Dwelling Place Page 13

  “I feel like another man,” he wrote from Savannah, “and for you, dear Mary, next to God and Christ, I wish to live. Duty to my Master requires that I should not see your face for some time…. But we can pour out our hearts to each other in our letters. We can be companions, although the ocean rolls between us.”41

  8

  PRINCETON

  Charles did not know it when he left Liberty in the spring of 1829, but the next year and a half were to be the most important period in his life. During the coming months he was plunged into a moral and spiritual crisis the likes of which he had never known and the likes of which he would never again experience. Deeply competing impulses were at the heart of the crisis, each impulse vying for his loyalty, each making its claims on his life. The crisis, at its simplest, was a competition between his sense of duty, with all of its deeply held religious convictions, and his love of his Liberty County home, with all of its associations and memories. The precipitating issue was vocational—what calling should he follow in his ministry?—but the fundamental issue was slavery and his relationship to it. The crisis was intensified, and perhaps made possible, by his distance from home during his coming months in the North and by his exposure to antislavery leaders. But the crisis was also intensified by his sense that duty and home ought somehow to overlap each other, that he ought somehow to be able to do his duty without giving up his southern home with its rivers and marshes, its plantations and people whom he loved.

  The trip north was itself a respite. To become engaged to Mary and then to stand beside General Stewart as he died had left Charles emotionally exhausted and ready for the rest that a sailing ship could provide. As the brig headed out to sea, he watched the river ripple with schools of mullet and sturgeon. At sea he delighted in the porpoises that played in the evenings under the bow of the ship, creating a phosphorescence that illumined their bodies and the wake of their passage. They resembled, he thought, “torches borne rapidly through the deep with their flame and sparks trailing after them.” He watched a whale breach and spout water in a jet “like an engine, but in a white foamy spray,” and he stayed on deck during a storm that left him marveling at the power of God and “the sublimity in such a scene.”1

  Charles landed in Philadelphia, then took the stage to New York and a steamboat to New Haven. After visiting some friends at Yale, he traveled to Hartford, where he spent a day with his friend Catharine Beecher, daughter of Lyman Beecher, the most influential Protestant clergyman in the country. Charles and Catharine had been friends since his early days in Andover, and he knew her to be an educator and social reformer of remarkable strength. She had founded in 1823 the Hartford Female Seminary, an academy forhigher education for women noted for its happy atmosphere and rigorous academic standards. Catharine was an early feminist, but one who wanted to expand the role and power of women in the home, where they would shape the future of the republic by carefully teaching and nurturing the children of a young nation.2

  Catharine warmly welcomed her southern friend who had visited her at the school two years earlier. “She led me,” Charles wrote Mary, “to the seat of the Teacher at the upper end of the hall, and said to me as we passed along, with all eyes turned upon ‘Mr. Jones,’ ‘Can you face 120 young ladies?’” Charles did and was immediately struck by the way Catharine insisted that her students “understand the principles of their particular studies.” As a reformer she was urging that ornamental education for girls—an education that emphasized painting, embroidery, and piano—be replaced by an education that taught the disciplines of rationality and persistence. In her best-selling Treatise on Domestic Economy she later wrote: “The success of democratic institutions, as is conceded by all, depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the mass of the people.” And she added, “If they are intelligent and virtuous democracy is a blessing; but if they are ignorant and wicked, it is only a curse.” And so, she insisted, there was a need for teachers in the homes and schools of the land who could help raise the intellectual and moral character of the mass of the people. Charles agreed completely with such sentiments, and he wondered about the implications for the “mass of the people” at Carlawter and the Retreat and the other settlements and quarters across the South.3

