Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  17. CCJ, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes, A Sermon, 18–19.

  18. CCJ to MJ, 3 February 1830, JTU.

  19. CCJ, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes, A Sermon, 25–28. For the “face-grows-to-fit-the-mask” theory, see James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990), 70–107, esp. 76.

  20. Ibid., 29–30. See also CCJ, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States (Savannah, 1842), 208–210.

  21. CCJ, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes, A Sermon, 30–32.

  22. This first call was extended by the Midway Domestic Missionary Society in cooperation with the new association. CCJ to MJ, 8 September 1829, JTU.

  23. CCJ, Thirteenth Annual Report of the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in Liberty County, Georgia (Savannah, 1848), 61; CCJ, Tenth Annual Report, 15–18.

  24. Robert Manson Myers, ed., The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven, 1972), 1585–1586; CCJ to MJ, 14 January 1832, JTU.

  25. See “Journal of a Missionary to the Negroes in the State of Georgia,” Charleston Observer, 28 September 1833 and 14 March 1835. For the Sunbury Baptist Association, see Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Westport, Conn., 1979), 316–329, 357–362; Janet Duitsman Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South (Columbia, S.C., 1999), 27–29, 106–107.

  26. MJ to EM, 26 July 1831, JTU; Mary Robarts to MJ, 10 September 1831, JTU.

  27. CCJ to MJ, 14 January 1832, JTU.

  28. CCJ to MJ, 3 December 1831, JTU.

  29. Ibid.; Minutes of the Synod of South Carolina and Georgia, 3 December 1831, PHSM.

  30. “Report of the Committee, to whom was referred the subject of the Religious Instruction of the Colored Population, of the Synod of South Carolina and Georgia, at its late Session in Columbia, S.C.,” Charleston Observer, 29 March 1834. The report had to work its way through the procedures of the synod and was not published until 1834.

  31. Ibid.

  32. CCJ to MJ, 6 December 1831, JTU.

  33. Ibid.

  34. George Howe, “History of Columbia Theological Seminary,” in Memorial Volume of the Semi-Centennial of the Theological Seminary at Columbia, South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 1884), 140.

  35. CCJ to MJ, 6 December 1831, JTU.

  36. MJ to CCJ, 6 January 1832, JTU; MJ to CCJ, 23 January 1832, JTU; MJ to CCJ, 8 August 1832, JTU.

  37. CCJ to Betsy, 9 October 1832, JTU.

  38. Session Minutes, Midway Congregational Church, 23 November 1832, PHSM.

  10. MONTEVIDEO AND MAYBANK

  1. Map of Montevideo and Carlawter, JTU. See also map in County Record H, 226–227, SCLC. For the memory of planning the house and for the hopes for the garden at Montevideo, see CCJ to MJ, “Our Tenth Wedding Day, December 21, 1840,” JTU; CCJ to MJ, 5 November 1838, JTU. For some details of the house and garden, see 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), 9–10.

  2. Cf. MJ, Journal, 9 December 1867 and 12 January 1868, JTU.

  3. CPB, 1–4.

  4. MJ to Joseph Jones, 11 March 1834, JTU.

  5. CPB, 3.

  6. Ibid., 2, 64; MJ to CCJ, 17 May 1837, JTU. For Lizzy’s lingering illness see MJ to CCJ, 17 May 1837, JTU.

  7. “Accounts,” in CPB, 18. Sandy was one of the most valuable slaves at Montevideo in the 1830s. In 1837 he was valued at $1,000. For Syphax and Porter as carpenters, see ibid., 7.

  8. Ibid., 18–26. For the wharf see CCJ to MJ, 13 November 1841, JTU.

  9. Rodris Roth, “Tea Drinking in 18th Century America: Its Etiquette and Equipage,” in Contributions from the Museum of History and Technology, bulletin 225, paper 14 (1961). See also Charles E. Orser, Jr., “On Plantations and Patterns,” Journal of the Society for Historical Archaeology 23, no. 2 (1989): 28–40.

  10. For landscape’s role in shaping human perspectives and emotions, seeChapter 4, note 11.

  11. For the “hidden transcripts” of the slave settlements, see James C. Scott, Domination and the Art of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990), 1–16.

  12. Cf. “The Negro Spirituals,” Atlantic Monthly 19 (June 1867): 685; “Slave Songs on a Mission,” Southern Christian Advocate 7 (29 December 1843): 114.

