Dwelling Place Read online

  So the first generation at Carlawter, the generation that could remember Liberty Hall, that knew John Jones and Susannah Girardeau and old Jupiter and blind Silvey, this generation began to pass as the second generation began to marry and to have children. Jupiter and Hamlet did not long survive Lizzy, as they, with others, passed over Jordan and were buried in the cemetery at Carlawter.36 In this ebb and flow, the complexity of kinship was deepening as lines of relationships stretched out from family to family, frequently crossing one another.

  By 1839 Carlawter had become a community, a specific place in the Georgia low country that was a part of a larger world of southern slavery and its economy. Here men and women lived and worked together and watched their children and grandchildren, and those of their neighbors, grow up and marry. Here along its sandy street and around its evening fires stories were told, memories were lengthened, traditions were developed, and the bonds of kinship were tightened. To be sure, larger, distant forces of economics, politics, and technology continued to affect the lives of all who lived here. Yet the Gullah community that was built at Carlawter played a fundamental role in shaping how those who lived in the settlement saw and interpreted the world around them. And equally remarkable, Carlawter itself was composed not simply of a mass of slaves but of distinct men and women, people with names, with diverse personalities and personal histories—Cato and Cassius and Porter and Phoebe and Patience and Lucy and all the others who found their lives and their lots cast in this particular place under the bitter burden of slavery. During the coming years each of them, in his or her own way, would seek to negotiate the deep waters of slavery as they looked toward freedom’s distant shore.

  16

  SOUTH HAMPTON

  When Charles sent Phoebe to a neighboring plantation in late 1837, it was to South Hampton, where Barrington and Catherine King lived with their nine children. Catherine King needed some additional domestic help in preparation for a move of their family in late April 1838. By the time Phoebe arrived at the plantation, Barrington King was in the midst of selling South Hampton and turning his considerable energies toward the creation of new wealth spun from cotton mills built on the rolling hills of North Georgia.1

  John Ross and the other members of the Cherokee delegation whom Charles had met in Washington in the summer of 1830 had been unsuccessful in preventing the state of Georgia from taking their lands. They had succeeded in getting the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in their favor in one case, but President Andrew Jackson had disregarded the court’s order, and by 1838 the Cherokees were being forced to leave their lands and to travel their Trail of Tears to a reservation in Oklahoma. (Ross’s wife, Quatie, was one of some four thousand who died along the way.) A state lottery had already provided for the division of the Cherokee lands, and the up-country was about to become the most populous and prosperous part of the state, as whites were poised to rush in and take the land secured by the military power of the United States.2 Even in distant Liberty County, the impact of the violent and bloody removal of the Cherokees was substantial, as its upheavals broke in upon the old stability of the population and set in motion removals of another sort from plantation houses and settlements in the county.

  Already in 1829, Roswell King, Sr., had traveled on horseback throughout the up-country on behalf of the Bank of Darien. His purpose had been to explore the region and the possibilities of a branch bank near the newly opened gold mines of north Georgia. What he found north of the Chattahoochee River was a region of hardwood forests, fertile valleys, and rushing streams. In 1832, following the first lottery for sections of the Cherokee territory, he had purchased a sizable tract of land and had begun making his plans for a village and mill as he awaited the removal of the Cherokees. In 1838, as some seven thousand U.S. troops began rounding up the Cherokees and confining them in “collection forts,” King moved to a site just north of the Chattahoochee on Vickery Creek, not far from the bustling little town of Atlanta. Other families from the low country soon joined him in his newly created village of Roswell, and all of them were closely connected to the Joneses of Montevideo. Among them was Major James Stephens Bulloch, who arrived in the spring with his wife, Martha Stewart, daughter of the old general Uncle Daniel Stewart. After a two-week trip from Savannah, “Cousin” John Dunwody of Arcadia plantation near Midway Church arrived with his wife, Jane Bulloch, the sister of the major. The Reverend Nathaniel Pratt and his wife, Catherine King—Roswell Sr.’s daughter—came from Darien so that Nathaniel could establish a Presbyterian Church in Roswell. And Barrington King left South Hampton in April with his wife, Catherine, and “9 children, 8 servants and 6 horses,” to join his father and the others from the low country in the establishment of a new community and a new industry. By 1840 the Roswell Manufacturing Company had 28 whites working the looms of its cotton mill. By 1844 there were 75, and soon after more than 110. And by the mid-1840s Barrington Hall, Bulloch Hall, and Dunwody Hall—all elegant Greek Revival mansions—had been built, as well as Roswell King’s handsome two-story Primrose Cottage, the Pratt’s home Great Oaks, and the Roswell Presbyterian Church. Fourteen miles away, near the new village of Marietta, James Smith, who had been with Charles’s father on his fateful hunt in 1805, built his up-country home of Welham. These removals, and others that followed, stretched the lines of kinship from Liberty County plantation houses and settlements to the mansions and slave cabins of a nascent New South.3

