Dwelling Place Read online

  In late October 1835, Charles left Liberty County to attend a meeting of the seminary’s board of directors in Columbia and to present to the synod the report on the proposed Southern Union. He sailed from Savannah to Charleston in order to visit with friends in the city and to take advantage of the new railroad that was already reaching from Charleston toward Augusta and Columbia.3

  His ship sailed quietly into the Carolina port on a clear fall morning and came to its mooring at Adger’s Wharf. Charles hurried down the gangplank and down cobblestone streets to the home of his elderly cousin Eliza Ferguson, who received Charles with the warmth and hospitality of a doting aunt. He had visited with her on his travels to and from the North, and she was eager to hear all the news of Joseph and his family, and especially of Sister Susan, who had lived with her while a student in Charleston. Charles was especially eager to talk with friends and relatives about their views on the religious instruction of slaves, for he sensed that if Charleston could be won to the cause, then the way would be opened throughout the South for a sustained and comprehensive campaign. The growing sectional dispute over slavery he found particularly troubling, and he was finding himself more than ever convinced that the religious instruction of slaves was the only safe and sane way for the nation to extricate itself from the morass of slavery. The previous summer he had written William Plumer, an influential Virginia clergyman, that religious instruction must be accomplished “as speedily as possible. Our salvation from sore evils, from divine judgments, depends upon it. The Religious Instruction of the Negroes is the foundation of permanent improvement in intelligence and morals in the slave-holding states.” Charles wrote Plumer that such instruction was “the only entering wedge to the great and appalling subject of slavery. The only sun, that appearing through the darkclouds, will shed down pure and holy light, and if the Institution of Slavery is to be abandoned, will cause the nation to relax its hold and gradually and peacefully lay it off and then sit down in delightful repose.” Such perspectives, however, were precisely what some in South Carolina feared in regard to religious instruction. They wanted no “entering wedge” on the subject of slavery, and the only thing they found appalling was the growing antislavery clamor in the North.4

  Judge Charles Jones Colcock (the cousin Charles had met in Columbia two years earlier) called on Charles, as did Mrs. Bowen, the Episcopal bishop’s wife. Charles went to see Thomas Smyth, the pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church, and met with Smyth’s father-in-law, James Adger, reputed to be the wealthiest man in the city. He talked with them all about his missionary labors and about the duty of southern Christians to provide for the religious instruction of the slaves. Smyth shared Charles’s sentiments and was himself later accused in Charleston of being an abolitionist. Such a charge was, of course, far from true, although Smyth did think slavery an evil that ought to be removed “as soon as God in His providence should open the way.”5

  What made Charles’s visit to Charleston timely was a publishing campaign initiated by abolitionists in the summer of 1835. Less than six months after Charles had visited Benjamin Lundy (the antislavery editor of the Genius of Universal Emancipation) in 1830, Lundy’s colleague William Lloyd Garrison had launched the Liberator, in which he called for the immediate abolition of slavery. Garrison declared in the first issue:

  I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject [of slavery] I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation…. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD6

  Interestingly, most of those who had heard Garrison’s challenge in 1831 were New England conservatives who immediately attacked him. Among the most vehement opponents of Garrison was Joseph Tracy, editor of the Vermont Chronicle, who denounced immediate abolitionism as revolutionary and a product of the fanaticism of the French Revolution. Slavery, Tracy insisted, should be a “preparatory school for freedom.” And he pointed to Charles’s new missionary labors and the work of the Liberty County Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes as models for what needed to be done on the long road to freedom.7 By the summer of 1835, however, southerners were taking note of the growing strength and vehemence of abolitionism. And nowhere was this note taking more vigorous than in Charleston, where a mob broke into the post office, gathered all the material that was thought to have been sent to the city by abolitionists, and burned it in a great bonfire. A “Committee of Twenty-One” leading citizens, with Judge Colcock as chair, had been appointed to investigate the abolitionist threat to the city. The committee had called for laws that would allow authorities to seize and destroy “all incendiary publications which may be brought into this State, calculated to excite domestic insurrection or to disturb the tranquility, happiness and safety of the people.” All of this excitement did not bode well for the proposed Southern Union, but what made matters more difficult for Charles was the direct attack that had been launched against the religious instruction of slaves by the fiery planter and political leader from Edisto Island, Whitemarsh Seabrook.8

