WOODMANSTON—The plantation, located near Bull Town Swamp, was the home of the LeConte family. Woodmanston was famous for its botanical garden and in particular for its extensive collection of camellias. The plantation was the childhood home of the scientists Joseph and John LeConte.
WOODVILLE—A Sea Island cotton plantation and summer home on Colonel’s Island that was a part of the Audley Maxwell estate. When Maxwell died, his daughter Julia Maxwell King, wife of Roswell King, inherited Woodville. The plantation house overlooked the mouth of the North Newport River. The Kings used it as their summer home, staying there from early June until the first frost in the fall. Marauders burned the plantation house shortly after the end of the Civil War.
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
Individuals and Institutions
CCJ—Charles Colcock Jones
CCJj—Charles Colcock Jones, Jr.
CTS—Columbia Theological Seminary
EHJ—Elizabeth Screven Lee Hart Jones (1801–1870)
EM—Elizabeth Jones Maxwell (1794–1856)
HHJ—Henry Hart Jones (1823–1893)
JJ—Joseph Jones (1833–1896)
JoJ—John Jones (1815–1893)
JosJ—Joseph Jones (1779–1846)
MJ—Mary Jones
MSJ—Mary Sharpe Jones; after April 22, 1857, Mary Sharpe Jones Mallard
MSJM—Mary Sharpe Jones Mallard; before April 22, 1857, Mary Sharpe Jones
RQM—Robert Quarterman Mallard
SJMC—Susan Jones Maxwell Cumming
TS—Thomas Shepard
WM—William Maxwell (1785–1866)
Document Sources
CJUG—Charles Colcock Jones, Jr., Collection, Special Division, University of Georgia Libraries CO —Charleston Observer
CPB—Carlawter Plantation Book, JTU
GHS—Georgia Historical Society, Savannah, Ga.
JDU—Charles Colcock Jones, Jr., Collection, Duke University
JJUG—The Rev. John Jones Collection, University of Georgia
JTU—Charles Colcock Jones Papers, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University
MPB—Maybank Plantation Book, JTU
PHSM—Presbyterian Historical Foundation, Montreat, N.C.
PCLC—Probate Court, Hinesville, Liberty County, Ga.
SCLC—Office of the Clerk of Superior Court, Liberty County, Ga.
UGA—Special Division, University of Georgia Libraries
1. LIBERTY HALL
1. For Jupiter as the driver at Liberty Hall, see John Jones to Elizabeth Jones, 9 February 1796, JTU; John Jones Daybook, 1805, JTU. For Lizzy and Lymus see John Jones Daybook, 1805, JTU; Plantation Book for Carlawter, 8, JTU. Except where otherwise noted, “John Jones” citations refer to the master of Liberty Hall who lived from 1772 to 1805. For slave driver as “caller” in the early morning, see William L. Van DeBurg, The Slave Drivers: Black Agricultural Labor Supervisors in the Antebellum South (Westport, Conn., 1979), 11. For the use of conch-shell horns, see Duncan Clinch Heyward, Seed from Madagascar (Chapel Hill, 1937), 179. Such a horn can be seen in the Charleston Museum, Charleston, S.C. For slave clothing, see John Jones Daybook, 1803–1805, JTU; Estate Papers of John Jones, PCLC.
2. Mary Jones Low to John Jones, 15 February 1784, JTU.
3. John Jones, “A List of My Negroes for the Year 1805 per my Tax returns,” JTU; Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998), 104–122; Robert Ascher and Charles H. Fairbanks, “Excavation of a Slave Cabin: Georgia, U.S.A.,” Historical Archaeology 5 (1971): 3–17; Theresa Ann Singleton, “The Archaeology of Afro-American Slavery in Coastal Georgia: Regional Perception of Slave Household and Community Patterns” (Ph.D. diss., University of Florida, 1980); Leland Ferguson, Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650–1800 (Washington, D.C., 1992), 63–82; Julia Floyd Smith, Slavery and Rice Culture in Low Country Georgia (Knoxville, 1985), 119–130; John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill, 1993), 153–167.
4. John Jones to Elizabeth Jones, 25 January, 1796, JTU; John Jones to Elizabeth Jones, 16 January, 1795, JTU; Elizabeth Jones to John Jones, 1 January, 1797, JTU; John Jones to Elizabeth Jones, 29 January, 1796, JTU.
