Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  15. Frank T. Schnell, Jr., Introduction, to CCJj, Antiquities, xxv, xix. For JJ’s medical and scientific career, see James O. Breeden, Joseph Jones, M.D., Scientist of the Old South (Lexington, Ky., 1975); Margaret Humphreys, Yellow Fever and the South (Baltimore, 1992).

  16. MSJM to MJ, 16 October 1860, JTU. Cf. CCJj to CCJ and MJ, 10 October 1857, JTU.

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

  18. MJ to CCJj, 22 May 1851, CJUG; MJ to MSJ, 10 December 1852, JTU; MJ to MSJM, 26 June 1857, JTU.

  19. CCJ to CCJj, 27 February 1852, CJUG; MJ to Laura Maxwell, 18 February 1850, JTU.

  20. For EM’s writing, see EM to CCJ, 17 June 1850, JTU; John Jones to CCJ, 8 October 1856, JTU. For EM’s relationship with her nieces and nephews, see CCJ to EM, 14 May 1838, JTU; EM to Laura Maxwell, 5 September 1845, JTU; EM to CCJ, 31 August 1846, JTU.

  21. CCJj to Mary Ruth Jones, 11 May 1888, JDU.

  22. MJ to CCJ, 5 November 1835, JTU. For MJ’s concern for the conversion of her children, see MJ to MSJ, 11 June 1847, JTU; MJ to CCJj 28 October 1850, CJUG.

  23. Cf. Audley Maxwell King to CCJj, 6 May 1850, JTU. For the Calvinist emphasis on “ordinary life,” see Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 211–233.

  24. See MPB, 10, JTU; CCJ to MJ, 2 April 1845, 17 April 1845, 10 February 1846, JTU; CCJ to WM, 3 April 1849, JTU.

  25. Cf. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myrna Bergman Ramos (New York, 1970).

  26. Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm so Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979), 450–456; Jacqueline Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks (Chapel Hill, 1980); Robert C. Morris, Reading, ‘Riting, and Reconstruction: The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861–1870 (Chicago, 1981).

  27. CCJ to MJ, 2 April 1845, 17 April 1845, 10 February 1846, JTU.

  28. For the character of oxen used in the rice-growing regions of South Carolina and Georgia, see Martin A. Garrett, Jr., “Evidence on the Use of Oxen in the Postbellum South,” Social Science History 22, no. 2 (Summer 1998). For the number of oxen at Montevideo, Maybank, and Arcadia during the 1850s, see, e.g., CCJ, “Stock on the three Plantations,” Almanac, June 1855, JTU.

  29. See “Photograph File,” JTU; CCJ to CCJj, 4 August 1858, CJUG; CCJ to CCJj, 10 May 1862, JTU; MJ, Journal, 4 January 1865, JTU.

  30. CCJj to Mary Ruth Jones, 11 May 1888, JDU; cf. CCJj’s account of Indian fishing in Antiquities, 332–340. For the tradition of slave fishermen in the low country, see Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), 201; Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998), 240–242. CCJ to MJ, 20 October 1856, JTU.

  31. For the work of slave women generally in the low country, see Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 194–203.

  32. CCJ, Eleventh Annual Report of the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in Liberty County, Georgia (Savannah, 1846), 9; Journal of MJ, 4 November 1866, JTU. See, e.g., CO, 12 October 1839, 26 October 1839, 12 September 1844, 19 October 1844, 16 November 1844.

  33. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1977), 99–100. CCJ, Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States, 130.

  34. James C. Scott, Domination and the Art of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990), 3–4, 31–36. CCJ, Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States, 110.

  35. Scott, Domination and the Art of Resistance, 157–166. Ras Michael Brown, “‘Walk in the Feenda’: West-Central Africans and the Forest in the South Carolina–Georgia Lowcountry,” in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, ed. Linda M. Heywood (Cambridge, 2002), 301–302.

  36. CCJj, Negro Myths from the Georgia Coast, Told in the Vernacular (1888; rpt. Columbia, S.C., 1925), 1–3. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 81–133, and Scott, Domination and the Art of Resistance, 162–166, have been particularly helpful for my analysis of these folktales.

  37. CCJj, Negro Myths, 50, 52, 37, 67.

  38. Ibid., 12–14, 64.

  39. For the trickster, see Will Coleman, Tribal Talk: Black Theology, Hermeneutics, and African/American Ways of “Telling the Story” (University Park, Pa., 2000), 20–23.

  40. CCJj, Negro Myths, 29–33. Cf. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 111; Scott, Domination and the Art of Resistance, 163.

  41. CCJj, Negro Myths, 108–110.

  42. Cf. Thomas L. Webber, Deep Like the Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community, 1831–1865 (New York, 1978), 131–139; Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington, Ind., 1995); Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 75–107.

