Dwelling Place Read online

  The move to Savannah was not easy for the fourteen-year-old Mary, for she had grown to love the marshes and rivers of the low country and the quiet ways of plantation life. Only after she had been in Savannah for some months could she write her father that the “city to me commences to wear a new aspect.” It had appeared at first, she said, very lonesome, “but as I gradually became better acquainted with tall brick buildings and flat roofed tabbies and turned to exchange the beautiful and rural scenes of nature for the cramped and conceited works of the city, it appeared a little more cheerful.” All too obviously city life—even that of the small and attractive city of Savannah—was not too cheerful for Mary however much she struggled to put the best face on her feelings. “Although it was strange at first to be continually meeting new faces, to hear, instead of the sweet warbler of the grove, the cry of some hoarse fisherman, the change indeed was strange, but I have become quite accustomed to it, and begin to feel myself perfectly at home.”2 In fact, she never was fully at home in the city. Her heart was too much in the country at the Retreat and in its surrounding landscape, and her reaction as a teenager to Savannah was to be repeated in other cities in the years ahead.

  What helped with Mary’s homesickness, however, was the presence in Savannah of family and friends. Planters and their families flowed in and out of the city, visiting and shopping and seeing after supplies for their plantations. Some planters maintained handsome residences in Savannah as well as homes on their plantations, and nota few successful Savannah commission merchants and bankers owned plantations they would visit during balmy winter weather and during early spring days when the woods were filled with blooming jasmine. Among those who came and went from the city was Mary’s cousin Susan Jones, who had married James Audley Maxwell a few months after Mary’s arrival in the city. A handsome young man, Audley belonged through his father, Colonel Audley Maxwell, to one of the oldest Liberty County families. They had been instrumental in the establishment of Sunbury and owned a large plantation, Carnickfergus, on the Medway and a summer home, Social Bluff, on Colonel’s Island not far from Orange Grove plantation. While wealthy and respectable, the Maxwells carried the embarrassing memory of the first Liberty County Maxwell’s suspension from Midway Church for keeping a slave woman as his mistress.3

  Young Audley was a cotton factor in Savannah and was already making aname for himself in the business by the time of his marriage. He and Susan moved with ease between their comfortable home in Savannah, where Mary and Charles were visitors, and his family’s home on Colonel’s Island. At Social Bluff they had the front bedroom, and from its windows they could see the wide expanse of the North Newport as it emptied into St. Catherine’s Sound. Here in the summer of 1824, Susan gave birth to a little girl, Laura Elizabeth, who quickly won the affection of her two teenaged relatives Mary and Charles. “Laura is certainly a fine child,” the eighteen-year-old Charles wrote a few months later to sister Betsy, and then added in a rather surprised way, “I think more of it than I expected.”4

  The Maxwell home served as a gathering place for their extended relations and many friends. Audley’s youngest sister Julia was Mary’s age, and the two young women soon developed a friendship that was to last longer and be closer than either one of them could have expected. They were all part of Savannah’s elite, and they visited with ease among Bullochs and Habershams, Clays, Stileses, and Elliotts. Such a social setting allowed Charles and Mary and their young friends to refine their sensitivities to the rules of etiquette and to finely tune their ears to the coded messages of southern manners. They were learning not simply the grammar of good taste and decorum, so carefully maintained by the guardians of respectability, but a way to safely navigate the dangerous waters of a slave society. They needed to know when to speak and when not to speak, when to be direct and when to be oblique. And they needed to know what could be said only before family, and what one never talked about except in the most restricted circumstances.5 Learning such manners would play an important part in shaping the character of Charles and Mary and the other young southerners among whom they moved. Indeed, a natural and easy use of such manners, especially in the service of a generous hospitality, was a distinguishing mark of southern elites. Few exceeded the Jones cousins in mastering the nuances of these manners, and in the years ahead few practiced southern hospitality in more winsome ways.