  Seabrook, a graduate of Princeton, was the president of the Agricultural Society of South Carolina and had been a longtime promoter of scientific methods of agriculture and slave management. The previous year he had been elected lieutenant governor of the state and had been successful in securing legislation that had tightened restrictions on the times and places blacks could worship. In 1834 he had published An Essay on the Management of Slaves, and Especially, on their Religious Instruction. His essay contained a dismissive account of Charles’s work, of the synod’s report on religious instruction that Charles had written in 1831, and of Thomas Clay’s “Detail of a Plan for the Moral Improvement of Negroes on Plantations,” which Clay had presented to the presbytery in St. Marys in 1833.

  Seabrook’s attack on Charles began with an attack on the clergy generally. “The intermixture of plantations and the employment of any one whose profession it was to teach the word of God” Seabrook deemed filled with “insuperable objections.” Clergy, he admitted, had an important function in society so long as they were kept “rigidly within the limits of their station.” Reflecting the Deism of an earlier generation, he thought the clergy dangerous because they are “comparatively deficient in the practical knowledge of mankind” and because they are “subjected to no positive control.” A “few of our reverend friends,” he wrote, “in their behaviour and teachings, apply the same rules to the black as the white man,” and they were thereby laying “the foundation for opinions inimical to the peace of the State.” In regard to the synod’s report on religious instruction, he found that it contained “the foundation argument on which the emancipationist proposes to erect the superstructure of his schemes.” The synod’s plan was “sophistical and illusory,” and if it were adopted, then “the reign of fanaticism and misrule will have commenced.” As for Thomas Clay’s proposal presented to the presbytery, Seabrook wondered if it had been “suggested by a Tappanist,” referring to the followers of the antislavery philanthropists Arthur and Lewis Tappan. He suggested that Clay, a “Utopian projector,” was “in his heart an Abolitionist.”9

  Seabrook may not have known that Charles and Clay were slaveholders, although that seems unlikely in the little world of the South Carolina and Georgia low country. What he apparently did not know, or certainly acknowledge, was that Clay was a successful planter—much more successful than Seabrook, the expert on scientific management of a plantation. At any rate, Charles evidently thought Seabrook a pompous South Carolinian whose claims to speak for the South were not only pretentious and arrogant but also dangerous. Such an image was reinforced by a visit with Henry Laurens Pinckney.10

  Pinckney, whose newspaper the Mercury was one of the leading papers in the South, was the U.S. congressman from Charleston. With his brother-in-law U.S. senator Robert Young Hayne, Pinckney was part of a particularly powerful association of political leaders—including Hugh Swinton
Legare, who later served as U.S. attorney general and U.S. secretary of state—associated with the Circular Congregational Church. As president of the congregation, Pinckney wanted to explore the possibility of Charles’s accepting a call to become the church’s pastor. It must have been a tempting offer to Charles, for the congregation was one of the most influential in the South and included among its members—in addition to Pinckney, Hayne, and Legare—many of Charleston’s oldest and most respectable families: DeSaussures and Porchers, Bennetts and Vanderhorsts, Hut-sons and Perroneaus, and a host of others. To accept a call to such a congregation would provide an opportunity to nurture a concern for the religious instruction of slaves in the heart of a city that called itself the Capital of the South. But Charles’s heart was in Liberty County, and he put the subject of a call aside. What he was interested in learning from Pinckney was the attitude of the city toward religious instruction. What Pinckney told him was not encouraging.11

