Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  3. CCJ to MJ, 1 April 1833, JTU; Robert Manson Myers, ed. The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven, 1972), 1648.

  4. CCJ to MJ, 10 April 1833, JTU. For the island plantations, see Malcolm Bell, Jr., Major Butler’s Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family (Athens, Ga., 1987), 106–107, 147, 477; Margaret Davis Cate, Early Days of Coastal Georgia (St. Simons Island, Ga., 1955); Leland Ferguson, Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650–1800 (Washington, D.C., 1992), 63–82.

  5. CCJ to MJ, 4 April 1839, JTU. [Jane Wood Pratt], “Scripture Sketches for Colored Persons,” CO, 29 June 1833, 3 August 1833, 10 August 1833, 17 August 1833, 31 August 1833. For the identification of Jane Wood Pratt as the author of these sketches, see CCJ, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States (Savannah, 1842), 79; see also “A Letter on Dreams” CO, 25 January 1834.

  6. [Pratt], “Scripture Sketches,” 27 July 1833, 31 August 1833.

  7. CCJ, “The Moral and Religious Condition of our Coloured Population,” CO, 10 October 1833, 2 November 1833, 9 November 1833, and 16 November 1833.

  8. John Winn, “Thomas S. Clay,” 8 September 1888, GHS.

  9. Thomas S. Clay, “Detail of a Plan for the Moral Improvement of Negroes on Plantations. Read before the Georgia Presbytery. By Thomas S. Clay of Bryan County, Ga.,” CO, 8 February 1834.

  10. Thomas S. Clay, “Detail of a Plan for the Moral Improvement of Negroes on Plantations. Read before the Georgia Presbytery. [Continued],” CO, 22 February 1834. Cf. Janet Duitsman Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South (Columbia, S.C., 1999), 85–87.

  11. CCJ, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States, 267. Parts of the following analysis were originally published in Erskine Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob: A Portrait of Religion in the Old South (Atlanta, 1979), 59–81.

  12. RQM, Plantation Life Before Emancipation (Richmond, 1892), 16–17.

  13. “Minutes of the Watchman’s Meeting for Midway Church,” JTU; “Minutes of the Session, Midway Congregational Church,” 26 November 1830, PHSM.

  14. “Minutes of the Watchman’s Meeting for Midway Church,” JTU; Claim of Pompey Bacon, Liberty County, Georgia, Case Files, Southern Claims Commission, Records of the 3rd Auditor, Allowed Case Files, Records of the U.S. General Accounting Office, RG 217 (National Archives, Washington, D.C.). See also 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.

  15. See Journal of CCJ, 19 February 1860, JTU.

  16. RQM, Plantation Life, 48; CCJ to Thomas Shepherd, 23 December 1848, JTU; Eliza Mallard to RQM, 2 June 1854, JTU; Edward Harden to CCJ, 2 November 1854, JTU.

  17. “Minutes of the Session, Midway Congregational Church,” 15 February 1845, PHSM; RQM, Plantation Life, 51–57.

  18. Cf. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998), 441.

  19. CCJ, Tenth Annual Report of the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in Liberty County, Georgia (Savannah, 1845), 23; CCJ, Third Annual Report of the Missionary to the Negroes, in Liberty County, Ga. Presented to the Association, Rice-borough, January 1836 (Charleston, 1836), 4.

  20. CCJ, “Annual Report of the Missionary to the Negroes, in Liberty County (Ga.),” CO, 15 March 1834; CCJ, Eighth Annual Report of the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in Liberty County, Georgia; together with the Address to the Association by the President the Rev. I. S. K. Axson (Savannah, 1845), 4; CCJ, Tenth Annual Report, 41.

  21. CCJ, Eleventh Annual Report of the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in Liberty County, Georgia (Savannah, 1846), 20; CCJ, “Journal of a Missionary to the Negroes in the State of Georgia,” CO, 31 August 1833.

  22. CCJ, “Journal of a Missionary to the Negroes in the State of Georgia,” CO, 31 August 1833. For the chapel at Montevideo, see CPB, 95; CCJ to Jane Dunwody Jones, 10 September 1846, JJUG; CCJ to MJ, 24 December 1851, JTU. For plantation chapels, see Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church, 89; and Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slaves States: In the Years 1853–1854, With Remarks on Their Economy (New York, 1856), 80.