5. For slave drivers, see Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 218–225; Peter Kolchin, “Reevaluating the Antebellum Slave Community: A Comparative Perspective,” Journal of American History 70, no. 3, (1983): 595–596; Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, ed. Arthur Schlesinger (New York, 1953), 186–187; James M. Clifton, “The Rice Driver: His Role in Slave Management,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 82 (Oct. 1981): 331–353; William L. Van DeBurg, The Slave Drivers: Black Agricultural Labor Supervisors in the Antebellum South (Westport, Conn., 1979).
6. Plantation Book for Carlawter, 8, JTU; John Jones to Elizabeth Jones, 7 February 1796, JTU; John Jones to Elizabeth Jones, 9 February 1796, JTU.
7. John Jones, “A List of My Negroes for the Year 1805 per my Tax returns,” JTU; John Jones (1749–1779) Daybook, “A List of Negroes for the Year 1778,” JTU; Will of John Bohum Girardeau, 11 November 1800, Will Record, 1790–1823, PCLC.
8. John Jones Daybook, 1803–1805, JTU.
9. For African origins of Fanny, Marcus, and Elvira, see MPB, 50b. Marcus, the child of Fanny and younger brother of Elvira, is listed as “from Africa.” For Fanny’s difficulty in learning to speak Gullah English, see Thomas Shepard to C. C. Jones, 14 November 1850, JTU. For Gullah as a language and bearer of culture, see Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 559–580; Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (Boston: 1992), 20–22.
10. For the task system and the classification of “hands,” see Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 179–187; Philip D. Morgan, “Work and Culture: The Task System and the World of Lowcountry Blacks, 1700 to 1880,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 39 (October 1982): 563–599; J. W. Joseph, “Pattern and Process in Plantation Archaeology of the Lowcountry of Georgia and South Carolina,” Journal of the Society for Historical Archaeology 23, no. 1 (1989): 57–68; Larry E. Hudson, Jr., To Have and to Hold: Slave Work and Family Life in Antebellum South Carolina (Athens, Ga., 1997); William A. Noble, “Antebellum Hopeton and Current Altama Plantations in Georgia: A Study in Contrasts,” in One World, One Institution: The Plantation, Proceedings of the Second World Plantation Conference, ed. Sue Eakin and John Tarver, Shreveport, La., October 6–10, 1986 (Baton Rouge, 1989), 71–91. For “weapons of the weak,” see James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985), 1–47.
11. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 180.
12. Ibid., 11, 113–116, 358–376. For personal property of slaves in the Georgia low country, see Betty Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia (Athens, Ga., 1995); Thomas F. Armstrong, “From Task Labor to Free Labor: The Transition Along Georgia’s Rice Coast, 1820–1880,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 64, (1980): 432–437; Philip D. Morgan, “The Ownership of Property by Slaves in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Low Country,” Journal of Southern History 49, no. 3 (1983): 399–420; Dylan Penningroth, “Slavery, Freedom, and Social Claims to Property Among African Americans in Liberty County, Georgia, 1850–1880,” Journal of American History 84 (September 1997): 405–435. For comparable developments in the Caribbean, see B. W. Higman, Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739–1912 (Kingston, Jamaica, 1998), 191–257; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 182.
13. C. C. Jones, Jr., to Mary Ruth Jones, 11 May 1888, JDU; Estate Papers of John Jones, PCLC.
14. C. C. Jones, Jr., to Mary Ruth Jones, 11 May 1888, JDU; George White, Historical Collections of Georgia (New York, 1855), 537.
15. Robert Long Groover, Sweet Land of L
iberty: A History of Liberty County, Georgia (Roswell, Ga., 1987), 234; White, Historical Collections, 527–529; John Jones (1772–1805) Daybook, 1803, JTU.
16. James Stacy, History of the Midway Congregational Church, Liberty County, Georgia (Newnan, Ga., 1899), 1–20; Erskine Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob: A Portrait of Religion in the Old South (Atlanta, 1979), 5–6.
17. Stacy, History of Midway, 27–34.
18. Robert Manson Myers, ed., The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven, 1972), 8. For the strength of Calvinism in the South Carolina low country, see Erskine Clarke, Our Southern Zion: A History of Calvinism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1690–1990 (Tuscaloosa, 1996).
19. John Jones Daybook, 1803, JTU.
20. C. C. Jones, Jr., to Mary Ruth Jones, 11 May 1888, JDU; Bills paid to Dr. North for “attendance John Jones (last illness),” Estate Papers of John Jones, PCLC.
21. For Jacob and Sandy as carpenters, see John Jones Daybook, 1803–1805, JTU. For the practice of slave carpenters building coffins, see RQM, Plantation Life Before Emancipation (Richmond, 1892), 25.
