Dwelling Place Read online

  Because Charles could not be at all the stations each week, he worked through the association to see that each station had an organized Sunday school with a white superintendent and a coterie of white teachers. At the little village of Walthourville, the wealthy planter and Yale graduate John Dunwody was the superintendent, and his wife, Jane Bulloch Dunwody, was one of seven teachers who taught each Sunday the scholars who came from the nearby settlements.20 At Sunbury, Joseph Maxwell (the brother of Julia Maxwell King and brother-in-law of Susan Jones Maxwell) was the superintendent with nine teachers, seven women and two men. At Pleasant Grove, Barrington King from South Hampton plantation was the superintendent and taught with his wife, Catherine, and with Mary Jones and John Ashmore. In neighboring McIntosh County, where Liberty County planters summered at Jonesville, a class met at night during the week for an hour or an hour and a half, with John Mallard as the superintendent and with four or five teachers. At these and other stations, the religious instruction of the slaves was, as Charles had hoped, an effort that extended beyond his work as a missionary to the community of white planters. For the next thirty years white plantersandtheirfamilies were to be involved in teaching, week after week, those from the settlements who wished to learn from whites about the Bible, the church, and Christianity. Most who lived in the settlements were not interested, and not a few, no doubt, were decidedly hostile to the whole project. But over the years a substantial number participated—more than 20 percent of the total slave population in the county in 1845. And those who did participate became the foundation for the growing slave membership in the churches that reached, by 1845, one fourth of the whole slave population in the county—what Charles would call “A very large proportion indeed, and a majority of the adult population.”21

  Charles knew, however, that the white teachers needed help. The task that was before them was formidable and their teaching resources few. What they needed, he was convinced, was a carefully prepared catechism designed specially for the religious instruction of slaves. Charles tried some that had already been written, but they were intended primarily for little children or omitted too many areas of Christian faith and life.22 And so he set about, almost as soon as he began his missionary labors, to write a catechism that would be “well adapted” to the slaves’ conditions and circumstances. He published in 1834 A Catechism for Colored Persons, a manual containing “an intelligible and systematic view of Christian Doctrine and Practice,” and of such a length, 108 pages, “as to occupy some considerable, though not unreasonable time in going through with it.”23 In 1836 he began publishing in the Charleston Observer a “Historical Catechism” on the four Gospels of the New Testament. He began with John the Baptist. “In what wilderness did he come preaching?” “The wilderness of Judea.” “And what did he preach?” “Repent ye for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”24 And then Charles had questions and answers on Jesus, his life and public ministry. “Who was the mother of our Lord?” “The Virgin Mary.” “In what city did she live?” “In Nazareth.” “Of what King’s family was she?” “King David’s family.” “Was she rich or poor?” “Poor.” In this way Charles moved through the life of Jesus, teaching the story of his birth, of his baptism and his temptations in the wilderness, of his calling the disciples, and of his miracles. He wanted those who lived in the settlements to know biblical history. He felt it was the best he could do for those who by law were kept illiterate, who were kept from reading “the word of life.”25

  The supply of A Catechism for Colored Persons was soon exhausted, and Charles revised it and republished it as A Catechism of Scripture, Doctrine and Practice, for Families and Sabbath Schools, Designed also for the Oral Instruction of Colored Persons. Intended for both blacks and whites, this catechism soon became widely used throughout the South and was translated—without the sectionson slavery—into three other languages for use on the foreign mission field.26

  Nothing that he ever wrote would be so widely used as this catechism and nothing would bring him greater criticism.27 He intended it to be a clear, evangelical presentation of the Christian faith. God is presented as the creator and lawgiver who offers salvation to humanity through the death of God’s son Jesus Christ. Working against God is Satan and his fallen angels. Humanity, fallen through Adam’s sin, is saved through belief in Jesus Christ. “It does not matter,” Charles wrote in a commentary on an answer, “what country one comes from, whether we are from the East or from the West, the North or the South. It does not matter of what colour we are, whether of white, or brown, or black. It does not matter of what condition we are, whether rich or poor, old or young, male or female, bond or free. Jesus is able to save all who come into him.” It was orthodox, evangelical Protestantism that covered 150 pages of questions and answers and commentary. But set within this evangelical presentation of the faith was a social vision of the relationship of parents to children, of husbands to wives, and of masters to servants. Four pages were given specifically to the “duties of masters and servants.” 28

  Beginning with a presentation of God’s omniscience, the catechism constructed a paternalistic order in which the slave’s place and behavior were carefully defined and restricted.