  23. “Minutes of the Session, Midway Congregational Church,” 1833–1838, PHSM.

  24. CCJ, First Annual Report, 8; CCJ, Tenth Annual Report, 23; CCJ, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States, 17, 268; RQM, Plantation Life, 105.

  25. RQM, Plantation Life, 29–31, 17–19.

  26. CCJ to MJ, 19 April 1830, JTU. CCJ, “Journal of a Missionary to the Negroes in the State of Georgia,” CO 31 August 1833. 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), 17.

  27. “Journal of a Missionary to the Negroes in the State of Georgia,” CO, 24 August 1833.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Ibid.

  30. CCJ, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States, 16; CCJ, Thirteenth Annual Report of the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in Liberty County, Georgia (Savannah, 1848), 13–16; RQM, Plantation Life, 20–30.

  31. CCJ, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States, 115–116; RQM, Plantation Life, 32.

  32. CCJ, Suggestions on the Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the Southern States, 35; and cf. RQM, Plantation Life, 31–32.

  33. CCJ, Suggestions on the Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the Southern States, 35. Cf. CCJ, Second Annual Report of the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in Liberty County, Georgia (Savannah, 1835), 9; CCJ, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States, 241.

  34. See CCJ, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States, 209, 242; 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), 128; CCJ, Suggestions on the Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the Southern States, 35.

  35. CCJ, A Catechism of Scripture, Doctrine and Practice, 128.

  36. For encouragement by agricultural journals of providing good housing and care for slaves, see Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution (New York, 1956), 293.

  37. For household codes, see Wayne A. Meeks, The Origins of Christian Morality (New Haven, 1993), esp. chapter 3; David C. Verner, The Household of God: The Social World of the Pastoral Epistles, SBL Dissertation Series 71 (Chico, Calif., 1983); David Balch, Let Wives Be Submissive: The Domestic Code in 1 Peter, SBL Monograph Series 26 (Chico, Calif., 1981). Colossians 4:1.

  13.THE ARBORS

  1. CCJ, “Journal of a Missionary to the Negroes in the State of Georgia,” CO, 31 August 1833, 21 February 1835.

  2. Savannah Unit, Georgia Writers’ Project, Work Projects Administration, Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes (Athens, Ga., 1986), passim, esp. 116.

  3. Lydia Parrish, Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands (1942; rpt. Athens, Ga., 1992), 45–47. For Dublin Scribben belonging to Benjamin Scriven, see census of church members by CCJ in 1845 entitled “Return of Members,” JTU.

  4. See, e.g., the Savannah Republican, 10 November 1820, 20 December 1820. See also Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, 1998).

  5. Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York, 1989), 17–21, 29–34. CCJ, “Journal of a Missionary to the Negroes in the State of Georgia,” CO, 7 September 1833. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York, 1987).

  6. For the debate among historians ove
r “African survivals” in the slave communities of the Western world, see Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (Boston: 1992); John Thornton, African and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 1992); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).

  7. There is a massive anthropological literature that seeks to understand or explain witchcraft, conjurers, and magic. A good entry point into the literature is Brian Morris, Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory Text (Cambridge, 1987).

  8. CCJ, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States (Savannah, 1842). I have not included under the category of “conjurer” the healers, like Dr. Harry at the Mallard Place, who drew on traditions of African medicine and on an African-American pharmacology. My reasons for this are that the two are clearly separated in the primary sources before me. See, however, Theophus Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (New York, 1994), esp., 5–6.

  9. CCJ, “Samuel Elliott’s Funeral Sermon,” CO, 13 October 1838. For CCJ’s comments on conjuring in light of Vesey and Turner, see “Journal of a Missionary to the Negroes in the State of Georgia,” CO, 21 September 1833.

  10. CCJ, CO, 13 October 1838. See also CCJ, CO, 22 September 1838, 6 October 1838.

  11. Work Projects Administration, Drums and Shadows, 112–119. Cf. Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (New York, 1998).

  12. CCJ, “Journal of a Missionary to the Negroes in the State of Georgia,” CO, 21 February 1835.

  13. Ibid. See also for the leadership role of the black preacher Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), 255–279.