  In the spring of 1825, however, Charles was making plans that would place him in a different social and cultural context, one that would demand a different set of manners—those of New England. His decision the previous summer to become a minister meant that he was thinking about a theological education and his own readiness to undertake such an endeavor. His thinking about such matters had been temporarily interrupted when U.S. Senator John Elliot offered to secure a place at West Point for him. But Charles had quickly put that behind him and had pressed ahead in his plans for the ministry. As it happened, Ebenezer Porter, professor at Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, was also a friend of the family. Porter was a frequent visitor to Liberty County, had preached at Midway, and had stayed at General Stewart’s plantation. Andover, the oldest theological seminary in the country, had set the pattern for those that followed—a graduate professional institution with a three-year curriculum. The requirement of a college education for admission was intended to ensure that entering students had the philosophical and linguistic background provided by a collegiate education and the general culture and manners taught in the colleges. Charles’s problem was that while he had learned about the cotton and rice markets, he knew no Latin, much less Greek. Porter realized, however, that Charles was a well-read young man, that he had received a sound foundation at McWhir’s academy, and that he held genuine promise as a minister. He therefore suggested that Charles enter Phillips Academy, also in Andover, in order to prepare himself for an entrance exam into the seminary. Charles left Savannah in April, and on 12 May 1825 he entered Phillips as a nineteen-year-old preparing to take up for the first time a Latin grammar.6

  Mary stayed in Savannah for another two years. The most important event for her during these years was the marriage of her friend Julia Maxwell to Roswell King, Jr., of St. Simons Island. King’s father, Roswell, Sr., had come from Connecticut to the little town of Darien, south of Sunbury, and had established there a flourishing lumber, rice, and cotton business. For eighteen years the senior King had also been the manager of Pierce Butler’s vast rice and cotton plantations on the Altamaha River and on St. Simons Island, and it was this Roswell King who had been so furious when some of the Butler slaves had sought their freedom with the British in 1815. When the senior Roswell retired in 1818 to run his own extensive business interests, his namesake had taken over the management of the Butler estates. Only twenty-four at the time, young Roswell followed his father in the supervision of more than 530 slaves scattered over several plantations, some of which were divided by the wide and muddy marshes of the Altamaha estuary.7 Roswell, Jr., had thrown himself into the task of overseeing such an estate and soon had made a name for himself as a prudent and skillful manager. He represented a transitional figure among southern planters as they were moving from the austere code of patriarchalism to a paternalism that emphasized owners’ solicitude for their slaves. The new paternalism that was emerging was part of nineteenth-century romanticism, and it was increasingly influenced by evangelical sensibilities.8 Young Roswell was neither a romantic nor an evangelical, and he had no paternalistic assumptions about happy slaves who were content with their lot and grateful for the kindness of their owners. His was more of a utilitarian approach to the management of slaves, a belief that clear rules, fairly and consistently administered with some flexibility, would make for more orderly slaves and a more efficient plantation. But he also thought kindness important: “Slave owners cannot be too particular,” he insisted, “to whom he intrust the health (I may say life) and morals of what may justly be termed the sinews of an estate. A master, or overseer, should
be the kind friend and monitor to the slave, not the oppressor.” In the years ahead, not a few would wonder whether Roswell King, Jr., practiced what he preached.9

  The wedding of young Roswell and Julia Maxwell was held in October 1825, with Dr. McWhir, a friend of both families, officiating. “I commission you,” wrote Charles from Massachusetts to his sister Betsy and her husband William, “to give my congratulations to the bride, and Brother to touch a glass to the groom.”10

  Marriages within such planting families, like deaths within planting families, had an impact on the men, women, and children who lived in the settlements. Julia brought into her marriage slaves she had received as a gift of her father, Colonel Audley Maxwell. And Roswell had been steadily increasing the number of slaves he himself owned. What Julia King did not know, however, when she said her wedding vows, was that among the slaves living in the Butler settlements were three of her husband’s children by two different slave women. In the years ahead their presence and their parentage were among the subjects that good manners left unmentioned in the parlors and on the piazzas of St. Simons and Liberty County. It would take an outsider, one unrestrained by the rules of southern manners and eager to make a case against slavery, to publicly acknowledge this side of Roswell King’s life.11