  Q. Is God present in every place?

  A. Yes.

  Q. What does he see and know?

  A. All things.

  Q. Who is in duty bound to have justice done Servants when they are wronged or abused or ill-treated by anyone?

  A. The Master.

  Q. Is it right for the Master to punish his servants cruelly?

  A. No.

  Masters, it was said, should not threaten their servants and should provide them with religious instruction. Slaves were told that there is one Master of all in heaven who does not show favor to earthly masters for they will have to “render an account for manner in which they treat their Servants.” But if masters had their duties, slaves also had theirs:

  Q. What command has God given to Servants, concerning obedience to their Masters?

  A. Servants obey in all things your Masters according to the flesh, not in eye-serve as men-pleasers, but in singleness of heart, fearing God.

  Q. What are Servants to count their Masters worthy of?

  A. All honor.

  Q. How are they to do their service of their master?

  A. With good will, doing service unto the Lord and not unto men.

  Q. How are they to try to please their Masters?

  A. Please them well in all things, not answering again.

  Q. Is it right in a Servant when commanded to be sullen and slow, and answer his Master again?

  A. No.29

  Nothing that Charles ever wrote was to be quoted as often as these questions and answers on these four pages of his catechism. All of the other 150 pages would be largely ignored by his critics, because these few lines seemed to open up the world of his assumptions—whites and blacks each had their place in society and each had their responsibilities: whites were owners and masters; blacks were slaves and servants. What these lines revealed, it would be said, was the purpose of his missionary work—to teach black slaves to be obedient to their white masters.30

  In addition to lecturing at the stations, organizing Sunday Schools, and writing catechisms, Charles conducted religious services and preached most weeks. Preaching was a daunting task for him, though one that he relished. How was a white planter to preach good news to slaves? Charles was convinced that his preaching had to be adapted to the slaves who had been culturally deprived, neglected by white ministers, and left illiterate because of the laws of the state. Yet he believed that with “proper pains” he could “speedily carry them, ignorant as they are conceived to be, to the limits of our actual knowledge of the doctrines of Christianity: and what is more, make them know and feel it.” Such preaching, Charles believed, was a difficult task for a white man—let no one think, he insisted, that any ignorant white could preach to slaves. Success demanded “well educated and as intelligent minist
ers and good preachers” as the church could supply.31 In the same way, if a minister was of the opinion that “any sort of sermon” would do for black congregations, “let him try it,” Charles warned, “and he will presently be of another mind.” Black congregations, he said, were “good judges of a good sermon,” as well as “proud enough” not to accept poor preaching. Charles insisted that it was necessary for the preacher administering to slaves to “study just as profoundly, and as extensively, as he who preaches to whites.”32

  Charles’s first step in preparing a sermon for a black congregation was to study the “habits of thoughts, superstitions and manners” of the slaves so that he could try to bridge the gulf that separated him from those in settlements. He was aware that he did not know those who lived in the settlements at a significant depth and that the gulf that separated him from them was wider than the slough that separated Montevideo from Carlawter. For this reason he spent long hours studying the history, traditions, and folkways of African Americans.33 He turned to studies of West Africa—John Beacham’s book on the Gold Coast and the Ashanti, Lieutenant Frederick E. Forbes’s work on the Dahomey, Thomas Birch Freeman’s Journal, and John Duncan’s Travels. But during the early years of his work, he turned above all to the reports of John Leighton Wilson, a friend and missionary at Cape Palmas. Wilson and his wife, Jane Baynard—he was from South Carolina, she from Georgia—had freed their slaves, paid for their way to Liberia, and helped finance the settlers in their pioneering efforts. Wilson wrote letters and reports home, and many of them were printed in the Charleston Observer. They were not simply the pious stories of a missionary, but careful studies of African history and culture that were to win Wilson a place in the Royal Oriental Society of Great Britain and be gathered together into his encyclopedic Western Africa: Its History, Condition, and Prospects.34