  The political excitement, Pinckney said, that had surrounded the Nullification Controversy had “almost wholly ceased throughout the state, and the leaders have gone to making money, or into good offices, or are seeking such.” Pinckney thought that a “spirit of speculation” pervaded the city, “and some say they want to pursue a policy which will make the South independent of the North.” What was causing excitement now was “the Abolition question,” and, Charles wrote Mary, “sorry am I to inform you that the cause of Religious Instruction has been most seriously injured”:

  Mr. Pinckney observed that the people here were disposed to run into extremes. Very true. The Methodist missionaries have suffered some hindrances, by having some Plantations closed against them, and the whole community here will bear on the subject nothing but the most delicate touches. Nothing can be attempted until the fever cools. The Prints, and the Pamphlets, written here on the subject of Abolition, take the highest ground, in relation to slavery. Some go so far as to justify it in the abstract, and to say that it is no moral evil, no curse, but an absolute blessing, and must be perpetual!

  Charles noted that in spite of such radicals there were “colored schools” in all the churches of the city and that they “taught orally every Sunday.” Still, Charles was not encouraged by what he was hearing. In his conversation with Pinckney and Judge Colcock and with such religious leaders in the city as Smyth and the Episcopal minister William Barnwell, he learned that they approved the proposed Southern Union for the religious instruction of slaves. “But,” he wrote Mary, thinking no doubt of Seabrook and his supporters, “there is strong opposition to Religious Instruction in this state with many.”

  Charles evidently saw a radical defense of slavery emerging, a claim that slavery was no curse inherited from the past but a positive good to be defended at all costs. And he saw this claim as being rooted, ironically, in the old revolutionary Deism that lingered in South Carolina. “The truth is,” he wrote Mary, “as Mr. Pinckney and others say, the state is divided into two parties, the Religious and the Infidel. The infidel Party, though many of them pretend to approve religion, are opposed to it in every form.” Charles believed that the person responsible for such a situation was Thomas Jefferson’s old friend Thomas Cooper, the president of South Carolina College. “Dr. Cooper,” Charles insisted, “is their Father. That old man has done this state more evil than fifty years can remove. He has a world of iniquity to answer for in poisoning the State with his infidel principles. And yet, wonderful to tell, he says, he believes the Bible and is as good a Christian as any body!”12

  Such, Charles believed, was the source and character of the opposition to religious instruction of the slaves. On the one side of the debate stood those who believed that slavery, as he had written Plumer, was a “great and appalling subject” and that religious instruction was essential for the religious and moral training of slaves to prepare them for future responsibilities as they walked their long road toward freedom. Such a position, with its biblical defense of slavery and its accompanying paternalism, was, Charles believed, the best defense against those who called for the immediate abolition of slavery. On the other side stood those who argued that slavery was an “absolute blessing and must be perpetual! ” This was an argument of infidels, of the irreligious, who would increasingly claim scientific justification for their position. (They would soon be arguing that blacks were a separate species from whites and that there must have been a dual origin of the races.) Pinckney told Charles that there was some talk—encouraged no doubt by Seabrook—in the state legislature to forbid “every kind of instruction of the Negroes—even Religious instruction! ” Charles thought that “the infidel may embrace this present state of excitement in this way to stab religion. But they will rue the day.” He did not believe the legislators would act in such a reckless manner, but if “they do, they will for that act be given up to frenzy. They will by it, produce division in the South, and convert thousands of Northern men, now with us, into immediate Abolitionists.”13

  The visit to Charleston was important to Charles, for, he said, “I now know how matters stand.” Pinckney warned him that “every man who was interested in and engaged in doing any thing for the Negroes, was in a ‘ticklish’ situation.” Charles responded that “my friends had never accused me of rashness in my operations, and that it was best in periods of excitement to yield to the storm, until it was passed.” And so he prepared to leave Charleston affirming that “God reigns,” and that only God “can order things as they should be.”14