  19. ARCADIA

  1. Note by JoJ, 16 February 1840, JJUG.

  2. See Martha Bulloch to JoJ, 15 December 1836, JJUG; JoJ to Martha Bulloch, 1 February 1837, JJUG; Till Bulloch to JoJ, 4 August 1837, JJUG.

  3. Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States in the Years 1853–1854, With Remarks on Their Economy (New York, 1856), vol. 2, 44–45. See also Carolyn Clay Swiggart, Shades of Gray: The Clay and McAllister Families of Bryan County, Georgia, During the Plantation Years (Darien, Conn., 1999) 13–26;

  4. John Dunwody to Eliz. Smith Dunwody, 22 December 1840, JJUG.

  5. Births, deaths, and genealogical information found in JosJ, Notes on Births and Deaths, n.d., CJUG; Bessie Anderson, “Grandmother’s Drawer,” July 1869, JTU.

  6. Cf. CCJ to EM, 7 April 1832, JTU.

  7. JosJ to JoJ, 21 October 1832, JJUG.

  8. Mathew 6:19–21. Those gathered included JosJ, CCJ, JoJ, WM, Thomas Clay, James Smith, George Washington McAllister, Richard J. Arnold, Henry M. Stevens, and John S. Maxwell. See JoJ to Jane Dunwody Jones, 28 April 1842, JJUG. For the size of their slave holdings, see Federal Census, 1840, Bryan County, Ga.; Federal Census, 1840, Liberty County, Ga.

  9. JoJ to Jane Dunwody Jones, 28 April 1842, JJUG; Obituary for MJ written by JoJ, JJUG.

  10. Note by JoJ, 14 May 1842, JJUG; CPB, 17. Cf. JoJ to MJ, 1 October 1850, JTU.

  11. County Record M, part 2, 600–603, SCLC; Bonaventure Plantation file in JJUG. See also James Newton Jones to JoJ, 19 February 1845, JJUG; CCJ to Jane Dunwody Jones, 10 September 1846, JJUG; MJ to JoJ, 30 July 1847, JJUG.

  12. See Last Will and Testament of JosJ, Will Record, 1824–1850, PCLC; Inventory, Appraisement and Division of the Estate of Jos. Jones, Will Record, 1824–1850, PCLC.

  13. For the record of births and deaths at Carlawter and Maybank, see CPB, 64–73. For the births and deaths of slaves of SJMC, Laura Maxwell, and Charles Edward Maxwell, see MPB, 39–40, 46–47. For a statistical summary, giving age, gender, and month of births and deaths at Montevideo, see “Statistics of Montevideo drawn up by JJ, May 16, 1861,” CPB. For overviews of demographic studies on slave populations, see Robert William Fo gel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York, 1989), 114–153; William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (New York, 1996), 410–416, 441–451; Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998), 79–95.

  14. Will of Audley Maxwell, 27 March 1834, Will Record 1824–1850, PCLC. For the purchase of Lambert, see County Record O, 12–14, SCLC.

  15. “Minutes of the Session, Midway Congregational Church,” 1830–1840, PHFM. “A List of Negroes and other personal property of Estate John Lambert, 29th June 1837,” JJUG. For the act of the Georgia legislature allowing the sale of the Lambert Estate and the investment of the funds “in stocks, or such other property, as in their discretion they may deem best,” see Acts of the General Assembly of the St
ate of Georgia Passed in Milledgeville at an Annual Session in November and December 1838 (Milledgeville, 1839), 148–149.

  16. “List of Negroes at Lambert Plantation, May 1, 1848,” MPB, 39–40; Will of Andrew Maybank, 13 January 1834, Will Record, 1824–1850, PCLC; Will of Audley Maxwell, 27 March 1834, Will Record 1824–1850, PCLC.

  17. “List of Negroes belonging to Mrs. S. M. Cumming at White Oak Plantation, May 1, 1848,” MPB, 46–47.

  18. For the details on Arcadia, see “Tax Returns of CCJ and Wife MJ for the year 1847,”CPB, 59; CCJ to JoJ, 26 March 1846, JJUG. Plat of Arcadia, drawn by W. Hughes, 25 August 1856, CJUG.

  19. “Statistics of Arcadia drawn up by JJ, May 16, 1861: Population January 1846,” CPB; CCJ to WM, 21 September 1848, JTU; MJ to CCJj, 19 February 1863, CJUG; MJ to JoJ, 1 December 1865, JJUG; MJ to MSJM, 9 December 1865, JTU.

  20. Robert Manson Myers, ed. The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven, 1972), 1567; MSJM to MJ, 18 March 1865, JTU; HHJ to JoJ, “Confidential Note,” 6 February 1860, in JJUG.