  14. CCJ, “Journal of a Missionary to the Negroes in the State of Georgia,” CO, 21 September 1833.

  15. Work Projects Administration, Drums and Shadows, 114, 124–125.

  16. See James C. Scott, Domination and the Art of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990), 142–143. For slave use of poisons in the low country, see Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998), 614–618.

  17. CCJ, Thirteenth Annual Report of the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in Liberty County, Georgia (Savannah, 1848), 22. For the cultural significance of slave dancing, see Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 581–588, 592–593.

  18. Work Projects Administration, Drums and Shadows, 118. CCJ, “Journal of a Missionary to the Negroes in the State of Georgia,” CO, 25 January 1834. CCJ, Thirteenth Annual Report, 22.

  19. Malcolm Bell, Jr., Major Butler’s Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family (Athens, Ga., 1987), 151–152.

  20. For the development of the banjo, see Dena J. Polachek Epstein, “The Folk Banjo: A Documentary History,” Ethnomusicology 19, no. 3 (1975): 347–371. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 585.

  21. Cf. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 580–581.

  22. See MJ to MSJ, 12 June 1850, JTU. Cf. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1977), 6; and Dena J. Polachek Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana, Ill., 1977).

  23. Laura Maxwell Buttolph to MJ, 15 July 1857, JTU.

  24. “Watchmen in Newport Church, 1843,” JTU; “Watchmen in Midway Church, 1843,” JTU. For bush arbors and hush arbors, see Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York, 1978), 212–288; Janet Duitsman Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South (Columbia, S.C., 1999),8–12; Margaret Creel, “A Peculiar People”: Slave Religion and Community-Culture Among the Gullah (New York, 1988), 276–302.

  25. Parrish, Slave Songs, 161.

  26. “Slave Songs on a Mission,” Southern Christian Advocate [Charleston, S.C.], 29 December 1843.

  27. William Francis Allen, ed. Slave Songs of the United States (New York, 1867), 53.

  28. Parrish, Slave Songs, 165.

  29. Cf. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 251–263.

  30. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (Boston, 1870), 203.

  31. Allen, Slave Songs, 55.

  32. See W. E. B. DuBois, “The Sorrow Songs” in Souls of Black Folk (1902; rpt. Greenwich, Conn., 1961). See also Howard Thurman, Deep River (New York, 1945), 36.

  33. Parris, Slave Songs, 56–57.

  34. Ibid., 71–72. See also for the ring dance, Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 244–263.

  35. See “Minutes of the Session, Midway Congregational Church,” 1831–1832, PHSM. CCJ, “Journal of a Missionary to the Negroes in the State of Georgia,” CO, 17 August 1833, 7 March 1835, 25 January 1834. Cf. Clifton H. Johnson, ed. God Struck Me Dead: Religious Conversion Experiences and Autobiographies of Ex-Slaves (Philadelphia, 1969), 169–171.

  36. CCJ, “Journal of a Missionary to the Negroes in the State of Georgia,” CO, 17 August 1833, 25 January 1834.

  37. CCJ, “Journal of a Missionary to the Negroes in the State of Georgia,” CO, 17 August 1833.

  38. CCJ, “Simon the Sorcerer,” sermon preached 28 March 1834, JTU.

  39. CCJ, “Journal of a Missionary to the Negroes in the State of Georgia,” CO, 7 March 1835, 17 August 1833.

  40. CCJ, “Journal of a Missionary to the Negroes in the State of Georgia,” CO, 25 January 1834, 7 March 1835. For CCJ’s definition of a “new heart,” see CCJ, A Catechism for Colored Persons (Charleston, S.C., 1834), 99. A “new heart” involves both feelings and actions. Erskine Clarke, Our Southern Zion: A History of Calvinism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1690–1990 (Tuscaloosa, 1996), 9–23.

  41. CCJ, “Journal of a Missionary to the Negroes in the State of Georgia,” CO, 14 March 1835. For membership in the Societies, see CCJ, Eleventh Annual Report of the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in Liberty County, Georgia (Savannah, 1846), 19. For sacred meals among the Yoruba of west Africa, see J. Omosade Awolalu, Yoruba Beliefs and Sacrificial Rites (Essex, United Kingdom, 1979), esp. 134–182. For ritual as social drama, see Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y., 1974).