  It was not African history, however, but African-American history that demanded most of Charles’s attention as he tried to bridge the gap between the white preacher and the black congregations of Liberty County. Charles ordered and read everything he could find: reports and pamphlets, rare books and obscure records.35 But the most important thing he did was to visit among and talk to those who lived in the settlements. And he talked to no one who was more helpful than Sharper, the black preacher who lived at Lambert, the center of the Gullah-speaking community of Liberty County.

  Sharper stood in the line of black preachers hired by the Midway congregation and was the most respected man in the settlements. “He has been preaching the Gospel to his colored brethren,” Charles wrote, “for almost twenty years, with fidelity.” Sharper had been able to learn to read a little, and Charles found that he had “a wonderful command of Scripture in his prayers and sermons, which he has stored up in his long ministerial life.”36 But he not only knew the Scriptures, he also knew his people, and he must have wondered how to respond to this eager young missionary in a way that would be best for those who lived in the settlements.

  Sharper knew the Jones family only too well—his wife and his children belonged to Joseph Jones, and Sharper spent as much time as he could at his “wife house” at the Retreat. And now, since Andrew Maybank’s death, Charles was the owner of Sharper’s son-in-law, the carpenter Sandy Maybank, who was married to Sharper’s daughter Mary Ann.37 So Sharper knew all about Charles, and he must have known what was being said in the settlements about this young white man who owned slaves and was so eager to preach to them and teach them the Bible and be a pastor to them. Sharper evidently decided that the best thing he could do was be a mentor to Charles, to be an interpreter for him about life in the settlements and an intermediary between the world of the white preacher and the black slave. “He gives me,” said Charles, “more insight into the nature of my work amongst the Negroes in one conversation, than I gain in the observation of weeks. The ground is all familiar to him, and I esteem it a privilege and a blessing, that we labor together in the same field.” Charles urged other whites who were working among slaves to find such a person as Sharper as a mentor. Through them the missionary “will arrive at knowledge, from which the colour of his skin, his station and general association, exclude him; and knowledge which he ought by all means to possess.”38

  Charles, however, believed that he must not only know his people, he must also know his text. Every day in his study at Montevideo and then at Maybank he read the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek and then reviewed a variety of commentaries on the texts. Charles worked hard on his sermons and spent hours preparing them.39 But he never seemed to wonder how owning slaves might influence how he read and interpreted the text. He soon learned, however, that a text could be understood one way if you were used to having tea on a piazza and another way if you sat around fires in a settlement.

  Charles wrote his sermons in full manuscript form. There would be no outline to be given flesh and blood while he was preaching—much less a noteless or extemporaneous sermon! No, he wrote it all out with a handsome hand and on narrow paper, but with a clear threefold division: an introduction of three to six pages, an exposition of the text that often ran to more than fifty pages, and a conclusion of five to ten pages on what had been learned. Sermons intended for black slaves should be, he wrote, “plain in language, simple in construction, and pointed in application, and of any length from a half hour to an hour and a quarter, according to the subject and interest of the people.”40 Whites later remarked to Charles that they found his sermons easier to understand because he had spent so many years preaching to slaves.41