  In early winter 1827 Mary left Savannah and at last returned home to the Retreat. She was a lively and headstrong eighteen-year-old, already well set in her own ways, but she was moving back into a home that had been transformed since 1820, when she had gone away to Barsden Bluff. Joseph Jones and his young wife, Elizabeth, had had four children in the seven years since their marriage—Charles Berrien had been born their first year together; then had come Evelyn Elouisa in 1822, Henry Hart in 1823, and James Newton in 1825. If Mary continued to be polite but cool to her stepmother, she quickly gave her heart to her little brothers and sister. And they reciprocated, looking on her as an affectionate big sister who possessed much of their father’s common sense and iron will. Even Charles Berrien, who was his mamma’s boy, as an adult looked to Mary in times of crisis rather than to his mother, who always remained, even through her coming sorrows, something of a young bride dependent on others.12

  Of all the children, however, Mary was closest to her brother John, the only other surviving child of Sarah Anderson. He was a precocious twelve-year-old when Mary came back to the Retreat, and he already possessed a charm that covered a decided tendency to procrastination. He never met a stranger, and all who knew him were drawn to him by the warmth of his personality. Mary tried, without much success, to instill some of her own self-discipline into her brother. His cousin Charles later remarked that he had been a “wayward boy,” but that did not keep him from being a favorite of all in the Jones household.13

  Joseph Maybank Jones, the oldest of all the Jones children, had, after his study at Barsden Bluff with Mary, gone to Savannah and taken up the study of law. While still calling the Retreat home, Joseph Maybank had been elected to the state legislature in 1827 and was soon to enter the debate in the legislature about how the state should handle the Cherokees and their lands in north Georgia. When Marycame home in 1827, he was also thinking about setting himself up as a planter. He had his eye on some land on Colonel’s Island for raising Sea Island cotton, and he wrote his father to request a portion of his inheritance in slaves. His father complied and deeded over to his oldest son two families of slaves, twelve in all. Father and son agreed that the slaves would remain under the father’s management at the Retreat until young Joseph was ready to start planting. Neither Mary nor anyone else at the Retreat, white or black, knew of this transaction between the two Josephs, and when it was revealed, it was to bring into the open the tensions between Mary and her stepmother, Elizabeth.14

  In addition to the mother and father and the seven children at the Retreat, Elizabeth’s widowed mother, Mary Scriven Hart, was also a part of the household. And of course sister Eliza Robarts and her three children were frequent visitors during the winter months, and other relatives and friends came to enjoy the generous hospitality of the Retreat, so that it was a full and lively plantation home, where good manners were used to lubricate such close contacts and to keep all these relatives and friends from rubbing each other the wrong way. Also needed, of course, was a full staff of house slaves to do the cooking of meals, the washing of clothes, the cleaning of chambers and chamber pots, and the minding of children. Jack and Sylvia had the primary responsibility to see that all ran smoothly—that the meals were prepared on time, that the table was properly set, that the washing and cleaning were done as expected, and that guests were welcomed with grace and efficiency. Among those who helped with these myriad tasks was Jack’s daughter Phoebe.

  When Mary had arrived at the Retreat, she found that her father had named Phoebe to be her body servant. The mistress was eighteen and the maid seventeen. Both were strong, smart, and talented young women. Both had fathers who were respected and well known for their strength of character, and both had lost their mothers. Both were, in their own circles, elite, privileged daughters of influential fathers. But Mary was free and Phoebe was her slave, and the bitter distance between the slave and the free, between the white and the black, was the fundamental reality of these young women as their lives became bound together and as each inescapably encountered the humanity of the other.