  13. For slaves’ attachment to the places where they “were born and brought up,” and the reasons for such attachments, see Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881; rpt. New York: 1962), 97.

  14. Cf. B. W. Higman, Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739–1912 (Kingston, Jamaica, 1998), 297–300; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982), 32–42; David N. Livingston, “Hallowed Ground: Mapping the Geography of the Sacred,” Books and Culture 6 (May–June 2000): 36–39.

  15. Robert Manson Myers, ed. The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven, 1972), 1621.

  16. An Inventory and Appraisement of the Goods and Chattel of the late Andrew May-bank, deceased, of Liberty County, 17 March 1843, County Record L, PCLC; [Andrew Maybank,] A List of Slaves on Col. Island Plantation, Jan. 1833, JTU.

  17. Myers, Children of Pride, 1621.

  18. Will of Andrew Maybank, 13 January 1834, Will Record, 1824–1850, PCLC.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Ibid. JosJ bought Maybank’s Cherry Hill plantation near Midway Church. See Last Will and Testament of JosJ, Will Record, 1824–1850, PCLC.

  21. CCJ to MJ, 22 July 1829, JTU.

  22. MPB, 4.

  23. Executor’s Sale, Andrew May bank Estate Papers, JTU; Will of John Bohum Girardeau, 11 November 1800, Will Record 1790–1823, PCLC; Audley King to CCJ, 17 October 1853, JTU; Will of Andrew Maybank, 13 January 1834.

  24. Estate of Andrew Maybank in Account Current with C. C. Jones, Executor, Accounts Book, 1831–1838, PCLC. The Maybank Endowment, like most of the endowment of Columbia Theological Seminary, was lost in the Civil War and its aftermath.

  25. MPB, 1–3.

  26. CCJ, Journal, 2 June 1860, JTU.

  27. Myers, Children of Pride, 1574–1575.

  28. Mortgage of James Holmes to Andrew Maybank, 18 November 1823, County Record I, SCLC; Sheriff’s Titles to Andrew Maybank, Esq., for Driver Andrew, his wife, Mary Ann, and Their Three Children: Charles, Silvia, and Gilbert, 14 September 1826, CJUG.

  29. Audley King to CCJ, 21 July 1857, JTU.

  30. Notice on Jacob, 24 February 1823, Andrew Maybank Jones Collection, UGA.

  31. For the history and geology of the Georgia Sea Islands, see James D. Howard, Chester B. Depratter, and Robert W. Frey, “Excursions in Southeastern Geology: The Archaeology-Geology of the Georgia Coast,” Guidebook 20, 1980 Annual Meeting, Geological Society of America, Atlanta; Elizabeth J. Reitz, Tyson Sibbs, Ted A. Rathbun, “Archaeological Evidence for Subsistence on Coastal Plantations,” in The Archaeology of Slavery and Plantation Life, ed. Theresa A. Singleton (Orlando, 1985), 163–186.

  32. William Bartram, Travels Through North & 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), 33–35.

  33. For the character of salt marshes and the cordgrass Spartina alterniflora, see John and Mildred Teal, Life and Death of the Salt Marsh (New York, 1971); Jennifer Ackerman, Notes from the Shore (New York, 1996).

  34. MJ to Joseph Jones, 9 December 1823, JTU.

  35. For CCJ’s experience of the sublime at sea, see CCJ to MJ, 6 October 1829, JTU. For MJ’s experience of the sublime on Sapelo Island, see MJ to CCJ, 4 August 1830, JTU.

  36. Cf. EM to CCJ and MJ, 31 August 1846, JTU; CCJ to Laura Maxwell, 5 October 1846, JTU; CCJ, Journal, 29 August 1860, JTU.

  37. Cf. CCJ’s rejection of a “sic
kly sentimentalism” in CCJ to MJ, 22 November 1829, JTU.

  38. These theological convictions are found throughout CCJ’s sermons and lectures. See, e.g., CCJ, “Nineteen Lectures on the Epistle to the Romans,” JTU; and “Thirteen Lectures on Genesis,” 1833, JTU.

  39. There is a huge body of literature on the ways in which religion is a reflection of a social context. See, e.g., Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (1841; rpt. New York, 1957); Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion (Moscow, 1957), esp. 37–38; Maurice Bloch, Marxism and Anthropology (Oxford, 1983), esp. 17–18. More recently, some anthropologists have argued for the reciprocal relationship between a religious tradition and a particular social and cultural context. See Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, 193–223 (New York: 1973). Cf. also Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George H. Taylor (New York, 1986), 183–197; Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), esp. 19.