  In the afternoon Charles and Catharine rode horseback out to Weathers field to see the new prison there—an example of the prison reform movement—and then rode slowly back together, “beguiling our way,” he wrote Mary, “with interesting conversation” while they admired the beauty of the Connecticut River valley. “It was one of those evenings in spring that almost incline us to wish them no end.” The two of them took tea alone and spent the rest of the evening together with Catharine’s sister Mrs. Mary Beecher Perkins. The day provided an opportunity for conversation about Charles’s own calling and for Catharine to express her strong antislavery sentiments. Perhaps Charles mentioned to her Lizzy or Rosetta or Old Jupiter. He did tell her of Mary and their engagement. He left about nine o’clock, not having met on this trip Catharine’s younger sister Harriett, who in a few months was to join Catharine at the Hartford seminary. Years later, when Harriett wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she verified her picture of slavery in part by referring to the writings of her sister’s friend from the South, Charles Jones.4

  Charles paid a quick visit to his friends Lowell and Abigail Mason in Boston and then went on to Andover. In spite of his love for much of what he knew of New England, he had already made up his mind to leave Andover and go to Princeton. He wrote Joseph about the reasons for his decision. The weather was bad and the climate “too far north for my constitution.” Dr. Porter was in feeble health and there was consequently no professor of ecclesiastical history, the area of Charles’s special interest. But the real issue was cultural. “I am rather too far north, and should like to get into society a little more southern, or at any rate, a society not so entirely northern.” Besides, he wrote, “To graduate from Princeton will help my popularity (if that is to be considered) at home more than to graduate at Andover.” Princeton, in its composition and social character, was clearly not so much a Yankee institution as Andover. If Charles were to graduate from Andover, his theological orthodoxy, his manners, and his views on slavery would be suspect at home. “I think,” he wrote Mary, that “it would be of advantage to reside among those who are more congenial in their manners and feelings and aims, and at a place where I shall be brought more in contact with the people and the field that shall claim my labours as a minister very shortly.”5

  Charles, however, was deeply ambivalent about New England and its manners and people, and his move south to Princeton was part of the struggle that marked this period of his life. Friends in Georgia worried that during his years in the North he had become a Yankee, with cool manners and distant ways. Some of his friends, Mary had written him earlier, “entertained serious fears lest the cold, calculating temperature of a Yankee climate might chill in your affections those to whom you were and still are ever dear.”6 Even strangers would think him a Yankee and be surprised when they discovered he was from Georgia. Charles, in fact, had come to admire deeply much about New England—especially what he regarded as its orderly landscape and calm and virtuous ways. And if, in later years, he changed his tune, his admiration for New England ways and values was genuine and a part of his intense struggle during his last months in the North.7

  While Charles was busy making his move to Princeton, Mary was following the familiar routines of Liberty County. She moved with the family to Sunbury for the summer and fall and entered into the social life of the little village. There were visits to Colonel’s Island and to the summer cottage of Colonel and Mrs. Maybank to enjoy the seafood served at “The Hut,” and to Laurel View to see Betsy and William and Susan and the children. But there were also sorrows to be borne. During the sickly season of late summer and early fall, General Stewart’s wife died, her sufferings at the end “being very great.” And little Georgia Maxwell, Susan’s youngest, was taken with
a fever. “The agony of her disease,” wrote Mary, “was most heartrending to behold” as the child was in convulsions for up to three and a half hours at a time, and nothing could stop the course of the deadly fevers.8 And then Mary’s closest friend, Hetty Dunwody, was struck down. They had been in school together at Barsden Bluff and had spent time together in Savannah. Seeing “the lonely grave closed upon her” had been a severe shock to Mary. Charles, moved by Mary’s grief, wrote back: “We live in a vast charnel-house. The living fall dead by our side day after day, nor do we know but that the sword will smite us next.”9

  After the death of Georgia, Susan took Laura and Charles Edward and went to St. Simons for a long visit with Julia and Roswell King. Betsy and William went with them to the island. With its long beach, balmy fall weather, and the hospitable home of the Kings, it seemed a good place to heal the shock of Georgia’s death.10