  Already railroad lines were pushing rapidly across Georgia, the largest of the states east of the Mississippi. By 1843 the Central Railroad connected Savannah with Macon in the middle of the state. Two years later the Georgia Railroad linked Atlanta to Augusta, where there were rail connections to Charleston. At the same time the Western and Atlantic Railroad was pushing across the center of the former Cherokee territory to link Atlanta with Chattanooga and the railroads of Tennessee, while other roads connected Macon with Atlanta and still others were reaching from Macon toward the rich, unsettled lands of southwest Georgia. This transportation revolution meant not only a new mobility for people and goods but also new ways of investing capital, new ways of seeing the world as it went rushing by train windows, and new ways of thinking about the future as the sound of the train whistle began to be heard across the state.4

  a

  b

  c

  d

  Roswell homes (all courtesy Georgia Archives): (a) Barrington King home; (b) James Bulloch home; (c) John Dunwody home; (d) the Reverend Nathaniel Pratt home

  For Barrington King, the move to Roswell meant a change in investment from his low-country plantation to an up-country cotton mill. South Hampton, with its 1,950 acres, was located a few miles downriver from Montevideo and had come to King in 1822 through his marriage to Catherine Nephew of Ceylon Plantation in neighboring McIntosh County. Under King’s supervision South Hampton had become one of the most prosperous plantations of Liberty County. He had needed, of course, a sizable labor force to build a thriving rice plantation, and this need had also been largely met by his marriage to Catherine Nephew, for she—like Susannah Girardeau and Sarah Anderson and Sarah’s daughter Mary Jones—had brought a number of slaves into her marriage.5

  Those who lived in the settlement at South Hampton had accomplished the grueling work of converting river swamps along the North Newport into wide rice fields with embankments, canals, and floodgates. Giant cypresses, black gums, and tupelos had been felled, and their stumps had been left in the mud, where they would remain as silent reminders to future generations of the massive labor required to clear the swamps. When the North Newport was low, ditches had been dug in the mud at the water’s edge and the earth thrown up into embankments fifteen feet in breadth at the base and five feet high. Then the cleared land had been divided with smaller embankments into fields of convenient size and connected by canals and by floodgates built by the plantation carpenters Jacob and Peter.6

  Unlike the older method of raising rice on inland swamps at the Retreat, the
resulting river fields at South Hampton had a reliable supply of water that could be readily controlled. When the tide pushed upstream in the spring at the full moon, the gates would be opened and the fields, already plowed and planted, would be easily flooded through the series of canals and gates. This “sprout flow” of water stayed on the fields for a week and then when the tide was out, and the river level had dropped, the fields would be drained to allow the seeds to sprout. Once the young sprouts had established themselves, the gates would be opened for the “stretch flow,” when the fields were flooded for about a month to kill any grass that might grow in the sun. And when the weeds that grew in the stagnant water needed attention, the gates were opened again at ebb tide and the fields drained. Barefooted men and women then plunged into the muddy rows of rice and hoed the weeds two and sometimes three times during the coming weeks in the summer sun. Finally the “harvest flow” came, with its tepid and teaming waters to support for two months the ripening rice and to keep the stems from becoming long and leggy. When this flow was drained in mid-September, once again barefooted men and women went down into the mire, this time to reap the rice with sickles. The rice, after being left on the stubble to dry for a day or two, was gathered into small sheaves and carried on the heads of the laborers to rice barns, where the sheaves would be threshed and the rice winnowed and pounded.7