  40. For the functions of ideology, see Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System;” Ricoeur, Lectures, 3, 185, 254–266.

  41. For the utopian character of this alternative vision, see Ricoeur, Lectures, xvi, xxi–xxiii, 15–17, 269–314; Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York, 1936), 208. Mannheim and Ricoeur emphasize that utopian visions, rather than legitimating an existing social order, challenge it.

  11.THE STATIONS

  1. “Journal of a Missionary to the Negroes in the State of Georgia,” CO, 6 July 1833.

  2. Eliza Sumner Martin, “Flemington” in Liberty County, Georgia: A Pictorial History, Virginia Fraser Evans, compiler (Statesville, N.C., 1979), 79. CCJ, Thirteen Lectures to the Negroes of Liberty County with Dates and Places, JTU. “Annual Report of the Missionary to the Negroes, in Liberty County (Ga.),” CO, 15 March 1834.

  3. “Journal of a Missionary,” CO, 6 July 1833.

  4. Ibid.

  5. CCJ, A Catechism for Colored Persons (Charleston, S.C., 1834), iii–vii. Cf. Janet Duitsman Cornelius, Slave Missionsand the Black Church in the Antebellum South (Columbia, S.C., 1999), 124–158.

  6. “Journal of a Missionary,” CO, 27 July 1833.

  7. “Journal of a Missionary,” CO, 6 July 1833; CCJ, Lecture 2: Sabbath, Marriage, Primitive Condition of Man—Genesis 2:1–13, JTU.

  8. “Journal of a Missionary,” CO, 6 July 1833. For a review of the scholarly debate on what Herbert Gutman called a wholesome “pre-nuptial intercourse” and what E. Franklin Frazier called “slave licentiousness,” see David Brion Davis, In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery (New Haven, 2001), 278–289.

  9. CCJ, Lecture 2, Genesis 2, 10–13, JTU.

  10. Ibid., 11.

  11. See CCJ, A Catechism, iii–vii; cf. Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, 1991), 284–325; Cain Hope Felder, ed. Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation (Minneapolis, 1991), esp. 40–56.

  12. CCJ, Lecture 2, Genesis 2, 13–14, JTU.

  13. Ibid., 15–16.

  14. “Journal of a Missionary to the Negroes in the State of Georgia,” CO, 6 July 1833, 27 July 1833, 17 August 1833, 24 August 1833, 31 August 1833, 7 September 1833, 21 September 1833, 28 September 1833.

  15. CCJ, Lecture 4, History of Cain and Abel, Genesis 4, 5; Lecture 6, Noah, Genesis 6,7; Lecture 9, Building Babel, Genesis 11, 6; Lecture 12, History of Abraham, Genesis 12, 7.

  16. CCJ, Lecture 13, Genesis 13, 14, 15, 16, 31–35, JTU.

  17. CCJ to MJ, 22 July 1829, JTU; and “Report of the Committee, to whom was referred the subject of the Religious Instruction of the Colored Population, of the Synod of South Carolina and Georgia, at its late Session in Columbia, S.C.,” CO, 29 March 1834. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985), 17–44.

  18. CCJ, Eight Lessons on the Epistle to the Hebrews, Lesson 1, 1, JTU.

  19. Cf. MJ, Journal, 1863, JTU.

  20. CCJ, Second Annual Report of the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in Liberty County, Georgia (Savannah, 1834), 1–2; and CCJ, Tenth Annual Report of the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in Liberty County, Georgia (Savannah, 1845), 22.

  21. CCJ, Second Annual Report, 3; CCJ, Tenth Annual Report, 25; CCJ, Second Annual Report, 2; CCJ, Eleventh Annual Report of the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in Liberty County, Georgia (Savannah, 1846), 15–16; CCJ, Twelfth Annual Report of the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in Liberty County, Georgia (Savannah, 1847), 13.

  22. Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church, 128–131; and Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York, 1978), 161–162; and Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens, Ga., 1987), 295–301.

  23. CCJ, A Catechism for Colored Persons, iii.

  24. “Historical Catechism: Part I. Of John the Baptist,” CO, 17 September 1836. See also CO, 10 September 1836, 1 October 1836, 5 November 1836.

  25. “Historical Catechism: Part II. Of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,” CO, 12 November 1836, 19 November 1836. CCJ interrupted the publication of the “Historical Catechism” for three years and then resumed it in 1839. See “Historical Catechism: Part II. Of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,” CO, 9 March 1839, 16 March 1839, 6 April 1839, 20 April 1839, 27 April 1839, 11 May 1839.