  For Phoebe the injustice of this distance and the oppression of its power would long weigh on her like a great lid that kept her emotions under control and caused them to boil with rage beneath a submissive exterior. The consequence was that more than most in the settlements she became a person with two lives—she was the servant on whom her strong-willed mistress would increasingly depend, and she was a restless spirit struggling to be free, to find places where the pressure could safely be released and the rage exposed.

  Phoebe learned the art of sewing and became a skilled seamstress. She became as well, in Charles’s words, an “accomplished house servant in any and every line: good cook, washer and ironer.”15 But more than all of this, she became the person who best knew Mary’s habits, who could best anticipate her needs, and who could most skillfully meet them. Most of the time as Phoebe went about her work, she bit her tongue, choked back her rage, and conquered the impulse of open defiance. Moreover, she generally managed to be cheerful and not sullen or moody. But there was an edge to her, and Mary knew that an impulsive rage lay near the surface of Phoebe’s cheerful demeanor, submissive manner, and careful speech.16

  If Phoebe managed to keep her rage from erupting in front of whites, she was not able to keep from being impulsive in other areas of her life. She had had a child, a daughter Clarissa, when she was barely sixteen, a full four years before most of the women in the low-country settlements had children.17 Clarissa’s father was unknown to the whites and apparently never openly claimed his daughter, and Phoebe was herself not a particularly attentive mother. She had, to be sure, the demanding work of a body servant that took most of the hours of her day. But she never had, as did many slave mothers, a focus on protecting her family or a strong interest in making the life of her children easier. Her restless spirit, so carefully controlled during her long hours in front of whites, sought freedom elsewhere as a part of the bitter price of slavery. If she never fit the image of a “Jezebel” that whites imposed on some slave women—of a troublesome, lusty wench—her fierce restlessness was troubling for whites even as she was valuable to them.18 For Clarissa her mother’s restlessness meant that, even though she was the granddaughter of Jack and the daughter of Phoebe, she was to grow up on the margin and not at the center of the slave community. With the brief exception of a few months, she was never a house servant like her mother and grandfather, and as an adult she lived at the edge of the settlements and was not closely linked to a web of family connections.

  By the winter of 1827 Charles had been at Phillips Academy for almost two years. He had plunged into his studies, especially the classical languages: he was already r
eading Latin and had gotten far enough in his Greek that he hoped to be able to pass the entrance exams to the seminary in late spring. He had been developing habits of hard study and a daily schedule that included morning and evening devotionals and long walks in the New England countryside—during a break, he wrote those at home, he had walked forty miles to Plymouth “to shake down my bones.” And he was learning about himself in new ways and about how others saw him. Some at Phillips regarded him as wealthy. They were inclined, he wrote home, to “give a southern man credit for just three times as much as he is worth, and to exact in proportion.” “The lady who attends to the affairs at commons hall asked me to tell them who was in the right, the one who said I was very rich or the other who said very poor. I reiterated ‘poor, very poor, poor, very poor’ as long as my business lasted and came off leaving her crying out for ‘rich.’”19

  But Charles was also homesick for Liberty County. “I am,” he wrote sister Betsy, “very often with you at Orange Grove in my dreams by night and my thoughts by day.”20 He sent greetings to General and Mrs. Stewart. “Remember me,” he wrote “to Aunt and Uncle Stewart. Tell them I think of them a great deal and would give much to spend time with them as I have in days past.”21 And he thought a lot about those who lived in the settlements—about Rosetta and her family, Jack and Sylvia, Lizzy and young Cato and Cassius, and the others at Carlawter, the Retreat, and Orange Grove. “Please tell the black people,” he wrote, “they are remembered.” When he learned that old Hannah had died, he was melancholy. She had lived at Liberty Hall and had been purchased by Joseph Jones in Riceboro in 1808. While she suffered from senility in her last years, she represented a link with the past. He wrote his sister Betsy: