Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  In the meantime, Mary had left Liberty County and was headed for Atlanta, thinking that she could be of help as the family prepared to leave. With her was Flora, whose husband Joefinny had made his escape early in the war. Arriving in the city, they found the house empty, the family gone, and the city in a panic, so they too joined the exodus of frightened people fleeing the approaching battle. The trip to Augusta was a nightmare for them. Wrecked freight cars on the tracks stopped the train in the middle of nowhere. “My stock of provisions,” Mary later wrote, “had been completely exhausted before I left Atlanta. We stopped where not a drop of water could be had. I found a crust of bread in the lunch basket, which was shared with Flora.” They had to get out of the train in the middle of the night and walk quite a distance “up embankments and down in ditches” to reach a relief car. Finally, thirty-six hours after they left Atlanta, they reached Augusta, exhausted and hungry. There Mary found that Robert had headed back to Atlanta to stay with the people of his congregation who remained in the city and to work among the wounded until there was an order for a general evacuation. Such was the confusion and the fear as the harsh realities of war drew near.18

  By the middle of October, Mary and the Mallards were back in Liberty County. Mary had returned to Arcadia, and the Mallards were staying in Wal-thourville, where they had rented rooms in the old academy so that Mary Sharpe, now seven months pregnant, could be near a doctor. Sister Susan was nearby in the little village of Flemington with Laura and David Buttolph and their children. Julia King and Mary King Wells had moved to Taylor’s Creek in the interior of the county, and William Maxwell, grown old and increasingly feeble, was living at his Springfield plantation across the marsh from Maybank. They, with others in Liberty County, awaited with growing fear the arrival of Sherman’s army.19

  Atlanta had fallen, and with its fall had come great destruction—the train depots and sheds, the rolling mills and machine shops, the foundries and the arsenals had all been put to the torch, and going up in the flames with them had been hotels, churches, businesses, and between four thousand and five thousand homes. In nearby Roswell, textile mills and tanneries built by Kings and Dun-wodys, by Bullochs and Pratts were burned to the ground—although the elegant homes were saved—and the poor white women who worked in the mills were sent with their children to Marietta, where they were shipped north on trains before the tracks between Atlanta and Chattanooga were torn up and twisted.20

  With Atlanta in ruins, Sherman plunged into middle Georgia on a brilliant and daring march to the sea. He had with him some sixty thousand men, twenty-four thousand horses, and twenty-five hundred wagons, each pulled by six mules. Allowing his supply lines and all communications with the North to be cut, he moved his great army toward Savannah, declaring that the army would live off the land—and live off the land it did. Foragers were organized and sent out each day to scour the countryside, to ransack plantations and farms, and to bring back with them whatever they could find to feed and support an army. And so the foragers—bummers, they came to be called—went out and came back with horses and cattle, with mules pulling wagons loaded down with corn, peas, and sweet potatoes, with ham, bacon, and barrels of molasses, and with squawking chickens and squealing pigs. And in their wake there went up the smoke of burning barns and rebel houses.21

  The army left Atlanta on 16 November and rumbled steadily toward the sea. Among the plantations in Sherman’s path was Indianola. As the first troops approached on 2 December 1864, the overseer hastily led all from the settlement to a hiding place in a nearby swamp. They took with them two horses—including Stepney’s mare—and sixteen mules, hoping to keep them out of the hands of the Yankees. But a young slave betrayed their location, and the raiders came swooping down on their hiding place, forcing them all back to the plantation. Wave after wave of plunderers then passed over the plantation for three long days, and when they finally left they had confiscated not only the horses and mules but ten oxen, seventy-two hogs, three wagons, four thousand bushels of corn, two hundred bushels of rice, and all the potatoes and molasses they could find. They left behind them twenty-five bales of burning cotton and the ashes of the cotton gin and barns. Joe rode out from Augusta for a quick visit to assess the destruction. The Yankees, he said in disgust, were nothing but “degraded wretches.” As for those who lived in the settlement, they refused to join the thousands of slaves who were now jubilantly following the liberation army. For the present, Stepney and the others would stay at Indianola and try to support themselves with the provisions that had escaped confiscation. Perhaps they anticipated the way the Yankees would leave the slaves vulnerable to the devastating attacks from Confederate troops attempting to harass Sherman’s army from the rear.22

