  Once most of the harvesting was done, Cato turned his attention to the new rice fields off the river: they needed, he knew, more work before they could be planted in the spring. For the two previous winters Cato had been supervising, under Shepard’s instruction, the enormous effort of clearing the slough that separated Montevideo from Carlawter. During the first winter he had sent his brothers Cassius and Lymus, Daniel and Adam, and the other men of the settlement into the swampy arm of the river with axes and crosscut saws to fell the old cypresses and black gums, water oaks and tupelos. Charles and Gilbert—who came from Maybank to help—had used oxen to draw the logs together on dry places, and the women of Carlawter had cut the branches and built great flaming pyres of the green wood so that for weeks during that winter smoke had filled the air of Montevideo and its settlement. During the next winter—following the directions that had been given earlier by Dr. Harry from the Mallard Place settle-ment—Cato had supervised the construction of the long embankment that kept out the water of the river. Wooden trunks, or floodgates, constructed by Sandy Maybank and Porter, had been carefully placed to allow the flooding and draining of the old slough.4

  Now in the early winter of 1850, Cato was sending the men and women of the settlement back to finish burning the remnants of the now well-dried and blackened tree trunks and to complete the digging of canals. To dig the canals, they
had to plunge into the muddy fields and with long-handled shovels toss the heavy earth to the side to make the dykes that separated the fields. When stumps were in their way, they used axes and mattocks to grub them loose and oxen to pull them out. For full hands like Cassius and his brothers the daily task for digging the canals was between two hundred and five hundred cubic feet, depending on the number of stumps that had to be removed.5

  Cato was eager for this demanding work to be finished, and he pushed his hands hard so that in the spring all would be ready for the planting of rice in the dark and fertile soil. But he told Shepard that he was worried that the effort to get the new rice fields ready would put them behind in their planting of corn and other provision crops.6

  As they were beginning these winter labors, word came that smallpox had “unexpectedly made its appearance in the most malignant form in Riceboro.” Adam Dunham, a Riceboro merchant, had been in New York purchasing supplies. When he returned home, he became sick. At first Dr. Benjamin King—still too fond of his liquor—thought Dunham’s illness a bad rash and allowed a number of visitors to see him. Soon, however, Dr. William McConnell was called in, and he declared the disease to be smallpox. Dunham confessed to having seen a man with smallpox in New York, and immediately Riceboro was put under quarantine. Old Robinson, the father of Cato and Cassius and all of Old Lizzy’s children, had had smallpox years earlier, and he was called from the Retreat to be the nurse of those with the disease. Citizen guards were placed around the boro, including the southwestern edge of Montevideo. Sandy Maybank and Porter had been doing some carpentry work in Riceboro, and for a while there were fears that they might have contracted the disease, which was beginning to spread. The guards asked Thomas Shepard to give them up so that they could be kept under the quarantine in Riceboro, but he refused, saying they showed no sign of the disease and that he would not allow them to be exposed by being taken back to the boro. But he worried that some from Carlawter might try to get through the quarantine and visit in Riceboro—especially the children of Old Robinson—or sneak through on the way to visit a wife or family on another plantation. He talked to Cato and insisted that no one be allowed to leave the plantation. Later Shepard wrote Charles:

  I have every confidence in Cato’s care and vigilance. He never leaves the plantation and has not seen his wife for several weeks. All communication between all being completely stopped. This seems hard upon the men whose wives are abroad but the only safe way of arresting the disease. I have no doubt the disease will soon be terminated.

  He had given, he wrote, a special charge to Cato “to keep a bright look out” on his brothers, for there was danger of their getting the disease if they slipped away to the boro to get tobacco and came in contact with their father.7

  In the meantime, Dr. John LeConte had come out from Savannah, bringing some vaccine, and he had begun to inoculate his family and their slaves. Thomas Shepard and William Maxwell immediately began to do the same, but they had difficulty getting enough vaccine. They consequently took “some vaccine matter” from the scabs that had formed on their own arms and used this for the people in the settlements. Within a few weeks the crisis was passed—nine in the boro had gotten smallpox, and one had died. Those who had contracted the disease suffered terribly, their bodies covered with oozing scabs and pustules. Adam Dunham, who brought the disease to the county, “paid dearly of it,” wrote Henry Hart Jones, “in the utter loss of his good looks. His face looks like an infinite number of minute ground moles had been burrowing under the cuticles of the skin.”8