  When Charles began preaching, he sought to make his delivery “grave, solemn, dignified, free from affection, hauteur, or familiarity, yet ardent and animated.” 42 He was suspicious of any kind of emotional excesses and had written Mary from Princeton: “We should not lay very great stress upon particular high states of excitement in social or public worship, where it may in some degree be the effect of external circumstances…. The most satisfactory evidence of true Christian character is habitual frame of mind towards God.” 43 He reflected the habits and dispositions of the white members of Midway. They wanted, after all, sermons suited for their neat meetinghouse: logical, solid as a heart-of-pine, and with a simple grace. Such a theological position was, of course, well suited to maintain control and order with a large assembly of slaves, and Charles expected a “dignified and restrained” response from his black listeners. There were to be no “audible expressions of feeling in the way of groanings, cries, or noises of any kind.” He wanted no “amens!” to his sermons, no moaning that could spread through the congregation with a low hum gathering strength until it struck like lightning over the waving marsh. Of course, with more than a fifty-page manuscript, any such worries may have been unnecessary. Still, in spite of his sermons’ cerebral character and subdued tones, Charles had a passion and pious zeal that reached out to the heart as well as the head. And somehow, strange as it seems, in the preaching and the listening, at least some of the gulf between the white preacher and the black slave was bridged.44

  Charles’s consuming theme was the conversion of lost souls from sin to salvation. The subject was for him the great theme of the Scriptures, the message to the nations, and good news to those who knew all too well the nearness of death and the familiar trails to the graveyards of Liberty County. He had sermons on “Salvation Is of the Lord,” on “The Resurrection of the Body. The Fact. The Author. The Time and Manner. The Nature,” on “The Folly of Deferring Repentance.” He preached sermons that were intended to comfort: “God Is Love,” and to encourage: “The Common People Heard Him Gladly.” And he preached sermons that warned all who had ears to hear—“The Wicked Shall Be Turned in to Hell, and All the Nations That Forget God.”45

  There were other sermons, however, that were aimed more directly at those who lived in the settlements. Charles began in early 1833 a series of sermons on the duties of servants to earthly masters. Built around the stories of biblical slaves, these sermons were intended t
o “inculcate respect, obedience and fidelity to masters, as duties, for the discharge of which they as servants would have to account to God in the great day.”46 One sermon was on Eliezer, Abraham’s servant, who was a model slave: he took care of Abraham’s property, he would not offend God by becoming a thief, and he was a faithful and diligent worker. He was all that any good master would want, and his reward was great not only in heaven but also on earth, as he was chosen to be the chief among Abraham’s slaves. Standing in contrast to Eliezer was Gehazi, Elisha’s servant, whose behavior was a warning to all disobedient and unfaithful slaves: he was a thief, a liar, and completely untrustworthy. He was all that any good master abhorred, and for his sins God had made him a leper and a wanderer among the desert places.47

  The most famous of all the biblical slaves was Onesimus, the runaway slave of Philemon, and Charles decided, four months into his missionary labors, that he would preach on this runaway. He left Solitude in early March 1833 and rode to Midway, where a large congregation of slaves had gathered at the stand across the road from the church. He lectured in the morning on the second command-ment—about not making or worshiping graven images—and he denounced the charms and sorcery of the settlements and said that they were used for wicked purposes to fool a superstitious people.48 In the afternoon he turned to “The Story of Onesimus.” The stand was in the woods and the slave congregation sat around Charles under “booths” or bush arbors. “I dwelt chiefly on the character of Runaways,” he reported in the Charleston Observer. He spoke of the “folly, the impropriety, the impolicy of their course.” What could they expect to gain by taking off for the swamps or Savannah? Charles then went on to speak of “the duty of all to suppress the wickedness, never to conceal or harbour a runaway etc.” As he spoke, he began to notice the faces of his congregation: “By the countenances of the audience, the subject was evidently disagreeable. Some endeavoured to sleep, others to look away, and many got up and left the ground.” Their reactions caught him by surprise, for the county was known for having few runaways—there was in Liberty County, Charles believed, “doubtless less running away than in any other population of like size in the State.” What he was discovering, or at least getting a glimpse into, was the world of the settlements where running away did not seem like wickedness but a bold bid for freedom. Moreover, those who came to church did not want to hear running away condemned by a white preacher. After the meeting, one man came up to him and said: “That is not Gospel at all; it is all Runaway, Runaway, Runaway.” Another said, “The doctrine is one-sided,” and many said “they would never more come to hear me preach.” Charles was apparently stunned and simply noted: “Thus we parted.”49