  Byearly December, Sherman was near Savannah as he moved his forces along the banks of the Ogeechee in order to make contact with the Federal fleet in Ossabaw Sound. On 10 December the plantation that had been home to Thomas Clay and his sister Eliza went up in flames. Richmond-on-the-Ogeechee had been one of the most beautiful and affluent plantations of the South, and for more than a generation the Clays had sought to make it a center for the enlightened and benevolent management of slaves. Now it too was ashes. Three days later, Yankee foragers were in Liberty County. They would be not a quickly passing storm but a storm that stalled and lingered over the land.23

  As Sherman’s forces drew near, Mary decided that Montevideo was safer than Arcadia.24 So once again the process began of hastily moving what was regarded as most valuable and what was thought most likely to be taken by those who would come to plunder. On the morning of Tuesday, 13 December, Mary rode from Montevideo to Arcadia to gather a number of household items. Believing that the Yankees were still some distance away, she lingered until late in the afternoon before setting out for Montevideo, with Patience’s son Jack driving the carriage. They traveled down a sandy road through thick woods where the limbs of oaks draped with Spanish moss stretched out to mingle with one another and form a canopy that obscured the sky. Suddenly a “Yankee on horseback sprang from the woods and brought his carbine to bear upon Jack, ordering him to halt. Then, lowering the carbine, almost touching the carriage window and pointing into it,” he demanded of Mary what she had in the carriage. She replied, “Nothing but my family effects.” He asked her where she was going, and she said to her home. “Where is your home?” he asked. “Near the coast.” “How far is the coast?” “About ten miles.” He then told her that he would not like to harm a lady, but he warned her that more Yankees were just ahead and that they would take her horses and search her carriage. He advised her to turn around immediately and take a different route. She thanked him and ordered Jack to do so. For the next few hours they dodged Yankees as they made their way down little sandy roads in the fading light until they finally arrived at Montevideo.25

  Later that evening, sometime after ten o’clock, Robert arrived. He was riding a mule, having given his fine horse to his brother Cyrus, who was serving picket duty for the little Confederate force that was in the county. Earlier in the day, Robert had abandoned his clergy position as a noncombatant by taking up a musket at Confederate headquarters. The musket was in Robert’s possession for only a few hours before he gave it to a soldier who needed one, but they were hours that cost him dearly. Now at Montevideo he talked with Mary and Mary Sharpe, delaying his departure as long as possible. He read aloud from the eighth chapter of Romans—“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” He went upstairs and kissed the children, and then after Jack had signaled all was clear, he departed on a trail through the woods.26

  Late the next afternoon, Charles, who had been in Walthourville with his wife, Lucy, suddenly came into the parlor and burst into tears. He had come walking and sometimes jogging all the way from Walthourville. “Oh,” he cried, “very bad news! Master is captured by the Yankees, and says I must tell you keep a good heart.” When Yank
ees had arrived in Walthourville early that morning, they had questioned Robert, and when they learned that he had taken up a gun, if only for a few hours, it was enough to have him arrested and sent to a prison camp by the Ogeechee.27

  The next morning, while Mary was outside walking on the lawn that ran down toward the river and Mary Sharpe was in the dining room, Elsey came running to say that the Yankees were coming. Three men rode up and dismounted by the stable. They demanded of Mary, “Where are your horses and mules? Bring them out!” Quickly the men ran toward the house, burst in on Mary Sharpe and began shouting for whiskey. Then they began to run through the house, poking into closets, going through drawers, prying open that which did not readily yield to keys, taking what they wanted. Later in the day, more men came. They ran everywhere through the house, cursing and screaming, hoping as had early arrivals to find something of value. When they finally left, they took with them the horses and a mule, but the old mule they soon turned loose, and it made its way back to the stable.28