  21. CCJ to MJ, 5 October 1844, 5 August 1845, JTU; Evelyn Jones Anderson to MJ, 6 September 1845, JTU; MJ to CCJj, 11 May 1854, CJUG; CCJ to CCJj, 17 March 1860, CJUG; SJMC to “Dear Cousin,” 12 April 1866, JTU.

  22. Myers, Children of Pride, 1571–1572; JoJ to MJ, 9 April 1851, JTU; James Newton Jones to JoJ, 13 June 1853, JJUG; CCJ to CCJj, 9 October 1854, CJUG. EM to Laura Maxwell, 5 September 1845, JTU. Julia King to MJ, 9 November 1845, JTU. James Newton Jones to MJ, 24 September 1845, JTU.

  23. Charles Edward Maxwell to MJ, 27 November 1845, JTU. A copy of MJ’s response to Julia King was written on Julia King’s letter to MJ, 9 November 1845, JTU. Myers, Children of Pride, 1571–1572, 1721.

  24. See Laura Maxwell to MJ, 23 October 1844, 31 October 1844, 17 August 1847, JTU.

  25. HHJ to MJ, 8 May 1844, JTU.

  26. Rebecca Mallard to RQM, 30 January 1850, JTU.

  27. Henry Hart Jones to MJ, 19 August 1848, JTU. For a careful exploration of the dynamics of sex and race in the antebellum South, see Catherine Clinton, “Caught in the Web of the Big House: Women and Slavery,” in Women and the Family in a Slave Society, ed. Paul Finkelman (New York, 1989), 9–24.

  28. Myers, Children of Pride, 1570–1571. Rebecca Mallard to RQM, 5 March 1850, JTU.

  29. Myers, Children of Pride, 1544.

  30. Julia King to MJ, 20 August 1846, JTU.

  31. MJ to EM, 24 September, 1846, JTU; Last Will and Testament of JosJ, Will Record, 1824–1850, PCLC.

  32. See Susan Cumming to MJ, 16 September 1851, JTU.

  33. The account of JosJ’s accident and death is drawn from the nineteen pages of CCJ, “Some Account of my Dear & Honored Father’s Death,” 21 October 1846, JTU. See also CCJ, “Obituary of Capt. JosJ,” 18 October 1846, JTU.

  34. JoJ to MJ, 12 October 1847, JTU.

  35. JoJ to MJ, 9 April 1851, JTU.

  20. THE RETREAT II

  1. Proceedings of the Meeting in Charleston, S.C., May 13–14, on the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, Together with the Report of the Committee, and the Address to the Public (Charleston, 1845), 3, 4. See Erskine Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob: A Portrait of Religion in the Old South (Atlanta, 1979), 100–107; Barbara Bellows, Benevolence Among Slaveholders: Assisting the Poor in Charleston, 1670–1860 (Baton Rouge, 1993).

  2. William McWhir to MJ, 15 May 1845, JTU.

  3. Quoted in Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South 1820–1860 (New York, 1967), 10–12.

  4. For the Charleston slave trade and the importance of Chalmers Street in the trade, see Frederic Bancroft, Slave Trading in the Old South (New York, 1931), 165–196.

  5. For the expansion of slavery to the western states, see Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York, 1989), 64–72; Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 161–244.

  6. Charleston Mercury, 12 May 1845.

  7. Proceedings of the Meeting in Charleston, S.C., 15.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Ibid. CCJ to MJ, 18 May 1830, JTU. Drayton Grimké was the brother of the abolitionists Sara and Angelina Grimké. See Catherine H. Birney, The Grimké Sisters: Sara and Angelina Grimké, the First American Women Advocates of Abolition and Woman’s Rights (Westport, Conn., 1969).

  10. Proceedings of the Meeting in Charleston, S.C., 15.

  11. Ibid., 15–17.

  12. CO, 24 May 1845; Proceedings of the Meeting in Charleston, S.C., 18.

  13. CCJ, Eleventh Annual Report of the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in Liberty County, Georgia (Savannah, 1846), 34. For CCJ’s reflections on the changes in the South during the previous ten years, see ibid., 23; Thirteenth Annual Report of the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in Liberty County, Georgia (Savannah, 1848), 57. See also Janet Duitsman Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South (Columbia, S.C., 1999), 103–123.

  14. John Jones, “Memorial of Charles Colcock Jones, D.D.,” in Memorial Volume of the Semin-Centennial of the Theological Seminary at Columbia, South Carolina (Columbia, 1884), 197; CCJ, Eleventh Annual Report, 21; CCJ, Thirteenth Annual Report, 58–67. Cf. also Donald G. Mathews, “Charles Colcock Jones and the Southern Evangelical Crusade to Form a Biracial Community,” Journal of Southern History 41 (August 1975): 299–320; Eduard N. Loring, “Charles C. Jones: Missionary to Plantation Slaves 1831–1847” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1976), 152–290.

