Dinah was devastated and she beseeched Mary to help her. Mary wrote Charlie and her brother Henry asking whether they could find a buyer in Liberty County. Charlie wrote back:
Abram is in Wright’s office for sale, and in a very distressed frame of mind, not knowing who will be his purchaser, and with the probability staring him in the face of his being carried far away from his wife and children, to whom he appears to be sincerely attached. It is a hard case, and I would in a moment purchase and send him to the Island was such a thing practicable. As it is, we can only regret the sad fact of his being thus parted without the means of preventing the separation.
Henry wrote back, after conferring with Norman Gignilliat of neighboring McIntosh County, who had purchased forty-eight of the King slaves:
I send you a line in haste simply to acknowledge the reception of your kind note and to state that I communicated immediately with Mr. Gignilliat in reference to the case of Abram. Mr. G. seems unwilling to purchase but upon my offering to release him for one year from the payment of the thousand dollars on his notes due to Helen, he consented for me to take steps to ascertain the price at which the Boy is held. I accordingly addressed a letter to Mr. Wright and received for reply that the Boy was still in his office, but the owners had left for the West. He promised however to write me forthwith and learn the value placed upon Abram, and then to notify me of the same. I cannot hold out much encouragement however that Mr. Gignilliat will take him. I have sought industriously for a purchaser elsewhere, thus far without success.
And then a letter came to Dinah from Abram himself:
My dear wife I take the pleasure of writing you these few [lines] with much regret to inform you that I am Sold to a man by the name of Peterson at reader and Stays in new orleans. I am here yet But I expect to go before long but when I get there I will write and let you know where I am. My Dear I want to Send you Somethings but I do not know who to Send them By but I will thry to get them to you and my children. Give my love to my father and mother and tell them good Bye for me. and if we Shall not meet in this world I hope to meet in heaven. My Dear wife for you and my Children my pen cannot Express the griffe I feel to be parted from you all
I remain your truly husband until Death
Abream Scriven
Mary wrote at the bottom of Abram’s letter: “Answered for her by her mistress.”21
Abram and Dinah never saw each other again. A few years later, Abram learned from another Jones slave that Dinah had died.22
While Abram and Dinah’s marriage was being broken apart, Joe had assumed his new position as professor of chemistry at the Medical College of Georgia. Not long after his arrival in Augusta, he had begun courting Caroline Davis, a charming young woman and a member of one of the most distinguished families in Georgia. The young couple had much in common. Her father was also a Presbyterian minister, a graduate of Middlebury College and Princeton Theological Seminary, and her mother was a Cumming and thus related through marriage to Joe’s aunt Susan Jones (Maxwell) Cumming. Caroline and her three sisters were known “for their remarkable intellect, taste, and charm.” Charlie had visited with the family several years earlier and had noted that “The young ladies are all well educated, intelligent, and studious in their habits, with fine conversational powers.” When their engagement was announced, Charles and Mary were delighted. Charles believed that “the match is purely a love match” on Joe’s part and “equally so on the other side.” And, wrote Charles, “from all I can learn, Carrie will take a great interest in his pursuits and pride in his advancement, and will exert herself to render his home happy.” Charles was particularly pleased “to learn also that she is both industrious and economical and fond of reading, which in my experience are invaluable traits in a wife.” “Your own dear mother,” he told Charlie, “is a model wife in all these and many other particulars too numerous for me to mention.”23
Increasingly at the center of Mary’s life—and of Charles’s too—were the grandchildren, who seemed to them to be amazing gifts in their old age. After the birth of Mary Jones Mallard in 1858, another little girl had arrived, Charlie and Ruth’s firstborn, whom they named Julia Berrien after her maternal grandmother. In 1860 the first grandson was born—a fine little fellow whose proud parents named him Charles Colcock Mallard. Then a year after Joe and Caroline married they had a little boy—Samuel Stanhope Davis Jones—born a few months after his cousin Charles. So by Christmas 1860 Charles and Mary had four grandchildren—Mary, Julia, Charles, and Stanhope. They were the delight of their grandparents, and when they were brought for a visit to Montevideo or Maybank, the old places seemed to radiate a deep joy, and Charles and Mary remembered with gratitude the years when their own children were gathered around them at home.