  Such a system of rice production had brought substantial wealth to Barrington King and had provided him with the resources to undertake his up-country adventure in manufacturing. With his vision of the future increasingly dominated by images of fast-flying shuttles and expanding rail lines, he had sold South Hampton in 1838 to his brother Roswell King, Jr., for $22,000. Included in the price were forty-two slaves from among the men and women who lived in the South Hampton settlement. The proceeds of this sale and the sale of other slaves were invested in the Roswell Manufacturing Company and in his elegant new home, Barrington Hall. In this way Barrington King parlayed his rice wealth into a new career as a southern manufacturer, and the family of Roswell King, Jr., became neighbors and among the closest friends to those who lived at Montevideo. Roswell would become “Uncle Roz” to Charlie, Joe, and Mary Sharpe, and Julia Maxwell King would be “Aunt Julia” to them.8

  Roswell King, Jr., had managed the Butler estates on the Altamaha and St. Simons Island for twenty years when he retired as manager and moved with his family to South Hampton in 1838. He was a complex person whose complexity was hidden beneath a remarkable candor and matter-of-fact way of seeing the world that often cut through the cloud of southern manners that were intended to conceal as well as soothe. He had gained a reputation as a skilled manager of slaves, and his “manner of expressing himself” had become almost legendary among rice planters by the time of his move to South Hampton. On keeping slaves from running away, he had written ten years earlier: “No Negro, with a well stocked poultry house, a small crop advancing, a canoe partly finished, or a few tubs unsold, all of which he calculates soon to enjoy, will ever run away.” On punishing slaves he had insisted: “The lash is, unfortunately, too much used; every mode of punishment should be devised in preference to that, and when used, never to lacerate.” This was particularly true of young slaves, he said, who like “all young persons will offend.”9

  King valued efficiency above all things in the management of a plantation and thought that it required not only hard work and careful planning but also a flexible spirit and a commitment to innovation. So a quest for efficiency marked his treatment of slaves—what was efficient was good; what was inefficient was bad. When a concern for the welfare of the slaves led to the efficient production of rice and the efficient management of the plantation, then such a policy, he thought, should be pursued. And when a harsh lesson needed to be taught for the efficient control of slaves, then such a lesson was necessary. On one occasion, when several slaves had tried to escape from Butler Island into the surrounding marsh and swamps, he had used the novel punishment of pouring cold water over them on a January day. One of those so punished, a twelve-year-old boy weakened by worms, died a few days later evidently from the shock to his system.10 And there were other dark sides to King that threatened his efficiently run plantations—most particularly his treatment of his own children who lived in the settlement, and of their mothers whom he had abused as a young man before his marriage to Julia Maxwell. When he left the management of the Butler estate to take up residence at South Hampton, he left three of his own children as slaves by the muddy banks of the Altamaha.

  If King’s youthful passions, linked to his power as a white manager, had been a threat to an efficiently run plantation, he allowed no parental affection—or even sense of responsibility—to intrude on his decisions as a planter and slave owner. At stake, of course, were issues other than personal feelings. Mulattoes, children with a white parent—even a powerful white father such as Roswell King—were not included in the classification of “whiteness” that had been carefully constructed over the years, first in British North America and then in the United States. For King to treat his mulatto children as other than the property of the Butler estate would have been a challenge to the racial assumptions and ideological foundations of slavery. White had come to mean free and privileged in the United States, and anyone with any African ancestry could not be white.11