  15. CCJ, Tenth Annual Report of the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in Liberty County, Georgia (Savannah, 1845), 24–36; CCJ, Eleventh Annual Report, 7–10; CCJ, Twelfth Annual Report of the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in Liberty County, Georgia (Savannah, 1847), 4–9; CCJ, Thirteenth Annual Report, 4–10. CCJ, Tenth Annual Report, 6; “Minutes of the Session, Midway Congregational Church,” 18 February 1839, 15 August 1840, PHSM; “Minutes of the Watchman’s Meeting for Midway Church,” 8 March 1840, JTU.

  16. CCJ, Twelfth Annual Report, 11–12.

  17. CCJ, “Return of Members,” 1846, JTU; CCJ, Twelfth Annual Report, 11–12.

  18. CCJ, “Return of Members;” CCJ, Twelfth Annual Report, 13.

  19. CCJ, Twelfth Annual Report, 13. Cf. CCJ, Seventh Annual Report, 5. For white members in Midway, see “List of Church Members” and “Deaths” in James Stacy, The Published Records of Midway Church (Newnan, Ga., 1894), 144–154, 157–163. The total number at any one period does not exceed 350. For the few white members of the Baptist Churches during this period, see Minutes of the Thirty-First Anniversary of the Sun-bury Baptist Association, Convened at Walthourville Baptist Church, Liberty County, Georgia (Savannah, 1848), 5.

  20. CCJ, Eleventh Annual Report, 16.

  21. CCJ, Twelfth Annual Report, 14–17. For property owned by slaves in Liberty County, see 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. CCJ, Twelfth Annual Report, 17–18.

  22. CCJ, Thirteenth Annual Report, 14–15.

  23. For the larger nineteenth-century context of CCJ’s reform and benevolent efforts, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (New York, 1991); Gertrude Himmelfarb, The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (New York, 1995).

  24. Last Will and Testament of Joseph Jones, Will Record, 1824–1850, PCLC.

  25. Inventory, Appraisement, and Division of the Estate of Joseph Jones, 15 December 1846, Will Record, 1824–1850, PCLC.

  26. CCJ to Elizabeth S. L. Jones, 21 December 1846, JTU; CCJ to R. N. Charlton and William Law, 4 November 1848, CJUG.

  27.
Last Will and Testament of Joseph Jones, Will Record, 1824–1850, PCLC.

  28. CCJ to James Newton Jones, 6 March 1847, JTU; CCJ, “Memorandum” 1847, JTU. CCJ to EM, 29 July 1849, JTU; MJ to MSJM, 31 July 1862, JTU.

  29. C. B. Jones to MJ, 27 December 1851, 17 June 1854, JTU.

  21. COLUMBIA II

  1. CPB, 64–73; “List of Negroes on Lambert Plantation, May 1, 1848,” “List of Negroes Belonging to Mrs. S. M. Cumming at White Oak Plantation, May 1, 1848,” MPB, 39–46.

  2. Robert Manson Myers, ed. The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven, 1972), 1674–1675.

  3. Eliza Sumner Martin, “Flemington,” in Liberty County, Georgia: A Pictorial History compiled by Virginia Fraser Evans (Statesville, N.C., 1979), 79–94. Undated note on death of Rahn child, apparently 1849, from Ezra Stacy to CCJ, JTU. MJ to CCJ, 5 January 1852, JTU.

  4. Cf. Audley King to CCJ, 21 July 1857, JTU. See, e.g., CCJ to WM, 2 February 1849, JTU.

  5. CCJ, Thirteenth Annual Report of the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in Liberty County, Georgia (Savannah, 1848), 10.

  6. Ibid., 67; Rebecca Eliza Mallard to RQM, 22 January 1848, JTU; Papers of the Estate of John Lambert, IV, 1847–1851, GHS. Myers, Children of Pride, 1735.

  7. CPB, 68; MJ to Laura Maxwell, 17 August 1848, JTU; CPB, 67–68.

  8. CCJ to TS, 14 December 1848, JTU; CCJ to William and Betsy Maxwell, 17 April 1850, JTU; CCJj to Mary Ruth Jones, 11 May 1888, JDU.

  9. CCJ to William and Betsy Maxwell, 17 April 1850, JTU. For slaves’ recognition of white dependence, see Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (Boston, 1992), 6, 27; cf. also Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998), 334–337.

  10. MPB, 4.

  11. JoJ to MJ, 27 October 1847, JTU.

  12. JoJ to MJ, 19 July 1847, JTU.

  13. JoJ to MJ, 1 June 1848, JTU.