Charles continued, of course, to be industrious in his retirement years. He preached as often as he could to the slaves at his old preaching stations—at the stand at Midway, at the Sunbury and North Newport Baptist Churches, and at Pleasant Grove. And when his strength allowed, he preached in the village churches at Dorchester and Walthourville and on occasion from the old pulpit at Midway.24
But most of his energy had gone into the writing of his history of the Christian church. It was a daunting task under any circumstances, but especially so at isolated plantations along the Georgia coast. He had pressed ahead, however, using his personal library and ordering books as needed. His vision of church history was both broad and narrow—broad in his understanding of the church’s origins with Abraham and the people of Israel, and narrow in the sense of isolation from the massive historical works—especially among the Germans—of the nineteenth century. By the summer of 1860 he had begun negotiations with Charles Scribner to have the book published.25
The difficulty that Charles faced, however, was that his handwriting had deteriorated to such an extent that he needed someone to copy the manuscript in a neat hand for publication. In what appeared to Charles as a providential development, a young man who was visiting the island that summer, William States Lee, volunteered to be his scribe. Lee had grown up on Edisto Island, South Carolina, where his father was the longtime pastor of the Presbyterian Church. Although a New Englander by birth and education, the father had become a fire-eater for secession. His Edisto congregation was composed of a few wealthy planting families and several hundred African-American slaves.26 If anything, Edisto was more isolated than Colonel’s Island, for it was reached only by boat. Its wealth, isolation, and large Gullah population had no doubt shaped the way young Lee saw the world and his place in it. In 1860 he was in the process of establishing a new school in Columbus, Georgia, but he spent several months that summer living at Maybank, copying out the manuscript day by day. Patience was sick much of the summer, and so others had to take her heavy responsibilities for the kitchen. Among them was Peggy, an attractive young slave who was being trained to be a domestic servant.27
30
SOUTHERN ZION
A few weeks after William States Lee left Maybank in the late summer of 1860, Charlie was elected mayor of Savannah. He was only twenty-eight years old, the youngest man ever to be elected the city’s mayor. “It is a high honor,” Charles wrote his son, “coming unsolicited, and the expression of the confidence of a majority of your fellow citizens.” Your parents, Charles wrote, are “gratified that your conduct and character have been such as to attract to you their suffrages, which place you in the highest office in their gift.” But Charles was not one to give such praise without a parental admonition: “We sincerely hope,” he told his eldest son, that the citizens of Savannah “may not be disappointed in their expectations of you, but that you will conscientiously seek to discharge your very responsible and in many respects difficult duties with all sobriety, industry, impartiality, justice, and integrity, and with kindness and decision and intelligence.” Charles and Mary, drawing on their Calvinist ethic, had educated each of their children’s “mind and heart and manners” for “usefulness in society.” Charl
ie now seemed on his way to a particularly brilliant career in the public sphere, where he would be of eminent service to his homeland.1
By the time of Charlie’s election, however, the nation was already moving rapidly toward the crisis of secession. A civil war seemed increasingly likely, and the rhetoric of war was nowhere more intense than in the low country, with its elegant little cities of Charleston and Savannah and its heated atmosphere and noxious miasmas. Like distant thunder rumbling across the Medway marshes, war talk began to intrude into what Charles and Mary regarded as the peace and harmony of their low-country home.
From his student days in New England, Charles had long admired much about the North, especially New England’s pious and orderly ways. With his colleagues in Columbia and Charleston—Howe, Thornwell, and Smyth—he had long been a Unionist in sentiment. When South Carolina had threatened secession in 1850, Charles had written John Jones from Philadelphia: “South Carolina has gone beyond reason. I was going to say politically mad: she will pitch Georgia into the sea if we break her hopes a second time. We did so in nullification days. She remembers it.” He believed during his years in Philadelphia that “the people of the United States—North, East, South, and West—are true to the Union. It is the ultras, the factionists—few in comparison to the masses—that create excitements by their noise and impudence. I am still of the opinion all will come right.”2
As sectional tensions had built, however, Charles’s views had begun to shift. John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859 had been particularly infuriating. Charles had become livid—not over the possibility that the raid might have let loose a slave insurrection, for he dismissed a slave rising as improbable. Rather, the raid seemed to pull back a curtain for Charles and reveal to him the intentions of growing numbers in the North. “The whole abolition crusade,” he wrote Charlie, “which has been preached for thirty years ends in the sword.” Charles believed there was still time to avert a disaster, but he thought the conservative forces of the North must act decisively to avoid the ruin of the republic. If they failed to put down “this spirit of treasonable and violent aggression” against the South, then they too would drink the bitter dregs of a national disaster.3
One year later, however, the nation seemed to be moving irreversibly toward civil war. In mid-October 1860, Charlie wrote his parents: “The election of Lincoln seems now almost a fixed fact, in view of the recent advices received from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. The Republicans claim New York by a clear majority of forty thousand.” Charlie warned that if Lincoln were elected, “the action of a single state, such as South Carolina or Alabama, may precipitate us into all the terrors of intestine war.” And then he added, almost as a postscript: “I sincerely trust that a kind Providence, that has so long and so specially watched over the increasing glories of our common country, may so influence the minds of fanatical men and dispose of coming events as to avert so direful a calamity.”4