  42. “Journal of a Missionary to the Negroes in the State of Georgia,” CO, 21 February 1835.

  43. CCJ, “Journal of a Missionary to the Negroes in the State of Georgia,” CO, 28 February 1835. For slave funerals, see Raboteau, Slave Religion, 44–45, 71–72, 83–85; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 640–645; Creel, “A Peculiar People,” 313–317. Cf. Awolalu, Yoruba Beliefs and Sacrificial Rites, 53–68.

  14. COLUMBIA

  1. See Estate of Andrew Maybank in Account Current with C. C. Jones, Executor, Accounts Book, 1831–1838, PCLC. Minutes of the Board of Directors of the Theological Seminary, 1, 1827–1861, archives CTS.

  2. CCJ to William Plumer, 24 January 1835, 23 February 1835, PHSM. See “Proposed Society for the Religious Instruction of the Colored Population,” CO, 30 May 1835, 26 September 1835.

  3. CCJ to MJ, 2 November 1835, JTU.

  4. CCJ to MJ, 2 November 1835, JTU. CCJ to William Plumer, 28 June 1834, PHSM.

  5. Erskine Clarke, Our Southern Zion: A History of Calvinism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1690–1990 (Tuscaloosa, 1996), 144, 188–189.

  6. Liberator, 1 January 1831.

  7. Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens, Ga., 1987), 269–272.

  8. “Voice of the People,” CO, 11 August 1835. See Tise, Proslavery, 308–346.

  9. Whitemarsh B. Seabrook, An Essay on the Management of Slaves, and Especially, on their Religious Instruction: Read before the Agricultural Society of St. John’s Colleton (Charleston, 1834), 13–26.

  10. Cf. Tise, Proslavery, 317–318; Duitsman Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebe
llum South (Columbia, S.C., 1999), 91–97.

  11. For the social location and political and economic influence of Circular Congregational Church, see Clarke, Our Southern Zion, 142–164, 346–347; William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, The Web of Progress: Private Values and Public Styles in Boston and Charleston, 1824–1843 (New York, 1985). CCJ to MJ, 6 November 1835, JTU.

  12. CCJ to MJ, 5 November 1835, JTU.

  13. See Tise, Proslavery, 308–346; William Sumner Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South (Chapel Hill, 1935), 242–284. See responses of two Charleston clergy to claims of a dual origin of the races: Thomas Smyth, Unity of the Human Races (New York, 1850); John Bachman, The Doctrine of the Unity of the Human Race Examined on the Principles of Science (Charleston, S.C., 1850).

  14. CCJ to MJ, 5 November 1835, JTU.

  15. CCJ to MJ, 11 November 1835, JTU.

  16. CCJ to MJ, 16 November 1835, JTU; CCJ to William Plumer, 8 December 1835, PHSM.

  17. CCJ to William Plumer, 8 December 1835, PHSM; CCJ to MJ, 16 November, 1835, JTU.

  18. MJ to CCJ, 17 May 1837; CCJ to MJ, 23 May 1837; CCJ to MJ, 2 June 1837, JTU.

  19. CCJ to MJ, 18 November 1836, JTU; MJ to CCJ, 21 November 1836, JTU.

  20. CCJ to MJ, 19 May 1837, JTU. See also The Museums at Stony Brook, 19th Century American Carriages: Their Manufacture, Decoration and Use (Stony Brook, N.Y., 1987), 34–65. CCJ to EM, 8 February 1837, JTU; CCJ to EM, 14 May 1838, JTU.

  21. Robert Manson Myers, ed., The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven, 1972), 1555–1556. Louis C. LaMotte, Colored Light: The Story of the Influence of Columbia Theological Seminary, 1828–1936 (Richmond, 1937), 43. See Will of Andrew Walthour, Will Record, 1824–1850, PCLC for Sara Ann Walthour’s inheritance from her father. By 1860, Howe owned with Sara Ann eighty-six slaves and property valued at $60,000 in Liberty County. See Joseph Karl Mann, “The Large Slaveholders of the Deep South, 1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 1964), 739.