  Left behind in Liberty County, a grieving Mary returned to the Retreat in late November 1829 and sat down to write a response to a letter from Charles. He was feeling increasingly agitated by the question of slavery and by the ways it was tearing at him. He felt that he must know Mary’s views on the subject. Was she feeling some of the same conflict that he felt?11

  Writing from her garret room at the Retreat, with Phoebe no doubt nearby, Mary wrote that while she had scarcely formed any definite views on slavery, she would state her feelings. “In many respects my feelings are not unlike your own. With you I think it one of the greatest curses any nation or people should have to contend with. Its effects I think most deleterious to the advancement not only of morals but science, to decided energetic improvement.” She also thought it “a great hindrance to the growth of grace in the Christian’s heart.” The principle of slavery, she insisted, “must be revolting to every feeling and reflective mind and the only efficient obviation of the evil—total abolition.”

  But even in declaring slavery such an evil, Mary did not think emancipation could be accomplished immediately, and when accomplished, it would take the national government’s involvement to compensate slave owners, “for there are not many individuals who would be willing to beggar their dependent families through such philanthropic motives.” Then, echoing sentiments not so distant from those of Catharine Beecher on “the mass of the people,” she wrote:

  Neither do I think it would at all promote the slave’s interest to liberate him in his present degraded state. You might almost as soon contend for the emancipation of all that horde of corruption pent within our common prisons as the general mass of Negro slaves. I am sure I know not a dozen that I could unhesitatingly say I thought capable of self-government—devoid of every principle of moral rectitude, divested of all the finer sensibilities of our nature; the master’s scowl or the master’s rod form the only barrier to the commission of crime the most atrocious. In their present state what might not be the consequences if unrestricted by the laws of man; and ignorant and fearless of the commands of God, they were permitted equally with ourselves to enjoy the rights offreemen?

  Mary acknowledged that she felt “greatly dependent upon them for ease and comforts.” But for that very reason “it seems a greater kindness and a more Christian act rather than liberate them, whilst so closely bound by the shackles of innate vice, to seek to raise them first in the scale of moral excellence by a different mode of treatment from what has been adopted hitherto, by treating them more as rational beings and trying to instill into them virtuous principles.” She would not advocate opening to them the field of science, “for that would only be awakening them to a sense of their own misery without in any degree benefiting them or advancing their happiness.” Rather, she would advocate religious instruction.

  Teach them to feel that they are immortal, accountable beings. Teach them the need of a Saviour and whilst your slaves, teach them the duty of obedience from higher motives than earthly displeasure—from Christian principles that which the Bible inculcates. I cannot say what would be the result of the experience of such a mode of treatment. Many would say it was altogether chimerical and never would accomplish the desired end. I cannot affirm that it would be otherwise, but I should be pleased to see it tested.12

  So Mary, writing from the Retreat with its settlement nearby, spelled out her position—a program for benevolent reform within the system of slavery. Slavery, it could be agreed, was a great evil, and the only answer to its evil was total abolition. But abolition was not possible at the present time, nor would it be in the best interest of those who lived in the settlements. They lacked the internalized disciplines needed for freedom—the virtues and morals required for self-government. To teach them such virtues and morals, to show them their need of a savior, and to inculcate a sense of “the duty of obedience” as responsible beings—here was a high calling worthy of evangelical reformers. Charles would take longer to come to such conclusions, but Mary’s response to his question was clearly the direction in which he was moving.

  Charles did not find Princeton all that he had hoped for. It certainly had a strong southern presence—both the college and the seminary had long been favorites of wealthy southerners. But the conservatism of the seminary clashed with the theology he had learned at Andover. To be sure, compared with Harvard Divinity School, Andover was hardly a bastion of theological liberalism. At Unitarian Harvard, according to one of its disillusioned students from the South, “The peculiarity of their belief consists in not believing … the system of the Orthodox.”13 Andover had been established precisely to promote orthodoxy and, with the divinity school at Yale, it had become a center of evangelical reform movements. But its orthodoxy had sought to modify a scholastic Calvinism that still ruled at Princeton.