Charles himself fluctuated—sometimes he thought the election of Lincoln would mean war, and sometimes he thought not. In late October, as the election drew near, he wrote Charlie: “I do not apprehend any very serious disturbance in the event of Lincoln’s election and a withdrawal of one or more Southern states, which will eventuate in the withdrawal of all.” On what ground, he wondered, “can the free states found a military crusade upon the South?” The self-interest of the North, he thought, was with peace. And he asked: “Is not the right of self-government on the part of the people the cornerstone of the republic?” But even if the southern states had the right to withdraw, Charles prayed that God would “avert such a separation, for the consequences may in future be disastrous to both sections. Union if possible—but with it we must have life, liberty, and equality.” 5
In early November, the die was finally cast and Lincoln was elected. In less than a week the “politically mad” Charlestonians were in Savannah making their appeal for concerted action. Charlie, as mayor of the city, hosted them and gave the opening address at a grand gathering at the Pulaski Hotel. Not unexpectedly, he called for the defense of southern rights and southern honor. Mary read the account of the meeting and wrote Charlie that she and his father “felt honored that our son bore so high a place.” And Charles wrote his son that he “was much gratified with your speech at the dinner to the Charlestonians in Savannah.”6
That same week a “Southern Rights Meeting” was called for the citizens of Liberty County. Charles hurried to the county seat at Hinesville to take part, and Mary went with him. She went, she said, “to represent her father, being the oldest child of his family now living.” “You know her patriotism,” wrote her proud husband to Charlie. Moreover, wrote Charles, she “has taken possession of your pistol with the shooting apparatus underneath, and Gilbert is ordered to clean and put it in perfect order.”7
The meeting in Hinesville proceeded as expected—the right of a state to withdraw from the Union was said to be a fundamental right of the republic, and the idea of the North attempting to coerce the South was ridiculed. Henry Hart then moved that a committee be appointed to draw up a resolution for the citizens of Liberty County. Charles was among those on the committee who soon reported back to the meeting. The resolution noted the “repeated aggressions on the part of the North upon our constitutional rights, and the institution of slavery,” declared that the election of Lincoln “ought not to be submitted to,” and resolved “that we cordially approve of the action of the legislature in regards to the call for a state convention, and in sustaining the decision of which, we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”8
While Charlie and his parents were making clear their position on Lincoln’s election and on secession, Joe was busy preparing for a major address to the Cotton Planters Convention during the second week of December. For months he had been traveling the state collecting and analyzing data about the condition of agriculture in Georgia. He had prepared a 312-page report that examined the state’s agricultural resources and that called for various reforms. Joe was asked to give a summary address to the convention. The invitation was considered a high honor since the convention drew planters from all over the state and had as its president the U.S. secretary of the treasury, Howell Cobb. As circumstances would have it, Joe’s address fell at the same time Charlie was to preside over a secession meeting in Savannah. Mary hurried to Macon in the middle of the state to hear Joe’s address, while Charles made the trip into Savannah to be present at the city’s historic meeting.9
Joe began his address before the packed convention by summarizing his findings. He did not, however, go far in his address before he launched into a fiery appeal for secession. Lincoln’s election, he declared, marked the triumph of a sectional party “sworn to subvert our institutions, and excite our slaves to rebellion and murder; and which would not merely make us dream of fire, poison, and murder in our sleep, but would surround us with a wall of fire, and apply the torch of incendiary to our cities, our farm-houses and our dwellings.” The studious and hardworking Joe, using the most inflammatory rhetoric available to him, cast his lot for his southern home and its enslavement of all who lived in the settlements and quarters of the South.10
In Savannah, meanwhile, a large crowd gathered at city hall. Charles, as an elderly gentleman and father of the mayor, was given a front row seat. The crowd overflowed from the hall into the surrounding streets. Charlie gave an opening address that was “rapturously applauded.” Resolutions and nominations to the state secession convention were prepared. Those in the hall emptied into a sea of people on the streets. Charlie went out on a balcony to put the resolutions and nomination to the multitude. There was a “universal hurrah of ayes,” a cannon went off, and rockets flew into the sky “illuminating the scene.” There was a pause. Charlie then put the next question: “‘Contrary minds, no!’ A dead silence—when one man cried out: ‘There’s narra no, Mayor Jones!’”11
So Charles and Mary, Charlie and Joe played out their parts in the
secession of their state. They were, they thought, not only acting in good faith but also following a well-worn path of duty and civic responsibility. They believed that they were defending their home and homeland against a ruthless enemy, that they were acting as any patriotic and courageous people would act, and that their deepest commitments impelled them to take their stand on the side of the South and human slavery. They could not conceive at the time, of course, how much blood would flow in the defense of their homeland. Nor could they imagine how their good intentions would help bring them unexpected and unwanted results. But they had intimations of what was to come when, in the spring of 1861, shots were finally fired at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor.
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