22. William Bartram, Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws (1791; rpt. New York, 1988), 36–37.
23. Prayer by John Jones, John Jones Daybook, n.d., JTU.
24. Transcribed from the Midway Cemetery, Liberty County, Ga.
25. Joseph Jones, “Memorandum to Capt. Swain,” 1805, JTU; Cf. David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change (New York, 1977), 122–134, 167–196.
2.RICEBORO
1. Will of John Bohum Girardeau, 11 November 1800, Will Record, 1790–1823, PCLC; 1800 Tax Return for Sunbury District, SCLC.
2. For the fear and uncertainty slaves experienced around the prospects of a sale and removal, see Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (New York, 1962), 97. Cf. CCJj to CCJ and MJ, 24 August 1854, JTU.
3. John Jones Daybook, 1803–1805, JTU.
4. For Rice Hope plantation, see Indenture Between Mary Jones and Philip Low, Record B,348–351, SCLC. For the relationship of Rice Hope to the Retreat, see John Jones (1749–1779) Daybook, 1778, JTU; C. C. Jones, Jr., to Mary Ruth Jones, 11 May 1888, JDU; JosJ, Notes on Births and Deaths, n.d., CJUG. For patriarchalism, see Philip D. Morgan, “Three Planters and Their Slaves: Perspectives on Slavery in Virginia, South Carolina and Jamaica, 1750–1790,” in Race and Family in the Colonial South, ed. Winthrop D. Jordan and Sheila L. Skemp (Jackson, Miss., 1987), 37–79; Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Low-country (Chapel Hill, 1998), 274–284. For patriarchalism and the role of an uncle in providing protection and guardianship, see Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York, 1982), 36–57.
5. JosJ, Estate John Jones in a/c Current, JosJ Administrator, 1805, 1806, PCLC. For medicines used at Liberty Hall, see ibid. and John Jones Daybook, passim.
6. For the hurricane of 1804, see CCJ, “Funeral Service of Mrs. John Ashmore, June 1847,” JTU. For the plantation expenses at Liberty Hall and the growing financial crisis, see JosJ, Estate John Jones in a/c Current, 1805–1808, PCLC.
7. Robert Manson Myers, ed. The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven, 1972), 12; “Sheriff ‘s Sale,” Georgia Gazette (Savannah), 26 July 1798; MJ to CCJ, 27 October 1827, JTU.
8. Kenneth Coleman, “1775–1820,” in Kenneth Coleman, ed., A History of Georgia (Athens, Ga., 1977), 96–97, 101.
9. “Sheriff ‘s Sale,” Georgia Gazette (Savannah), 26 July 1798.
10. See, e.g., Georgia Gazette (Savannah), 16 August 1798, 18 October 1798, 1 December 1799, 8 May 1802; Columbian Museum and Savannah Advertiser, 10 November 1799.
11. Real Estate Division, County Record E, 194–195, 227–228, 239–240, SCLC. Head-right was a land-grant system for able-bodied men dating back to the early 1600s in the Virginia colony and adapted throughout the South and later Texas. Up to one thousand acres per family, including fifty to one hundred acres per wife, child, and slave, sometimes at minimal extra cost per acre, might be granted the applicant by the state to encourage the settlement and working of the land.
12. Real Estate Division, County Record F, 11–12, 18–19, 54–56, SCLC; John Jones Daybook, 1803–1805, JTU; Appraisal of the Estate of John Jones, 14 October 1805, Will Record A, 1790–1823, PCLC.
13. Virginia Fraser Evans, “Riceboro,” in Liberty County, Georgia: A Pictorial History, compiled by Virginia Fraser Evans (Statesville, N.C., 1979), 38–41; William C. Fleetwood, Jr., Tidecraft: The Boats of South Carolina, Georgia, and Northeastern Florida, 1550–1950 (Tybee Island, Ga., 1995), 45–121. For the transatlantic economy, see Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York, 2002).
14. Evans, “Riceboro,” 38–39; JosJ, Estate John Jones, 1805–1808, SCLC.
15. For the purchase of rum, see John Jones Daybook, 1803–1805, JTU. On rum use and slave health, see Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York, 1989), 153; and Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 134–143. For the decades-long controversy between planters and shopkeepers in Riceboro, see CCJ to Thomas Shepard, 23 August 1849, JTU.