  26. “The Rev. Charles Colcock Jones, D.D.” Southern Presbyterian, 4 June 1863; John B. Adger, My Life and Times, 1810–1899 (Richmond, 1899), 100–101.

  27. Parts of the following analysis were originally published in Erskine Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob: A Portrait of Religion in the Old South (Atlanta, 1979), 35–58.

  28. CCJ, A Catechism of Scripture, Doctrine and Practice: For Families and Sabbath Schools, Designed also for the Oral Instruction of Colored Persons, 3rd ed. (Savannah, 1845), 69. Cf. Margaret Washington Creel, “A Peculiar People”: Slave Religion and Community Culture Among the Gullahs (New York, 1988), 211–251.

  29. Ibid., 127–131.

  30. Cf., e.g., Raboteau, Slave Religion, 294; and Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 115–118. But Larry Tise, in a “comparison of one of the popular New England catechisms of the early nineteenth century with one of the so-called catechisms for slaves reveals an extraordinary similarity of content.” Tise uses the catechism of a South Carolina Episcopal bishop for comparison, but the same may be said of CCJ’s catechism—there is an extraordinary similarity of content with popular catechisms used in New England. See Tise, Proslavery, 418 n. 20.

  31. CCJ, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States (Savannah, 1842), 256, 252.

  32. CCJ, Suggestions on the Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the Southern States; Together with an Appendix Containing Forms of Church Registers, form of a Constitution, and Plans of Different Denominations of Christians (Philadelphia, 1847), 14.

  33. CCJ, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States, 261, 110–111.

  34. Hampden C. DuBose, Memoirs of Rev. John Leighton Wilson, D.D., Missionary to Africa, and Secretary of Foreign Missions (Richmond, 1895), 97–105. For Wilson’s letters, see, e.g., CO, 28 September 1833, 8 November 1834, 9 May 1835, 1 September 1835, 7 May 1836. J. Leighton Wilson, Western Africa: Its History, Condition, and Prospects (New York, 1856).

  35. Cf. CCJ, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States, passim.

  36. “Journal of a Missionary,” CO, 31 August 1833.

  37. For Mary Ann as Sharper’s daughter and Sandy Maybank’s wife, see CCJ, Journal, 25 April 1858, JTU. For Sharper staying with his family regularly at his “wife house,” see “Journal of a Missionary,” CO, 21 February 1835.

  38. “Journal of a Missionary,” CO, 31 August 1833.
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  39. CCJ, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States, 261.

  40. Ibid., 256; CCJ, Suggestions on the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, 14.

  41. CCJ to MJ, 26 June 1837, JTU.

  42. CCJ, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States, 255.

  43. CCJ to MJ, 8 December 1829, JTU.

  44. CCJ, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States, 255, 262; cf. CCJ, Suggestions on the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, 15; and Tenth Annual Report, 41–42.

  45. CCJ, sermon file, 1832–1838, JTU.

  46. CCJ, Third Annual Report of the Missionary to the Negroes, in Liberty County, Ga. Presented to the Association, Riceborough, January 1836 (Charleston, 1836), 13.

  47. CCJ, “Eliezer, Gen. 24:1–67,” sermon written 15 March 1834, JTU; CCJ, “Character of Gehazi, Servant of Elisha, the Man of God,” sermon written 12 July 1833, JTU. Cf. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), 202–206.

  48. “Journal of a Missionary,” CO, 21 September 1833.

  49. Ibid. I have used this version of what happened with the sermon on Onesimus rather than the better-known account written years later in Tenth Annual Report, 24–25. Cf. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 294; and Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 115–118.

  50. CCJ, “Religious Instruction of the Negroes,” CO, 17 September 1836.

  51. CCJ, Tenth Annual Report, 24; CCJ, Third Annual Report, 24.

  12. THE MALLARD PLACE

  1. CCJ to MJ, 1 April 1833, JTU.

  2. Ibid.; Minutes of the Sunbury Baptist Association, Convened at the Newington Church, Screven County, Georgia, Nov. 1829 (Savannah, 1829); Minutes of the Sunbury Baptist Association, Convened at Walthourville, Liberty County, Georgia on Friday and Saturday, November the 11th and 12th, 1836 (Savannah, 1836); MJ to CCJ 8 February 1830, JTU; “Watchmen in Newport Church, 1843,” JTU.