  Roswell and Julia had five white children at the time of their move to South Hampton. The oldesttwo—Mary and Audley—grew especially close to Charlie, Joe, and Mary Sharpe at Montevideo. Mary King, who was eleven in 1838, was already showing a lively, independent spirit and giving hints of the beautiful young woman she was soon to become. Fun loving and affectionate, she was especially close to her cousin Laura Maxwell, the daughter of Charles’s sister Susan Jones Maxwell and her late husband Audley. In a few years sister Betsy wrote to Laura that Mary King “is as gay as a lark, and at the head of all mischief and fun; your grandmother [Maxwell] said the other day that she expected Mary would never be satisfied at home again unless she had a crowd with her; she always wants to go somewhere or must have company.” Since Laura was also a cousin to Charlie, Joe, and Mary Sharpe, she and her brother Charles Edward acted as links drawing the King and Jones families close to one another and making them more than simply neighbors.12

  Audley was nine at the time of the move to South Hampton, and he and Charlie soon became close friends. Together they explored the swamps and woods around their plantation homes and the marshes, creeks, and rivers that surrounded Colonel’s Island; and together they learned to hunt and fish and to ride their marsh ponies down the sandy roads of Liberty County. Possessing an affectionate and winsome disposition, Audley was more like his mother, Julia, than like his father, Roswell, although he loved order and neatness and in time was to become a successful planter himself. Some years after the move to South Hampton, his father wrote to Charles: “Audley comes up fully to our expectations and is mother’s main man, but for me, there is too much precision in him, too much a man of rules: if a thing cannot be done according to rule, it cannot be done at all. He does not enjoy his breakfast unless his hair is perfectly brushed. I want a man that will tumble out of his bed, half awake; and direct, but as he gets older these will wear off.” But then the father added: “You must not infer from what I said about Audley that he does not come up to our expectations. He fills my shoes now. But a man to get along these times must be erratic. With me if a thing could not be done by the rule, I adopted one of my own, and seldom failed.”13 As for Roswell King himself, he quickly became a part of the little circle of friends and relatives that moved between Montevideo and Maybank, the Retreat, Lodebar, the Mallard Place, and the other prominent plantations of the county. He was accepted as an eccentric who not only spoke his mind in often memorable ways but was also something of a know-it-all. Sister Betsy, who had known him for years, on one occasion showed him some strange fish brought from Florida’s tropical waters. “For the first time in my life,” she wrote, she “heard him say he never
had seen such things before—something wonderful for him, for he has always seen or known everything no matter what you show him or say.”14 Still, many of his neighbors and friends found him an attractive and interesting person. Even Charles—who knew him as an unconverted, worldly man with a hard edge—was drawn to him and found in him a friend. And if King ignored his own children whom he left in the slave settlements on the Altamaha, he was a favorite of the white children, who delighted in his eccentricities. Robert Mallard, the youngest son of Thomas Mallard, would remember him with affection:

  Uncle Roz’, as he was called, was immensely popular with the young folks. For one thing, he was a mortal coward where horses were in question. He would travel up and down the river in his canoe, rowed by his black singing oarsmen, between the plantation and summer homes, but nothing could induce him to get into his wife’s carriage to go to church, or even for a neighborhood visit; if he went at all, he was an outrider, on the step behind, ready to get off the moment the horses became restless.15

  For her part, Julia Maxwell King was a cheerful, pious, and good neighbor to the Joneses and sought to be a kind and benevolent mistress to her slaves. She and Mary Jones had been friends since Mary’s student days in Savannah, and Julia remained close to her sister-in-law Susan Jones Maxwell. Her piety was always in some tension with Roswell’s quest for efficiency, and their family life and to some extent the character of their children reflected the tension between the competing values of the parents. But Roswell supported her insistence that the family have daily devotions, and he became a participant at Bible reading and prayer, including those times on Colonel’s Island when they gathered as a little community with the Joneses and other neighbors. “He deeply honored the piety of his wife, a lovely Christian woman,” Robert Mallard remembered, and he “helped her in his peculiar way. ‘Come, Julia, get the books,’ he would say (she had family worship). It was never neglected, nor he absent.”16