  On Friday, 16 December, Prophet the carpenter from South Hampton came to the house and said that Audley King’s wife, Kate, was alone and terrified at South Hampton and wanted to come and stay at Montevideo. Audley had taken to the swamps to avoid capture. Armed with two navy revolvers, a huge bowie knife, and a double-barreled shotgun, he would spend the next month dodging Yankees and would use all his skills as a woodsman to help feed refugees as they went streaming south to the Confederate lines on the other side of the Alta-maha River. Mary wrote Kate to come immediately to Montevideo. With fear and trembling, Kate came hurrying down the narrow road that led to the Montevideo avenue.29

  Later that afternoon, there was a sudden great “clash of arms and noise of horsemen,” as forty or fifty men came riding into the yard at Montevideo. These were the serious foragers, the bummers, who came to take all that they could find. They stormed into the house, “flying hither and thither, ripping open the safe with their swords and breaking open the crockery cupboards.” Mary, as a precaution, had had some chickens and ducks roasted and put in a food safe. “These the men seized whole, tearing them to pieces with their teeth like ravenous beasts.” And all the time they were clamoring for whiskey. They yelled, cursed, quarreled, and ran from one room to another in wild confusion. “Such [were] their blasphemous language, their horrible countenances and appearance,” Mary Sharpe felt that they were like the damned, “the lost in the world of eternal woe. Their throats were open sepulchers, their mouths filled with cursing and bitterness and lies.” They stripped the house of all the food they could find, carrying out bags of meal and flour from the pantry and the attic, loading them into a wagon they had brought with them and a wagon they took from the place. Mary pleaded with them to leave some of the meal and flour for the women and children, but her pleas fell on deaf ears.30

  Early on Saturday morning, about four o’clock, there was a sound of horses. Mom Sue, who worked in the kitchen, came running upstairs “breathless with dismay” and reported that raiders, after asking her whether there were any young women in the family, had sent her to say that the women were going to be raped. “Oh,” Mary later wrote, “the agony—the agony of that awful hour no language can describe! No heart can conceive it. We were alone, friendless, and knew not what might befall us.” Mary, Mary Sharpe, and Kate King knelt down around the bed and began praying. And the children, hearing their voices, got up and knelt down beside them. They could hear the sounds of more squads arriving. Finally the women and children rose from their knees and “sat in darkness, waiting for the light of the morning to reveal their purposes, but trusting in God for our deliverance.” In the gray twilight of the morning, they looked “out of the window and saw one man pacing before the courtyard gate between the house and the kitchen.” Later they learned that “he had voluntarily undertaken to guard the house. In this,” wrote Mary, “we felt that our prayers had been signally answered.”31

  During the next week, one raiding party followed another. Smokehouse, corn crib, rice house, all were stripped bare. The carriage was brought out of the carriage house, filled with chickens, and driven away down the Montevideo avenue, followed by wagons loaded with barrels of sugar and molasses. As the raiders left, they shot sheep in the pastures and left them to rot.

  Meanwhile, in Savannah the Confederate forces, badly outnumbered, slipped out of the city in order to join up with a Confederate army. Among those leaving was Charlie with his light artillery. On 21 December, Sherman telegraphed Lincoln, presenting “as a Christmas-gift the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.” To the blacks of the city, Sherman appeared as Moses the liberator of slaves. “I’d always thought about this, and wanted this day to come, and prayed for it and knew God meant it should be here sometime,” a Savannah slave declared in disbelief, “but I didn’t believe I should ever see it, and it is so great and good a thing, I cannot believe it has come now; and I don’t believe I ever shall realize it, but I know it has though, and I bless the Lord for it.”32

  The fall of Savannah did not mean, however, the end of the raiding parties plundering Montevideo. Day by day they arrived looking for anything that had been left by earlier bummers.