16. For the role of a village in a plantation setting and for the tensions between shopkeepers and planters, see Larry E. Hudson, Jr., “‘All That Cash’: Work and Status in the Slave Quarters” in Larry E. Hudson, Jr., ed., Working Toward Freedom: Slave Society and Domestic Economy in the American South (Rochester, 1994), 77–94; Philip D. Morgan, “The Ownership of Property by Slaves in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Low Country,” Journal of Southern History 49, no. 3 (1983): 399–420. For ways in which Riceboro could function as a scene of conflict between white planters and slaves with their boro allies, see James C. Scott, “Making Social Space for a Dissent Subculture” in Domination and the Art of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990), 120–124.
17. For a particularly brutal court sentence requiring the whipping of a slave in Riceboro in 1809, see Ralph Betts Flanders, Plantation Slavery in Georgia (Chapel Hill, 1935), 262.
18. For traditional locations in Riceboro of slave sales, see Sale of Certain Negroes to Joseph Bacon, County Record F, 197, SCLC; Savannah Republican, 20 June 1816.
19. For examples of the familiar questions asked in slave sales, see Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison, Wis., 1989), 83–108.
20. Lydia Parrish, Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands (1942; rpt. Athens, Ga., 1992), 196.
21. Sale of Certain Negroes to Joseph Bacon, County Record F, 197, SCLC; Sale of Certain Negroes to Capt. P. H. Wilkins, County Record F, 197, SCLC.
22. See James Stacy, History of the Midway Congregational Church, Liberty County, Georgia (Newnan, Ga., 1899), 30; County Record H, 13, SCLC; Sale of Certain Negroes to Col. Joseph Law, County Record F, 198, SCLC. See also PBC, 5.
23. See PBC, 5; Indenture between JosJ and Susannah Jones, Elizabeth Jones, John Jones, Susanna Mary Jones, and CCJ, 16 June 1808, County Record F, 211, SCLC.
24. John Jones Daybook, 1803–1805, JTU; Will of Susannah Jones, 5 October 1810, Will Record A, 1790–1823, PCLC.
3. SUNBURY
1. Sale of Certain Negroes to Col. Joseph Law, County Record F, 198, SCLC. See also CPB, 5. For slave nurses of slave children, see William A. Noble, “Antebellum Hopeton and Current Altamaha Plantations in Georgia: A Study in Contrasts,” in One World, One Institution: The Plantation, Proceedings of the Second World Plantation Conference, ed. Sue Eakin and John Tarver, Shreveport, Louisiana, October 6–10, 1986 (Baton Rouge, 1989), 78–79. For work of slave children, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill, 1988), 151–159; Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counter
point: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998), 197–198, 252–253. A note, evidently by MJ, written on the back of a letter from Jos. P. Eryles to CCJ, 1 November 1847, JTU, provides information on Rosetta’s role as CCJ’s early nurse and on CCJ’s early history. Hereafter referred to as MJ Note on Early History of CCJ, JTU.
2. JosJ, Estate John Jones in a/c Current, JosJ Administrator, 1805–1808, PCLC; MJ Note on Early History of CCJ, JTU; RQM, Montevideo-Maybank: Some Memoirs of a Southern Christian Household in the Olden Time; or, The Family Life of the Rev. Charles Colcock Jones, D.D., of Liberty County, Ga. (Richmond, 1898), 34–36.
3. CCJ to CCJj, 20 April 1854, CJUG.
4. Journal of MJ, 1863, JTU.
5. Ibid.; CCJ to CCJj, 20 April 1854, CJUG.
6. John M. B. Harden, M.D. “Observations on the Soil, Climate and Diseases of Liberty County, Georgia,” in Southern Medical and Surgical Journal, new ser., 1, no. 10 (October 1845): 555–557.
7. JosJ, Estate John Jones, 1808, PCLC.
8. John McKay Sheftall, Sunbury on the Medway: A Selective History of the Town, Inhabitants, and Fortifications (Norcross, Ga., 1995), 14–16; William Bartram, Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws (1791; rpt. New York, 1988), 32–33; Charles C. Jones, Jr., Dead Towns of Georgia (1878; rpt. Savannah, 1997), 173–174.
9. Jones, Dead Towns of Georgia, 210–223.
10. The lots were numbers 29 and 30. See Appraisal of the Estate of John Jones, 14 October 1805, Will Record A, 1790–1823, PCLC. For the location of the lots, see the town plat in Jones, Dead Towns of Georgia, 141. For the regular movement of the family between Sunbury and Rice Hope, see, e.g., Mary Low to John Jones, 28 March 1785, and Mary Low to John Jones, 25 April 1795, JTU. For the burial place of Mary Low behind the Jones house in Sunbury, see Last Will and Testament of JosJ, Will Record, 1824–1850, PCLC; John Jones Daybook, 1804–1805, JTU.
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