  For Charles the critical difference between Andover and Princeton was closely linked to his own personal struggles and to the spiritual crisis he was facing. The theological question focused on human freedom. How much freedom does any person really have? To what degree do circumstances and the contingencies of one’s own birth limit personal freedom? More specifically, does the human will have the power within itself to repent and change the direction of a person’s life? Charles identified himself as a Hopkinsian, after the New England theologian Samuel Hopkins. Hopkins had shaped a “New England theology” that had drawn deeply from the wells of Jonathan Edwards’s thought and that was particularly well suited for a democratic America. Most notable was an emphasis on what Hopkins called “disinterested benevolence.” For Hopkins, the essence of sin was selfishness and self-love. A Christian conversion, however, made possible in a person a disposition for the good of others that did not take one’s own interest into account. This New England theology had been a mighty engine for the creation of social reformers, and Hopkins himself had been one of the first in New England to denounce the slave trade as immoral.14

  In a long letter to Mary, Charles explained to her the difference between the Princeton theology and the New England theology he espoused. The Princeton people, he said, insisted that repentance is a pure gift of God, that the “sinner cannot repent; that he has no power at all to repent. He must do what he can and wait God’s time.” But the New England theology that Charles held insisted that the inability of a sinner to repent consists in “disinclination, and disinclination only…. The sinner has all the natural power to repent; he is able to repent. The reason why he does not, is because he will not.”15

  So for Charles repentance and belief were largely a matter of the will, of volition. One simply had to decide, to make up one’s mind, to accept Christ as one’s personal savior and to change the direction of one’s life. Such a theological position was to put him in the camp with Lyman Beecher and other revivalists and social reformers, and with the broad cultural optimism of nineteenth-century America that celebrated the freedom and power of the human will. Here was to be the heart of his pleas with William Maxwell and Joseph Jones and other unconverted relatives. They simply needed an act of will to denounce their love of self and their self-inter
est and turn to Christ and a new life. And what about Phoebe or Rosetta’s Sam or Cassius or the other unconverted ones who lived in the settlements of Liberty County? Were they not also, as Mary said, “immortal, accountable beings” with the freedom to repent and change their ways if they were presented with a direct appeal of the Gospel?

  Most pressing for Charles, of course, was the freedom of his own will. Did he have the freedom to decide about the direction of his life, to turn from self-love and self-interest to a concern for the good of others? Most specifically, did he have the freedom to reject slavery, the self-love and the self-interest of a white slave owner, and attack the harsh physical slavery of the settlements? Did the contingencies of his own life—the fact that he had been born in a slave-owning family, that he had been loved and nurtured by slave owners, and that he was a part of a long cultural history that justified human slavery—were all of these contingencies simply “disinclinations” to be overcome with an act of the will? Such questions troubled his sleep, and during the day increasingly occupied his thoughts.

  Charles set about addressing the questions in a manner he had learned from his New England mentors—he formed a “Society of Inquiry Concerning Africans.” It is, he wrote Mary, “a matter of no small astonishment that the whole race of Africans as objects of Christian sympathy and benevolence, have been overlooked in Princeton seminary from its foundation, and that even motives of policy have not induced some attention to them.” And so he drew up the constitution and bylaws of the new society, got the approval of his professors, and was elected president. The design of the society was specially shaped to address in a rational and orderly fashion Charles’s own spiritual and vocational crisis. The society was to collect “information respecting the condition and prospects of enslaved and manumitted Africans throughout the world, but more particularly those of our own country; to collect information respecting all benevolent societies designed to meliorate the condition of the neglected and degraded portion of the human family.” All of this collecting of information was to be done to help Princeton students ascertain “our personal duties and responsibilities” toward enslaved and manumitted Africans and “the manner in which their best interests may be promoted.”16