  On 4 January at daylight, Mary Sharpe told her mother that she was going into labor. Mary sent Charles through the woods to get Dr. Raymond Harris. The old man was the father of the late Dr. Stephen Harris who had eloped with Emma Jones years before. The father had bought the Retreat from Henry Hart Jones and was now living at the plantation where Joseph had once ruled the roost and from which he had banished the young couple for disobedience and impertinence. Now in response to Mary’s plea, the elder Dr. Harris followed Charles as they slipped quietly through the woods on paths that linked the settlement at the Retreat to Carlawter. He found Mary Sharpe in a most critical condition, and he told Mary that she “must be prepared for the worst.” He said that if “he did not succeed in relieving the difficulty, her infant at least must die.” Mary responded, “Doctor, the mother first.” “Certainly,” he replied. And so the old doctor began to do what he could to save Mary Sharpe’s life, and if possible to preserve the life of the child. While Mary Sharpe labored in great agony, struggling to give birth to her infant, band after band of Yankee raiders arrived, shouting and cursing and ransacking the place in the hopes that something of worth might still be on the plantation. Kate King met them alone at the door and pleaded with them not to come into the house or to make such a racket outside the widows. But the shouting went on. One Yankee pushed past Kate and came into the house but did not go into the bedroom where Mary Sharpe was fighting for her life and the life of her child. Finally, through her own courage and with the skill of the doctor and the prayers of her mother, Mary Sharpe gave birth to a “well-formed infant—a daughter.”33

  The next evening as night closed in, Mary walked alone up and down the front piazza. For years she had viewed her low-country world from this vantage point. Here she had been surrounded by loved ones; here she had looked out on a world of great beauty and much delight. Here on the piazza Jack and Lizzy, Phoebe and Patience, Lucy and Peggy had served her tea and had responded to her every wish. And year by year her memories of this place had deepened as all her senses told her that this was her earthly home. But now in early January 1865, as she listened to the sounds of the river flowing and felt a cold night wind rising, she struggled to comprehend the bitter changes sweeping over the land. Now on this evening she saw her plundered life illumined by low lingering flames. Departing Yankees were setting ablaze neighboring plantation houses and barns. As she identified points of light in the darkening sky, she looked with fear and trembling in the direction of the venerable old church at Midway, for already the Baptist Church at Sunbury had been burned as a signal fire. That evening, however, no light from Midway reached out into the engulfing darkness.34

  Word gradually trickled into Montevideo on the extent of Yankee depre
dations. South Hampton was stripped; the Retreat was robbed of everything from bedclothes to provisions; Arcadia and White Oak, Riceboro, Walthourville, and Dorchester, all were overrun by Yankee raiders pillaging the wealth of past summers. More than a thousand Yankees camped at the old Mallard Place, turning it into a wasteland. Others camped at Lambert, where they “killed the cattle, sheep, geese, leveled the fences and burnt the cotton-house.” And everywhere the proud whites of Liberty County struggled to survive the onslaught of destruction and dispossession.35

  William Maxwell, now eighty years old, had thought that he would ride out the storm by staying on the coast at his Springfield plantation. But the storm struck him with particular fury. Hordes of Yankees camped at nearby Sunbury and regularly “entered his dwelling and pillaged every part of it before his face, taking food, bedding, bed clothing, silver, knives, forks, books, and every particle of his wearing apparel except the suit on his person.” They knocked out windows and left doors broken open so that the winter wind blew through the house. Trying to stay warm, he built a fire in the parlor and hung his cloak over the back of his chair to try to block the wind. While he was bending over to tend the fire, a young Yankee came up and seized the cloak and ran away. “Insulting foe,” wrote Mary in her journal, “wherever you now are, know that although no visible mark of God’s displeasure may rest upon you, the reward of such a dastardly act surely awaits you at the bar of eternal justice.”36

  The old man was forced to leave Springfield and to set out on foot for Dorchester, six miles away. As he walked slowly past the Springfield settlement, he knew not only the humiliation of defeat but also the bitterness of illusions unveiled. “So completely,” wrote Mary, “had the Yankees poisoned the minds of this venerable gentleman’s servants who had all been raised with the tenderness and comfort of children around him, they stood up and saw him depart alone from his own dwelling without offering the slightest assistance and it has been said even laughed as with feeble steps in thin garments he was driven from his own home on a cold winter’s day.” Only Miley—who had been blinded by her husband’s abuse and nursed by Betsey Maxwell—“came out of her house as she heard his passing step and threw her arms around him and with streams of tears told him of her love and devotion to him.”37