  Charles left Charleston at six in the morning. He was delighted to be riding on the train, for not only was it a novel way to travel, but it also showed that southerners did not wish to be left behind as progress and technology came rushing across the nineteenth century. He and his traveling companions occupied “an apartment in one of the cars, cushioned with cloth, and a large grass mat on the floor.” They sat “socially around as in a Parlour, and had a most delightful time of conversation.” The train reached at times the astonishing rate of 25 miles per hour and was “swifter than a race horse.” After a trip of 60 miles, they left the train and took the stage for the last leg of the journey, arriving in Columbia at three in the morning. They had taken twenty-one hours to travel about 120 miles—scarcely four hours by train to travel the first 60 miles and more than sixteen hours by stage to travel the last 60.15

  When the question of a Southern Union for the religious instruction of slaves was taken up by the synod, Charles was not surprised when action on the proposal was postponed indefinitely. His visit to Charleston had prepared him for such an outcome and for those who said “that the time was not right for such an organization,” given the “excited state of the country.” Local organizations, such as the one in Liberty County, were thought best for the times, rather than a regionwide union. Charles concurred, for he could see in the synod a growing commitment to religious instruction and to the paternalistic assumptions that informed his work.16

  If Charles was not surprised by the synod’s action on the Southern Union, he was surprised when he was nominated for and elected to a professorship in ecclesiastical history and church polity at the seminary. He was certainly not well prepared for such a position—he had no background in either subject other than his studies at Andover and Princeton. But the case that was pressed on him was that he could “do more good for the Negroes, by directing the minds of the young men [at the seminary] to them as a field for pastoral and missionary labours,” than he could by his “own direct labours” in Liberty County. Such a call, Charles thought, he had to take seriously. His own preference was obviously to stay in Liberty County and continue the work he had begun there, but his theology and his deepest convictions compelled him to listen carefully to the call of the synod to determine whether it was God’s call on his life.17

  Charles, however, was not about to make a quick decision on such an important matter. He hurried home to talk with Mary and with other members of his family. Sister Betsy clearly did not want him to go—he wa
s needed in Liberty County, she said, and besides, the circle of loving family members would be left with a gaping hole if Charles and Mary left with the children. At first Charles agreed with them, and for the next year he went about his missionary labors in Liberty County and the development of Montevideo and Maybank as if he would stay in the county. But by the fall of 1836 pressure was building for him to accept. The issue for him was once again, as it had been at Princeton, a question of duty and its relationship to home. Was it his duty to accept the call to Columbia, to leave Montevideo and Maybank, to separate himself from so many whom he loved, and to give up his evening visits to the settlements of the county? Duty, a sense of moral obligation rooted in his love of God, seemed to be drawing him to Columbia and saying that he must disregard personal inclinations.18

  Mary was willing to go, but she was clearly not happy about the thought of leaving her plantation home. “I have been thinking a great deal of your decision in relation to Columbia,” she wrote him in November 1836, “but my mind has been calm in prospect of the result. Have we not asked wisdom and direction of our Heavenly Father as to the way of duty and will He not lead us ina plain path? ”

  Mary drew the line, however, at “selling out” plantations and people in Liberty County. Charles was wondering whether he should do just that if he were to accept the call to Columbia—should he rid himself of all “planting interests” and put Montevideo and Carlawter and Maybank behind him? Friends discouraged such a course. And Thomas Clay, back from a long stay in New England, said that such a step “would undo almost all that we have done.” To be a convincing advocate for religious instruction, one needed, evidently, to be a slaveholder. Besides, selling out would confirm the suspicions of Seabrook and others that the movement was at its heart antislavery. For Mary, it was even simpler—she did not want to break the ties to home. “I should not like,” she told Charles, “to sunder the chords that have bound us so long and happily—for go where I will, like the captive bird I expect to sigh for the native air where I sang my sweetest song.” So a year after he was elected to the professorship, Charles finally said “yes” to the call to Columbia but concluded to hire good managers to look after Montevideo and Maybank.19