  The smallpox outbreak intensified the long-brewing tension between the merchants of Riceboro and the surrounding planters. The planters were furious that Dunham had exposed the county to an epidemic without quickly acknowledging his contact with the disease in New York. On their part, the merchants felt that the quarantine had been maintained for too long and that their business had consequently suffered unnecessarily. To compensate for their losses, the merchants began to be more blatant about selling liquor to slaves who would slip through the night and come to the little village for some illicit pleasures. The planters responded by organizing for the first time in years a regular nightly patrol to intercept any slaves without a pass from an owner. Henry Hart wrote Charles and Mary that Charles Stebbins and his nephew Richard Lyon, who owned a general merchandise store in Riceboro, were the chief culprits. They harbored, he wrote,

  a Negro in their store the other night without a ticket refusing to deliver him up when summoned by the Patrol, who however guarded the doors until half past one o’clock Sabbath morning and took the Negro as he came out. The citizens have taken the matter in hand vigorously and patrols scour the country almost every night. Council will be procured to prosecute Stebbins and Lyons on several distinct counts. I expect to mail this letter tonight on an excursion of the above kind with some of my Dorchester neighbors. On Saturday night they intercepted Negroes with whiskey jugs going over the Bryan line for liquor also. There will probably be a general meeting of the citizens on this subject.9

  Tensions were obviously building not only between planters and storekeepers but also between planters and their slaves; and the unrest surrounding the smallpox outbreak was but a sign of things to come in Liberty County.10

  Cato’s vigorous response to the threat of smallpox, however, had only strengthened Charles’s confidence in his driver. A few weeks later, when Cato had become sick with a bad cold and what was apparently a serious sinus infection, Charles wrote him a long letter. He told him to wear warm undershirts and drawers; he should get “Phoebe to cut them out and make them at once and nicely for you.” If he lacked any “outer clothing,” then Mr. Shepard would get them for him. “You must pay attention to what you eat,” Charles told him, and be particularly careful to stay out of bad weather. “We have been together a long time,” Charles wrote,

  and I have always had a great attachment to you and confidence in you, and you have always been a good and faithful man to me. And now that we are apart from one another and you are sick it makes me feel a great deal. But I hope you will soon be up again. Be careful of the cold, damp, and changeable weather in February and March. Mr. Shepard will point out some one of the men who can take a look after things when you are not able to be as much about as you wish, and he can take directions from you and make his report to you.11

  Charles’s letter to Cato was in the familiar language of a paternalistic master to a respected slave. They had been “together a long time”—from the earliest days that both of them could remember. They had walked the fields together, talked about crops and the weather together; they had worried together about the sick in the settlements and in the plantation houses; and they had prayed together in the little chapel, at the watchmen’s meetings, and at the North Newport Church. Charles had grieved with Cato when Old Lizzy had died, and Cato had helped to carry Joseph’s body toward its grave at the Retreat. The two men probably knew each other about as well as a white master and black slave could know one another. Certainly Charles thought so.12

  Cato responded to Charles’s letter with one of his own. He could not write it—when Charles had been learning to write, Cato had been learning about the work of a slave. So Cato had Thomas Shepard to write it for him, and that meant of course that the letter was not fully Cato’s, that whatever he said was interpreted by Shepard and written in Shepard’s stilted language. But still this letter reflected—as did the other letters Cato wrote to Charles—something of who Cato was and how he saw the world.

  Dear Master

  I received your kind letter, and when Mr. Shepard was reading it to me on the marsh dam, I felt thankful to God for so good a master and it made me feel melancholy to think you and mistress who I knew loved and felt for me was so far away, and the uncertainties of our lives. Maybe we shall never again look on one another, but be this as it may, we know one thing if we live as we ought death cant separate us, though it may do so for a little while.

  And lat
er Cato wrote Charles:

  I always feel satisfied that I have a good Shear of your Love and Confidance, but whenever I See you take the time and trouble, to write me your Servant a kind and I may say fatherly letter, it makes me feel more like crying with love and gratitude for So kind a master than any thing else, and always feel it in my heart to say, I will try and be a better Servant than ever.13

  Cato appeared in these letters and in other aspects of his orderly life to have internalized the ideology of the whites. He certainly knew the familiar rituals of subordination, as he addressed Charles as “Master” and told Charles what he wanted to hear. Day after day, he arose, went out to oversee the work of those who lived at Carlawter, and lived his life in ways that appeared to reinforce the belief that it was natural and inevitable that whites be owners and blacks be owned. Moreover, Cato had played a large role in making Montevideo a successful plantation. He had never participated in an organized revolt—nor, for that matter, had anyone else in the settlements of Liberty County—even though he knew blacks vastly outnumbered whites. He apparently believed at some level that slavery was inevitable, and that the power of whites was of such a character that there was little possibility of overthrowing the system. Maybe he thought that a successful revolution only “grows out of the barrel of a gun” and that slaves lacked the necessary firepower and military organization to challenge white hegemony. Certainly such assumptions were the intention of the Liberty County Independent Troop, with its parades and military exercises. At any rate, Cato’s public language, his gestures, his way of relating to whites all pointed toward an acceptance of white authority and its legitimacy. Such seemed to be the power of the ideological forces that had been at work in his life since the day Lizzy had given birth to him in Sunbury. Certainly Charles thought of Cato as a “good and faithful man” to his master.14